by Ken Morgan | Aug 27, 2024 | Uncategorized
“We tried Alpha and it didn’t work.” Countless ministers have reported this to me. Yet Alpha is easily the most effective process-evangelism resource used by churches across the western-world. Alpha serves as the centrepiece of the mission process in some remarkably effective churches – most notably London’s Holy Trinity Brompton. I’ve heard other church leaders similarly lament the failure of playgroups, kids clubs, sporting clubs and meals programs. Yet I have seen dozens of churches build fruitful mission pathways featuring these very same programs. Imagine hiring a tradie to build an extension on your house and they showed up onsite wielding only a hammer. When you question their logic and they respond, “This is an awesome hammer. I’ve watched lots of top-notch tradies and they all used hammers like this one.” Churches often fall into the mistake of thinking a single tool will enable them to become effective disciple-making communities. We hear stories about churches that began running a particular program with great success and surmise that running the same program will deliver similar results. Occasionally it works. But more often success in making new disciples is due to a confluence of factors all working in unison. Let’s think about process. Earlier I described Alpha as a process-evangelism resource. In churches that use Alpha effectively, it’s usually a process within a longer process of disciple-making. That process usually includes with an environment that meets a felt need, like a playgroup or mainly music, where warm and trusting relationships can form. From there it might be an invitation to a reading group or the Alpha marriage course – again,...
by Ken Morgan | Aug 13, 2024 | Uncategorized
As a young fella I had a conversation with a heroin addict. Thinking I could educate him out of his self-destructive lifestyle (I was young, naïve and heroic, okay?), I bluntly stated. “You keep doing what you’re doing and you’ll be dead before you’re thirty.” “I know.” He responded blankly. He didn’t need educating on the dangers of drug abuse. He needed a reason to live. He needed an answer to the question, ‘Why?’ Education and training seem to be the go-to solutions for what ails society. Yet education campaigns alone have been pretty ineffective in dealing with problems like obesity and domestic violence. Responding to a problem with education and training assumes the reason people are doing something harmful or not doing something desirable is their lack of understanding and skills. When something isn’t happening in a church, the reflex action seems to be to run some training. Training is useful for equipping people with skills and processes required to effectively fulfil roles in the life of the church. Churches frequently offer training in disciple-making skills like sharing personal faith, sharing the gospel or helping people to develop devotional habits and spiritual disciplines. Yet even if training is front-ended with a rationale or a biblical imperative, it will at best answer ‘Why?’ at a cerebral or subscription level, while primarily answering questions about ‘What?’ and ‘How?’ It equips those already motivated, but doesn’t motivate those who aren’t. The deeper answer to ‘Why?’ usually comes wrapped in human flesh – Jesus came as incarnation, not information. Jesus appointed the apostles firstly to be with him. They followed him personally. Jesus made disciples by...
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...
by Ken Morgan | Jul 7, 2017 | MIssion
Order your copy today http://pathways4mission.com If you are outside Australia you can purchase the book Book Depository Amazon
by Ken Morgan | Jun 11, 2017 | MIssion
Have we made mission too hard? There’s been a lot written over the past 15 years about becoming more missional. Books and seminars and conference speakers urge individuals to go and make disciples. That means engaging the surrounding culture, binding up wounds, forming relationships, sharing faith, proclaiming the gospel, forming converts in Christian spirituality and then bringing them along to church. In calling Christians to think like missionaries, we may fall into thinking that mission is the action of the individual among the masses – especially when we think about mission in our place of work or learning. Yet for all of our challenging individuals to mission and disciple-making, we’re not, broadly speaking, seeing a whole lot of results. I’m wondering if, by expecting too much of the individual, we’re placing mission beyond the grasp of the average believer. Paul’s writing in 1 Corinthians 12 and Ephesians 4 argues for a corporate, interdependent approach to ministry, without making distinction between ministry to those within the Christian community and those outside. The whole mission of Christ is the occupation of the whole body of Christ. Mission is something in which we can all participate, regardless of gifting or temperament. But instead of every individual taking it upon themselves to fulfil the whole mission of Christ in microcosm, perhaps each of us could simply find our place to use our gifts and pull our weight in community. In so doing, we might just accomplish with more effectiveness the great undertaking with which Jesus has commissioned us. Using the pathways model to think about mission can be helpful. Who are the unchurched people here? Do I know them? No? Well, that means I’m in a ‘potential contact’...
