Restoration in the Church – Chapter 9

Church-based Evangelism

Terry relays that the early Restorationists were charged with being too inward looking and takes this chapter to explain why, even after a strong formation as an evangelist, he ‘turned [his] back on the lost for a while’.
“The lasting results of our endeavours, however, could not even be termed negligible. They were virtually non-existent. People were contacted and sometimes even came to church for a while, but only fell away again after a short while” (p97)
So, because of a prophetic word in a prayer meeting in which the Lord instructed the church to ‘mend the nets’, greater focus was given to living out internal relationships within the church in accordance with New Testament norms for fellowship. This had the effect of causing the church to grow but mainly through transfers of Christians from other churches: “What I began to see was that if we ‘got the church right’ people would be pressing our doors to get in but, in the main, the importunate were thirsty Christians.” (p97)
Terry acknowledges that because of this, his churches were accused of ‘poaching’ parishioners, that they had somehow wooed them deliberately. He says, this wasn’t the case and the transferring was actually due to a genuine move of the Spirit. As people came into a genuine experience of God, there would be a chain reaction in those who witnessed the change in them, their baptism and the power of the Spirit in their life, thereby bringing friends and family to Christ.

However, Ephesians 4:7-13 also details the ascended Christ giving evangelists as a gift to the church for its growth. Terry names Mike Sprenger and Ben Davies as gifted evangelists in Brighton and the wider movement respectively, who bolstered the church in the two-fold capacity of being an able Gospel communicator and an equipper of others to do the same. Of the evangelist he says “An evangelist moving freely among churches open to his ministry will be a constant source of inspiration. He should not be a stranger who simply comes to town to put on his show in the area and look to the local churches to back him up… Let them in to disturb and equip you!” He quotes Howard Snyder at the Lausanne Congress saying “The church is the only divinely-appointed means of spreading the Gospel… Evangelism makes little sense divorced from the fact of the Christian community.”
The acid test is who is actually joined to the local body, not who is ‘converted’. “The invitation is to flee one society and be added to another (Acts 2:40-41)” Having believed the response is to be baptised and Terry says the movement is ‘upfront’ about baptism in water and baptism in the Holy Spirit as the initial steps in proper discipleship. He details how house groups sometimes change mode from an inward focussed fellowship setting to something like a proto-Alphacourse setting where a meal will be shared with contacts from outside the fold who then hear after-dinner first-hand stories of personal faith in God. “Gradually the whole atmosphere of church life becomes evangelistic. Numbers are being added to churches to such a degree that buildings are becoming full. Where do we go from here? Happily, we did not start with the goal of filling the building but filling the earth, so the fact of our overcrowding is greeted with rejoicing, not dismay.”
The solution is to keep planting out when growth overflows. “When we had become about 500 committed adults plus nearly 200 teenagers and children, we asked about 200 who were travelling from Brighton every Sunday to form a new congregation in their area. A school hall was found and so we started again. We began originally in a small school hall in Hove. Our ultimate goal was not simply to fill the large church building, which we later renovated, but to fill the Brighton and Hove area.” The language of ‘added’ gave way to “that other exciting New Testament word ‘multiplied’.”

Conclusion
There are many aspects of this chapter familiar to my own experience at the same church. My tenure here began around the turn of the century and has continued for almost 25 years at time of writing. The same ethos of church-based evangelism, the Ephesians 4 Evangelist and of church-multiplication prevails. The impetus of the Spirit and the mission context of the surrounding area seem to be in constant motion but periodic recollection of the primacy of corporate prayer, of prophetic guidance and waiting on God serve as helpful bulwarks against the faddishness and fleshliness which church-life is apt to fall into. Most of all, for movements which spring out of the furnace of Holy Spirit renewal and revival, the risk of self-parody ‘having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power.’ 2 Timothy 3:5 is never far away and we need to be alert to all its forms, especially where these preclude the Gospel going out.