Saturday, 25 January 2014

5 Big Evangelical Trends for 2014By Chuck Warnock

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What’s in store for the church this year? Read Chuck Warnock’s astute predictions.

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5 Big Evangelical Trends for 2014

By Chuck Warnock

In keeping with end of the year predictions, here are mine. Of course, several years ago I predicted $5 per gallon gas. Thankfully, we never got to that point. But in light of my obvious fallibility, I’m framing my prognostications in the familiar “what’s in and what’s out” categories. Here’s what I think (and hope) are in and out for 2014:

1. Out: Celebrity Christians. In: Communities that model love for God and others.

More articles and blog posts appeared in 2013 lamenting the culture of “celebrity” that has infected the evangelical world. Celebrity Christians include people who are already celebrities, like Paula Deen and the Duck Commander, but celebrity Christians also include regular guys and gals who are clawing their way to the top of the bestseller list and the next big conference. Christian book publishers love the celebrity culture, but the rest of us are beginning to feel a little used.

In for 2014 are faith communities that model love for God and others. These communities are multiplying in American Christian culture, and have great appeal to everyone’s target group, Millennials. Beyond their attractiveness, communities like Grace and Main in Danville, Va., are replacing celebrity with service and fame with friendship. Watch for more like them in 2014.

2. Out: Big evangelical conferences. In: Small local peer groups.

Apparently, there are about 75 major evangelical conferences each year. Most of these target pastors, and obviously no pastor can attend all or even most of these conferences. The big conference model is coming to an end, just like the big electronic conventions of years past. Time and cost will be major factors in their decline. Also, if celebrity Christians are out, conferences which feature celebrity Christians will also fade away.

In for 2014 are small local peer group conversations. Book discussions over lunch, peer-to-peer support and contextual problem-solving will grow in importance in 2014.

3. Out: Coaching. In: Spiritual direction.

Coaching has reached critical mass in the church world. Anyone can be a coach, and unlike in the sports world, church and pastoral coaches aren’t graded on the success of their coaching. Coaching is a metaphor borrowed from the sports world that is losing currency in the church world.

Spiritual direction, on the other hand, is a traditional and appropriate helping ministry in the Christian community. Spiritual direction focuses on spiritual disciplines and insights such as discernment, guidance, insight, wisdom, vocation and mission. The growth of spiritual practices such as lectio divina, the daily office and the use of prayer books portend the rise of the ministry spiritual direction in 2014.

4. Out: Major Christian publishers. In: Self-publishing for local ministry.

With a few notable exceptions, major Christian publishers continue to churn out pop books from celebrity authors. The costs, distribution, marketing and mass audience targeting of Christian publishing results in fewer authors with higher profiles (“celebrities,” see Item 1).

However, self-publishing platforms like Amazon provide free access to the author who has something to say, but has a limited audience. More self-published books will be available in 2014, and more of these will be written for a specific congregation or community. Mass marketing, in other words, is out, and contextual publishing is in.

5. Out: Preaching for “life change.” In: Pastoral care.

Rick Warren popularized “preaching for life change,” which most pastors interpreted as preaching topical sermons on practical subjects like parenting, finances and marriage. But not everyone is as good as Rick Warren at this type of preaching, and it easily degenerates into telling people how to live.

Pastoral care in sermon and practice, however, walks with individuals and families through all of the significant passages of life, and life’s unexpected difficulties, too. This “alongside” preaching and practice ministers to people in their life experiences, and encourages them to find God’s presence in moments of joy and sadness.

Those are the trends I see for the coming year. Of course, there are negative trends that we in churches will have to deal with, too. I’ll leave those to others, and wish you a Happy New Year!

Chuck Warnock pastors Chatham Baptist Church in Chatham, VA and writes the popular Confessions of a Small-Church Pastor, a blog especially for pastors of churches with up to 300 in attendance. Chuck is a contributing editor for Outreach magazine writing their “Small Church, Big Idea” column, writes prolifically for Leadership Journal and Christianity Today, and is a frequent conference speaker on the subject of church leadership. He is currently working on his D.Min. at Fuller Seminary. Learn more »

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Two faces of Benefits Street: No drugs, no drunks, no crime - and no foul language! Now our hard-working community's turned into a moral cesspit, say families raised there in a prouder age

Photographs taken of residents of James Turner Street in post-war Britain
Location is now featured in Channel 4's Benefits Street
Residents, almost all of whom are on benefits, shown living in squalor
Locals say area was starkly different after the war - with a strong community spirit and work ethic

By PAUL BENTLEY

PUBLISHED: 22:08, 24 January 2014 | UPDATED: 02:26, 25 January 2014

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A little girl in a white silk dress poses shyly with a basket of flowers, in a garden bordered by a neat privet hedge. The roofs of terraced houses can be seen beyond. She is about to attend a church parade.

A small boy, of perhaps the same age, stands to attention in a double-breasted coat and school cap outside the bay window of his redbrick home. His shoes and shirt are immaculate and only an errant right sock, which has begun to wrinkle and slide down his leg, suggests anything less than a dedication to military smartness - by his parents, at least.

Both photographs were taken in the same street, in the same period of immediate post-war Britain. No litter. No television aerials. Both evoke an urban working-class pride in family, home and hard work, as well as a sense of community and making the best of a tough situation.

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Looking smart: Martin Hanchett (left) stands in his school uniform on the street and Nina Clayton, aged 6, all dressed up for the church procession

The girl’s dress is made from parachute silk; a luxury commodity only made available by a parent’s involvement in the recently ended world war.

In that respect the photographs are wholly unremarkable. Thousands like them must exist. And yet they are not mundane. In their modest good order they are both shocking and sad, because the street in which they were taken is today the most notorious in Britain; made so by a television programme which has shown the current residents’ lifestyles, squalor, habitual criminality and an overall social disintegration.

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James Turner Street in Winson Green, Birmingham, is infamous after being featured in Channel 4’s highly controversial series Benefits Street.

Today the majority of residents in the Victorian terrace houses claim benefits. The road is filthy, with rubbish strewn across the street and dirty mattresses abandoned on the pavements.

Many of those featured are criminals, drunks or class-A drug addicts. Neighbours rob each other and children fend for themselves while their parents smoke and drink outside.

Nina Clayton, aged 6, pictured middle, with her family all dressed up for the church procession

But it was not always this way. This week, we spoke to members of families who lived in the ‘golden age’ of ‘Benefits Street’ in the Forties through to the Seventies. They have long since moved away and now say they are saddened by how far their former home has fallen and the ‘scrounging vermin’ who live there now.

Martin Hanchett was the small chap in the cap and wrinkled sock. His family lived two doors away from the house now inhabited by the mother known as White Dee.

His great-grandparents, grandparents and his mother Helen all lived on the road, the family having settled there at the start of the 20th century.

Mr Hanchett, 65, said the family all worked in manual jobs, some from as young as ten years old, and moved to the area from Nottingham because Birmingham was renowned as the ‘city of 1,000 trades’.

The women would work in cafes or wash neighbours’ clothes for change, he recalled.

‘Everybody was working,’ he said. ‘People had to because there was no welfare. Attitudes are different now. There’s a lot of people on benefits today. My parents and grandparents wouldn’t believe it. When they were alive, if you didn’t work you didn’t get anything.’

The retired engraver, who now lives in Halesowen, West Midlands, with his wife said he was dismayed at the state of the street and how moral standards have disappeared.

‘Nobody ever swore like that when we were there. If you were caught swearing in the street and a passer-by heard you, he’d give you a clip round the ear. That’s how it was.

‘The way they now swear at the young kids is dreadful.

‘I can’t remember as a kid any robberies or thefts. I never knew anyone who was a drunk. There wasn’t anyone taking drugs. There was never rubbish on the road like there is now.

‘You kept your doors open. It used to be a nice road, with privet bushes outside every house. People had pride in their appearance.

‘It was a community — a village within a city, really.

Changes: The street is now featured in Channel 4 documentary Benefits Street

‘A lot of people I know can’t bring themselves to watch the programme. We’re shocked at what has happened to the street.’

Nina Clayton was six when her photograph was taken as she wore the parachute silk dress, made by her mother.

In the Forties she lived with her parents and two brothers a few houses away from where White Dee now lives.

‘Our house was a small grocer’s shop,’ she said. ‘I was only five or six at the time but I remember it so well, cigarettes kept under the counter for regulars, sacks of liquorice root, the fish and chip shop around the corner where you could get free scratchings.’

John Cahill, 56, lived on the street in the Sixties and Seventies before leaving to join the forces. He is now a bricklayer and lives in Wolverhampton with his wife, with whom he has three adult children.

He said: ‘It infuriates me that these people are wallowing in their mire. They enjoy the lifestyle they are leading. It just dismays me to see what sort of vermin have colonised the area. They have turned it into a cesspit.

‘It is such a shame because of all the happy memories I had growing up there. I am ashamed to tell anyone I spent my childhood there because people will think I am as bad as the people in the programme. But my parents and their neighbours were a world apart.

Two residents sit drinking beer on their doorstep while talking to a child on a bicycle

Piles of rubbish are often seen scattered all over the street - which was very different in the post-war era

‘My parents would be disgusted if they saw what it was like now.’

Mr Cahill was brought up with his three siblings on James Turner Street by his father Joseph, a lathe turner, and mother Edna, who worked in a factory.

He said all the residents worked, even most mothers, and they took pride in their children’s discipline and appearance.

‘My dad worked all the time. My mum was also at work. They couldn’t afford not to.

‘You never swore in front of your parents because you knew what you were going to get if you answered back. Now the children are effing and blinding, and that’s even the toddlers.

‘I can’t believe how bad it has got. It is filthy now. There is this greed — people want something for nothing.’

The road is believed to be named after James Turner, a 19th-century master at the local King Edward’s School, who never missed a day of work.

‘He went out, worked hard and earned that honour,’ says Mr Cahill. ‘Now his name is associated with everything he was not.’

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Saturday, 25 January 2014