A vital faith community keeps being driven by the good news of Jesus. If you are no longer moved by the message of salvation, how can you communicate the good news to those around you? Do you as a local congregation have the courage to spend time and energy on this?
What is important is the heart to heart meeting
In his book “Life from the Source” Marius Noorloos presents a worked out method around deepening the faith and missionary congregation building. He describes the congregation as a community that is characterised by having a:
- Heart for the Lord
- Heart for each other as his disciples
- Heart for his work in the world.
In other words: what is important in the missionary congregation is to learn to find Jesus, to follow and represent him. The method to build up a missionary congregation through deepening faith consisted of three elements: Action, Reflection and Communication.
In the church we tend to move quickly into action, we want to have a working plan and get going. If the activities receive too much emphasis you will get a ‘business-like busyness’ and there is a danger of the congregation becoming business-like.
Reflection is essential: about vision and policy; setting priorities and reflecting on where building up the congregation will lead. A one-sided emphasis on this approach may mean a lot of thinking and talking, but that nothing gets started - everything becomes too theoretical.
“Life from the Source” begins with the importance of real communication. What is important here is the heart to heart meeting, whereby we practice listening to the words of the good news. As a result of these meetings our faith is deepened and now we can be inspired to build a vital and attractive congregation.
A number of suggestions
- In Marius Noorloos’ book “Life from the Source” leaders in local congregations are invited to connect the small conversations of meetings of people with the big Conversation of the meeting with God. Bible sections and questions are handed out to facilitate this meeting and conversation. What is important here is not discussion but the question ‘how is your life affected by this bible text; what strikes you?’ (You could also see a method of Bible study called Lectio Divina on the internet). Those who engage in these conversations do make themselves vulnerable and it is important that those facilitating the discussion make sure conversations don’t turn into arguments. It is not important to be proved right, what needs to happen is that the various experiences are given careful attention. In this way you will learn to understand each other better and barriers to relationships are removed.
- Helpful ways forward will arise from these intensive conversations. Who are we as a congregation? What do we contribute to our environment? What are the developments that we can make? What ideas give life to the congregation?
- Finally, are there activities that can be used as building stones for building up faith and congregation? What are we going to do? Who is going to do it? How? When? And with which means?
In practice this means that the option is Communication, Research, Action rather than Action, Research, Communication.
Marius Noorloos offers a complete programme in his book, including a helping hand to a course leader and examples of building stones in the process. In practice it has been proved that church leaders dedicating five evenings exclusively to this process is a good start.
Possible approach for the church
- Concentrate on this method as church leaders: ask a number of people to have a look and present it. Make a decision as to whether or not you want to start using this. Reserve a Saturday on which you can have a closer look at the contents, setup and intention.
- Set aside five evenings in the year in which you familiarise yourselves with the programme.
- Develop building stones through creating a plan of action.
- Invite members of the congregation to join in a similar process. You could do this through house groups.
