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Yesterday I introduced what Pastor Bobby Warrenburg defined as four culture shifts that need to occur if churches are to be intentionally disciple-making and wrote about the first one:
- Attendance culture to transformational culture
- Collection culture to mobilization culture
- Competition culture to collaboration culture
- Addition culture to multiplication culture
Today, let’s think about shifting from a collection culture to a mobilization culture.
This is a subject I’ve written about extensively, contrasting “gathered” and “scattered,” what he calls “collection” and “mobilization.”
Hugh Halter, writing in his book And: The Gathered and Scattered Church, notes that most churches regardless of size: from home churches to mega churches are much better at gathering than scattering, of collecting than mobilizing.
I’ve shared before that Neil Hudson from The London Institute for Contemporary Christianity (LICC) in his book Imagine Church makes the case that people are already scattered. The trick is to use the church’s gathered time to equip their people for their scattered time. To help them realize that the places God has already put them are where God wants them to live out their faith. First, the church has to make the culture change we’re advocating here.
For example, In Imagine Church, Neil talks about a church which liked to send out mission teams into the poor areas of their city, followed by a member of the team telling of their work during a Sunday morning service. One day an elder’s wife realized, “I’m a medical doctor. I see more of those people in a week than the rest of the mission teams do in a year. And no one has asked me to tell my story on Sunday morning!”
Neil’s colleague, Mark Greene, in The Great Divide, talks about the church member who lamented: “I teach children’s Sunday School, and they bring me up to the front of the church and pray for me. Five days a week I teach in the public schools, and the church has never prayed for me for that!”
Back to another aspect of the college illustration from yesterday: students don’t “gather” or “collect” in colleges indefinitely. Colleges know that they are training the vast majority of their students for life away from the school. The students graduate (especially this time of year!) and are automatically mobilized into the job force to use their education.
May our churches do the same!
And he appointed twelve (whom he also named apostles) so that they might be with him and he might send them out to preach. (Mark 3.14, ESV)
Do all things without grumbling or disputing, that you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world. (Philippians 2.14, 15, ESV)