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There seems to be no end these days to the production of books attempting to help the church get back to what it is supposed to be. The title Total Church suggests (correctly) that this is another such book. But this one deserves special attention not because of the hype surrounding it but because the authors have done an excellent job of showing what the “bottom line” of “church” is and how that bottom line affects everything we associate with church life.

Tim Chester and Steve Timmis, Total Church: A Radical Reshaping around Gospel and Community (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008).

The book’s layout is simple. The first two chapters spell out the two principles around which every other chapter in the book is based. These two principles are gospel and community. In the rest of the book, the authors consider various aspects of church ministry--things like evangelism, world mission, discipleship, and ministry to children--and show how gospel and community impact and inform these ministries. The result is, as the subtitle explains, a “radical reshaping” of how to do church. The authors contend that  “whether we are thinking about evangelism, social involvement, pastoral care, apologetics, discipleship, or teaching, the content is consistently the Christian gospel, and the context is consistently the Christian community” (p. 16). But unless understands what the authors mean by gospel and community, this book will be just another “how to” manual for doing church.

GOSPEL. The reason the gospel is so important is because it is by the gospel, by the proclamation of Jesus, that God rules. It is God’s “great work” to “bring people to eternal life through our proclamation of the gospel.” This means that God’s people must be word-centered. And since this word is a missionary word, the church must also be mission-centered. The church has been spent out into Satan’s kingdom as God’s people live their everyday lives. This means that we need to view all of life as gospel-centered wherever we live, work, or play. Until the Church understands this, we will continue to be mere “Sunday morning” Christians, and the impact of the Church on our communities will be minimal.

COMMUNITY. The Christian community is central to Christian identity, and “this is perhaps the most significant ‘culture gap’ that the church has to bridge (p. 41). Being a Christian means not only that we belong to God but also that we belong to the others who are in Christ. “To fail to live out our corporate identity in Christ is analogous to the act of adultery: we can be Christian and do it, but it is not what Christians should do” (p. 41). Being in community means we must make decisions with regard to how it impacts the community. Chester and Timmis sound quite radical in their explanation of community, but they are also as thoroughly biblical on this topic as anyone else I’ve ever read on the subject of Christian community.

So how do gospel and community affect the total church? Evangelism, for example, involves the proclamation of Christ of course, but it also necessitates introducing non-Christians to the gospel community. It is not enough, the authors say, to build a relationship between one believer and one unbeliever. This does not mean getting the unbeliever to a church service but rather introducing them to a community of Christians in action. The authors are not talking about an event but about “ordinary people doing ordinary things with gospel intentionality” (p. 63).

Consider also the authors’ views on spirituality. They react to proponents of “contemplation, silence and solitude” as the pathway to spiritual maturity arguing that such is “the exact opposite of biblical spirituality” (p. 141). Instead the authors’ demonstrate that biblical spirituality is word-centered rather than contemplative; mission-centered rather than silence; and community-centered rather than solitude. Why? Because “union with Christ is not the goal of spirituality; it is the foundation of spirituality” (p. 143). And what we need to practice our spirituality is a passionate engagement with the world not a quiet retreat from it. We also need “church culture sin which it is normal and expected for everyone lovingly to confront and persuade everyone” (p. 151).

The authors of Total Church have persuasively argued their point that for the Christian the whole of life must be shaped around gospel and community. They have not just argued the point, however; they have also offered practical suggestions for followers of Jesus to live out their faith in this way. The authors’ model is a “house church” structure, but they do not push that structure exclusively. Instead they have done the whole church a great service in demonstrating how doable it is for anyone who is serious about their Christian faith to live intentionally on mission for the gospel.

What is sin? What does it mean to be lost?

Those were some of the questions we discussed during our last study of The Prodigal God. In the parable of the Prodigal Son, we see an illustration of a view that is prevalent today regarding what it takes to be loved and accepted. The so-called prodigal (the younger brother in the story) decides to go back home, but he believes he is no longer worthy to be called his father's son. He wants to be "a hired servant" so he can pay back his father the money he squandered.

This is an illustration of religion, the idea that you must do something to merit God's acceptance of you. Only in the Christian gospel do we see a different picture. The prodigal does not have to merit the father's love; the father kept the door open to his son from the very beginning by giving him the inheritance he demanded rather than expelling him from the community (as any typical Middle-Easter patriarch would have done). Yes, the father's love for the younger son was there all along, but what was needed to detonate that love in the prodigal's heart was repentance. When he "came to his senses" (Luke 15:17) and realized how he had spurned the goodness of the father, only then could the love of the father explode in his life and bring him the happiness he had failed to find elsewhere.

So we can see in the younger son that sin is not merely "breaking the rules." Sin is, as Tim Keller says, a "disordered love." It is loving something more than that which you should love ultimately. It is seeking our significance and happiness in something or someone other than God. It is, in fact, idolatry. The younger son sought his significance and happiness in his immorality, but he came to know that it was only in his father's presence, in the delights of his father's love, that he could be satisfied.

The older son had the same problem, except he sought his significance and happiness in his morality, and that led him only to self-righteousness and anger. He, too, wanted the father's things rather than the father himself. He also had a disordered love. We'll talk more about him next week, but it is already obvious that both sons were alienated from the father. Both sons were "lost." And the only way back to God is when we recognize this to be the case, because the only prerequisite for receiving the grace of God is to know that you need it (Keller, Prodigal God, 45).

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Crosstown Church dedicated the entirety of our offering last night to relief efforts going on in Haiti. With well over 100,000 confirmed deaths (and counting) from the January 12 earthquake, we can only imagine the devastation the citizens of Haiti have been enduring.

Our weekly budget calls for $500. We set a goal of collecting $1000 for Haiti. Currently, we stand at $1071 with online donations still to be counted.

This is a significant contribution from our little church, and we want to thank all of you who have partnered with us. If you would still like to give to this offering, you may do so through the rest of the week by donating online and selecting "Haiti Relief."

Crosstown Church will collect an offering to be given to relief support in Haiti in the wake of the devastating earthquake on January 12 that has killed possibly as many as 100,000 people. All offerings collected on Sunday, January 24, will be given to two relief efforts.

• The North American Mission Board's Disaster Relief Fund
• Churches Helping Churches

We are asking all core group members of Crosstown Church to make their financial contributions this coming Sunday so that we can give the maximum amount possible to the relief efforts taking place in Haiti. If you would like to join us in this effort, bring an offering to Sunday night's Bible study or feel free to give online. If you do give online, be sure to select "Haiti Relief" from the options box so your donation will be used for that purpose.

Our current budget calls for $500 a week. We would like to give away $1000 this week, so please be in prayer about how much extra you might give for this good cause.

The kind of outsiders Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches, even our most avant-garde ones. We tend to draw conservative, buttoned-down, moralistic people. . . . That can only mean one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did. (Tim Keller, The Prodigal God, pp. 15-16).

Jesus told the parable of the two lost sons (traditionally knows as the Parable of the Prodigal Son) in response to the muttering of the Pharisees who despised Jesus because of the kind of people he was willing to associate with. The religious elite were constantly at odds with Jesus and his teaching, but the despised of that culture were intrigued with him. In the story of the two lost sons we find that not just the "sinners" but also the "good people" are lost. And the only hope for both is the extravagant (indeed, prodigal) love and grace of a seeking Savior.

But if this gospel is for those on the path of moral conformity just as much as it is for those who are on the path of self discovery, then why is it that many churches today are not attracting the broken and marginalized with Jesus' message of grace?

Perhaps one reason is that in a day when more and more people are non-religious or even anti-religious, the church has depended on the rise of conservative, orthodox religious movements attempting to "take back the culture" rather than depending on the gospel message that Jesus proclaimed.

Indeed if people continue to hear "Christians" saying ridiculous things like the idea that God punished the nation of Haiti with a devastating earthquake because they once "swore a pact with the devil" in order to free themselves from the French, the true Christian gospel will remain hidden. Until we get back to the gospel of Jesus, the Church will continue to fail to reach the "lost sons" around her, both the ones inside as well as the ones outside of her walls.

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