More on Total Church

Thanks to Wendy who left a comment on my last post pointing me to a couple of articles in The Briefing on Total Church. I'm too tight to buy things like that, but I found it on the wonderful internet. The link below will take you to a series of emails exchanged between Steve Timmis (co-author of TC), Tony Payne (Editor of The Briefing) and Simon Flinders (an Assistant Minister in Sydney).

Talking about Total Church, part 1
Talking about Total Church, part 2
Talking about Total Church, part 3

The australians spend a lot of time on some quite specific definitions, which I have a feeling might say more about the bees in their bonnets rather than failures of Total Church. But Steve Timmis's responses are great. It's worth a read.

Total Church

Have you ever read one of those books where it's as if someone has taken lots of things you were thinking about and written the book you wanted someone to write about them? For me, Total Church is one of those books. And Steve Timmis and Tim Chester have definitely stretched my brain.

I know it's been out for a while, but I had a book token (thanks Cumbria CU!) so I invested in it. It was worth every penny (in fact, I woul dhappily have spent the full £10 on it - I should've saved the book token for something else...). I can't actually express how much I love this book! And so there will probably be a few posts on this as I try to. The book is based on a simple idea - the church should be a community centred on the gospel, with a focus on mission. Having set that out (very clearly and persuasively), the boys head off into all sorts of different aspects of church life to find out what it means. The results are seriously mind-boggling. Once we've taken it on board, it will affect how we think about church and about it's place in the world.

As I said, it came along at just the right time, when I was thinking about some of this already. But Total Church made it really clear that I have a lot more thinking to do. In a lot of ways I was quite reassured by the book, because I'm possibly not as random as I thought I was. At a certain job interview recently, I said a couple of things off-the-cuff which I later thought sounded really stupid, and were probably wrong. But, to my surprise, Tim and Steve said them too! (I won't say what they were here, but I might mention them in future posts...)

If you're a Christian you should read this book, either to encourage you or (more likely) to challenge and unsettle you. Pastors should read it, but so should the people they're pastoring - it's all about community, which will only work if the 'leaders' and the 'led' are on board. I love this book. And if you bear with me, I'll tell you some of the reasons why...