Considering Simple Gospel Ministry

David Fairchild (along with Drew Goodmanson) has been thinking about Frame’s triperspectivalism as it impacts ministry.  The diagram is his, from his post on the Transformissional Church.

If you take this from a Simple Church perspective, you see a great picture of what a church is supposed to do.  This also fits with what I wrote in my post on How Churches Change.  The means of all ministry is the Gospel.  All church problems are, somehow and someway, gospel problems.  There has been a breakdown of the gospel.  The norm for all church ministry is to be the gospel.

In the life of the believer, it is to continually produce grace renewal.  Existentially, we change and continue to change as by faith be believe and apply the gospel to our lives.

Another product in our lives is to change our circumstances from in-grown church life to missional church life (meaning we begin to live as missionaries to those around us).  We don’t keep the gospel to ourselves, but communicate it incarnationally and verbally in ways people might understand.

So, this reflects the focus of a simple ministry- making disciples who live by grace that make disciples who live by grace.  We then put it in terminology that reflects the process we use to move people from gospel hearers to gospel believers to gospel proclaimers.

This is not easy to accomplish.  The flesh will always resist the work of the gospel, in both grace renewal and missional mindset.  We tend to complicate things, create divisions by multiplying agendas so forth and so on.

But this is what we should strive to do.   David puts it this way:

A Gospel-Centered Church is committed to:
-Reading the whole Bible as the Gospel (Luke 24 hermeneutic)
-Preaching and teaching the Gospel to believers, not just unbelievers
-Preaching and teaching the Gospel in every sermon and every lesson
-Seeing the Gospel as the “milk” and “meat” of God’s Word
-Studying theology/doctrine to better understand the Gospel, not simply for more facts
-Viewing the world, the church, and ourselves through the lens of the Gospel

A Missional Church is committed to:
-Living in mission “for” the city in which God has sovereignly placed us
-Learning to speak the language of our culture to make the Gospel as clear as possible
-Listening to people and their ’stories’
-Being a community that is counter-cultural rather than merely a Christian sub-culture
-Working in such a way that we live out the Gospel in our work and recreation
-Demonstrating the unity of church in our city
-Showing off the beauty of the Gospel by helping others in need through acts of mercy and generosity
-Seeing every believer in Christ as a missionary
-Understanding the flow of history is the activity of our missional God at work restoring all things to himself by His Gospel (Luke 24)
-Structuring every ministry with a missionl texture towards the world for the sake of the lost

A Grace-Renewal Church is committed to:
-Being renewed by grace every moment
-Becoming “new” people, not just “nice” people
-Believing the Gospel can change anyone, including ourselves
-Motivating others with grace, not guilt
-Solving all problems (personal, familial, church, social) with the Gospl
-Learning how the Gospel changes us and others (transformation vs. reformation)
-Loving others through the Gospel
-Community that seeks to “gospel” one another in love