In Depth:  Stephen Timmis

A fly-tipped estate in Wales, the sparkling coast of Italy, the diversity of London: what do these entirely different places have in common?

They share not only great gospel need, but also, by God’s grace, blossoming gospel witness. Western Europe has a vibrant cultural heritage. This region offers hundreds of years of spiritual, academic, artistic, musical, scientific and architectural abundance. But today it is a spiritual wasteland; the most secular continent in the world.

‘Jesus’s instruction for us to pray to the Lord of the harvest to send out workers for the harvest tells us that the need of the day is to get as many young men and women as possible into full-time paid gospel ministry’ reflects a prevailing culture among ‘our kind of evangelicals’.

Our emphasis on getting ‘good people’ into our apprenticeships, ministry training schemes and equivalents, and in turn sending them to theological college and into ‘ministry’, speaks volumes about our priorities — for our churches and for the individuals concerned.

Steve Timmis is involved in The Crowded House, an initiative to plant a network of household churches throughout the city of Sheffield.

The aim is to reach and disciple people for whom traditional church holds no attraction, and who dismiss it as having no relevance to their lives. In two consecutive articles, Steve explains the biblical and cultural reflection behind the initiative.

Steve Timmis is involved in The Crowded House, an initiative to plant a network of household churches throughout the city of Sheffield (see the October 1998 issue of EN).

Its aim is to reach and disciple people for whom traditional church holds no attraction, and who dismiss it as having no relevance to their lives. In two consecutive articles, Steve explains the biblical and cultural reflection that lies behind the initiative.

Let's say you are a novice missionary in a foreign country, working among a previously unreached group in the back-of-beyond. What would you do?

This may be slightly presumptuous of me, but I imagine that one thing you wouldn't do was simply what you did back in England: for example, construct a special hut with pews and a pulpit, and meet twice on a Sunday at 10.30 and 6.30.

Andy Hawthorne is 37 years old. He's married to Michelle, and has two children aged seven and four. They all live in Manchester and Andy supports Manchester United FC. He's a member of St. Mary's, a thriving Anglican evangelical church in Cheadle.

All of which is fairly routine. Commonplace. Even mundane. However, there can't be many middle-aged Christians who 'front' a dance band whose albums are distributed by a major recording company, featured on Radio 1, been subject to Joan Bakewell's attention on Everyman, and includes someone who was once the UK Breakdancing champion, and a DJ at Manchester's leading nightclub.