The challenge for the churches to better serve their communities “in Jesus’ name” was the driving force behind the May 8-9 learning event at Riverland Hills Baptist Church in Columbia, where approximately 260 persons focused on an emphasis of “turning the church inside out.”
“The church needs help connecting to the community,” said Reggie McNeal, director of the South Carolina Baptist Convention’s leadership development office and coordinator of the two-day gathering of pastors and other church leaders from throughout the state.
“We’ve spent most of our time,” McNeal continued, “trying to get the community to connect to us. So, we used this conference to challenge the leaders to get outside the church, sharing different ways they can serve the community in Jesus’ name.”
Another motivation behind the conference, he said, was “the reality of the collapse of the church culture,” pointing out, “You can build the perfect church and they still won’t come.”
“We’ve got to go to them,” he noted, and then added, “And what a concept that is, given the Great Commission.”
Ed StetzerEd Stetzer, a missiologist with the North American Mission Board and introduced as a “voice to the emerging church,” said the church is God’s “chosen vessel” for reaching the world, but is “not succeeding.”
He said that 89 percent of churches are “not growing through healthy evangelistic outreach,” even though they may be showing increases in membership through other means.
Stetzer said the church must be “missional,” which he defined as “acting like a missionary, doing what missionaries have done for centuries.”
He decried the tendency of churches to “turn tools into rules” with the result that “many believers are exiting the traditional church” and discovering meaning in what he termed “alternative faith communities.”
There are some, he said, who view the church as “not helpful, and even harmful.”
Believers must not abandon the church, Stetzer declared, but instead should change the church so that people attending “won’t leave, saying, ‘What was the point?'”
He said that while in many quarters of the nation there is “disdain for the church,” there also exists great interest in spirituality. Many, he said, are “repelled” by what they see in the church of today and that nearly 25 percent of Americans meet weekly to study the Bible in groups of 20 or fewer people as their “primary form of spiritual nurture.”
Stetzer said that copying the models of others – Rick Warren, for example – is not the answer, but rather “finding God’s unique vision for your church.”
The form the church takes, he emphasized, is less important than its “message of repentance and forgiveness of sin.”
He urged Christians to not fall into “the sin of preferences,” but rather to “rejoice with others who do biblically sound church differently.”
“God is at work in powerful ways,” he concluded.
Wolfgang SimsonWolfgang Simson, the leading authority on the house church movement and author of the book, “Houses That Change the World,” said the house church movement is “exploding” in other parts of the world, particularly in Asia.
“Something is brewing out there,” he said of a new movement “that cannot be contained in the traditional containers.”
“God is building a new harvesting network,” he affirmed.
Describing house churches as a “new ecclesia,” he described himself as nothing more than – but nothing less than – a “follower of Jesus” and “this provides my insight into the house church movement. As a church, we need to do the same thing. We should not ask God to bless what we are doing, but we should do what God is blessing.”
He said that the West has been slow to recognize or accept the house church movement, which, in the minds of some, has a “secret, underground” aura about it, but in other parts of the world – especially where government persecution has robbed many believers of their church buildings and clergy – house churches have multiplied.
“They had no churches,” he said of those Christians, “but they still had homes.”
Simson said that the house church movement is just “one aspect of the bigger picture” of what God has in mind for his church, while calling on church leaders to “compare what we have done” in building the church with “what God intended.”
Garry Poole, an evangelism leader with the Willow Creek Church, spoke at the third of four plenary sessions on starting “seeker sensitive small groups” as an effective tool for dealing with the problem of “roadblocks” in developing a relationship with God.
Poole described two types of people: those who are Christ-followers, and those who are seekers – that is, people who are “not yet Christ-followers.”
He offered the small seeker group as a proven method of reaching seekers who have yet to seek out the church, but are open to small groups of other seekers where they feel “safe.”
Noting that only the group’s leader is a Christ-follower, Poole said that the seekers “are in the majority” at the informal meetings where they have an opportunity to discover biblical truths for themselves.
The object of the small group is not to “spoon feed” the seekers, but rather to facilitate what he termed “aha” moments of self-discovery.
Poole said that small seeker groups are a tool “anyone can use,” providing what he called a “built-in excuse for spiritual conversations” which are often difficult in other settings.
Church leaders desiring to establish such groups, he pointed out, must first “catch the vision that seekers matter to God, and they matter to us.”
He said “bridges of trust” through friendships between believers and seekers are essential for the establishment of small groups, where it also is vital to “create a caring community that is more than just a meeting.”
Ken Smith, interim pastor at First Baptist Church of Leesburg, Fla., who has also relished his role as a football team chaplain at South Carolina, Florida State and Mississippi State universities, told conference participants, “There is a whole pagan culture out there that the church is not reaching.”
“And,” he added, “it’s not Jesus that people don’t like, it’s the church.”
Smith, whose Leesburg church has ministries that include a medical clinic, children’s home, crisis pregnancy center and men’s rescue mission, said that believers trying to help a hurting community “must first listen to the story of others before they will hear you.”
The former football lineman and coach said that Jesus lived and taught a “radically new gospel of grace” that made it clear there are “no undesirables in God’s kingdom.” This radical nature of Jesus and the gospel “has not occurred to everybody,” he added.
At Leesburg, he said, “we find the despised and the set-aside and remind them that they have value.”
“If we’re doing church without caring for people,” he said, “then call it off.”