Articles by Paul Scanlon

God is Drawn to Emptiness

‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty… and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.’1

From this very first mention of the Holy Spirit in Genesis until now, God has always been drawn to emptiness. Today, he still hovers over the emptiness and chaos in our world, eager to partner with the church in bringing light and order to it. And herein lies the problem: much of the church is not drawn to emptiness but is content to simply find comfort and security in its own fullness. The vast majority of the church, certainly in the western world, appears to be overfed and under exercised. Whilst God has no problem with fullness, it must never become an end in itself. All our fullness is ultimately for the benefit of someone else’s emptiness. To be full of the Spirit is good, to be full of joy and love is good, but if that fullness is not being poured into someone else’s lack of joy and love, it’s not good.

John wrote, ‘From the fullness of his grace we have all received one blessing after another.’2  In other words, we have been blessed from his overflow. The cross was the ultimate act of God’s divine fullness overflowing as he shed his blood and emptied himself for a dying world. We now do the same, allowing the fullness of his life in us to overflow into the empty lives of people outside of Christ. The church is in the overflow business, not the fullness business.

We are blessed to be a blessing, we are filled in order to overflow and we are found to find others who are still lost. Jesus said that the ultimate separating issue between the sheep and the goats on judgement day would come down to the overflow of our lives - the hungry that were fed, the thirsty that were quenched, the naked that were clothed and the prisoners we embraced and included.3  If all we do is simply overflow to each other, we the blessed just get more blessed, and our churches become mutual blessing societies instead of society blessers.

Emptiness has a voice

When we understand that God is drawn to emptiness, we will look at emptiness differently. As part of this teaching in my home church, I put a number of empty chairs on the platform for all to see. My point was that emptiness has a voice and that the empty chairs in our services were speaking to us, beckoning us towards them. An empty chair in church is not an embarrassment or an attendance miscalculation, it is instead an opportunity for the ‘full’ to exercise their responsibility to find someone to fill that emptiness. An empty chair says, ‘we were expecting others, we have made provision for others and we have room for more.’

In our home we have lots of spare seats, far more than my wife and I would ever need. But our home is furnished not just for those who live there but for those who will come and visit or even stay for a while. We have created enough emptiness in our home so that we are constantly reminded that our home is not just for us, it’s also a place for our overflow, enjoyed by those we invite, which is hundreds every year.

God’s house is no different. Our ongoing commitment to develop multiple services, for example, springs from our continued commitment to keep creating more emptiness. In one sense this wasn’t easy for us as leaders, because we work hard to fill our buildings. So, once they are full, the last thing we want to do is empty them again. But our concern must always be to ask, ‘who is our fullness keeping away?’

Never forget that the widow’s jar of oil only stopped pouring when she ran out of emptiness.4  When she had no more empty vessels, God stopped pouring, and he will do the same in the church. When we stop finding empty people, God will stop pouring. Emptiness keeps God’s presence with us.

What are you doing to grow your church?

What are you doing to grow your church? Who are you reaching, inviting and bringing to fill your empty chairs? Faced with this challenge I’ve often heard people excuse themselves by quoting the scripture, ‘I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow.’5   They justify their inactivity by saying, ‘well, only God can make the church grow’. But what Paul is actually saying is that God can only grow whatever we are planting and watering. Paul said that God made what he and Apollos were doing, grow. And so I am asking you, what are you doing that God can grow and bring increase to?

Mark makes the same point when he writes, ‘Then the disciples went out and preached everywhere, and the Lord worked with them and confirmed his word by the signs that accompanied it’.6  The Lord worked with them! God is not working near the church, for the church, or around the church, but with the church. ‘With’ is the language of partnership and co-labouring. We are not called salt, light, yeast and ambassadors for no reason, they all describe our part in the increase matrix; they are all descriptions of our nature as the church, as agents of change.

So, I ask you again, what are you doing to grow your church? What can God increase in your life? Who are you helping, including and bringing to church?

Please don’t say, ‘well, I’m praying for growth’. Prayers are good but prayer won’t bring people. Many churches are praying for what they call ‘rain from heaven’ believing they are praying for the harvest. But rain is not harvest, what the rain waters is the harvest, and whatever God does from heaven will only benefit churches that have put something into the earth. Rain can only grow what’s already in the ground. If heaven is working in the shadows of people’s lives by using current world events to deepen their sense of lostness, those who through this come to an awareness of their own spiritual famine will only turn to churches that are already known to them as places of hope and houses of bread.

No Church Conciousness

During the London terrorist bombings of July 2005, those who survived said that everyone in the tube trains openly prayed and cried out to God. But doubtless few, if any of them, found their way to church following their ordeal. Why is this? The unchurched have a deep awareness of God, especially in a crisis. However, they do not have an awareness of the church. When the unchurched think ‘God’, they don’t think ‘church’. To them, the God of heaven has no earthly address. But the church is God’s address on the earth, and only the churches that are making this known will have increase.

The church is people, not an institution or organisation. Therefore, the only way the church will grow is through the influence and evangelism of church people in their communities. In fact the book of Acts tells us that ‘the Lord added  to their number daily.’7  God added people to people. He adds to who we are – the church – not to what we do.

People turn to the only church they know. So, my dentist, my builder, my hairdresser, gardener and petrol station attendant  have all turned to me at various times for spiritual guidance and life coaching. Why? Because to them I am the church, I am the nearest thing to God they know. When my builder was going through a painful marriage break up, he asked me for prayer and counsel. He asked his brother for lodgings, his mother for laundry and his mates at the pub for support and sympathy, but he asked me for prayer. He knew that I was a Christian and that I had something far more important to offer than lodging and laundry. I was God’s address and for him it was not just a general connection between God and the church, it was a connection between God and my church. I have reserved some emptiness for him at my church service, I have seats available in God’s House for him, and he knows it. When he thinks about God he thinks about me and my church, and that’s the seed that God turns into harvest. Our church is his barn, so he has a place of safety any time he’s ready. We have made room for him. 

The deception of evangelism by association

Whilst I believe in partnering with what others are doing around the world, it doesn’t actually mean that I’m doing it too. If I send money to an evangelist, that doesn’t mean I’m personally evangelising anyone. That’s like saying, I save lives because my uncle is a paramedic, or I’m fit because my brother is an athlete. I am deceiving myself!

You are not reaching people just because you are in a church that does. Our church here in Bradford is renowned for its  community  outreach but that doesn’t mean that everyone in our church is reaching people. It’s easy to enjoy the reputation a church has, yet not contribute to its success. We have CAT, or Community Action Teams, who reach thousands of unchurched people but that doesn’t mean everyone who isn’t a CAT team member is also reaching the unchurched. If they think they are, they are deceiving themselves too!

To illustrate my point I got four men up on stage to help me carry someone. As we all lifted the person up and held him aloft, we all looked to be sharing the load. Then I dropped my hands to make the point that I was carrying no weight and that even though we can all look like we are reaching the lost because we are in a lost-reaching church, that doesn’t mean everyone who touches the burden is actually carrying it. I then instructed the other three men to let go in turn, which finally left one man struggling to hold the load. He of course then collapsed! He was the only one actually carrying the load but it looked like we were all involved.

When we take what is everybody’s thing - and reaching the lost is everybody’s thing - and make it just a few people’s thing, there are a number of consequences:

• Reaching the lost appears to be a specialist area, leaving the majority uninvolved.

• Reaching the lost becomes a ‘burn-out’ ministry, because only a few are doing the work of all.

• Reaching the lost gets a bad reputation as a ‘Cinderella’ area of church life and people begin to  fear the ‘E’ word – evangelism.

• An ‘us and them’ atmosphere develops between those working hard to reach people and those who aren’t.

Influence is not evangelism

Influence is good; it’s kingdom, it’s salting, it’s touching people’s lives, but it’s not necessarily evangelism. Influence is essentially non-relational, whereas evangelism is always relational. Influence is scattered seed but evangelism is a carefully planted seed. Influence is more like broadcasting, evangelism is very specific ‘narrow casting’. Here in Bradford we influence many unchurched people, but I don’t want to influence all and evangelise none. No doubt there are many people in Hell who were influenced by the church but never evangelised.

The truth is we need both, because influence without evangelism becomes just social work, acts of goodness but without God. Equally, evangelism without influence can be God without goodness. I don’t want to just influence my community, my work colleagues, school friends or neighbours; I also want to share Christ with them.

I believe that Jesus was very aware of the weakness of influence without evangelism, or we could describe it as salt without light. After Jesus had fed the 5000, John records an occasion where he challenged the crowd about their motives for following him: ‘I tell you the truth, you are looking for me, not because you saw miraculous signs but because you ate the loaves and had your fill. Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.’8  

Clearly Jesus felt responsible for their perception of him. He didn’t want them to think that he had come to start a feeding programme. He wanted them to know about the eternal ‘bread of life’, not just the daily bread they were chasing.

I have wrestled with this issue in my own community and decided that we don’t want to simply provide feeding, education and rehab programmes detached from who we are. With this in mind I want to commend to you a message I preached entitled, ‘Ensuring that the hands that help the poor are also the hands touching Jesus’ . It is a long title but necessary to explain its content. My essential point is that when Jesus fed the 5000, plus women and children, he only used his disciples to do it. Despite this not being labour efficient or the quickest way, he still did it. I believe that the main reason Jesus did it this way was to ensure that the hands that touched the people were the hands touching him. He didn’t use an agency or subcontract it out to a community charity; he wanted to retain a direct relationship with the crowd. Remember now, I’m talking here primarily about the context of our local communities where our relationship with the lost is the key to their church awareness. I want people to know who is helping them and why.

What are you doing to grow your church? Not, what’s the pastor doing? Shepherds don’t produce sheep, sheep produce sheep. Shepherds provide the environment for that to happen. Jesus said, ‘the harvest is plentiful but the workers are few’.9  Will you improve on the few and help reach the many?

Growth must be the culture not the structure

Culture is defined as ‘the attitudes and values which shape society’. In other words, the culture is how we think, behave and function. Once a thing becomes the culture it ceases to be an emphasis, a teaching or an important point, it becomes the DNA. Some things in church life must become the culture which shape the attitudes and values of all. Reaching the lost should be at the top of that list.

Consider what this well known passage is describing: ‘They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. All the believers were together and had  everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favour of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.’ 10

This is describing a culture, not a structure or a programme. It is describing an attitude within the people which produced a church culture of personal devotion to God, the church leadership, each other and the poor. All God had to do was add to the culture ‘daily those who were being saved’. God partnered with the culture. The ‘X factor’ of the early church was its culture.

It’s not enough that our churches have evangelistic programmes or outreach events. If growth isn’t the common culture then we will be trying to shape attitudes and values by an evangelistic structure. There is no life in the structure, all the life is in the culture, structure simply serves the culture.

Our church, maybe like yours, has an ‘appeal’ culture in that at the close of each service we make an appeal for people to come to Christ. I am glad to say that every week people do come to Christ, but that’s not only because we make an appeal. An appeal culture can only work inside a ‘bringing’ culture because if you don’t bring any unsaved people to church, there’s no one to appeal to.

As a young believer in my early teens, I remember that every Sunday evening at 6.30pm we had a weekly Gospel Service. Each week the pastor would faithfully preach a Gospel message and make a salvation appeal but rarely did anyone get saved. This wasn’t because he hadn’t done a good job, it was because we were not bringing anyone to church. We had a Gospel Service culture without an evangelistic culture; we had nothing for God or the pastor to partner with. We were trying to achieve by structure what could only ever happen by culture.

I pray that you will honestly think about the church culture you are developing because it will have a major effect on your personal and corporate efforts to reach the lost. It is the context from which you answer my main challenge to you in this article, what are you doing to grow your church? And as you proactively respond, God works with you because like you, he is drawn to emptiness.

1 Genesis 1:1-2
2 John 1:16
3 Matthew 25:31-46
4 2 Kings 4:1-6
5 1 Corinthians 3:6
6 Mark 16:20
7 Acts 2:47
8 John 6:26-27
9 Matthew 9:37
10 Acts 2:42-47