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Small Groups – A Place for Bible Study

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If you read this column regularly you might have noticed similar articles related to small group ministry in the last two issues.

Some years ago when I began having regular meetings with the small group leaders at our church (Covenant in Fayetteville, GA), I introduced Lyman Coleman’s three legged stool. It’s not complicated: Bible study, share your story, task. Still it was months into the meetings before the leaders could immediately recite those three basic elements.

Bible Study:

Years ago the small group model identified with InterVaristy Christian Fellowship focused almost exclusively on Bible study. Today there are small group ministries that de-emphasizing Bible study, preferring to concentrate on fellowship. I believe this is a mistake.

1. We all are painfully aware that people today don’t know the Bible. It’s not just foreign to our culture, it is virtually a closed book to many who profess faith in Christ. Yet it is on the Scripture that we base our faith. Consequently, if a group is to have a Christian focus the Bible must be prominent.

2. With some, there is a question regarding the difference between a small group that does Bible study and a Sunday school class. Because the Sunday school class is usually larger and the small group more intimate, the study of Scripture in the small group can be more personal. If such is the case its message can become more pointed as the Spirit applies the Word through the discussion of those present.

3. Finding materials for the sort of Bible study that will facilitate meaningful personal interaction around the Scripture can be problematic. More and more I find myself doing my own material. It’s time consuming. Some will feel inadequate making such an attempt. But the reward can be great.

I include a couple of other things under the Bible study heading:

1. Singing: there are groups where this is a regular part of their meetings. 2. Praying: at Covenant I encourage each group to have a significant time of prayer. That is our congregation at prayer. In the group I lead, we have practical “conversational prayer” which is basically the group having a conversation with God. This allows members to enter in as often as they like. We can easily spend 15-20 minutes in prayer and to me it seems more like just a few minutes. More importantly, we’ve seen God work in our midst in significant ways. Often the most rewarding part of our evening is the conversation we had with our Father.

In today’s world there is at least one other caution that is important. Too often people looking at a biblical text ask the question “what does it mean to me”? wthout first asking “what does the passage mean”? and asking the first question without dealing with the second is to run a significant risk. That the Bible will be made to say whatever an individual or group wants it to say, the meaning will be entirely subjective. And the truth found in Scripture will not only be compromised it could be lost.

Small group ministry is an important facet of many church programs. But small groups meeting without wrestling with the implications of the Scripture for their lives, individually and corporately, are at the very least deficient.

Why Men Hate Going to Church

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David Murrow is a layman who has served as an elder in the PCUSA. He is the director of an organization called Church For Men. He lives with his family in Anchorage, AK. As he noticed what he called a “gender gap” in churches he was perplexed as to the reasons for this situation. He began to research and found very little written on the subject. In his research he found men want to know God, but they want nothing to do with the church. He says that for years we have been calling men back to church, but now we need to call the church back to men.

Some of the reasons he found for the lack of presence of men in the church is the way the church has structured itself along feminine lines. Men’s religion is masculinity and when they come to church they don’t feel comfortable with the sensitivity and emphasis placed on relational activities. He finds that there is not enough challenge, risk taking, and vision in the church for men. He notes that the church is male led, but dominated by women. He has an interesting profile of men who are seminary trained and called to pastor churches.

He emphasizes the importance of the church, but leaders need to change the thermostat in the church more to challenge rather than promote comfort, conformity, and ceremony. If the church is to survive he says, we need more men, and they need to be made to see the importance of their mission. Murrow writes, “Men have no idea how vital Christ is to the future of mankind. Nor do they realize how needed they are. Without men and their warrior spirit in the church, all is lost. Our job is to lift the veil of religion and call men to the battle.”

He has a section on three gaps, identified as the gap of presence, the gap of participation, and the gap of personality. These are good reviews about men and women and the roles they play in the church.

He also has a number of chapters where he deals with the way men view the church. Some readers will not agree with all the descriptions or possible solutions he makes for change, but it is good to know what perceptions men have about the church and how the church needs to address these perceptions. Murrow makes a point of how mainline churches have adopted “inclusive language,” stripping masculine pronouns from hymns, liturgy, and even Scripture, in order to make women feel more comfortable in church. He also shows how denominations that have opened their doors widest to female leadership are generally declining in membership. He warns how this can be an obstacle in ministering to men.

He concludes the book with the importance for every man to have a spiritual father, and to become a spiritual father to another. Second, he underscores that every man needs a band of brothers. Why is it important? Murrow writes, “Jack received Christ during an invitation at his local church. Two months later, he no longer went to church, had lost all contact with believers, and was not living any discernible Christian life.” More than half of Christian conversions end this way. (Barna)

What if a spiritual father had taken responsibility for Jack? What if he’d been scooped up by a little platoon of men and discipled? With a band of brothers spurring him on, do you think Jack would abandon the faith just eight weeks later? That’s the strength of a little platoon-no man gets left behind. (226)

This is a good book for pastors and elders to read, and use in training men involved in leading men’s ministry in the local church. Murrow says this is not just a book for men, but for women also and I would agree.

Filed Under: Men

How is the Church to be in the World but Not of it?

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chd-inside.jpgIn a recent weekend seminar focusing on making Kingdom disciples, I encountered several questions regarding how the church is to be in the world but not of it. In Making Kingdom Disciples, A New Framework, I give a framework for being in the world but not of the world. The framework requires knowing the Word, knowing what we believe and why, and knowing the transforming effect truth is to have upon our lives. Included in the framework is the need to understand the world–not only to keep ourselves unspotted from the world, but also to know how to better communicate God’s truth in this world. Still, through my study, experience, and analysis I have a number of concerns about the church’s current involvement in our world.

First, as a church, do we completely understand our present situation? Much is going on in our world that is chaotic, fragmented and disconnected, causing us to trivialize the situation and see it has a passing fad. Yet, this very chaos is shaping our lives and culture. Second, if we do understand that what is happening in our world is shaping our culture and lives, do we know what to do about it? Are we prepared to give an explanation for what we believe and why, as the Apostle Peter instructed I Peter 3:15? Third, the church is battling two extremes. One is an indifference to the world around us, demonstrated by caving in to today’s irrational ideas of tolerance and political correctness. The other is capitulating to the world’s culture, busily embracing postmodernism’s pop cultural, market-driven focus where there is more form than substance. This has required a rewrite of Jesus’ Great Commission to read, “as you are going into the world, hold on to your faith but do not challenge others with that truth because after all, who’s to say you are right? Practice your religion in your private world, but do not bring it into the market place lest you be viewed as arrogant, dogmatic, and condescending to those who do not share your beliefs.

Also, as you are going into the world, be careful the topics you talk about lest you offend your neighbor and erect a barrier between you.” Growing out of that discussion and the subsequent questions, I coined a word for that context with which I tried to demonstrate how not to be offensive with our words. The word I flashed on the screen was “indolecism.” I did not want to offend anyone with the word lazy or slothful, but I suggested that I believe one of the reasons the church is ineffective is because Christians are lazy. They are not willing to expend the energy and time to study the situation, which at best produces a Christianity that is focused on me and mine rather than God. We have not understood what has gone before us in history and especially church history; therefore, we continue to fall into the same traps where our very survival is at stake. We would rather embrace the ways of the world to do our thing, even in the name of Jesus, than we would to think with a transformed mind about the world. I say, shame on us; God deserves better than that. Church history is strewn with wreckage of so many attempts of the church to buy into the world’s mold and ideologies, only to run aground and break apart. If we do try to pay attention to history, our tendency, because of the world’s influence, is to see it as simply one event after another with no connecting thread to help us make sense of those incidentals. Hence, we conclude history is relative and what is happening now is about the best I can try to understand, which of course you cannot do in a vacuum. In our seminar on modernity and its impact on our North American situation, I developed a one page schematic beginning with 1600 AD on to 2000 AD. One of the question posed was how North America moved from such a high standard of ethics and morality, which reflected a Christian consensus, to today’s street corner ethics and marketplace morality that has little or no semblance of Christian truth. Again, I concluded with the above group that I did not mean to be simplistic with the charge of indolecism, but we need to commit ourselves to being kingdom disciples who understand the Word and the world, to be thinking with a transformed mind in order to know what God would have us to do.

Those comments led me into a new book by David F. Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs, Christ in a Postmodern World. Wells has already instructed us in the past with other books. This fourth and final volume concludes the series. As I read Above All Earthly Pow’rs, I was encouraged that I was not alone in my concerns as to what is happening in evangelicalism in general and within the evangelical churches in particular. I was reminded of Os Guinness’s challenge in a book we reviewed this year, Prophetic Untimeliness. In our attempt to be up-to-date and make the Gospel relevant, we are actually becoming more and more irrelevant. The church has lost is salt and light on the world today, as a result. We cannot be like that which we challenge and make an impact. David Wells understands today’s world and how we have reached our present circumstance. He demonstrates over and over how we have negotiated, trivialized, or rewritten, by careful editing, the truth of the Gospel all in our attempt to be relevant. What this has done, according to Wells, is to challenge the church’s integrity with its message, therefore asking, does the church have a missional future? Wells clearly demonstrates how the church is not being the church today because it is buying into a spirituality that makes truth peripheral at best. The church, in its paranoia about being relevant has taken on “postmodern habits of thought and even unbelief.” Wells points out that we have jettisoned our Christian orthodoxy by tailoring our message for the new consumer audience.

The problem today is that “truth” appears to have no market value to the non-churched audience and even to some within the church. One example says Wells is how sin is preached, if in fact it is preached. Sin is presented not as an affront to a holy God but that which “harms the individual.” And in some churches, he says all we need to complete the picture of our worship, cast in light entertainment, is “popcorn.” Wells uses statistics to show that America’s belief in God is slipping because we are not giving people something solid to hold to. All is relative or pragmatic and not only is that what the pop culture around us is saying, but that message is reinforced within the evangelical community. He points out that the emergence of postmodernism and growing interest in religion and spirituality define the American culture and neither in themselves should encourage us. The way we are being taught to engage culture is by being like it. He further points out that our task “is not only to understand the nature of biblical truth but also to ask how that truth addresses the issues of the day.” Churches have a God-given assignment to help the people see truth in its preaching and teaching but also to help Christians understand how to engage the world around us. Being a kingdom disciple requires our thinking about God, the Word, the world and especially, as Wells says, the things that the world imposes on us-the workplace, appointments made, people we will meet, and jobs that must be done.

As I read Above All Earthly Pow’rs, I was reminded of a quotation that I have frequently used, “it is not what we think we are–what we think, we are.” Wells says that we do not think enough about the world and why it is as it is, and he is right. For example, I have heard some leading evangelical preachers talk about the revival of spirituality today uncritically, instead of first explaining how today’s interest in spirituality is so different from how the Church has understood spirituality in the past. Wells addresses that very cogently throughout this book. Preachers, teachers, parents, Christians, this is the kind of book we should be reading in our effort to think and live like kingdom disciples. We cannot go with the flow and embrace a form of Christianity without the substance and make a difference. The great commission in Matthew 28 calls us to make a difference, to make kingdom disciples. What we may be hearing in some circles of evangelical may sound relevant, exciting, new, and we are tempted to applaud, but the real question is, does the truth have a life-transforming influence on us and are we making any difference in our world, as a result?

In summary:

Small Groups – A Place to be Known

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Continuing from the last issue with the topic of small groups, I would like to review Lyman Coleman’s three-legged stool approach. A Christian group needs to involve:

1. Bible study, or more broadly worship. Some groups sing. Each group I work with allots a significant time for prayer. And the Bible should always be our reference point. 2. An opportunity to tell our stories. Everybody has a story to tell and almost everybody wants somebody to hear it. These stories are seen against the backdrop of Scripture, which gives us ongoing instruction for living and encouragement in our various relationships. 3. A task. We need to look beyond ourselves. That might involve inviting others to the group and/or taking on some sort of service project. Much of the mercy ministry effort in the church I work with flows from the small groups. It could also be that the task would be primary with time allotted for the other elements such as a choir, Session or Board of Deacons.

Small group suggests a level of understanding that grows as people come to know each other better. And that is a significant inhibitor. Many of us don’t want to be known. This makes us vulnerable. If they really know me will they still accept me? I ask myself that question. Whether you ask it or not, there’s a real possibility that it makes you cautious in relationships.

Yet we long for meaningful relationships. Many of us are lonely and feel somewhat isolated. But we fear what might be entailed in attempting to really connect with others. So we choose to remove ourselves, limiting relationships to those that are casual and consequently non-threatening.

To get close to someone suggests caring for that person. And caring can be both costly and scary. Often when there is a death we don’t know what to say to the one grieving so we avoid the issue by avoiding the person. When there is a serious illness the tendency is to refrain from any mention of it. We don’t want to say the wrong thing so we say nothing. When there is public sin there is a tendency to talk about the sinner but not to the sinner. Yet if it’s a friend isn’t there an obligation?

It might surprise you to know that many who practice such avoidance are the clergy – people we tend to think of as professionals in relationships and the practice of caring.

Friendships carry obligations. To avoid those obligations, we must avoid friendships.

Christians have experienced the love of God in Christ. That love should cause us to love others the way we have been loved. One forum for that is a group where people learn to look out for each other, challenge one another and pray with and for each other all the while reflecting on the message from the God who has brought us together.

Are you involved with a group of Christians who are stimulating your growth in grace? If not, why not?

God’s Faithfulness, Generation to Generation

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Editor’s Note: Christian Education and Publications oversees and coordinates the women’s ministry known as Women in the Church. WIC has been a vital part of our ministry since the beginning of the PCA. Many things have and are happening as a result of this ministry. In 2006 CEP sponsored the WIC International Conference. The following is an interview with Jane Patete, coordinator of the WIC ministry. Her vision and leadership have were one of the keys in the ’06 conference as well as WIC’s effectiveness in our overall ministry.

1. Briefly state the purpose of WIC (Women In the Church) with CEP and the PCA.

The stated purpose of the Presbyterian Church in America’s Women In the Church, which was approved by the first General Assembly, is: that every woman know Christ personally and be committed to extending His Kingdom in her life, home, church, community and throughout the world.

Women’s ministry was designed to be an expression of the theology of the PCA. There were non-negotiables: the authority of God’s Word, a commitment to the theological standards of the PCA, and a commitment to work within the ecclesiastical structure of the PCA. We want women to love the church of Jesus Christ. We want to help women understand their rich and fulfilling role in the church in an un-ordained position. We want women to be confident that the study resources are soundly biblical. This is why the fathers of the PCA placed women’s ministry under the oversight of the Committee for Christian Education and Publications. CEP serves local churches by providing leadership training and resources for kingdom discipleship.

2. What are some ways CEP has provided leadership training and resources for women?

Our overarching purpose is to disciple leaders and equip them to disciple others. Specific resources that help us fulfill this purpose are: