Total Church

Total Church
by Tim Chester & Steve Timmis
Inter-Varsity Press

I have been reading a number of books about "doing church" recently and have enjoyed each one, but Total Church is probably the best of them. I think if more of our churches looked like the portrait of church this book describes, our city and our nation would be transformed by the gospel. That's a big statement to make, but I really do believe that.

The key concept in Total Church is that our churches have to live by two key principles: gospel and community. For Chester and Timmis - and I would suggest for the New Testament writers - these two concepts go hand-in-hand and the church is weakened if either is downplayed. The writers suggest that many of the so-called "emerging churches" are good at community, but bad at gospel content. On the other hand they point out the weakness of many evangelical churches which are good at the gospel but poor at doing community. I would say there is truth in both sets of statements.

The proposed solution is to do gospel and community together. This approach certainly chimed with Mark Driscoll's book Radical Reformission, which I've also read recently, which calls for us to live reformissional lives rather than doing evangelism now and again.

So how are these two principles (gospel and community) fleshed out in the book?

First, the gospel. Total Church insists that the church must be gospel-centred and mission-centred. Church has to be focused on the word of God where we find the content of the gospel, and it has to be focused on communicating the gospel in mission.

Second, community. Total Church argues that we are to share our entire lives with each other as Christians, as a true family of God. It also argues that this community should be a place of welcome and belonging for unbelievers so that they can see Christianity in action and so be attracted to find out more, come to the Saviour and take their part in the gospel community.

The writers then take these two principles and apply them to a number of areas of church life including: worship, evangelism, leadership, discipleship, world mission and church planting.

It seems to me that this approach seeks to take the best of our "standard" evangelical churches and combine it with the best bits of "house churches" or "emergent churches" to give a potent blend that better mirrors the church as it was in the New Testament. It is a transforming message that church is not something we do among other activites, whether we are Sunday-only people or involved in midweek events too, but rather church is our lifestyle, something we simply are 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

This is radical stuff, but it is biblical radicalism that our lukewarm, pale churches need. I believe it is a message we need to hear, ponder and act upon if our churches are not to continue to decline.