Mark Greene wonders whether we've been living half the Gospel.

You can win a lot of skirmishes without winning a battle.

You can treat a lot of symptoms without affecting a disease.

And you can do an awful of good things without doing the thing that might
really make the difference.

For the last two decades the British church has been trying to work out how
to reach our nation and for the last two decades there have been great flurries
of activity - big advertising campaigns, a Decade of Evangelism, a massive
growth in youth work, the expansion of Alpha, the growth of the big conferences,
the publication of a phalanx of Bible translations, the launch of Cell, FaithWorks,
Jubilee 2000, the burgeoning growth of the Christian music culture, increasing
cooperation between Catholics and Protestants - a lot has been done, not all
of it has been successful, but still a lot to be thankful for. However, after
all that, is the remnant left in the Church actually better placed to reach
our nation? Or have we missed something? Well, diagnosis precedes treatment.

Five Questions in Search of an Answer

Imagine for a moment you're in the audience at a Christian conference. The
speaker introduces himself and then asks:

"As a matter of interest are there any ministers here?

Do you put up your hand?

1. Yes No

He then says, "Or any missionaries?"

Do you put up your hand?

2. Yes No

He then says, "Or any full-time Christian workers?"

Do you put up your hand?

3. Yes No

Up on the screen in front of you there's an image of a fragrance bottle.
It's called Touch and it's made by Burberry. The question is posed: "Do
you think that God cares what the Burberry company calls this fragrance?"

4. Yes No

The image on the screen changes.

You are looking at a grey-brown mammal that's about the length of a Ford
Transit. It has a long trunk and large flat, flapping ears.

"Do you think that God cares what we call this creature?"

5. Yes No

I've asked all those questions up and down the country. On the whole fewer,
than 10% answer 'yes' to any of them. Instincts are important, and so, of course,
are the kinds of questions you ask. If, for example, I asked you whether you
believed this verse:

"Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the
Lord, not for people." (Colossians 3:23)

You'd almost certainly put your hand up. But if I then asked you whether
builders and barristers were treated with equal respect in your church the
answer might be different. We can mentally assent to all kinds of truths but
what really matters is not mental assent but operational reality.

Amazing as it may seem, God is actually interested in what we name large
grey-brown pachyderms, a fact attested by Genesis 2:19 where he brings the
beasts and the birds "to the man to see what he would name them." This
interest relates to God’s command to Adam to look after creation, and
also it seems to me to God’s interest in how Adam uses his linguistic
and observational skills to distinguish one animal from another. Given that,
you probably wouldn't need a fleece to figure out that God would also be interested
in how the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve use their linguistic abilities
to name a fragrance - which is after all something so obviously connected to
our sensuality and sexuality - Eternity or Opium? Similarly,
it’s clear that God would be interested in issues related to the development,
production and packaging of a fragrance. Were animals abused in the process?
Were natural resources exploited? Were people exploited?

What we do matters to God. But most Christians don't really believe it. Similarly,

the truth is that every Christian is a minister but most don't see themselves

that way. Every Christian is also a missionary - someone sent by God into
the world to live and share his love and truth - but most don't see themselves
that way. Every Christian is a full-time Christian worker but most Christians
don't see themselves that way. They see themselves ultimately as part-time
Christian workers.

And they see themselves that way because that's what they are taught - explicitly
or implicitly. Despite all the rhetoric of the ministry and priesthood of all
believers, it is almost always understood as the ministry and priesthood of
all believers in the neighbourhood or within the local church community. It's
about how we use our spare time, not our whole time.

Of course, you could argue that my research methodology is faulty and my
questions deceptive and you would have a case, if it were not for the fact
that there is an enormous amount of research that backs up the observation
that British church culture is overall much, much more interested in our leisure
time than all our time. Indeed, LICC's recent Imagine Research among
750 evangelicals confirmed, for example, that the workplace is where those
who work outside the home:

* spend most time,

* have the highest number of challenging issues

* have most relationships with not-yet-believers

but

* find church teaching least helpful.

Now, if this were only an issue that related to the workplace that would
be one thing but the research revealed a much deeper issue. The problem in
the British Church is not that a topic has been ignored, so that all
we have to do is deal with the topic and all will be well.

No, the core problem is not about a failure to see God as a worker God, and
humans as created in the image of God as workers to cooperate with him in creating
a context for human flourishing. The core of the problem is not simply a failure
to grasp that the school place, university place and the workplace are the
key arenas for ministry and mission because they are the places where Christians
and not-yet Christians spend significant amounts of time together.

Nor isThe core problem the outrageous waste of talent and
missionary and ministry energy that the failure to mobilise God's people for
their ministry in the world represents - though it is a tragedy. As one woman
put it, "Some people die without knowing the ministry God has for them".
Indeed, they do.

No, the key problem is not that our teachers have failed to regard our work
as significant - though they have - the key problem is that we have failed
to regard all of life as significant. That is, we have not only failed
to consider the implications of God as a worker and the author of work but
we have severely diminished the scope of the salvation that Jesus came to bring.

The Whole-Life Gospel

Certainly, Jesus came to die in our place, to satisfy the wrath of the Father,
to take away the sin of the world and to defeat death and satan. And, in so
doing, he also came to bring abundant life. And that abundant life is not an
ethereal, disembodied life in the spirit, without reference to the everyday
realities of life in the flesh. No, abundant life involves living as material
human beings. It involves purposeful activity in the world, the production
of goods and services, the release of potential through endeavour - sand into
silicon chips, children into confident adults, disparate individuals into productive
teams. It involves the possibility of the expression of who we are as human
beings in Christ through art and music and food and celebration and sport and
dance.

Values before Activities

The challenge to the 21 st Century Church is not one that can be addressed
by a new set of programmes it is one that must be addressed by the re-discovery
of the holistic Gospel, of whole-life Christianity. The core issue is not programmes
but ethos, not activities but values. One of the reasons Christians have lost
confidence in the Gospel is because they have not been taught how to relate
it to their ordinary everyday realities. If the Gospel does not make any difference
to the way I spend my 'ordinary' life, then all I really have to offer my friends
and colleagues is a leisure time option - a Sunday service to attend. And that
would be a hollow mimicking of our culture which lives, as the Nat West slogan
puts it, 'for the weekend.' Or for the next match, the next programme, the
next fix, the next purchase, or the next ski trip. Consumerist culture lives
yearning for moments of special intensity. But the Christian life is meant
to be lived in the now. The grace of God transforms the present - enemies are
turned into people to love, bosses into those we should serve, drudgery into
service for the King of the Universe, pay rises into opportunities for generosity,
dough into bread - this is the transformation of the ordinary.

The problem the contemporary Christian church faces is not merely to teach
Christians how to share their faith, the problem in our rapidly changing, post-Christian
culture, is to learn how to live it. We need to engage our culture
with a whole-life Christian culture, not an escapist, disengaged, leisure-time
culture. Certainly, many people today are looking for an integrated way of
life, that empowers people to be consistent in values and action in every area
of life - and therefore to be authentic.

But this is easier typed than done.

Singing Christ in Babylon

Overall, our culture has changed faster than any of our major social institutions
have been able to cope with - look at how the speed of medical advance has
outpaced the capacity of medical ethicists to engage with the issues their
technologies have raised; look at how the pace of values change has outstripped
the educational services' ability to foresee the impact on sexual practice,
drug use and concepts of citizenship; look at how difficult the theoretically
worker-friendly Labour Party or the theoretically family friendly Conservative
Party have found it to propose any viable alternative to the oppressive and
deeply corrosive long hours culture that is shattering the physical, mental
and relational health of our nation. No, virtually every major institution
has been left behind by the speed of values change. The Church is no exception.
We live in Babylon. So we must learn to sing the song of Christ in an alien
land. And that requires a whole different approach to being a whole-life disciple
of Christ and to making whole-life disciples for Christ.

The reality, however, is that we hardly know how to make disciples any more.
We have an ever-increasing armory of evangelistic tools and resources designed
to make converts but very, very little material or experience in making disciples
in the interactive, dialogical, personal way that Jesus trained his close followers.
Indeed, very few of our pastor-teachers have ever been trained to make disciples
like that. Trained to preach, trained to counsel, trained to lead? Yes, yes,
and yes. But trained to disciple?

So where are we? We need to rediscover the riches of the whole-life Gospel
and we need to figure our how to live it and disciple others in it too. In
sum, we need a radical shift in the content and culture of British Church life
and a radical change in methodology. At least that's what we need, if we want
to win more than skirmishes and make sure that the next generation of Christians
are better equipped to live and share the whole-life good news than we are
now. Of course, changing the culture of the church may take a long time, but
in the meantime we can all be good news to a co-worker tomorrow and we all
know some other Christian that we can pray for and cheer along in their calling
to be live, apply and share the good news right where they are.