Total Church: Interview with Steve Timmis - Part Three
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Total Church: Interview with Steve Timmis - Part Three
By Pastor Scott Thomas
In an interview with my friend Steve Timmis the author of Total Church, co-authored by Tim Chester, Steve answers questions about the nature of a gospel community. The interview was conducted through a video conference with our Pastor's Training Program (PTP) at Mars Hill Church.
Total Church is published by Crossway through the Re:Lit line of books managed by Resurgence.
PTP Member: How big do the gospel communities get? How is replication structured?
Timmis: Ours is too big. We’ve got 26. We will divide as soon as we can get some of our younger men really geared up to take responsibility. I like to see a gospel community starting with as few as 8 people – and then growing to about 20 and replicating again. The issue is rapid replication, that’s us. And saturation church planting is our church model.
PTP Member: How do you determine who teaches when the gospel communities gather on Sunday? Is there ever any conflict between leaders or people – ‘we like this teacher,’ etc?
Timmis: No, we don’t. We just plan the program among us. I used to do most of the teaching but some of the leaders were concerned that I was becoming a little too crucial to the whole thing, and people were too dependent upon me, so I cut my teaching down significantly. I haven’t taught since November, for example, and I won’t teach until February. But there’s no conflict, and if there was, then people would be gospeled and basically told “that’s not what it’s about, it’s about the Word of God is being taught well.” My task now is to help train up the other guys who are teaching – that’s what I invest my time in.
PTP Member: Are there elders in the smaller groups?
Timmis: Yeah, there are elders. They either lead a gospel community or they oversee the gospel community with a trainee elder.
PTP Member: What about growth? I know the model is that growth would happen incarnationally in these independent gospel communities, but do you find that really happens? Or is still a large amount of growth happening in the corporate gatherings as more of an attractional model?
Timmis: It’s both and really. We do see growth happening in the central gathering, because it’s an open door to the street we get people turning up. Since the beginning of The Crowded House, we’ve always discouraged people coming from other churches in the city and we continue to do that. Sometimes it does happen, but it’s quite a tortured process because we want to make sure they’re leaving their existing church well and for the right reasons.
Non-Christians turn up, and they get assimilated and a gospel community takes responsibility for them. But it’s primarily peer evangelism – so our people in these gospel communities invest in the lives of their friends – so growth is there as well.
Scott: This sounds similar to what Mars Hill and our Acts 29 churches are doing in that we gather for the corporate, central teaching and worship and then disperse into what we would regard as community groups doing a lot of the same – being on mission, reaching, shepherding, caring, doing life together. Do you see any difference?
Timmis: I’m not in a position to be able to say it is different, because I haven’t seen Mars Hill up close to that degree. All that I can say is that in terms of the principles that govern us (by way of clarification – we are not setting ourselves up as being ‘different.’ We are simply setting ourselves up as ‘this is what our mission model is – our ecclesial model.). The key issue, and I’m using this word (advisedly) is where the power lies. For us it lies in the gospel communities. They’re the ones who make decisions about central teaching in the sense that all the gospel communities decide what we’re going to be teaching on, who teaches, and we’re committed to that. So our Sunday morning is an expression of the collective will of the gospel communities. It’s not an expression of the center determining what the gospel communities do. I don’t know if that’s what you do or the Acts 29 churches do. All I’m saying is that’s what we do. It’s a fully devolved model.
Part Four (final) tomorrow…
Seattle Boot Camp, The Call of a Church Planter
Speakers: Mark Driscoll, Matt Chandler, PJ Smyth, Scott Thomas, Dave Bruskas
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