As I've been thinking about reaching Yorkshire with the gospel it has got me thinking about our prepackaged view of church. When I say the word church all sorts of ideas pop into our heads. 2 services one in the morning or one in the evening or one afternoon service with tea, a building or a school hall, a Sunday gathering, home/gospel/small groups or whatever you want to call them. There are a set of assumptions which we make when we think about church. But are those assumptions helping us reach people with the gospel or stopping us reaching people with the gospel? Does what helps one group of people hinder another?
Take the idea of home groups (or whatever you call them). A group of people who regularly get together and are committed to studying the Bible together. That is great, and much great work and discipling is done in these groups. But are they culturally relevant for everyone? What about for those not from academic backgrounds, or who have always found reading and comprehension exercises difficult? In what other environment or secular setting do people sit down and discuss a document(I know the bible is much more than that)? My guess is its only in middle class, university educated environments and work places. Do we need to be more creative in our thinking about Bible teaching for the vast majority of people? What will this look like?
With most of my friends who are Yorkshire born and bred we don't read a book and get together to discuss it over coffee. We gather together to watch something or to do something (like go to the footie, or a pub quiz). We talk alongside each other as we do something together, or help each other out with something. We meet at the school gate and chat about real life problems and practicalities as we wait to pick our children up from school. So sitting in a room and discussing the Bible is so hard for these men. And it is not that they are wrong and we are right, it is not that they need to learn to do it. It is that we need to learn to be culturally flexible with the inflexible truth of the gospel. If courses on an evening in a building or a home are our way of evangelism will we ever reach these people?
Or take the presuppositions about a church service - I'm not talking about when it is or isn't as in day or time I'll throw myself on that grenade another day - but about its content. What level of literacy do our services require? What level are we aiming at in our reading and our preaching? Is the language we use technical or understandable?
Picture your normal service: how many songs do you sing, how quick are they, how many different songs do you sing in a month? How accessible are bibles to people? Do you have big print bibles? How well read is the bible (this is vital if people struggle to read for themselves)? What technical language is used in your service? Worship, praise, grace, trinitarian, gospel, justified, cross, prayer all words we use but which need to be explained and may be better replaced by a simple phrase.
I want to say right out front that I love singing and praising God is a biblical and right response to the love of God in Christ. But how welcoming is our singing if you are from a non-singing culture? Or reading if you find reading hard? Would we be better to have a smaller selection of songs we sing and almost learn so that how well you read the words of a screen is irrelevant? In a largely non-reading culture even among church goers how can we ensure the bible is taken in during the service? It needs to be read well, with feeling, emotion, depth, passion, sorrow depending on what the reading calls for.
I wonder if we need to stop and think about our evangelical Christian sub-culture. Who does it exclude? How hard does it make it for people to feel at home, to grow, to be discipled? The problem with assumptions is that we make them sub-consciously, by their very nature they are not thought through decisions. I can't help wondering if our church culture is part of the problem not the solution for many in Yorkshire?
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