Hello and welcome to Deep Roots, the podcast brought to you by Oak Hill College.
My name is Tim Ward and I'm one of the teaching staff here.
And I'm delighted to have two special guests with me here.
I've really been looking forward to this because two of my favourite people are in the room.
And I'm not just saying that because you're here.
It's true. John Tuckwell, who's...
Do you mean us two or the many people who are lined up against the wall over there?
I love all the hidden tech people. OK, good.
And I also love you two guys.
So John Tuckwell, who's the pastor of the church that I attend with my family,
pastor and friend as well, and also my friend and former colleague
Adrian Reynolds, former colleague from our time together, working at Proclamation Trust.
Hello, Tim. Hello.
Thank you for coming down here. Great to be here.
From up there in Market Harbour, where you are a job for the FIC, a job title.
You told me before we hit record and I've forgotten.
Yes, all to say what the FIC is, people might not know that.
It's the Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches.
Yep. And I'm the head of national ministries, which sounds very grand.
Absolutely. It basically means I do a bit of everything.
Tremendous. I've been trying to think, what is the title of the topic we're talking about?
So I'm going to set it up as quite general.
We're talking about the pattern of the Sunday meeting for a local church.
And the reason for getting you two together is, well, John, the church
you lead and that I'm part of.
We've recently made a significant shift in the pattern of Sunday services.
And Adrian, you did something similar in the church in Hampshire when you were a pastor.
Yep. We'll get on top of just what that is, because it's quite unusual.
What you've both done, it's not unheard of in this country, but it is fairly unusual.
So we'll come to that.
But before we get there, just describe the kind of church that,
Adrian, you did pastor, John, that you pastor now.
Adrian, you kick off.
So rural, small town, large village, I think you'd probably call it, in Hampshire.
It was a Grace Baptist Church, quite conservative Baptist chapel, really, you might call it.
Very consistent congregation, not huge numbers of visitors and walk ins down a long,
unmade lane that you had to kind of navigate on your foot in your four by four, really.
And probably 60, 50, 60 adults, maybe 20, 25 children, that sort of size.
So, I mean, within the FIC, interesting that that would be just below average size.
So, yes, smallish, people knew one another.
Pretty regular attendance, morning and evening service on Sunday,
that probably 60% of the church who came in the morning would also come in the evening.
So not different congregations, one congregation.
Yeah. And so you were the only member of staff there?
I was the only member of staff, yeah. And I had three other elders who led the church with me.
And John, Christchurch Cockfosters, just a mile up the road here.
Just a mile up the road. Top of the hill.
Yeah. Just a mile up the road, top of the Piccadilly line.
So lots of commuters.
It is, I mean, Cockfosters, it's a bit of a village on the top of London.
And so there's a village community, people know each other within the village
and quite an ethnically diverse church and a good spread of ages.
Lots of young families, church school, it's a good church school.
People want to get their kids in.
But we are nought through to 103, I think our elders church family member is.
And on a Sunday, around 350, probably sort of 70, 80 of those would be under 18.
And lots, Cockfosters is a place where you move to and you don't move away from.
So lots of people have been in the church for 50, 60, 70 years.
Yeah. Are there other evangelical churches within reach?
Because that might have an impact actually on our conversation.
What else is around? Yeah, there is.
Because 100 years ago, we planted into Hadley Wood, which is actually in our parish.
So St Paul's Hadley Wood is, I mean, there's a crow flies about a mile away.
Grace Church Highlands was a plant 15 years ago, not far.
St Thomas Oakwood, conservative evangelical church in the neighbouring parish.
So if you had a car and you didn't like Reverend Tuckwall's preaching.
Oodles of choice. Oh, yeah.
I mean, not far away. Interesting.
Enfield Town Community Church. Terrific independent church.
Not far away. Yeah, quite different to that.
So quite a contained town and bordering on one side on to locate it on Sandhurst
fleet sort of area. So around there,
lots of army barracks, which were quite cut off from us.
Only one other evangelical church, which was a very, very woolly.
I think to describe it as a middle of the road evangelical church would be quite
yeah, quite generous.
So that was the only other option.
OK, well, now I've built the anticipation.
Let's now let's talk about the change that John, you've made recently.
Adrian, you made a while ago when you were a pastor.
We'll come to the why in a minute, but let's just get a sense of
if someone arrives at Christchurch Cockfosters on a typical Sunday morning,
John, walk us through what happens in comparison to how it used to be.
OK, so the the previous model was a fairly classic nine am traditional service.
Forty or fifty or so would have been there with a ten thirty bursting at the seams.
Service once a month would have been all ages.
Kids groups.
I mean, the kids were barely in the service.
They would have they started out and just came in for the last five minutes.
Yeah, unusual way round that was.
Now they started out and they did.
Yeah, of course, some problems.
But now turn up, we have got nine fifteen service or eleven thirty service.
Both services are fifty five minutes long, or at least they are on the planning sheet.
And twenty minutes sermon, they're identical services, you know, unless you've got a baptism.
So you don't have that lit kind of liturgical loser distinction anymore.
They are identical.
We do have a midweek monthly more liturgical.
And that has been part of the challenge.
So nine fifteen through to ten past ten, eleven thirty through till twelve twenty five.
And then in and and no kids, no separate kids provision, no kids.
Yeah, so the kids are in those services.
Kids are in those services.
That's the joy.
OK, between those services, we have what we call crossover.
So ten fifteen till eleven fifteen.
And the idea is you come to the first service and stay for crossover or come for crossover
and stay for the second service.
It's a package and crossover.
There's loads that goes on in crossover.
Our kids ministry takes place there in terms of the kids groups.
We have our inquirers groups would take place then.
Because you can say to the parents, drop off your kids, come to the come to the cafe.
We're going to tell you about Jesus.
We do some training then, because we do training.
I help lead the small group leaders and then we do the training for them in that crossover
school.
Life groups, life groups.
Sure.
Giving it's generic name.
What proportion of people in very broad terms come to the crossover who have been at the
combined two services?
Well, in very broad terms, most.
OK, good.
But certainly not all.
And there is a pattern of we've noticed some parents will drop their kids off to the kids
groups and then go to the cafe around the corner.
So does that.
So someone comes you either do church or the service crossover or crossover service.
And within cross-over, should I say this now?
Yeah, go for it.
Engage groups, we call them adult groups.
They're sort of we want them to be sort of conversational.
I've described them as it's like coffee time, but with guided theological discussion.
So you're trying to talk to people and there's just a bit of input from the front.
That's not heavy on input.
It's not heavy.
No.
So 45 minutes and 50 minutes from the front, 30 minutes in groups is the way we try and
frame it for leaders, not just led by staff, church family members get to input in there.
It's been a good training ground for that whole range of topics.
Just give us a sense because that's one thing that's really struck me is what extraordinary
range of topics we've had.
Give us a sense of the kind of things we have done.
So we've done we spent three weeks on predestination, thinking that through and sort of deeper theology.
Did you plan that before?
Sorry, I couldn't help myself.
Someone does.
Come on, someone had to come up with that, didn't they?
We did three weeks.
So they generally run in three week blocks.
So you're not trying to overpack the content.
Three weeks think about the environment and Christian care for the environment.
We've thought about money.
We've thought about sharing your faith, how to welcome well in a church.
Care for the poor and the homeless.
Homelessness was a big one.
So we've done a real range of topics for church.
Thank you.
We'll come on to the why in a moment.
Just want to get a sense of what you did.
So Adrian, when you were a pastor, you were telling me beforehand, there's what you actually
did, which wasn't quite would have been your ideal.
So tell us what you did.
So I'll tell you what I did.
So if you turned up at church, you would have turned up at 10.
Ten we did classes of various kinds for 45 minutes.
So Sunday school classes, we called them Sunday school classes, children's Sunday school classes,
kind of traditional Sunday school classes, I guess, and adult Sunday school classes.
We had two or sometimes three groups.
We were that sort of size.
That was the sort of sustainable level for us.
And in those groups, a lot of the same things you did, actually, John.
So we worked in six week blocks or in fact, we morphed to work working in half term blocks.
It became more simple.
Because so many people in the church are thinking around school terms and half terms.
So we worked in half term blocks and we sometimes did books of the Bible.
We sometimes did training for evangelism.
We might have talked about discipleship topics and how you live out your faith in this situation
or that situation.
We might have talked about children with special needs and how we care for those, you know,
those sorts of topics.
I guess the same sort of topics that you're talking about.
And we did those with adults.
And slight differences, we did use to cut things different ways.
So sometimes we would meet men and women separately, which gave an opportunity both women to be
teaching, but also for women to be instructed and for men to be instructed in their particular
roles.
We might have met marrieds and singles.
We did that once.
We might go people who are at work, people who are retired.
We might do different levels that become slightly contentious.
And we actually did three levels.
We did revelation.
We did it in three different groups.
Yeah.
And we called them, we called them skimmed, semi skimmed and full fat.
And you could choose which one you were self selecting.
You chose which one.
Do you want to go to the full fat and really wrestle with, you know, what the millennium
is or do you just want to go and hear some very basic stuff about how revelation perhaps
works and encourages you to keep going?
Yeah.
So, yeah, all those different ways we did that.
So that was 45 minutes, then 45 minutes coffee time and all together as a church and then
a service altogether.
And actually, maybe we might not have time to talk about this, the whole language about
what you say, do you say service?
Do you say meeting?
Do you say gathering?
Yeah.
It's all very, all the language is very loaded, isn't it?
But as people would understand it, a service of an hour altogether, the whole church, no
crèche, no kids groups, everyone together.
25 minutes sermon as part of that.
And we can talk a bit more about how that actually worked in practice.
That would be the morning.
Who taught your groups?
Generally elders or one or two other people qualified to teach, I would say.
And we weren't flush with teachers, I don't think.
And we never got people in because it was Sunday morning, people were committed in other
places to church.
So we did it in house.
Occasionally we watched things.
So we might have had a video we watched.
So maybe it was some evangelism training.
We used Colin Buchanan stuff.
And then we had an evening service as well.
We didn't drop the evening service.
Okay.
Now, what did I want to do?
Yeah, drop the evening service.
I wanted to have four hours together as a church on Sunday, a blog, which had a similar
sort of morning classes or instruction or discipleship training, whatever you might
call it, for the whole age group, split up probably by age group, a break for coffee,
a worship gathering together, lunch together, probably with the Lord's Supper, and then
a short prayer meeting altogether as a church.
No evening service.
Yeah.
Didn't happen.
But that didn't happen.
So lunch didn't happen.
No.
And because within church leadership, you have grand visions, don't you?
You have plans of things you'd like to do.
And sometimes you just have to think very carefully about, you know, what's going to
keep the church together.
And actually, I reflect on it now, I think I might have pushed a bit, I should have pushed
a little bit harder because actually I set myself up for producing three things a week
instead of two, which suddenly became quite a lot more work.
But that's another story.
Yeah, yeah, that's really difficult.
Yeah.
The big thing we're getting to is why, why would you do this?
Why indeed?
Because this is unusual in the UK.
It has been, as lots of people know, it has been more common in the States, although I
think that's stars beginning to wane a little bit, a lot of the newer church plants in the
United States, I gather, wouldn't have what would classically be called an adult Sunday
school.
John, one of the moments I can remember when you were, I mean, you and the leadership of
the church were very much leading us on this, there's, well, I thought it was a glorious
moment of leadership.
I mean, I know you're getting some pushback and there were discussions around the church
family.
Inevitably.
It's new.
How will this be?
How will that be?
Fine.
People don't always like change.
And you stood up, you said with a big grin on your face to the whole church family one
day.
Very few churches in this country do this.
We'll do it for a trial period and we may discover why very few churches in this country
do this.
Now, wonderfully, we're through that trial period and the church family wanted to continue
and that's just wonderful.
For each of you, why do you think this general pattern, you did doing it in different ways,
but this general pattern of kids in the service and then an adult Sunday school alongside
something like an adult Sunday school alongside kids Sunday school.
Why does that not happen in the UK?
Why does that seem alien?
I have said, I've met quite a number of pastors.
When you talk about it, seem to say, do you know somewhere deep in my heart of hearts,
I feel there's a rightness to that and I'd like to give it a go.
But is what I've heard quite a bit.
Yeah, it's pretty scary.
And everyone, so I mean, I guess I can gauge that from the reaction of the church family
when we start talking about it.
Parents fear the misbehaving child and the exposure that gives to them.
Non-parents fear being completely disrupted by the kids tearing around.
There was quite loud voices.
So within a sort of conservative evangelical mindset saying, well, the sermon is the main
thing on a Sunday morning, and if we're doing something that makes it harder for grownups
to hear the sermon, then it must be a bad thing.
End of discussion.
Can understand that?
Yeah.
So why did you do it?
Because I don't think church is just a sermon.
Why did you do it?
Well, I, we were quite clear about why we were doing it.
And I think probably three convictions, which are kind of linked.
The first conviction was we were trying to make the sermon do too much.
So there's an awful lot of disciple making that should be going on in church, which is
not just about individual to individual.
It's about the responsibility of the church.
How do you help people do all those things we've been talking about?
Actually, you've been covering some really useful topics, John, that actually, where
do you cover those topics?
Where do you help people live for Christ on Monday morning, wherever they are?
And there was a missing piece.
Well, for about 50 years in many evangelical churches in this country, the answer to that
has been, oh, that's where your small groups come in.
Well, yes, except we all know that they have their own challenges.
But I think also there's something about the way that that teaching is linked to the authority
of the church.
So it's interesting if you go back over over time in church history, a lot of the a lot
of the really deep stuff that's been produced in terms of resources for the church has arisen
out of church gathered to hear teaching on subjects, whether that's Bible books.
So Lloyd-Jones famous Romans lectures came out of a Friday evening.
They were not Sunday sermon.
Many people think those are Sunday sermons and they weren't.
Just near to me in East London, St Dunstan's had a church lecture.
That was his title.
Hang on, you said you lived in Leicestershire?
I used to live in East London.
And the church there a few hundred years ago had a church lecturer called Jeremiah Burroughs,
whose midweek lectures were the rare became the rare jewel of Christian contentment, one
of my favourite Christian books, preached by the way, at six a.m. in the morning.
That's when they had their midweek meeting, which really is about Christian contentment,
isn't it, if you're getting up at six a.m. to listen to sermons on content, lectures
on contentment.
So there's there's a depth that you can't manage in a 25 minute sermon.
So that was the first conviction that we needed more depth in our teaching, essentially.
Second conviction is that the church, sorry, the the New Testament, the new covenant building
block of the kingdom is the church.
So we want to get the church together.
We want to be together.
And if you are a believer, whatever age you are, actually, we want you to be part of that.
We want you to be sharing the means of grace together.
It seems odd.
It just seems mismatched that we have this conviction about the church being the family
and the building block.
And yet we all go off and do our own thing.
It be like going I'm going to my parents 60th wedding anniversary in a couple of weeks,
and they booked a room at a local golf club.
It be like us all turning up and then going off to different places.
It just seems odd.
Why would you do that?
So you get used to it.
We do get used to it.
Yes.
And there's a simplicity about it, because actually, we don't have to worry about people
eating fish, which I really hate.
So you do get used to it.
So that was the second fiction that the building block is the church.
And then the third conviction is that there's something significant about the gathering
of God's people, and especially about the preaching, but not only the preaching, but
actually there is an encounter with Christ together.
And whether that's in the Lord's Supper, whatever your theology is of the Lord's Supper, whether
it's kind of swingly at one end or perhaps more Calvinistic at the other end, whatever
it is, there's something special about doing that together.
There's something special about the preaching of God's word.
It's not just a talk.
It might be a talk, but it's more than that.
It's an encounter with Christ together.
So actually, those three things came together to say, why would we not be doing this?
Yeah.
And as you know, I'm on board with this, but...
I've never heard you talk about that.
I'm surprised to hear that.
Of course, some people will naturally feel, and I think this is a perfectly reasonable
response.
Is it a deficient encounter with Christ when a group of people meet in someone's home on
a Wednesday evening to read scripture and pray?
My answer to that is no encounter with Christ can be deficient.
So any encounter with Christ is supernatural and wonderful and beyond words and beyond
description.
But if there is something about the whole gathered people of God that Christ has ordained,
that must be the best way to experience it.
Okay.
Fair enough.
So there are really three convictions and actually fairly foundational theological convictions
about the nature of...
And which we articulated from the beginning as we were trying to talk to the church about
it.
Yeah.
One of the challenges is not everyone in the church agreed with them.
Okay, sure.
Or not everyone in the church understood them.
Yeah.
Or really grasped them.
And I think that's one of the challenges when you're making decisions that appear quite
radical and you're doing them for convictional positions, it's not...
Within church, everyone knows this.
You've got a wide range of people.
You've got new believers, you've got old believers, you've got believers from this tradition,
from that tradition, you've got believers who think this theological point is the most
important, others who think it's the other one and everything in between.
Some of you think that no theological points are important.
So actually you might have very clear convictions.
You might even be able to articulate them.
That doesn't necessarily win over people to the cause.
And that's true in a lot of church life, isn't it?
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
Now, what's interesting about the two churches is a similar move, but looking really different
because of different demographics and different social occasions and so on.
So John, for you and the Leishabbot Christ Church, what were the core drivers for this?
Well, I mean, lockdown actually, from some sense, we learn a lot in lockdown.
Because we made this change coming out of lockdown, didn't we?
Yeah.
Had you planned it before lockdown?
No.
So it really was driven by that experience?
Well, we've got a church council member who, I can picture him, he wandered up to my window
one day, so I tapped on it, opened the window, socially distanced.
Nice going.
And he just said, everything's stopped, isn't it?
Everything's changed.
What a wonderful catalyst for change God has given to us.
And then we went through what we call a ministry review process where we looked at 10 key ministry
areas of church life.
I looked at Sunday services and we tried to listen to people's stories and it was fascinating.
So we had this 9am liturgical service and the assumption was everyone who went to that
must prefer a more liturgical service.
You phone them up, you chat to them, you check how they're doing in lockdown and all of that.
And you listen to their experience of church.
Oh no, I'd rather be at the 10.30, but I know I wouldn't get a parking space.
So I come at 9am.
Or someone who comes at 10.30, oh no, I'd far rather be at 9am, but I'm never going
to make it in time.
I'm not going to get up in time.
And so just hearing those stories.
And then one parent said to me, their kids are grown up.
And they said, look, my kids, they knew how to be part of a Sunday school and they knew
how to be part of a youth group.
And they knew what it was to be in a student church, but they don't actually know how to
exist in a normal church.
Everything had always been tailored specifically around them, which isn't church.
And then other parents telling the stories about their kids hadn't sat through a sermon
until they went to university.
And that was sort of the first moment.
And quite a few of the kids inevitably sort of fell away.
And hearing those stories and saying, look, this just, this isn't a right pattern of
church we've got at the moment.
Another way we framed it was because our kids were basically in the service for five minutes
on a Sunday and they were kept in the church hall.
And we said, if we said to our over 60 year olds, actually don't gather with us, you go
down to the church hall, you can come in for the last five minutes.
How weird would that, but for some reason we've got used to this concept of the kids not being
with us in the service.
And so with the catalyst of lockdown and all of that, we shook everything.
We thought long and hard about what we were trying to achieve.
And as a larger church, the relational poverty, which again, you know, lockdown taught us
quite a lot about our needs for relationships and thinking deeply about how can we really
get to know each other so that we can do the things that scripture commands us to do as
a church.
And then thinking about discipleship and we're in commuterville, you can put things on in
the evenings midweek, but people aren't back for them.
And they just got back and had some dinner.
It's hard to make midweek work.
Yeah.
We get, now we mentioned the Life Group Leader training now happens on Sunday morning.
We get a far bigger proportion of the Life Group Leaders for training on a Sunday morning
than we would midweek evening.
And I don't blame them for that.
Someone's commuted back from the central London to come out again for a meeting.
That's pretty difficult.
And it's a reality of living in an area where you kind of need to be a dual income family
to afford a house.
So you've got to shake your ministry around that.
And that's what we've tried to do.
And it has been glorious.
So actually, we asked you about reasons.
What you interesting, what you mentioned is we're talking about kind of Adult Sunday School,
but the driver you've mentioned was not to do with that.
It was to do with the service, the main gathering.
Children in was the conviction.
Yeah, and getting to know each other better.
And then, okay, so then you add an extra thing, which is some teaching, but lots of discussion
time for...
Because if it wasn't just, if we weren't so interested in getting to know each other well,
then it might be more one directional.
I mean, when we read scripture, church isn't described in a one directional and we've preached
our way through 1 Corinthians and we're sort of puzzling, how does that play out in church
life?
And one of the beautiful aspects of the engage groups is it's so much more multi directional
learning from each other.
It was a lovely moment recently, we were thinking about mission.
And the question was, who's lived in a different country?
Who's been to church in different country?
Hands up, most of the room.
And what are differences?
Tell your story.
And suddenly you got this rich sharing of, oh, you know what church doesn't just look
like it looks like in 21st century England.
I've said, at least as a member of the church family, the things my wife and I particularly
appreciate is having that extra space in crossover means that we have got to know a lot more
people faster than we would have done previously because in a church of any size, I mean, frankly,
coffee time is a zoo, isn't it?
A lot of people are trying to get a drink fast so they can sort of drink and get out
and just having space, 15, 20 minutes to sit and chat.
We've really appreciated that.
I think the other thing I really appreciate...
A lot of people want to come and visit, I think.
The other thing I really appreciate is we're an Anglican suburban church with a church
school.
So inevitably we've got a big fringe.
We've got a lot of people who come once a month, but might think of themselves as members.
And there's quite a lot of religion around actually, folk religion in the local area.
We just felt that in a good way, it raised the stakes of the actual commitment someone
makes to show that they really are a follower of Christ and a member of the church family.
Because arrive at the service going away now feels less comfortable as an option.
No, if you belong to this church family, you give your morning because you are committed
to this group of people.
And so, yeah, we've really appreciated those things.
Well, we've been talking about kids in the service.
I love to hear from both of you reflections around that.
It seems to me that's increasingly in the air.
It's been particularly strong in certain denominations and flavor of church.
I think others where it's not traditionally been strong, people are beginning to think
it.
The little actually for the little bit of reading around the history of this I've done,
I mean, I think it's debated.
People tend to find what they think could happen in the history, but there you go.
It does seem to have been pretty uncommon in church history for children regularly to
go out of the service or up to the age of 14 or even 18.
I gather John Knox once wrote something which instructed people quite firmly.
You'll be surprised for John Knox.
Scottish Reformation saying don't bring infants in before the age of six.
But from the age of six, they're in.
So there were lots of people who didn't seem to like John Knox.
So there's no kind of monolithic church.
Well, the Sunday School as we know it, I think it's pretty easy to prove that Sunday School
as we know it was initially an evangelistic endeavor.
Absolutely.
Well, and a humanitarian endeavor to educate the children of the poor.
Indeed.
And not concurrent.
It generally used to happen Sunday afternoon.
No, exactly.
There are many churches that pursue that.
Although the Metropolitan Tabernacle here in London, previously of Spurgeon, they still
have fleets of buses and they bus children in from all over South London to do evangelistic
Sunday Schools.
So I think historically you could debate around have children up to the age of five or six
always been in or have they not?
There seems to be mixed practice.
But certainly sending out everybody up to the age of 14 for a big chunk of the service,
including the sermon, looks like a bit of an oddity historically.
Agent, as you began to do this and were practicing it, how did you practice it?
Initial feedback from parents was none of the children will cope with this.
To which we said, can we give it a go?
And in a small church, you generally have enough relational capital to be able to have
a go at things if you want to.
And also I could go around and see every member of the church within a period of time quite
easily and say, come on, let's give it a go together.
So we found that generally children did cope OK, especially if their parents were on board.
So we did provide things for the children to do.
So I used to produce a worksheet which had two halves to it.
Half of it were questions that took you through the sermon.
So I had to think about this pretty carefully beforehand.
Sermons took longer to prepare.
So there were 12 questions that they answered as they went through.
There was a little quiz that they could give mum and dad to make sure mum and dad had been
listening.
That was their favourite bit actually called test mum and dad or put mum and dad on the
spot.
So I gave them some questions and answers that they could check over the meal time.
There was a little section called table talk, which was some application questions they
could talk about with mum and dad over the meal time.
So that was for the older kids.
And then the back end had some drawing space and word searches, those sorts of things.
So there was quite a lot of preparation putting that together every week, but every child
had that.
And I said to parents, if your children just come and they just draw, let them draw.
That's fine.
You know, we believe in the work of the Spirit of God to actually bring people to life and
then give them a hunger and a thirst for what they hear.
So let's trust the Spirit to do his work.
And it was remarkable over time actually how many children began to engage with that.
So that worked well for children in the church.
Reasonably well.
It wasn't perfect.
Just two observations on that.
We didn't have any children in the church with learning difficulties.
I'm now in a church where we've got 40 children, eight of whom have quite significant learning
difficulties.
And I'm not quite sure how that would work out.
Yes, that would be a whole different challenge that I didn't think through at the time because
I didn't need to.
And maybe that was remiss of me, but I didn't need to.
But the biggest challenge for us really was that people who came looking with a view,
not preaching with a view, this is kind of attending with a view.
You know, the people who turn up on Sunday morning checking you out, who had children,
already believers, hardly ever stayed.
Because they said what the parents in the church had also said, our kids won't do this.
But I had no relational capital with them to say, just give it a go, which I did have
with people in the church.
So they would say, our kids can't cope with this.
And sadness of sadness is they would then go to the pretty, wooly evangelical church
down the road, where I don't think actually they did as well.
Now, let's get to the chase on this one.
Do you think parents in the West, parents in a country like this one, have got some
views of what's good and right for their children and what their children will cope with that
frankly comes more from the culture than from the gospel and Christian life in that kind
of area?
Because I think that's what you're driving at.
Yeah, I completely agree.
Go on, talk.
For sure.
And same experience.
So one dad said to me, two young kids, their eldest is seven, I think, and this is just
not going to work.
They're not going to be able to concentrate.
Six months on having done a trial, I got sent to seven year old son's notes from the sermon
and just made me want to wait because it's a wonderful moment, isn't it?
Just you suddenly realize what you had expected from your child.
How much more can they take on board?
And so week one of the trial was a mess.
It was tricky.
And you notice all the parents move to the back corner because they wanted to play it
safe and actually trying to encourage them out of the back corner.
So actually your kids will be able to engage far better at the front, be bold, jump right
in.
And when they've made that move, the kids really have, I mean, we have, we have craft,
we've got a craft team, we put together a craft, ties in with every sermon.
But not every family use the craft because not every kid wants to use the craft.
Some just want to sit and engage.
And we do 20 minute sermons and we actually break those up into two halves with a song
in between, which I think helps everyone, but it definitely helps the kids.
But there inevitably there is noise.
A room with kids is noisier than a room without kids.
And it's interesting in other cultures, that's fine.
So I came back to East London, a church that was 50% non-white, probably more actually,
65 nationalities.
It felt normal to have kids running around, you know, making noise like in normal families.
And it's actually interesting in those other cultures, very often children in that sort
of setting call other adults, auntie and uncle.
There's more sense of family and what you're prepared to put up with as a family.
So I think there is something about we can be quite tight as sort of white Brits sometimes
and we need to loosen up a bit.
But I mean, have any adults said to you, I've got nothing against kids, I love kids, I wanted
to be part of the church.
The brute fact is I take in less of the sermon because there are kids making noise than I
used to.
Do you think that's happening?
Yes.
So what do you feel about that?
How do you respond?
Well, there's a conversation with the individual, I don't know, where are you sitting in a church,
because again, for them, the further forward they're sitting, the more connected they are.
And I don't know, it's true for every church, we fill up from the back.
It's so late, come on, let's get shown to the front.
No, it's only you.
There is no other church in the world where that happens.
For when you look at the whole, when you look at the body and the building up of the body,
there's a bigger thing going on on Sunday morning than simply one adult struggling.
And I remember one Sunday, you came to me, you'd sat right back in the far corner where
a lot of the noise tends to congregate.
And you said, it was noisy.
But if I wanted to concentrate, I could concentrate.
I think, I mean, I know people, dear friends of mine have really wrestled with this and
struggled with it.
I think I found myself as someone sitting, receiving the word saying to myself, does
the noise around me mean there will be things in the sermon I don't quite take in the way
I would have done if this had been silent?
The answer is yes.
But it's good preaching we hear, where there's a clear message that's repeated and comes
at us in a number of different ways.
That's just good oral communication.
So however much noise there is, can I take in the core message being preached?
Of course I can.
Well, have we got to even just, I just, I want to push that a little bit because I wonder
if there's something even a bit deeper.
So what is more valuable?
Is it you, Tim, an individual, Dr. Ward, getting, let's say 80% of the sermon.
Is that more valuable than you sitting next to little Timmy and both of you getting 50%?
Well, my theology is the latter is more valuable because of the togetherness of church.
And I think the problem is, and this is true of lots of areas of church life, we sometimes
as leaders don't do a very good job of articulating and applying well and consistently our theological
convictions about church and church life.
We settle into what's easiest, what's most pragmatic, what's most settled historically.
And I think that's just a big challenge in lots of areas of church.
Are we just butting up here again in yet another area against the rank individualism of Western
culture that we often don't challenge because the gospel challenges it massively.
There is individualism of the gospel.
Each person has to confess the Lord Jesus in order to be, yes, of course, but there's
a lot of cultural, we go further than that and we dress it up in a kind of respectability.
So I can't concentrate on the sermon.
That sounds quite a godly thing.
I really want to listen to the sermon.
I really want to concentrate on what's being said.
But that is a kind of, if that is being set up against someone saying, well, you know,
at least you're learning with someone else who's younger.
And we are basically dressing up individualism as a, with a kind of respectability.
So I think there's something in there.
The other thing it's done is forced to rethink on preaching.
I think we have, we work harder on our sermons now to make sure what we are trying to say
is crystal clear.
And you know, a lot of the padding, the Wednesday afternoon padding goes to get to a Friday
afternoon clarity.
And it's been interesting seeing, you know, bits where I'm putting it in the sermon thinking
of this will help communicate it to the kids.
Those are the bits the adults are coming out and saying that really landed it for me.
And they take it away.
And well, I've said as someone who teaches preaching, whenever I see your students give
me guidance on teaching teenagers well, I just look at them and think, I just think
that's good guidance on teaching anybody well.
But if people largely teach pliant adults who have learned to sit there and look interested
when they're bored or confused, we kid ourselves that we're communicating well because everybody's
quiet and looks like that.
No, they're not understanding or they're bored or both.
Yeah, there's a lot of advice on communicating well to kids is actually just how can you
get well to everybody?
There are other helps, aren't there?
So Sophie Killingly has written, she's an artist.
She's written a book or written a book.
She's drawn a book for the Good Book Company, which is just templates for kids sermon outlines
and little diary entries, which you can buy.
And then, you know, so you don't actually have to prepare these things yourself now.
They can always be pre prepared.
So there are resources around one little extra bit of our puzzle at Yale, Tim, which may
be worth saying is we dropped our midweek Bible study in small groups because we said
what we're doing is we're basically doing the Bible study on Sunday morning, the discipleship
study.
So what we did midweek is we made it a midweek.
We didn't do our after lunch prayer meeting that didn't ever get off the ground.
So we instead we had midweek small groups, which were prayer meetings.
And what we did in those three weeks out of four was we prayed in the sermon.
And actually, that was a great release for us because we didn't have enough we didn't
have enough gifted small group leaders who could really lead a good Bible study.
And so many pastors tell their heads.
Indeed.
And we said, well, actually, you're doing more.
You've got more content if you're going to measure it in content.
We didn't want to do that.
But if you're going to measure it in content by doing this 45 minutes on a Sunday and then
having a sermon, you're getting more content now than you have before.
Let's meet midweek to encourage one another and to pray it in and to say, well, how's
that going to affect you?
Let me pray for you and do it that way.
That's very interesting.
Another reflection, Tim, just this is confession of an idiotic pastor, really.
But all age services, separate podcast.
Coming soon.
And you know, my my concept of always an all age service week, take a big theological
truth, try and communicate that truth with a big visual aid.
I was never preaching to the children.
And there was a moment, you know, we made this change.
And I looked at one Sunday and I suddenly realized I'm pastoring the young people in
this church for the first time.
And that's what God's called me to do.
Because you've taught the same core Bible material or theology and or theological truth
to everybody.
And now it's application and now children.
Here's an application to you.
What does this mean?
Your lives.
Now I'm going to talk to those who are retired.
Exactly.
Yeah.
You're now pastoring everybody in front of everybody.
So the kids get to hear how the pastor pastors the older people and knows how to pray for
them.
And I'm just curious how very often if you ask people really honestly, which part of
the service do you most enjoy?
Classic evangelical British service.
They all love the children's talk most of all.
So actually, often that's because the pastor is speaking more simply and more clearly.
So actually, there's something in that if you can make your whole sermon, not a children's
talk, but if you can communicate simply and clearly and winsomely, actually you will be
able to you will find speak to the whole church.
This has been fascinating.
I've been talking for a long time.
Just a clock down here.
We need to wrap up in a few minutes.
The thing I mean, one of the things that's really struck me as we've been talking about
this now and as we were chatting about it before we before we hit record is how I mean,
in my mind, what we're going to talk about is quote, adult Sunday school, get the adults
together for additional teaching and time together relating together.
But thinking about that has led us to let's think about children in quote, the service
all the way through and actually how I wonder if a sense that you just it's never going
to work having the kids in is one of the things that militates moving to against moving towards
adult Sunday school.
But you you've both bitten the bullet on that one.
Yeah.
Although after I left, they have reverted back to the old model.
So yeah, I think the spring is very tightly formed.
Okay.
And you can pull on it.
And I think you need to have some longevity and commitment to make it work.
So it's really encouraging to me to hear exactly what you're doing and making it work.
I don't think I want people listening to underestimate the size of the task.
You you have a national ministry, you oversee you get a national outlook.
Oh, are we real outliers here?
Yeah.
Okay.
I mean, there'll be other churches that do it, but not many.
And especially larger churches, sometimes you'll get small churches who have a more
community group model of meeting together, who don't have resources or the size and actually
all the theological convictions to when they're starting from scratch, split up in that traditional
way.
But in terms of established churches, you really are outliers.
But I that's not a reason for not doing something.
And it's it's good to hear it's good to hear that it's making progress really.
I find that really heartening.
To church council members who really didn't like the idea.
I mean, they were godly about it.
We're happy to go.
Yeah.
The majority were were in favour.
Six months in after the trial came to me and said, I get it.
I really got it.
That's good news.
And we have a brunch once every seven weeks.
And in that crossover time.
And it's just glorious because we really do know each other.
I mean, that's been such a battle.
Church of 350 on the Sunday.
Well, it's bigger church than that.
If everyone turned up.
True for everyone.
But we really do know each other better.
Young and old and the moment where Sunday evenings in the summer, we've got we sort
of have Bible studies in the evening in place of evening service.
And last Sunday, there were three young people came along.
They're sitting in the groups.
They're contributing alongside.
So you've got an 80 year old sitting alongside an eight year old.
And that's just become normal in church life.
So it has achieved what you set out to achieve.
We're getting great.
That's great to hear.
Final question for each of you.
Of course, the the way this will look, it's going to look different in different churches.
I'm glad we had sort of two really quite different models talked about here.
There's going to be no one size fits all.
If someone listening to this was thinking, yeah, I would like to start thinking through
and leading my people in direction as to as to how this might look for us in our place.
I'm just picking up a cop foster model.
It's not going to be sensible.
What would be your advice as to the key things that that church leader ought to start talking
about with people and teaching them on that will just set the foundations in place so
that the church family can think about these things well?
Can I be cheeky and answer a slightly different question, please?
What question should I have asked?
Well, a pastor's calling is to serve his flock.
OK.
And we have deep theological convictions about what serves our flock best.
Yeah.
But they do need to always be contextualized to the people that God has given us to serve
and love and care for and protect and guard.
So I think I was too bullish.
OK.
I'm sort of a young Turk with very strong theological convictions.
And I think I should have gone about what I did a different way that would have been
perhaps more loving and caring of the flock.
And that would have been?
I just think that would have been a slower process, more explanation perhaps.
I've not really reflected on a huge amount, but I think we have to be careful to remember
that our key calling is not to drive our theological convictions through.
Yeah.
But our key calling is to love and care and serve for the flock.
So if the flock are not going to be able to cope with it, you have to rethink a little
bit.
Yeah.
So it's not pragmatism.
Yeah, sure.
I'm not very keen on the concept of pragmatism in ministry, but I think it's about being
a pastor and having the interests of the flock at your heart.
So I think actually that does answer your question in a sense, which is how do you go
about any change in church life or actually making church what you think it ought to be
as a gathering?
You have to think what is best going to serve those that the Lord is entrusted into my care?
How am I going to love them and care for them and build them and keep them and protect them
under the great chief shepherd?
That's really helpful.
I guess every pastor would genuinely say, I have on my heart to serve the people.
But I think what I'm rightly hearing from you is sometimes I won't know what will serve
them best and they will help me understand what will serve them best.
That's right.
Yeah, that's really helpful.
Thank you, John, for you.
I was thinking we preach through 1 Corinthians, which I think gave us a help give a bigger
view of church, what church is and to preach big church and to fight against little church
really helps.
And then it's the openness to conversations.
I mean, the trial was a trial and making sure that's a genuine trial rather than I'm just
going to tell you it's a trial for six months.
And we worked hard to try and listen to everyone.
We did what we called a big visit, so every household on the church database was visited,
not just by me, by a team of about 25 people.
And that was just a chance to make sure voices really were heard, because we believe that's
what church is.
It shouldn't just be this is what we're going to do now.
Here's a bigger picture of church and what might that look like for us together moving
forwards.
And let God surprise you, because he has surprised me.
I was terrified about this, but it has been wonderful.
That's great.
Thank you so much, John.
Adrian, really grateful for your time.
Thanks for having me.
Taking time out of busy lives of ministry.
Wonderful.
Great to be here.
We trust that this episode of Deep Roots has been a real blessing to you as you think through
your own leadership where God has placed you or if you're a member of the church, how you
can be a fruitful and godly member of your own church family in your own particular place.
Do check out our back catalogue.
We're building up quite a list now of previous Deep Roots episodes.
If you've missed some, you may well find some there that are a blessing to you.
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