The Word on the Wind - Alison Morgan

This is the best book I've read to give to members of “sleepy churches that are being woken up”. It starts off at a very general middle-of-the-road Anglicanism, even to the extent of having an introduction by Rowan Williams, and it ends up fairly close to charismatic evangelicalism.

Alison Morgan is a good and clear writer, who has obviously got lots of experience of helping people know God better and seeing him working, both in England and Africa. The only bits that got on my nerves were the bits about science and religion, where Morgan sometimes gets out of her depth. For example, in chapter 2, Morgan says that the scientific revolution was largely due to a recovery of the Greek way of thinking as compared to the Hebrew. That may well be the way things often function today, but it's just plain wrong when thinking about the history of science (for a better view, see e.g. Peter Harrison, The Fall and the Foundations of Natural Science).

But that's being picky. It's not Morgan's main point and in general this is a great book – the kind of book that made me go out and look for other stuff she's written – the kind of book I'd like to work through with folks in a church that needed waking up. She even has a poem with the reflection questions at the end of each chapter, which really isn't my style but I recognise will work well for others.

The De-Churched and God's Judgement

Here's a graph I find absolutely terrifying. It shows church attendance stats for the UK (I think it's for 2005).

On the horizontal axis is a breakdown on the population by age. And on the vertical axis is the proportion of the population as a whole. The three colours on the chat represent those who are currently regular attenders at church (at least once a month), those who used to attend church but no longer do so and those who never attended church.

Roughly 60% of the population have never attended church. Roughly 30% of the population used to attend church but now no longer do so.

What terrifies me is what this means for those who have been leading the church over the past few generations. God entrusted the care of his people to them, and they presided over the decline of the church so severely that nearly 75% of those who are now 85-year-olds were once part of a church, but only 15% or so of children currently are. Roughly 80% of living Brits who have been part of a church are no longer part of the church.

42The Lord answered, "Who then is the faithful and wise manager, whom the master puts in charge of his servants to give them their food allowance at the proper time? 43It will be good for that servant whom the master finds doing so when he returns. 44I tell you the truth, he will put him in charge of all his possessions. 45But suppose the servant says to himself, 'My master is taking a long time in coming,' and he then begins to beat the menservants and maidservants and to eat and drink and get drunk. 46The master of that servant will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour he is not aware of. He will cut him to pieces and assign him a place with the unbelievers. 47"That servant who knows his master's will and does not get ready or does not do what his master wants will be beaten with many blows. 48But the one who does not know and does things deserving punishment will be beaten with few blows. From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.

Luke 12:42-48, NIV

I can hear in my head the sort of conversation God will have with people who were ministers during that time. When God tells them of the privilege it was to be made a steward over his household and family, and asks them what they did with it. When they try to make their pathetic excuses for how they did their job so poorly that 5 out of every 6 people in their churches left and the church went from being seen as the foundation of society to being a boring irrelevance in just two generations.

And the church leaders today who carry on the trend - who don't see that their job is about bringing people to know Jesus - it is about saving lives rather than making sure the few already in the lifeboat have more comfortable cushions as they watch the rest of the world drown. Is their lot going to be any better?

God's judgement and wrath against the vast majority of British church leaders over the last few generations is going to be terrible. And that scares me, because God has called me to follow after them, and I am beginning to see something of what an awesome responsibility it is...

A Healthy Church?

Back once again to the Purpose-Driven Church movement. They give out awards for having a healthy church, which seem to be assessed entirely on their standard criteria - does the church have an explicit and deliberate emphasis on worship, discipleship, fellowship, evangelism and service? Problem is, plenty of churches can have that and be chronically unhealthy.

Here are some extra questions...

• Is the preaching normally preaching systematically through the Bible rather than just whatever the preacher wants to say that week?
• Are Christians there excited about Jesus?
• Do visitors actually feel welcome?
• What is the drop-out rate through the youth work, right up until they are fully integrated into the main body of the church? Ideally, it should be negative.
• How well are different social groups integrated? Do people primarily love and mix with other people like them or do all members of the church genuinely learn from people from different social, economic, age backgrounds?
• If the church stopped being all about God, how long would people take to notice?
• Does the worship reflect well on the worship band or on God?
• Does the preaching reflect well on the preacher or on God?

The Purpose-Driven Movement - A Reassessment

My initial reaction to much of the Purpose-Driven movement was that there is a fair bit of wisdom there, but little that is distinctively Christian. There is little emphasis on doctrine, and actually the book Purpose-Driven Church would work pretty much just as well for a mosque, synagogue or health club. And quite a few of the organisations that subscribe to the Purpose-Driven philosophy seem somewhat batty.

Over the last few weeks, I've seen some more of the movement. I've read bits of Doug Fields' book Purpose Driven Youth Ministry, and I've met and heard talks by some of the Purpose Driven Worship team from Highlands Fellowship, whose website includes this rather strong recommendation of Rick Warren's work:

God had given Pastor Rick Warren his plan for our generation, and now Jimmie knew that God had the same in mind for the church in Abingdon. [That's Abingdon, Virginia, USA, not the original one.]

And I have to say (despite the above quote) that I have been generally very impressed by what I have seen. Both groups - both Doug Fields and the folk from Highlands have stressed the importance and priority of the youth worker / music group member's relationship with and dependence upon God even above their skill as a youth leader or musician. Both of them seem to be using the "purpose-driven" approach simply to mean the importance of thinking through what you are doing and the way you are doing it beforehand, and aiming it all to God's glory.

Radical Church Planting

Tim Chester is currently reading Organic Church by Neil Cole, and has some very interesting insights and suggestions from it. I think I'll add that to the list of things to read next year...

• planting churches where unbelievers gather
• planting churches with a person of peace
• planting churches in the homes of new believers

Bill Hybels - change of mind?

Hybels confesses:

We made a mistake. What we should have done when people crossed the line of faith and become Christians, we should have started telling people and teaching people that they have to take responsibility to become ‘self feeders.’ We should have gotten people, taught people, how to read their bible between service, how to do the spiritual practices much more aggressively on their own.

In other words, spiritual growth doesn’t happen best by becoming dependent on elaborate church programs but through the age old spiritual practices of prayer, bible reading, and relationships. And, ironically, these basic disciplines do not require multi-million dollar facilities and hundreds of staff to manage.

from here

Marketing the Church

I'm currently reading David F Wells' book God in the Wasteland, in which Wells argues that the church has essentially sold out to modernism.

One area in which he says this has happened is the area of seeing what the Church is about as marketing - that of identifying a group to "sell" a "product" to, of marketing it and so on. In particular, he sees the danger as being the willingness to change or adapt the product to fit people's perceived needs rather than their actual needs, and of being faithless to God in order to be faithful to culture.

To my mind, however, he presents the issue as too black-and-white. We certainly should not sell out wholesale to the marketing philosophy. We should not change the God we proclaim or seek to worship him in ways which he has said are unacceptable. And it certainly seems to me that some churches, especially in the US, have gone too far in that regard. The whole Purpose Driven Church movement, for example, runs that risk because of the lack of clarity as to what the gospel actually is.

But neither does that mean that we should not be wise in the way that we seek to relate the unchanging truth about God to a changing society, or that there is some valuable wisdom which is used by marketers. Some marketing techniques imply a worldview opposed to that of the Bible. But not all do, and some can be co-opted for serving God.

Here's an extract.

Today, evangelicalism reverberates with worldliness. In first impressions, this worldliness does not appear ugly at all. Quite the opposite. It maintains a warm and friendly countenance, parading itself as successful entrepreneurship, organizational wizardry, and a package of slick public relations insights that are essential to the facilitation of evangelical business.

Now, there is nothing wrong with entrepreneurship or organizational wizardry or public relations or television images and glossy magazines per se. The problem is with the current evangelical inability to see how these things carry with them values which are hostile to Christian faith. The problem, furthermore, lies in the unwillingness of evangelicals to forsake the immediate and overwhelming benefits of modernity, even when corrupted values are part and parcel of those benefits. What is plainly missing, then, is discernment, and this has much to do with the dislocation of biblical truth from the life of the church today and much to do with the dying of its theological soul.

I agree. But I think that at times Wells overreacts. Maybe that's necessary in the kind of wake-up call he was intending to give though.

What we need is discernment.

Church Size

Here's a thought that came out of a discussion I was having with a friend last night, sparked by the realisation that neither of us felt especially part of the churches we'd been going to for the last year, whereas both of us had been core members of churches before that.

The maximum number of people who can attend a church congregation is generally limited by the size of the building, seating, etc.

The maximum number who can feel as if they belong to a church congregation is much smaller. It is generally limted by the layout of the building - specifically the number of people who can comfortably socialise in the space used, given the layout.

One big factor, for example, would be that if the seating is in tightly packed rows, only the ends are effectively useful for socialising because there isn't sufficient room to turn around otherwise, and people can't move freely into or out of the row.

Just a thought, but it intuitively seems right.

All things to all people versus Unity in Christ

One of the big questions facing the Church over the next decade or so is probably this:

In a multicultural and heavily fragmented society, how do we hold together the importance of being "all things to all people" in evangelism and visibly expressing the unity that all Christians have in Christ, while recognising that everyone has gifts needed for the building up of the Church?

Some people go so far in either direction that they lose the other point of view entirely. For example, the FreshExpressions movement seeks to tailor church very specifically to subgroups of society who often aren't reached by "normal" church. But in doing so, they alienate all the other subgroups of society.

But the converse doesn't work either - with some subgroups actively defining themselves by rejection of the norm, there often isn't a common central ground where everyone can feel at home.

I don't know the answer, but here are a few pointers.

• In some places, the early Church faced similar problems, particularly with Jews and Gentiles. In those situations the apostles' big message was that Christ had abolished the distinction in himself, so that Christians from different backgrounds should meet together, eat together and accept one another. We see them getting attacked by the Jews for this policy.
• Solutions now need to be local rather than global. The situation in different places is different - some groups don't exist in some areas, in some areas the differences are more pronounced than others, etc.
• Many people are members of more than one subgroup in society.
• Being clearer about the difference between evangelism and discipleship is important. There is no reason we should expect non-Christians to mix with people from very different backgrounds, but Christians should.
• Church services targeted at specific groups is inadequate if it is the only thing that is going on. Alternating between group-specific and united services might not be, but it would create timetabling headaches, and people would tend to go to the service at the same time every week.
• If evangelism (in the sense of introducing non-Christians to Jesus) should involve "being all things to all people", and church services should involve unity across different groups, then evangelism should not be the main focus of all church services, though some church services may be targeted at specific groups and hence be evangelistic
• The best people to target things at a specific group are people in that group. The second best are people who spend time with that group and become identified with it, but it needs to be real identification.
• The unity expressed between Christians from different backgrounds is itself a witness, but should not be the only form of witness.

Carson - loving enemies in the church

Ideally, however, the church itself is not made up of natural "friends". It is made up of natural enemies. What binds us together is not common education, common race, common income levels, common politics, common nationality, common accens, common jobs, or anything else of that sort.... In this light, they are a band of natural enemies who love one another for Jesus' sake.

Don Carson, Love in Hard Places

Applications to the whole Fresh Expressions movement, to the way that social subgroups work in church, etc...

The Covenant Mess

I've been wanting to blog my own thoughts on this for a while, but don't have time to write much at the moment. In the meantime, here are a few links to events saying what is going on. I've used original sources where possible.

• The text of the covenant
• Tom Wright's response, which in some ways is helpful, in others misses the point and in others is just plain nasty. I hope that's a political nastiness rather than a genuine one.
• Dave Walker's cartoon about it, which misses the point too, but does so in a funny way.
• Full list of signitories of the covenant, plus some answers to the questions
• Anglican Mainstream's list of relevant articles and links

Here are some thoughts I've posted elsewhere on some of the underlying problems which Tom Wright didn't address in his piece:

The rapid growth of some churches and decline of others has meant that the C of E synodical system is no longer fairly representative of the membership. Instead, it is heavily weighted towards members of small churches (which tend to be more liberal and/or catholic) compared to larger ones which tend to be more evangelical and/or charismatic. For example, St Ebbe's in Oxford has five main congregations on a Sunday, with a total attendance probably over 1000, yet it only counts as one church. HTB is a lot bigger even than that. 1000 members of local traditional anglo-catholic churches (of which there are many) would probably be 20 or more churches, with far more seats on Synods. This means that a high (and growing) proportion of congregants in the C of E, particularly the more evangelical ones, are greatly under-represented in the structures of the C of E.

The increasing mobility in society has led to a situation, particularly in urban areas, where the parish system has broken down. Parish boundaries are increasingly irrelevant and the majority of members of many churches do not live in the parish. Urban churches are therefore becoming more specialist - students, young families, elderly people, evangelical, liberal, anglo-catholic, whatever. The hubs of communities in towns are no longer the old village high streets, which worked well with the parish system, but larger developments. In such a context, it makes little sense to have a parish system, at least within towns. That's actually a large part of the thing they wrote.

As society becomes decreasingly Christian, people are more and more recognising that most people in Britain have very little awareness of the good news of Jesus Christ. This means that people who think it is important to proclaim that good news to everyone, and who don't see it being done effectively want to be able to work with the unreached wherever they are.

With the whole women bishops thing being debated, it is felt that there is a fair bit of debate going on about the role of bishops, and it is likely that the next few years will be formative for the structures in the C of E for the next few decades. If they're going to make a point about bishops, it seems a sensible time to do it.

There is a growing unity among the different groups of evangelicals within the C of E. As far as I can tell, this is the first time New Wine and Reform have got together on something. Certainly, it feels like the charismatic divide is starting to heal, which is good. That also means that they are more likely to be listened to.

What I think Tom Wright's response risks doing, however, is to create divisions within evangelical Anglicanism, which isn't good. I don't think that the original covenant did that in the same way, and Bishop Tom would have been much better (in my opinion) to gently point out a few faults rather than lay into them so heavily.

Here are a few more quick thoughts:

• I know a fair few of the people who signed the covenant personally, and I really don't think they're trying to do schism. What they're trying to do is be clear that there's a lot that they agree on about ways forward in the current situation, specifically with the debates about the future of bishops in the Church of England and the debate that should be happening about the future of the parish system
• The covenant is a covenant with each other - it's them agreeing on something.
• They represent a lot more people than Dave Walker suggested. I know at the college I'm training at, only a minority are members of any of the groups officially listed there (I think, though that might be close), but probably a majority would agree with the substance of what was said
• I don't think the purpose of it is to establish an us-and-them situation - it's to try to kick start dialogue. If someone else wants to come back at them with a discussion about how the parish system enables mission today, for example, I imagine they would be more than welcome to. But as it is, there's a large chunk of the C of E that thinks it hinders it.

More here.

Cross-Cultural Mission

One of the basic principles of Christian mission is described by Paul in his first letter to the church in Corinth:

Though I am free and belong to no man, I make myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible. To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law. To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God's law but am under Christ's law), so as to win those not having the law. To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings.
1 Corinthians 9:19-23, NIV

Basically, if we want to reach goths with the good news of Jesus (for example), the best way of doing that is to give up all the secondary cultural stuff and become a Christian who is also a goth.

Otherwise, if you've got a bunch of Christians who are all (as many are in the UK) white, university educated, middle class, non-smoking professionals, then outsiders are going to look in and say "That's a place for white university educated middle class non-smoking professionals, but I'm a black brickie who smokes and left school at 16, so I don't fit in." It shows people that they can fit in, it gets rid of most of the barriers, and lets them see Jesus better on their own terms. It doesn't demand that they have to change all their cultural stuff, that might well define who they are, if they are going to become a Christian.

I'm a Christian first and foremost. Yes, I'm white, middle class, university educated, non-smoking. But that should all be negotiable (except it's hard to change my DNA or the past). It doesn't define who I am, so I can change it if I love other people enough and really want them to know Jesus.

Now here's where the rubber hits the road. I know of no Christian churches which are doing this in trying to reach Muslims. I don't know Christian churches where the leaders grow beards, the women wear head coverings, they sit on the floor and put the Bible on a stand, where they only eat halal food. And we wonder why so few Muslims in the UK become Christians! Isn't it obvious! It's because we're not making the effort - because we are holding too tightly to our own culture to bother trying to reach them. I'm not saying we should become Muslims; I'm saying that where issues are negotiable (like hair styles, probably not like gender roles) then we should be willing to compromise to reach others.

What do we do instead? Benedictine techno-trance (no offence to those who really love that stuff), but the C of E seems to plug loads of money into alt.worship stuff because it is trendy even though it seems to bear no fruit and they don't know who it's meant to be reaching.

I know some great fresh expressions of church. I've talked about some on this blog - I've got friends involved with initiatives like the Plant and Eden. But they work precisely because they are losing classic white, middle class, etc culture and changing their culture to that of the people they are trying to reach. Where are the Christians willing to become like Muslims to win the Muslims?

Two Books About Running Churches

I've been reading quite a bit recently. Two books I've read, which I thought it would be interesting to contrast, are Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Church and Mark Dever & Paul Alexander's The Deliberate Church.

Both are written by the leaders of large baptist churches in the US. Both have some very American features in common - the use of a written church constitution. Both have a formalised membership system with clear (and some might say legalistic) expectations of members.

The big contrast between the two books is in terms of where they get their ideas from about leading and growing churches. Warren's book is good at the application of wisdom - a high proportion of his quotes are from Proverbs, and most of what he writes seems like common sense. In particular, he is good at wisdom in listening to the local community and seeking to reach them where they are as well as wisdom in focusing the work of the church on what the church should be doing (which he identifies as worship, evangelism, fellowship, disicpleship and service).

Dever & Alexander, on the other hand, aim to focus far more on what the Bible says about leading churches. There's a lot more about the importance of eldership, church discipline, etc. There are also useful correctives to some of Warren's weaknesses - his book does not actually articulate the gospel clearly - it assumes it, and at times could certainly be open to accusations of seeking to entertain non-Christians or not be completely clear what it's all about. I can see that people might view The Purpose Driven Church as a way to set up a very efficient and popular organisation without neccesarily making direct claims to absolute truth. It would be much harder to interpret The Deliberate Church like that.

But that's not to say that Dever & Alexander have got it all right. While much stronger on the doctrine and management of the church, and importantly clear on being cautious what message we communicate in our evangelism, they do not cover a lot of Warren's key material on identifying and reaching the community. Incidentally, if they did, I think they might well do it better - Warren's weakness there was that he mainly wrote about getting people who are already like the community to reach them, rather than sacrifically becoming all things to all men. Dever & Alexander's big weakness, other than weaknesses of omission, is that they sometimes take the argument from Scripture too far - to cover closed communion services, for example, and instead of working outwards from the Bible, they take a few (and only a few) of their own presuppositions and attempt a post facto justification of them from Scripture.

All in all then, I think God has gifted people differently for the building up of his church. Dever is a much better handler of Scripture than Warren; I suspect Warren is a better handler of people. Both skills are needed, and I found both books immenseley helpful in thinking through issues of church leadership.

eden

When I was a child, the World Wide Message Tribe did quite a bit of stuff at our church. They were a group of Christians who did a lot of songs, some of their own and some from hymnbooks, in a kind of house / rap / dance style. They went into schools and did missions there. I thought they were pretty good.

Later, through the influence of some of the people they'd come into contact with, particularly Soul Survivor, their theology started heading more in a kind of wacky charismatic direction. They claimed that revivals were taking place (sometimes despite external evidence), they claimed that OT verses were being given specifically to them and applied directly to them, and so on. I still went along to some of their stuff, and God kept on using them, but was less keen than I had been.

About the time I went away to university, they started trying to put lots of Christians into some of the rougher areas of Manchester, in what became known as the Eden Projects, not to be confused with the dome things in Cornwall. To be honest, I was put off supporting it by the ropey theology and seeming craziness of it generally. Some of that was snobbery.

Since then, the Worldwide Message Tribe has ceased to exist, but the Eden projects have multiplied and kept going. I've stayed in touch roughly with what was going on, but last week I read this book about Eden.

It basically tells the story of what happened - how what started out as a theologically wobbly and unsustainable attempt at urban regneration ended up being a network of church plants / grafts / transplants / reboots doing what seems to be a really good job of incarnational evangelism and working out fresh expressions of church in a series of difficult urban contexts in Manchester. In terms of how to go about planting churches in situations like that, I think it's probably better than mission-shaped church.

It's been really encouraging and challenging to see how God, by his grace, uses the commitment and risk-taking-ness of his people, even when we get stuff wrong, for his glory. Really challenging because I'm far too good at playing it safe.

mission-shaped church

I’ve been reading the official C of E report mission-shaped church recently. People who I’ve spoken to who’ve read it (mostly young adults in leadership roles in the C of E) generally rave about how good it is. As usual, I’m going to disagree....

mission-shaped church is basically trying to answer the question

How can the Church of England go about reaching the people it isn’t reaching at the moment?

Much of the book is good advice about church planting, examining the weaknesses of the parish system in large areas of the country, etc.

Much of the book is looking at ways that people are trying to reach out at the moment, especially in terms of “fresh expressions of church” – doing things differently, cell churches, network churches, especially in terms of growing churches among new groups, etc. The weakness? I think they’ve screwed up the theology.

Don’t get me wrong. I agree that the C of E is not bringing the gospel to a huge proportion of the population, and that a large amount of that is down to the way we do things. It is important to recognise, as the book does, that England today is an increasingly fragmented society, with many different subcultures, often without much in common with each other. I agree with the authors that the C of E all too often is not engaging properly with many of these cultures. In fact, it seems that there are several subcultures within the Church of England, which often have little to do with the cultures in society.

I agree that our response to this situation should be to be “all things to all men, so that by all means possible we may save some”. But I think there is a huge danger in doing that; one which the book hardly even mentions.

The situation in the Roman Empire at the time the New Testament was being written was in many ways similar to ours. Society was fragmented, with the biggest divide that affected the church being that between Jews and Gentiles, and it is against that background that Paul wrote these words

Though I am free and belong to no man, I make myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible. To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law. To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God's law but am under Christ's law), so as to win those not having the law. To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some.
1 Corinthians 9:19-22, NIV

Paul in that quote seems to be speaking about precisely the same idea as mission-shaped church - that of changing who we are and the way we do things to reach people. But while evangelism does seem to have involved total cultural engagement, Paul had different priorities for how the church worked.

It could certainly be argued that the distinction between Jew and Gentile in the Roman world was at least as big as any of the divisions in modern culture. And yet the New Testament clearly sees them both in the same churches, in the same congregations, working alongside one another.

For [Christ] himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace, and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.
Ephesians 2:14-18, NIV

Part of Paul’s view there is of course on the fact that the Gentiles had previously been excluded from access to God. But part of it is clearly on the fact that Jew and Gentile have been united and reconciled to one another in Christ. In the Bible, there is not even a hint of creating separate Jewish and Gentile churches, though it is clear that the style of outreach used to reach Jews and Gentiles were very different at times.

Once people become Christians, they are united to all other Christians in the same family. Yes, that means that where the way we do things is uncomfortable for other Christians, we should change it. But it does not mean that they should have a separate church meeting because they like a different style of music. It means that we should lovingly accommodate them within the Church. Heaven is not going to be split into ghettos according to social background or ethnicity or musical tastes. Therefore the Church shouldn’t be either.

Where there is a good case for separate meetings is where the same languages aren’t spoken or where people are sufficiently geographically distinct (or indeed there are space considerations) so that it’s not reasonable for everyone to meet in the same place at the same time. And even then, there should be efforts made to express unity together.

This doesn't mean I think all Christians should go to their parish church. In many cases, the parish church will not be accessibly culturally or theologically. In those situations, I would say that ideally the parish church should change, and then the Christians might start going there.

So what would I suggest instead of mission-shaped church? As far as I can tell, there are two truths we need to hold together.

• Church should be accessible to and express the unity of all Christians in the area. If that means compromise on musical or liturgical styles then that is what it means. If that means getting to the point where established Christians are uncomfortable with it, they should do it out of love for God and for one another. It might well involve "fresh expressions of church".
• The way the Church reaches out to groups within the community should be incarnational, seeking to participate in the culture, to “become Jews to win the Jews, goths to win the goths”, etc.

It's worth me noting here that there are some very good insights in this book.