Introducing Scattered and Gathered: Equipping disciples for the frontline

It happened to me again last week. 

Alison had moved 250 miles to an area she didn’t know to care for family and she was looking for a church to belong to, looking for somewhere she could settle. She had found a new job, had moved into a new house, had few friends, but had a family that needed her support. She was, understandably, feeling apprehensive.
At the end of the morning service, I was telling her about our church community.
I explained that we were less interested in how she could serve us, more concerned about how we could help her discover how God was leading her in this new phase of life in light of the demands and opportunities that she would face now.
She listened closely, didn’t say anything, merely raised her eyebrows.
She clearly hadn’t expected to hear this.
She was a church veteran.
But this was unexpected.
This was new.
At least to her…

So begins the first chapter of Scattered and Gathered. I opened the book with this story because at the time of writing, it was the latest conversation I’d had with someone who was exploring the possibility of joining the church that I lead. It was an example of the sort of conversation that I have had with many Christians who have moved into the area and are looking for a church to join. It demonstrates all the unwritten expectations that Christians can have about belonging to a church community, and what it means to lead a church that takes seriously our call to make followers of Jesus who live this out in the complexity of the whole of their lives, not just in the perceived priority of church-sponsored activity. It’s a conversation that shows how difficult it can be for people to see their Scattered lives to be connected to their Gathered experience of church.

As part of the wider team at the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity (LICC), working alongside leadership teams from churches of all traditions, I am more convinced than ever that in order to cultivate a meaningful dynamic between our gathered life together as a church and our experience of living as disciples of Jesus in our scattered places we need to be clear about three fundamental issues:

• What it means to be a disciple of Jesus, when this is involves living out the implications of the lordship of Christ in their everyday, public lives, rather than just a personal commitment to Christ in their personal, private lives.
  
  
• What does to mean to be churches that keep people’s everyday contexts in the forefront of their planning of week-by-week ministry.
  
  
• What sorts of leaders are needed for these sorts of churches.

This book has been shaped by these core questions. It’s ordered in this way because I believe that the church’s primary vocation is to make disciples of Jesus. If we can keep that at the forefront, then we can explore how our life together as church communities serves that goal. And if that’s clear, then the role of leaders becomes much clearer.

A quick scan of these issues is enough to be clear that it’s impossible for one book to be exhaustive about any of these areas of concern, let alone all three. But it’s important that these three issues are seen as being intrinsically connected. They cannot be separated out.

It sounds simple, but in most churches this requires a fundamental shift in culture.

But it is do-able.

I didn’t want the book to be merely theoretical. I wanted it to include the stories of churches we have worked with, leaders we have met and people we know. And I wanted to write it for people who know this matters but may have lost confidence to know how to be churches that enable people to grow in confidence and courage as disciples of Jesus. I wanted to write it for churches that believe that change is possible for them.

Because I know it is.