Two of My Favorite Authors

Tim Chester and Steve Timmis have probably done more than anyone else (excluding Tim Keller and Jeff Vanderstelt) to help me understand what applying the gospel to everyday life looks like.  Their first book, Total Church, rocked my face off.  And Everyday Church is more of the same.

What is a Missional Community anyway?

I began planting a church about two years ago, and it’s been the hardest thing I’ve ever done.  One of the things we knew we wanted to do while planting Basileia Church was to have missional communities.  But to be honest, none of us completely understood what missional communities were, we just knew they sounded awesome.  Our first concept was that it was an outreach thing and a numbers thing.  In other words, in our minds a missional community was a small group that tried to reach people, and it was a larger small group (20ish people instead of 10).  That’s a stupid idea I know, but that’s what we thought.

It wasn’t until a few of us heard Jeff Vanderstelt, Steve Timmis, and Jonathan Dodson begin explaining missional communities that we really began to understand what they were.  When I read Total Church, the picture started coming together more and more.  And when I finally began trying to incorporate all these ideas into the life of our church, and God began doing really cool things because we started praying more, that I really understood.  Things got clearer, and they’re still getting clearer, and we’re still learning.

My Whole Life I’ve Never Really Understood Healthy Evangelism

I’ve always known and understood that evangelism is something I should do, but I’ve never been very good at doing it.  I’ve shared the gospel a fair amount, and I’ve seen some people follow Jesus as a result, but I’m willing to say that at least 85% of the time evangelism felt weird and contrived.  I believed what I was saying, I just never really believed that the way I was going about it was actually very effective.  I lean reformed doctrinally, so I was confident that God was working everything out and would draw people to Himself, but I still felt like there was more to it.  And I think there was more; it’s this idea of missional living, missional community, and everyday church that made things feel authentic and real.  Instead of evangelism being an event, it was a way of life.

I Probably Felt the Most Alive in College

In college I was part of a community of believers that really loved one another and where we honestly pushed one another towards godliness.  And I’ve got to say it was awesome; I wouldn’t trade those years for anything. And I don’t think it was just because it was college. It was the friendships, and the desire to see one another walk with God, and learning how to use our gifts for God, and the sense that we had real brothers and sisters in the faith who loved one another. But there was an element missing.  It was mission.  A lot of what we did in college was self-centered.  I didn’t even really realize it at the time.  But our group never reached out very well.  And we didn’t even realize we were blowing it; we were seeking to be the best Christians that we knew how to be. Our experience in church was that evangelism was this “second or third tier” thing that no one really did, except occasionally.  We thought God just wanted you to know His word, and sing great worship songs, and maybe go on a mission trip, and not sleep with our girlfriends / boyfriends until marriage.  But everyday mission was a foreign concept.  Evangelism, if we did it, was this separate event where you shared the Roman’s Road.  It definitely wasn’t a part of everyday life.  This honestly was a great community, but it wasn’t a missional community.

Everyday Missional Living

The thing that makes evangelism feel natural is doing it all the time as part of your everyday life.  It’s learning how much you still need the gospel, and how much your buddies still need the gospel, and how much your neighbors need the gospel, and learning how to talk about the gospel and challenge yourself to put faith in Jesus all the time.  Sometimes people will argue that “friendship evangelism” doesn’t work; it’s jus an excuse to be lazy.  I mean you can’t just be a designated driver for your plastered college buddies all the time, without ever sharing the message of Jesus, and expect them to come to faith.  That’s true.  But missional living isn’t friendship evangelism as I just described it. Instead, it’s learning that you are a missionary all the time.  I’m learning to redeem every part of my day for the purposes of God.  Rather than evangelism being something that I (at best) do once a week for a few hours, it’s something I’m trying to do all the time.  And it’s something our whole community participates in together.  For me, this has made all the difference in the world. Evangelism no longer seems contrived, but genuine.  I’m part of a group of believers who love one another and who are on mission together for the good of the community in which we’re planted.  We want to bless the community and see our neighbors and friends and acquaintances come to know Jesus.  We’re learning how the gospel message is what’s needed in every situation.  We don’t behavior modification, we need Jesus’ grace.  And we’re learning to pray a lot.  I need God to work all the time.  I need Him to make things happen.  I can’t do anything on my own.

I know I’m Not Really Reviewing a Book

At this point I know I’m not really reviewing Everyday Church, I’m just telling you how I’ve been inspired and instructed by it.  In a nutshell, it’s a follow up to Chester and Timmis’ first book, Total Church.  One big difference between the two books is that Everyday Church is based loosely on 1 Peter, where as Total Church is a more systematic explanation of what a missional church looks like. I love both books.  Everyday Church goes through 1 Peter because it’s one of the most instructive books in the New Testament for describing how the people of God should live as missionaries in the midst of a culture that it continually finds itself more and more at odds with.

Anyway

Instead of getting in the nitty gritty of the book, let me just say, “You should read it.”  You should read Total Church too.  They’re both life-transforming, and I don’t say that lightly.  Perhaps my ramblings on this blog post demonstrate how much I love this book, and I hope they have inspired you to check it out too.

Everyday Church Easily Earns 5 out of 5 Cups of Black Coffee.

Related Posts:

• Book Review: Total Church by Tim Chester & Steve Timmis
• Extended Quote of the Day – Tim Chester & Steve Timmis
• Book Review: The Tangible Kingdom by Hugh Halter and Matt Smay
• Book Review – Church Planter by Darrin Patrick
• GCM: Gospel Communities on Mission – Conference Audio

Tim Chester and Steve Timmis’ book, Total Church is one of my favorite reads in the last couple of years.  I’ve been in the process of reading and digesting this work for much longer than I would have expected with a 200 page book.  But every time I would start to read again, the content was so good, so challenging, and so helpful, that I would find myself re-reading chapters, and encouraging others to get a copy and re-read chapters with me.  To date, this has been the most helpful book I’ve read in helping to plant Basileia Church.  This is the book that I most want all the people of Basileia Church to read, and it’s the book I want all my friends considering church planting to read.

So what is it about?  The subtitle of the book tells the whole story:  “A Radical Reshaping around Gospel and Community.”  In the authors’ own words:

“This book argues that two key principles should shape the way we “do church”:  gospel and community.  Christians are called to a dual fidelity:  fidelity to the core content of the gospel and fidelity to the primary context of a believing community.  Whether we are thinking about evangelism, social involvement, pastoral care, apologetics, discipleship, or teaching, the content is consistently the Christian gospel, and the context is consistently the Christian community” (15-16).

Further, Timmis and Chester explain:

“Being gospel-centered actually involves two things.  First, it means being word-centered because the gospel is a word––the gospel is news, a message.  Second, it means being mission-centered because the gospel is a word to be proclaimed––the gospel is good news” (16).

The rest of the book is basically an explanation and exegesis of these two statements.  Following the introduction,there is a chapter on the gospel and a chapter on community, and then the rest of book covers all of the topics that flow out of these two foundations:  evangelism, social involvement, church planting, world mission, etc.

The thing that makes this book great is that it is deeply theological and deeply communal.  Many would lead us to believe that a church can either be deeply theological or deeply communal, but not both.  The argument is usually described like this:  “If a church chooses to be good at community, it will come at a cost to theological obedience.  Or if a church chooses to be theologically astute, then it will come at a cost to true community.”  This is a classic liberalism versus conservatism argument.  Liberals apparently do community well, but at a cost to good theology.  Whereas conservatives apparently do theology well, but at a cost to true community.  Chester and Timmis paint a different picture altogether.  (And as a side note, I would argue that it’s not good theology to be bad at community, and it’s not good community to be opposed to hard truth).

To put it another way, the type of church that Chester and Timmis are describing feels very post-modern in a communal sense but not very post-modern in a theological sense (I realize I may not be using post-modern in the most correct sense of the word, but just ignore that for a second and follow my train of thought).  It’s very obvious that Chester and Timmis deeply believe the Bible.  They don’t don’t deny propositional truth, and yet they’re describing church in a way that feels very at home in a post-Christiandom.  What they’re describing sounds not only plausible in my city, but exciting.  This description of church will work among people with little or no Christian background (which is increasingly the situation we find ourselves in within the urban centers of America).  And Chester and Timmis don’t seem to simply be reacting to the changing culture around them, and thus scrambling to try and figure out how to “do church” these days.  Rather, they seem to be reflecting deeply on the Scriptures and trying to figure out how to “do church” period.  The authors are actual practitioners, not just theorists.  They came to believe what they believe by reflecting on the Bible, putting it into practice, and seeing what happened.  The result is both theologically pleasing and pragmatically feasible.  A rare combination in the midst of pendulum-swing-prone-Christianity.

Here’s the other reason I really love this book.  It’s teaching me how to share my faith in a way that feels both authentic and obedient to the Bible.  I’ve struggled all my life to share my faith the way that the Bible commands. It always felt contrived and sales-pitchy.  I knew I was supposed to do it, in fact I wanted to do it, it just never felt right.  Lots of times I shared, I was trying to be obedient to God, but it didn’t feel like it was doing any good.  But now, finally, I’m seeing what living a life of mission looks like.  The result has been that I look forward to sharing my faith with new friends.  I don’t feel embarrassed to share the gospel.  I can see that the gospel really does change lives.  Is it still difficult at times?  Yes, certainly.  But it now feels more like a new way of living, a way of life where all of my life is mission, instead of a segmented time where I try to be obedient to the Great Commission for a couple of hours.  This is life-changing.  This is authentic.   This is New Testament.

I love this book.  You should read it.

5 out of 5 cups of black coffee.

Buy it from Amazon:

Related Posts:

• Book Review – Church Planter by Darrin Patrick
• Book Review: Everyday Church by Tim Chester & Steve Timmis
• Book Review: The Escondido Theology by John Frame
• Extended Quote of the Day – Tim Chester & Steve Timmis
• Five Sentence Review: What is the Gospel? – Greg Gilbert

“Being gospel-centered actually involves two things.  First, it means being word-centered because the gospel is a word–the gospel is news, a message.  Second, it means being mission-centered because the gospel is a word to be proclaimed–the gospel is good news, a missionary message.”

- Tim Chester & Steve Timmis, Total Church, 16.

Related Posts:

• Book Review: Everyday Church by Tim Chester & Steve Timmis
• Extended Quote of the Day – Ed Stetzer
• Extended Quote of the Day – Francis Schaeffer – part 2
• Book Review – Church Planter by Darrin Patrick
• Extended Quote of the Day: Craig Bartholomew & Ryan O’Dowd