Volume
38, No. 1 [back] SEMESTER HIGHLIGHTS
There’s an old bumper sticker that says “Christianity isn’t taught. It’s caught.” Well, it’s true, it’s remarkably painless, though it requires effort and a serious sense of purpose, and we have considerable evidence that bears it out. So says this year’s Zeisberger lecturer, Martha Grace Reese, one-time labor lawyer, Disciples of Christ pastor, author of Unbinding the Gospel: Real Life Evangelism, and founder of GraceNet, a church consulting and coaching firm that helps congregations develop effective evangelism programs.
First, the bad news. In examining the statistics on 30,000 mainline Protestant churches as part of a four-year study funded by the Lilly Endowment, Reese was able to identify only 137 that had had five or more adult baptisms during the previous year. Now, the good news: based on more than 1,000 interviews with leaders in congregations that have recently posted significant growth, mainline churches are increasingly “getting it,” and more and more of them are getting contagious about sharing it with folks who have had little or no previous exposure to the Gospel.
What these churches have in common is the kind of faith that just can’t keep from pouring out. “They love Jesus. It’s not rocket science. They are churches in which the people have a relationship with Christ and it’s real and it’s vibrant and they talk about it. It’s wonderful,” says Reese. They have also made reaching out to others a top priority, and have steeped themselves in prayer and in encouraging their members to talk openly, in a non-coercive but intentional way, about what their faith means to them.
Believing that there’s no time like the present (as she says, the whole point is to change not just ideas, but habits) Reese broke the audience into triads and had them talk with one another about times when they had vividly sensed the presence of God in their lives, sharing prayer concerns with one another, and praying for one another by name. In the near future, she and her colleagues hope to employ these and other exercises in systematically training 1,000 congregations across the country, helping them to discern and develop their own potential for faith sharing — a gradual process, but one that she says energizes the existing membership as it welcomes new people into the church.
— Steve Simmons
Continuing Education
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