by Ken Morgan | Jul 30, 2024 | Uncategorized
“Church is not working.” I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard or read the statement. The statistics would seem to confirm that things aren’t working. In 1959 about 41% of Australia’s population was in church on a Sunday. In 2016 it was 7%. However, not everyone is lamenting the ineffectiveness of the church. Pentecostal movements are continuing to grow and multiply new churches. While these attract some of the people who decry the failures or irrelevance of their prior church, Pentecostal churches are also reaching unchurched people. Likewise mainstream denominations are planting new churches and a good proportion of these grow to viability by a combination of transfers and new believers. Many of these newer churches are more-or-less contemporary versions of the established model – a weekend public worship service with music, prayer, preaching and perhaps eucharist – combined with weekday small groups and other activities designed to engage and serve both believers and those yet to believe. There’s also increasing interest in small forms of church: micro churches, missional communities and house churches. These have shown almost viral growth characteristics in non-western settings. The results in western contexts are more patchy. Many of the proponents of small-form churches are those disillusioned with big-box formats. When it comes to revitalising existing churches, it makes sense to look at what seems to be working and try to emulate it. When we say ‘emulate’, we tend to mean ‘copy’. We’ve all heard the war stories of well-meaning ministers who’ve tried to re-engineer traditional worship services into something more contemporary. There’s also been a...
by Ken Morgan | Jul 16, 2024 | Uncategorized
A couple of years prior to the pandemic, I was an unwilling participant in an ‘evangelism’ experiment. I found myself walking along Elizabeth Street in the Melbourne CBD. Although the footpath was packed with peak-hour pedestrians, up ahead I could see that the six-person wide throng was narrowing to a single file, pressed against a bluestone wall on the right, as if repelled by a force-field emanating from the kerb on the left. The source of the repellent force turned out to be a young man, armed with a portable PA, solemnly reading aloud from the bible open in his hands. I admired his commitment to evangelism. His missiology – not so much. Research by Stark and Finke[1] found that conversion (i.e. adopting a new religious belief) most often takes place in a close social network, be it familial or friendship-based. People generally adopt the prevailing faith of their social group. Belonging to the group precedes religious conversion. Joining a new social network where strong relational ties are formed is frequently the precursor to adopting a new faith. George Hunter III[2] demonstrates how well this dynamic was put to work by the Celtic monks who effectively Christianised the British Isles and Northern Europe. My own straw-poll research has shown that the overwhelming majority of people who profess Christian faith knew three or more believers before they made their first profession. People adopt the faith of their friends and family. Moreover, Stark and Finke observe that they are more open to adopting the faith of newfound friends when their pre-existing relational ties have been disrupted. A change of life circumstance, such as becoming a parent or moving to a new...
by Ken Morgan | Jul 2, 2024 | Uncategorized
“I won’t do evangelism.” Genuine fear played across the face of the church council member. When I asked what he thought evangelism meant, he described someone preaching on a street corner. If that’s evangelism, I’m unlikely to do it either. Evangelism is not a neutral word. Some see it as an imperative, others as the preserve of judgemental fundamentalists. While the church generally has a sense that it should somehow be announcing the good news of Jesus, the exact content of that good news and the means by which it should be communicated are far from settled. For as long as I’ve been hanging around the church (and that’s nearly fifty years), there has been a succession of tools, techniques, programs and products all designed to mobilise the church toward evangelism. All the while, the church as a proportion of the population has halved. If we’re honest with ourselves, most of us are pretty happy to leave evangelism to evangelists. What if we could be effective in helping unchurched people become followers of Jesus without learning scripts, without ‘steering’ conversations, without campaigns, crusades or anything else that seems like relational kryptonite? At the end of Luke’s gospel, Jesus states that repentance and forgiveness will be preached (and there’s another article in that) to all nations. And then he told the gathered disciples, “You are witnesses of these things.” In court, reliable witnesses have a degree neutrality: “This is what I saw, this is what I heard, this is what I experienced.” Unreliable witnesses try to craft their testimony to get an outcome. Hostile witnesses resist giving testimony to the extent they can. When I run a Pathways workshop I often conduct a straw poll as to how many people...
