The Jerusalem trap  

In 1520 Luther wrote a treatise called The Babylonian Captivity of the Church. I am concerned by what I call the Jerusalemic Captivity of the Church. Indicators of what I mean include the preponderance of financial and personnel resources directed to the upkeep of its buildings, the payment of its leaders and the care of its existing members. Jerusalem based mission is attractional[1]; it is a matter of inviting others to our buildings and worship. This can be by the occasional offices, pastoral contacts and evangelistic processes. All these events we control or provide.  It is arguable that Christendom in general, and the parish system in particular, has trapped most home mission thinking within these inward facing controlling assumptions, whereby centripetal mission is seen as normal and normative.  

It also prevents Jerusalem church from seeing that it is not definitive church. It is just one expression of church.   Jerusalem thinking has changed its post code over history. Now it can be found in Rome , Canterbury or the protectionist parish in your deanery. The mind set is unchanged – and this vast, sucking, vacuum cleaner has not been turned off.   Jerusalem minded church is blind to, and ignores evidence for, an inconvenient truth of the church’s identity. That strand calls the church into non identical reproduction elsewhere. It leads to healthy birth of fresh expressions of church, as signs of the Kingdom and continuation of  the mission of God.  

There is powerful evidence that the young church was disturbed out of its inherited self centring views, by the word of Christ and the activity of the Holy Spirit. That word is Acts 1.8. “You will receive power when the Sprit comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem , Judea, Samaria and to the ends of the earth.” The Acts story then shows the Spirit’s difficulties in persuading the church to fulfil this word.  

I think today there is a renewed need for liberation from being mentally ensnared in the erusalem captivity trap. The 2004 Church of England report Mission-shaped Church is Anglican comment on how the Spirit is doing the liberation today. It drew on a wide range of stories, many researched by the Sheffield Centre, which were disturbing the inherited pattern.[2]  It also woke us up to the existence of people outside Jerusalem who were never going to be at home there. It publicised a pie chart I created by extrapolation from Richter and Francis’s work on those leaving church.[3]  We came to think there were at least four very different groups in society, that were almost like tribes. The churched [10%]  the fringe [10%] the dechurched who are open to return to us [20%], another group whose bad experiences make them closed to return to us [20%] and the non churched [40%] who have never been in touch with us. Proportions of these groups vary across the first world churches, but what is common is that the non churched is the growing sector and most noticeably among the young.  The non churched are thus the majoy future mission field.

This chart put into the public domain the terms, dechurched and non churched, that I coined in 1999[4]. They describe groups of people very different from each other and more important, both groups are made up of people largely closed to church as they know it.  The 2006 statistics, from TEAR fund have shown us that the proportions open to church as they know it is far lower than we previously thought.   

I have written since that there is some mileage in loosely mapping today’s groups onto the distinctions and stages offered in Acts 1.8, without pretending that was Luke’s intention. 

Existing church attenders could be described as Jerusalem people.

Those on the fringe are not unlike those living in Judea , who sometimes attend. The missionary journey to Judeans is justly centripetal. They would see increased commitment in terms of deeper attachment to a Jerusalem .

The closed dechurched could be likened to those in Samaria, having in common an unfortunate story of distance, distrust and dislike in regard to Jerusalem. I like the language also of calling them the dischurched.

The non churched, and those of other world faiths, who are ignorant of the core of Christianity, or believe themselves rightly dismissive of it, can be likened to the Greeks and Romans who thought the Jews were strange, not least for their lack of idols, their insular cultural particularity and different moral stances.  While Greek and Romans do not represent the ultimate ends of the earth, they were at least a yet further stage out toward it.[5]   And it is clear from the New Testament that Paul was not content to make Rome ; he had Spain in view, and doubtless would have taken a voyage to a newly found America .  

However the view that sees the change in the Acts story as being primarily from inward to outward, obscures a further dimension that is even more disturbing. Usually this is missed. Listen to how the missionary historian Stephen Neill writes about the change. “it became clear that the movement of the church was to be, not from the circumference inwards to Jerusalem , but outwards from Jerusalem to the circumference.”[6] Or Michael Green; “Luke is at great pains to stress the links between the apostolic church in Jerusalem on the one hand and the spreading circles of Christian outreach on the other.”[7]  Both experts have only grasped one dimension of the change, thus in both cases leaving Jerusalem at the centre of the picture. This is a distortion of the Acts story. It imports Christendom thinking which assumes a Jerusalem is at the centre of society and of mission. A major correction must be offered to this picture.  

The eccentric effect

I suggest to you that the truth is that the Jerusalem , Judea, Samaria , Ends of the Earth progression is, mechanically speaking, not concentric. It is eccentric, once the Judean boundary is passed. I would even dare to suggest that the Holy Spirit is eccentric – not in the sense exhibited by some Anglican clergy, but like a cam. As it turns, the eccentric elliptical shape does work, that a circle cannot.  The eccentric cam creates patterns of disturbance that open things.  

This brings a quite different perspective to the concentric view of outward mission. The centre of the story shifts from Jerusalem . The first indicator is noted in the Samaritan episode in which Peter and John travel to them and those converts are not brought, culturally or geographically, back to Jerusalem .  

This eccentric pattern then grows more distinct, in three ways. Firstly the Acts story itself stops following Peter and follows Paul thus the centre of interest shifts.  Secondly, Paul travels further west and more churches different from Jerusalem are born, not just in Asia but beyond it. Thirdly, and most importantly, the non Jewish Christians are not circumcised, indicating both cultural and religious diversity. Thus simple centrifugal thinking is a serious distortion of the actual story and its intentions.  All of this is can be argued without recourse to including the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70.  But the significance of this event is not lost on Stephen Neil. “Until that date Jerusalem had been without question the mother church of the whole Christian world…. Since AD 70, the Christian Church has never had one local centre.”[8]    Neil is right; Jerusalem ceases to control the story.  Today we have not yet reached that point mentally.  

Yet the eccentric is undeniable, it is validated by the Acts 15 Council of Jerusalem.  We forgot it later in Christendom, which reverted strongly and self consciously to the Jerusalem mindset, infected by Roman Empire values of  power, control and uniformity.  It is a trap. We have lived in it too long. It is an unbiblical view of mission, of church and the Holy Spirit. It is time to escape.  

Instead of thinking that mission should replenish existing congregations, the logic of mission that is centrifugal and eccentric, makes it credible to create churches that are neither physically or culturally modelled on the particularity of a Jerusalem expression of church. In our day these rediscovered patterns have begun. Since the late 1970’s fresh expressions of church have formed, mainly not in church buildings, nor always in relation to parish boundaries. Moreover their worship, common life and ongoing engagement with society, was shaped both in relation to context as well as drawing on the inherited tradition.  They found very different starting points in being church through the journey to people living in diverse cultural and spiritual addresses. This highlighted starting with creating community not providing worship.  It emphasised lives changed by Jesus, before talk about Jesus. I suggest we have failed to root the legitimacy of these discovery in Acts 1.8 and a doctrine of the Spirit in mission. What we have begun to see recently is the normal, staying in Jerusalem is not.  

So how shall we escape the trap?

The headlines from Acts give us promising directions.  

1                    Hold onto Jesus words:  

Do that even when you can’t see how they would be fulfilled.  I suggest you look at them not as a geography lesson but a cultural journey. Church is called out beyond the safe familiarity of Judea , into disagreeable and disreputable Samaritan relationships and beyond our imaginations to cultures and groups we don’t even know about yet. My understanding is that Jesus’ words make this progression normal.  

2                    Do not be deluded by success in Judea: Acts 5.16  : “Crowds gathered also from the towns around Jerusalem , bringing their sick .. and all were healed.”   

I bet that went in the Jerusalem Parish magazine. “It’s working folks. They’re coming”. Yes rejoice, because God loves those in Judea too. But that was not the longer intention of the Spirit. Don’t confuse part of the story with the whole of the story. 

I am not saying that journeys to Judea are always wrong.  Gal 2. 7 Peter is called to be an apostle to the Jews.  The problem is more subtle and more deep. Judea is not enough; that journey isn’t always right. Moreover it doesn’t equip you well for a Samaritan Safari.  What works in Judea may need to look different in Samaria , Athens or Rome .

Let every church dare to ruthlessly analyse their membership. Find out how many are faithful Christians, how many are converted from the fringe, how many were seriously dechurched and how many had no Christian background. Then compare that to national proportions. What is certain is that mission cannot not be done by recycling Judeans between flavour of the month churches.  

3          Welcome the 3 eccentrics – for eccentric is part of normal.  

1^st Ask who are the Philips. Spot them, pray for them, and let them go. They won’t stay with traditional diaconal roles in My Big Fat Greek wedding, but will want to move on to Mission Impossible in creating churches. Let them be troublesome, surprising and dangerous fro Jesus. And don’t think they will all be known to the church and recognized as Lay or Ordained Pioneers. We have no idea of the names of those who planted the three greatest churches of the early days– Antioch , Alexandria and Rome .  God works also with the anonymous – the Christians who just do the stuff as they go. 

2^nd  Pray to recognize Cornelius when he comes, even if he looks like an unclean animal.  You will be re-evangelised by the Spirit and by the God-called God-fearer.  Go back to Riddell’s book Threshold of the Future. Re-read his take on Acts 10 which he calls a paradigm for our time.  

3^rd Pray that today’s Pauls will be converted, found and welcomed. Who is being called to go to the uncircumcised, the outsiders, the non churched? Pray for wisdom to accept that these eccentrics will do church differently, they will surprise and even shock us. Eccentrics are there to cause change to what we think is centre.  

4          Don’t try to make it happen.  

Planting Fresh Expressions of Church is about compassion and call; it cannot be done well from Christendom motives like power or compulsion.  Nor is it about being trendy or fashionable.  

Pretending you have a serious Fresh Expression when you are re-badging an outing to Judea is I think rather sad.

Persuading the rest of the church in Jerusalem to go on a crusade to Samaria would lead to race riots, not spiritual conversion. Pushing all in Jerusalem out to Antioch is not vocational, it is imperial.   

Let the Spirit disturb the church with his eccentric effect and follow what God is doing. Then there is just a chance we may escape out of the Jerusalem trap, for the sake of the world and the glory of God.

A story of such dynamics in today’s church: Christ Church Central, Sheffield

The background and rationale

Sheffield is an industrial and financial city of over half a million people.  Historically famous for knives, for 700 years, it has an international reputation for high grade steels but is now much more diverse, with two universities and teaching hospitals.

But its history makes it strongly socially divided West and East. The prevailing Gulf stream wind systems are from the south west. So the Mill owners and Industrialists built their big stone houses on the South West side and the more populous workers had to make do living on the East amidst the pollution. It is said that west Sheffield people go to the doctor ten times less than those on the East.  Though Sheffield Diocese is made up of 173 parishes and 222 churches, 5 churches in South West Sheffield make up 20% of the entire church going population.  The two largest are St Thomas Crookes and Christ Church Fulwood both with well over 1000 people.  

Our story is how the church in Fulwood burst out of the Jerusalem Trap. For many years Fulwood had teaching ministry and drew people from all over the city.  Plenty of Judeans were making their way into Jerusalem and having quite a good time.  Yet all the time, though they increased the number of Sunday congregations they struggled with two features; one the building being full which then hampers further growth and with the spiritual dynamic that too many members were content to be passengers on a well run ship.  Building better but looking inwards was limiting.  

Things began to change with Hugh Palmer as vicar and the awareness that creating more and different churches, that shared their theological values, might be a better way forward. Could planting churches be a better way? His associate colleague, Tim Davies comes from a missionary family and he sensed a call to this some 5 years ago.  This co-incided with the realisation that the city centre was repopulating. Graduate retention has always been high, but the trend for city centre living was Sheffield catching up with London and Manchester . We now think another 10000 people live in the centre. Who was to reach them and how?   Would it be possible to start a church for people who don’t go to church – in other wards they started to spot some Samaritans who wouldn’t come to Jerusalem and to wonder where the ends of the earth applied to Sheffield . When a need and a resource begin to match – that’s always worth noticing.  

Tim took time to research the area and the discipline of church planting.  Preparation is seldom wasted. He was thorough and rigorous about forming a team.  If they were going to work through friendships, rather than programs and building based work, there would need to be enough people who had enough contacts.  Moreover there would need to be enough people to share out the tasks that come with public worship and provision for the families of those who came. That meant he was looking for a team of 50 who were called, committed and capable.  It was then fascinating that a church of 1000+ could be worried about the loss of 50 people. How easy it is for us to lack missionary imagination and be scared of giving away some of our best. Whey do we find it difficult to believe the words of  Jesus – it is more blessed to give than to receive? Yet a year later, the team which had learnt to grow together,  were commissioned at an evening service and literally walked out of church – to applause.[9]  

What do they do and what have they learnt?

I believe one key way to analyze what has happened is that they have kept their founding values but been flexible about nearly everything else, in order to suit the context. This is a good missionary principle.  

Here are the values in their words:

“We think that church is not a building but people, people who aim to live their lives with Jesus Christ as their God and Saviour. Christ Church Central is people, people who aim to make the message of Jesus, and the teaching of the Bible, accessible, understandable, relevant and available to everyone. We hope to start more churches in Sheffield that are for people who don't go to church.”

They really listened to the diverse city centre culture and community and discovered that Sunday afternoon, not morning, would be the best time to meet.  They listened to the café culture around them and so the afternoon starts at 4.30 with coffee and cake. How different from the odd church culture, divorced from society, where you get a second class drink afterwards.

They have experimented with where to meet and chosen not to meet in the Free Church hall they were given at a cheap price. They meet in a city centre bar, that needs cleaning up every Sunday after Saturday night use. Its neutral and accessible. They listened to culture and the meeting is much more interactive, participative and many different people get to lead and contribute.  

They know people need ways in - and that Sunday however friendly – is not the usual starting place.  So they have a monthly walkers club because Sheffield is on the edge of fabulous walking country. It’s a major leisure activity. The first Sunday of every month they go out into the Peak District for a guided walk. They meet at 10 am – easy if church attendance isn’t blocking the way.  There is a football group which meets every Friday evening at a local school. There is also a mothers and toddlers group. Nothing beyond the imagination but doing what is locally obvious.   For those who want to explore more there is a Christianity Explored group, also a website that people can interrogate with some in depth articles on current issues.  

They run small groups – not as filling stations to top up Christians midweek but much more wholistic.  In their words, the aim of these are: Gospel sharing: pro-actively telling others the message of Jesus Christ. Bible study that teaches, rebukes, encourages and trains in godliness

Prayer for one another and the church. Christian friendship that loves, supports, rejoices and weeps together. Gamma groups are part of the outreach strategy and the pastoral care.  

Some surprises and challenges.

They began with a focus on the new city centre dwellers.  Some CCC members even bought some of these apartments to live among those they sought to befriend. They found you meet them in the bars, cafes and gyms, not in their electronically gated little boxes.  You always have to work out how a culture gathers and go there to meet them, not ask them to come to you.

They started by trying to diversify how church was done and have found more diversity than they expected. I guess the ends of the earth is always beyond what we can imagine. They now work with a variety of groups.

One is what they call their International friends group – mainly Asian students who have come to live or study in Sheffield and one retired member of the team Bill has been a missionary in Japan , which is a great background.  

Another is Uni students who become part of our wider church family. Two things to notice are they try not to let this work dominate and secondly they work hard to ensure the students are involved in all aspects of the church's ministries. They don’t come as consumers.  

Yet another group, through Church on a Bus, is aimed at the city centre homeless. Led by Mike they aim to be an outward looking, welcoming, Christian community where the men and women that come along can feel safe, valued and belong.  As he says, we meet on Wednesday evening from 7.30pm at our hall to prepare the coffee and cake, and to pray. We aim to be parked up and ready to serve by 8pm. The focus of the evening is food, friendship and low key one to one conversational evangelism with whoever turns up. We try to finish the evening looking at the Bible with time to pray with and for those who have joined us over the course of the evening. We aim to finish by 9.30pm, then its back to Egerton Hall for a review, prayer and a bit of washing up!  

They have grown from 50 adults towards 200 which all the time presses them to stay flexible about where and when to meet. They have multiplied ministries and sent the their young leaders off the college with a view to come back and start yet further outward looking, strongly communal, bible focussed churches.  All the time it is stretching. It just shows how often church is designed to remain much the same.  

The last thing to note is that the parent church has been so delighted with what has happened, seen what happens when you keep faithful to values but are flexible about practice, that they plan to send our another group every two years.   With the right leaders, good processes and identifiable mission fields, that sounds very promising.  It could never have happened all in Fulwood. They had to leave to learn and to discover what God could do outside their comfort zones. This is similar to the disturbances brought by the missionary Spirit in the book of Acts.