North Central Strategy: Keeping God Central

10th April 2003

1. Overview

This is a difficult goal to write a strategy for - you can hardly come up with specific, measurable, achievable targets for how central God is in the church. But if you want a crude measure of how active God is among us, maybe the best question to ask is: how often do we see new people becoming Christians in North Central? To be honest with ourselves, the answer to that is not encouraging. How can we change that?

The world's biggest church is Yoido Full Gospel church in Seoul, South Korea. Led by Paul Yonggi Cho, it started in 1958 with two people, and grew as follows:

• 1961 - 1000
• 1968 - 8000
• 1977 - 50,000
• 1979 - 100,000
• 1981 - 200,000
• 1984 - 400,000
• 1992 - 700,000

At that point, growth leveled off because when they plant a new church, which they do a lot, they tend to send 60,000 people or so to get it started. So if we're looking for a strategy to bring God into the centre of what we're doing and to find his blessing, we could do worse the look at how Cho does it.

There is a persistent anecdote that I've heard several times at conferences and on tapes. I've not been able to verify it on the Internet, but here it is for what it's worth: the story is that Cho was a guest on one of the big secular American talk-shows - Jay Leno or Letterman or something like that. The interview went like this.

Interviewer

You have the world's biggest church. How did you do it?

Cho

We pray.

Interviewer

I see. Now, what is your strategy?

Cho

Ah ... We pray.

Interviewer

OK, let me ask this a different way. What are the distinctive things about your church that mark it out as different from others, and that have contributed to your success?

Cho

We pray.

[vamp till fade]

2. Where we are and where we're going

In North Central, we have done very well in a lot of ways: we have good meetings, with an appealing atmosphere, in an attractive setting. We do things in a way that doesn't put people off, and that no-one needs to be ashamed to invite their friends to. We've fought battles of marketing, presentation and style, and content too: and we've done well in these areas, using ``natural'' weapons like sensitivity, intellect and experience.

But Paul says ``though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power.'' (2 Cor 10:3-4) If we want to break through spiritual barriers, and see people becoming Christians, then we will need to use spiritual weapons. In other words, ``We pray''.

This is not at all to say that what we've done has been useless. It's good, but it is only a foundation. There is no purpose in having good meetings if it's just to have good meetings: the reason they're there is to provide a setting for the power of God to come and transform people. We need to build on the foundation we already have, but using spiritual power. ``This kind can come out only by prayer.'' (Mark 9:29)

3. What, then, shall we do?

One of the bible's key verses on prayer is this:

There is a lot of meat in those forty words: we could preach a five-week series on the preconditions of God answering prayer without stretching it too thin.

1. ``my people who are called by my name''
   Those who pray effectively are God's own people; that's us. Part of what gives faith for praying effectively is knowing that we are his, and that comes from hearing his voice and being in relationship with him.

2. ``humble themselves''
   We need to give up thinking that we can do this church-building thing on our own. Stop relying so heavily on our natural abilities (intelligence, experience, etc.) and instead look more for God's supernatural power in what we're doing. ``Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.'' (Proverbs 3:5-6)

3. ``pray''
   Self-explanatory, we just need to do it!

4. ``turn away from their sins''
   I don't particularly have any sense that sin is a big problem in North Central, but who knows?

5. ``seek my face''
   We need to prioritise our relationship with God above the activities we do in his name. When we aim for the former, we'll get the latter too. If we aim for the latter, then without the former we'll miss the mark.

4. Practicalities

All of this so far has been quite abstract (and not very strategic!) We need to work out what we can actually do to make God central in the church. We have no concrete plans, but a few ideas:

1. A month of prayer: replace all the meetings throughout a month with prayer meetings. The radical version of this plan includes Sunday mornings in this; the weedy version just affects midweek meetings: two cell-group nights, plus the men's and women's meetings.

2. Fasting: we've not used this at all in North Central. It's got to be worth a try.

3. Refocus our Sunday-morning worship so that it is centered more on what God is like than on our response to him.

The last of these can be done subtly from the front; but to make the first two work will require large-scale buy-in from the congregation at large. That in turn will probably require prophetic preaching (rather than merely persuasive) which we probably don't have in-house.

We considered and discarded idea like prayer diaries, which everyone approves of in the theory but no-one actually follows (least of all us.)

 
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If you're reading a paper copy of this document, the soft-copy can be found at www.miketaylor.org.uk/xian/godcentral.html.