It’s ­annoying, ­but ­it ­asks ­some­ challenging ­questions

LETTERS TO THE CHURCH
By Francis Chan
David C. Cook. 216 pages. £7.99
ISBN 978 0 830 776 580

Why would an American pastor plant a mega church, and then walk away? That is what Francis Chan did, and this book explains why.

His church had grown rapidly, from 30 to 1,600 in six years, but did people really know one another? Were they coming for the show? Did church make any difference to them outside the 90 minutes they spent together on a Sunday? What is church anyway?

Small churches

Chan and his wife set up a new network of house churches, which are always small enough to fit into a home. This book writes from that experience, but to challenge churches everywhere to think hard about themselves. Chan covers a wide range of burning issues in a chatty style: a call to rediscover the sacred; the recovery of biblical church order; growing a sense of family in a church; developing a culture of servanthood; growing leaders who are good shepherds; identifying with Christ in his sufferings, in the context of the American dream; unleashing the members of the church from a ‘zoo’ mentality trapped in a church gathering to a ‘wild’ mentality serving out in the world. Finally, he sets out the approach he has taken in his house-church network in San Francisco.

Personality and preaching

Some people will love this book. There are lots of little nuggets you might want to quote on Instagram. However, I came away wishing the author could be a bit more anonymous. Mega churches are built around a personality, and Francis can’t quite lose that habit in his writing style. A lot of Scripture is quoted extensively in the text, but not expounded. It is brought in to support assertions, not as a starting point. No Scripture passage gives any chapter its shape. He also seems to be really turned off by preaching, and only mentions it pejoratively. Is he haunted by the experience of preaching to a huge crowd? I also wondered why nothing much was said about how leaders get trained and what the spiritual diet is in a network of house churches.

Overall, this book is like a package from Amazon. Somewhere inside are the goods you ordered, and they are worth having, but they do come surrounded by a lot of unnecessary paper. Total Church by Chester and Timmis is much, much better.