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 PrintableVersion Total churchA radical reshaping around gospel and communityRadical fellowshipTOTAL CHURCH This book, like a good DIY product, does pretty well ‘what it says on the tin’. Total Church pleads for two key principles for church and mission. First, the gospel as content: being word-centred (for the gospel is truth) and being mission-centred (for the gospel is truth to be proclaimed). Secondly, the community as context: sharing our lives as Christians and offering a place of belonging to unbelievers. Part 2 of the book, headed ‘Gospel and community in practice’, is divided into 11 chapters, one each on evangelism, social involvement, church planting, world mission, discipleship and training, pastoral care, spirituality, theology, apologetics, children and young people and success. Again, the outside of the tin is pretty accurate. They critique current trends within the church; emerging church movements are strong on community but weak on truth, while conservative evangelicalism is strong on truth but weak on community. Their call is for the best of both. The authors are part of a Christian community in the North of England that goes by the name The Crowded House. Ian Coffey’s foreword explains how ‘they are attempting to live out the gospel of Christ in the context of a local neighbourhood and, by so doing, to draw others to personal, living faith’. The significance of this is that some of the meaty content is broken up with some practical real life scenarios to illustrate, and a good number of these are testimonies from those involved in The Crowded House. At one level, therefore, the book reads as an explanation of, and justification for, the way that the authors are doing church. Serious theologyAt another level, however, the book is a serious piece of theological writing and, far from being of limited value to those with a particular interest in what may seem to be a fairly esoteric way of doing church, it is aiming to provide a tool for the evaluation of the ways all of us are doing church. I was glad not only for the brief summary of the two key principles in the first two chapters, but for the masterly way these key principles are applied to many aspects of church life in the chapters that follow. Together with The Living Church by John Stott, also published this year, it has been part of week one of my summer holiday reading. Would they both find a place on our church bookstall and, if so, which book for which reader? Well, yes, I hope both will be on our bookstall. And, as a rough rule of thumb, I will steer those who do not know Stott’s writings to John Stott’s book; the ‘convictions of that lifelong pastor’ ought not to be neglected. It is also significantly shorter as a book and, frankly, an easier read. But for those who have been reading Stott on and off all their Christian lives, I will recommend Total Church for a principled approach to church life, albeit one that is, in practice, a fair way away from that model of church with which Stott has been most familiar for almost all his life. Having said that, it is just possible that Total Church will work rather better as a book given by congregational members to their leaders, than vice versa; it may save some ministries from the frustration of seeking to conform to an inimitable model of church life in London W1. Jonathan Gould,
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