Recommend It With A Dose Of Careful Guidance | Total Church: A Radical Reshaping around Gospel and...

A book that "gets it" on the church | Total Church: A Radical Reshaping around Gospel and Community (Re:Lit) | Tim Chester, Steve Timmis

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	• Total Church: A Radical Reshaping around Gospel and Community (Re:Lit) Tim Chester, Steve Timmis Crossway Books, 2008 - 224 pages average customer review:based on 20 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

What if there were a different kind of church?

For a kid who didn't grow up in the church, I'm certainly becoming extremely passionate about it. I love learning about what makes the church the church and how Christians can improve how we "do church" in order to better reflect the character of Jesus.

My daughter (via my lovely wife) gave me this book for Christmas and I was pleasantly surprised. I'd been reading a similar work earlier in the year that made me want to slap myself in the face for reading such a stupid book (that's the nicest critique I can give).

Total Church combines a deep love for Scripture and the Gospel, with a strong desire to see people come to know and love Jesus in intimate community. It's truly a rare thing when you see people advocating for both strong, biblical teaching alongside building relationship, but Steve Timmis and Tim Chester do exactly that.

The premise is that a biblical church must be gospel-centered (meaning, both word-centered and mission-centered) and community-centered. "Christianity is word-centered because God rules through his gospel word," say the authors. "Christianity is mission-centered because God extends his rule through his gospel word." The gospel is good news -- it is a message, as succinct as "Jesus is Lord," but as comprehensive as the entirety of Scripture, which all centers around the atoning death and resurrection of Jesus. Because the gospel is good news--our sins can be forgiven thanks to the finished work of Jesus--it is a message that must be proclaimed. "You cannot be committed to the gospel without being committed to proclaiming the gospel" (pg 32, emphasis added).

This is exceedingly refreshing in a time when many (specifically well-known) churches rarely proclaim the gospel--if ever.

Further, because our identities are not formed in a void, but within community, we must also understand that our identity as Christians is found in Christ's new community. This is, in essence, what it means to be a "total church." You love the word of God, you proclaim it, and you discover your new identity in community with your fellow brothers and sisters in Christ.

The second half of the book (chapters 3 on) deal with the practical implications of this philosophy. I won't cover all of them, but just a few of the stand-out items:

Evangelism takes on a three-strand approach, wherein we build relationships, share the gospel, and introduce people into community simultaneously. In some ways, this is similar to the Alpha approach, but less programmatic. It allows evangelism to happen naturally through relationship. "It's ordinary people, doing ordinary things with gospel intentionality...The ordinary needs to be saturated with a commitment to living and proclaiming the gospel," say the authors. It's about de-compartmentalizing our lives and being "authentic" (to use an oft-coined buzzword).

Social involvement is not simply social action. It is a cohesive blend of action and evangelism. If our social actions don't point to the gospel, they "are like a signpost pointing nowhere" (p 78).

Church-planting is where mission and community intersect: A biblical church is one that replicates, planting new churches.

Total Church, as great a book as it is, is not without it's problems. First, it wrongly argues that the apostolic church only met in homes, whereas Scripture says that the early church met both in homes and gathered together for corporate worship. Acts 2, for example, shows that the 128 believers gathered together to worship Jesus. The Spirit fell, Peter preached and three thousand were added to their number. Secondly, it supports the view that sermon as monologue rose after Constantine's "conversion" and it was no longer possible to teach in a dialogue setting due to sheer numbers. This ignores the more likely origin of the sermon as monologue: the Jewish synagogue & religion. Thirdly, the authors' view is that the disciplines of "contemplation, silence and solitude" are not biblical, whereas Jesus on numerous occasions went to be alone with the Father (Luke 6:12, 9:18, 22:41 are but three examples). Spirituality within community is extremely important, but we cannot overlook the importance of private spirituality as well.

Steve Timmis and Tim Chester have done an excellent job presenting a comprehensive and compelling vision of a biblical church in Total Church. If you've ever asked the question, "What if there were a different kind of church?" you will find this book an encouraging and challenging read.

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Recommend It With A Dose Of Careful Guidance

This book, front to back, keeps saying the same thing over and over again:

"These things are not just for the offices of Christ. These are the things for the saints!"

Things like Gospel and Community are a given but what about things like Evangelism, Pastoral Care, Apologetics or even Theology? Yes, these things are for all the saints.

Most of the chapters are dead on and the authors work really hard to try to get the mindset switched from "oh, that is for those who are called" to "I am called to the Great Commission."

The ONLY beef I would have is with the Spirituality and Theology chapters.

Spirituality - Authors prooftexts (an all too common mistake in the Evangelical world) Matthews 18:19-20

Theology - While otherwise very solid, it is the way that the authors put theology into practice at their own church. Each of the house churches come up with their own theology and... that is it. No verification by elders. No checking for heresy. No emphasis on clarification. Certainly, we cannot follow suit.

I would wholeheartedly recommend this for any small group. Open it up to discussion and see what your people would push back on. But if you do so, you have to walk with them and guide them along.

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A book that "gets it" on the church

Books like Total Church: A Radical Reshaping around Gospel and Community offer a glimmer of hope among the steady decline of Western Christianity. Rather than clinging to the traditions of the last few centuries, Christians around the world are asking the hard questions and adapting to life outside of the comfortable societal majority. Written by Tim Chester and Steve Timmis, Total Church is one of the best and most important books on the church written in the last few years. It seems pretty obvious from even a cursory reading that the authors are Biblically orthodox, men who cherish and revere the Word of God. They also have some important questions to answer regarding how the church functions.

The key to the entire book is the idea of Gospel witness and Gospel community. There can be no genuine Christian community unless the Gospel word is the central authority, a community where the Bible is taught as authoritative. The community of believers is likewise vital to living out the Gospel witness to the world. The key is that a Gospel community is more than a couple of weekly meetings where Christians come from all around to pick up their religious fix for the week and then go about their lives. It is a whole life commitment. Scattered throughout the book are examples of people involved in a ministry called The Crowded House and they are a mix bag of people who minister in various ways. None of them as I recall are professional ministers but many of them have made substantial lifestyle changes to be able to spend more time in ministry (several work at secular jobs part-time so they can minister more often). The disconnect between Gospel and community is crippling the church and Her witness and urgently needs to be addressed.

I also appreciated the perspective. This is the second book in a row I have read on the church written by Christians in the U.K. and it strikes me as a "sneak peek" of what we might see happening here in the near future. How do we minister in America when Christianity is no longer the default, when it is not nearly as cultural accepted, when being a Christian is not assumed? This book answers some of those questions.

The chapter titled "Success" was worth the price of the book by itself and really gets at the core of what is wrong with so much of the Western church. When I read the section regarding Ephesians 4: 11-16 calling on leaders to equip others for ministry, I almost leapt out of my chair to cheer! Elsewhere in the chapter they dealt with the erroneous notions of success in the church. We equate large congregations with success. Growth is internal, big churches get bigger. Total Church suggests that the better model is growth through replication, instead of building bigger and bigger churches the church grows by planting more churches. A lot of what appears in this chapter is going to rub people the wrong way because it bumps up against their traditions but perhaps it will also shake some people up.

Chester and Timmis "get it" when it comes to ministry. Not perfectly for sure but there was very little I had a problem with in the book. My only concern is in application, because it seems that we have a long way to go before we can get to this model of ministry. I do think that the collapse of institutional Christianity has a silver lining in that as the forms and structures that stifle ministry collapse it will free Christians up to form Gospel centered communities that will be a witness to the world. It might just be that the paradigm shift we are seeing in Western Christianity, lamented by so many, is actually going to the be the healthiest thing to happen to the church since the Reformation.

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A "how to do" church book with good theology

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.

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.

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Two pastors outline and apply a pair of overarching biblical principles that call the current body of Christ to a deep restructuring of its life and mission.

"Church is not a meeting you attend or a place you enter," write pastors Tim Chester and Steve Timmis. "It's an identity that is ours in Christ. An identity that shapes the whole of life so that life and mission become 'total church.'" With that as their premise, they emphasize two overarching principles to govern the practice of church and mission: being gospel-centered and being community-centered. When these principles take precedence, say the authors, the truth of the Word is upheld, the mission of the gospel is carried out, and the priority of relationships is practiced in radical ways. The church becomes not just another commitment to juggle but a 24/7 lifestyle where programs, big events, and teaching from one person take a backseat to sharing lives, reaching out, and learning about God together.

In Total Church, Chester and Timmis first outline the biblical case for making gospel and community central and then apply this dual focus to evangelism, social involvement, church planting, world missions, discipleship, pastoral care, spirituality, theology, apologetics, youth and children's work. As this insightful book calls the body of Christ to rethink its perspective and practice of church, it charts a middle path between the emerging church movement and conservative evangelicalism that all believers will find helpful.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

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