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God’s People GATHERED
It is the church gathered that most people are referring to when they talk about church. Church-gathered activities typically take place on the church campus and reflect the formal and official program of the congregation. Anything a person might do while wearing a “Beverly Heights” tee-shirt might be considered church gathered activities, even on the few occasions when the program takes place away from the church building.
It is shocking for most people to realize that, no matter how involved or overextended they feel they are when it comes to involvement in church programs, the maximum time an individual typically spends in church gathered activities is 2 –5% of their total lives.
This would not be surprising to Jesus, who had in mind for his people a life of strategic impact away from the gathered body (see God’s People Scattered below). That is not to say, however, that the church gathered is insignificant or unimportant. In fact, if the church were not gathered with regularity, its life in the scattered dimension becomes impotent.
We believe that all activities which comprise the life and ministry of the Beverly Heights Church in its gathered dimension may be subsumed under the following four categories:
Worship
The primary and ultimate activity of the believer is the worship of almighty God. This is reflected in our first core value: “We place high value on corporate and personal worship because we believe that God is worthy of our praise and we can enjoy a vital intimacy with Him known in no other way. We are therefore committed to encouraging worship in forms and contexts which enable people to make whole-hearted expression of praise and experience humble communion with the living God.”
He has made the world and all that is in it. He has formed us out of nothing and breathed into us the breath of life. In Jesus Christ we have uninterrupted access to Him by faith in the sufficiency of His death on the cross which makes our forgiveness possible. By the Holy Spirit we have been drawn to Him in love, dependence and obedience, even as the Spirit makes Christ’s image in us every day. And in Him we have, not only the fullness of life in this world, but the sure and certain hope of life eternal with Him in the new heavens and new earth when Jesus returns. God is worthy of our adoration and praise, and worship is one of the most exciting things we do as the church gathered.
Presbyterianism has a long and rich heritage when it comes to corporate worship. In offering praise and adoration to God it employs the great hymns of the faith and the historic creeds and confessions in acclamation of our holy God, while it calls the people of God to confess their sins and hear anew the affirmation of forgiveness in Jesus Christ.
Prayer and the preaching of the Word play a profound role in the two-way communication with the living God.
The last two decades of the 20th century have been a time of tremendous change in the way many American Protestant Christians worship. It has been a time of both the blending of traditional and contemporary elements of worship as well as a time when some churches have made a complete shift to all contemporary worship, either by offering alternative and additional experiences or by eliminating worship in the traditional mode altogether.
Worship at Beverly Heights underwent changes during the mid to late 1990s as well. Our approach shifted from traditional only to blended, with the addition of an all contemporary worship service in the year 2000. Each of these forms has played a role in our continuing quest to worship God in spirit and in truth, in a way that is encouraging to believers and relevant and winsome to the unchurched, whom we meet as the church scattered and seek to bring into the church gathered.
Christian Formation
Beverly Heights places the highest value on the Bible as the Word of God. We believe that the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments have been breathed by God into the hearts and minds of the authors of the biblical documents. We believe that the Bible is God’s Word for us and for the world. To read it, understand it, know it and build one’s life upon its truth is of singular importance for the believer.
The nurture of one’s spiritual life through the Word of God begins at the earliest of ages and continues until death. The program of nurture at Beverly Heights begins with Early Childhood Ministries and proceeds through Children’s Ministries and Youth Ministries to Adult Ministries.
Body Life
Koinonia is a Spirit-inspired commonality that is enjoyed by believers in Jesus Christ. Being one in our need for Jesus, our love for Jesus and our service for Jesus’ kingdom is augmented by our unity of love and care for one another. True koinonia is the answer to Jesus’ prayer that His disciples might be one even as he and the Father were one.
Church-wide congregational events provide a certain level of fellowship among brothers and sisters in Christ. However, the vital relationships that Christ’s reconciling death on the cross enabled, and which are necessarily among people who are living lives of significance in a hostile world, require a deeper fellowship, one which can only be enjoyed through relationships in small groups.
At Beverly Heights there are over 30 small groups with more than 275 believers participating in women’s, men’s, couples and support groups. As you will see below (The Beverly Heights Small Group Ministry), we believe that what must happen in church happens best in small groups.
Mission
One of the Beverly Heights core values and commitments states: “We place high value on the church’s worldwide ministry of the Gospel because we believe that the church has been commissioned to it by our Lord. We are therefore committed to understanding the part He desired us to play in this global endeavor and to being devoted to the cause of people coming to know Christ in place that are both near and far.”
Beverly Heights has historically been a “mission-minded” church. Approximately 25% of the annual budget is designated for the support of missionaries and agencies that work both locally and globally. An amount equal to an additional 30% of the missions budget is given by individuals through the church treasury for the support of the furtherance of God’s kingdom through mission endeavors.
Most recently we have been attempting to form strategic alliances and partnerships with individuals and agencies in order to more effectively accomplish the work of the Great Commission, which Jesus has given to the church. Special mission emphases and short-term mission experiences are regularly provided for youth and adults. At the present time 12 missionaries supported by the missions budget are either members of the congregation or are children of members of the congregation.
The Church Gathered and the Church Scattered
Two to five percent of one’s life dedicated to the life and ministry of the church gathered is not much time at all, particularly when such wonderful and life sustaining activities such as worship, nurture, fellowship and missions are involved.
But we believe that this is how the Lord would order things. He wants His people to spend a relatively small amount of time in church gathered activities in order that most of their time may be spent in living testimony to the power and glory and love of Jesus among those who don’t know Him.
It is therefore a primary concern of both the professional and lay leadership that the experiences that are enjoyed by members of the church when they are in the gathered dimension are meaningful, helpful, encouraging and of highest quality so that they will support and empower God’s people to be bright light, savory salt and active leaven for His kingdom when they are scattered in those places He wants them.
God’s People SCATTERED
Fully 98% of a believer’s time is spent in pursuits that take him away from the church building. The believer does not cease to be the church when he is way from the building – he is simply the church in a different dimension, the church scattered.
The church scattered is comprised of believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, living their lives under His lordship as the light, salt and leaven of the kingdom of God, wherever God has sovereignly scattered them. The church is scattered in homes, schools, workplaces, and community activities -- wherever a believer is, there is part of the church.
We believe that this is precisely what Jesus had in mind. Living in the world, bringing the kingdom of God near in word and deed is the true fulfillment of Jesus’ command to the man healed of the legion of demons to “go to your own home and tell them what God has done for you” (Mk. 5:19). It is the only approach to the Christian life that does justice to the public and declaratory nature of the faith to which we have been called and engages all believers in an obedient response to Jesus’ commands, not only to “come unto Me,” but “Ye shall be my witnesses,” etc. There are a number of key components to living the life of the church scattered. If one element is missing, the work that Christ desires to accomplish through His people will be thwarted.
Biblical and Theological Foundations
Along with the story of the man healed by Jesus in Mark 5 there is the account of the woman at the well recorded in John 4. At the instruction of Jesus she went into her village and simply spoke to the townspeople out of the limited contact she had had with Jesus. “Come see a man who told me everything I ever did” was her only verbal witness. Yet the result was powerful – people believed in Jesus, not based on her testimony alone, but based upon their own interaction with Jesus, initiated by her invitation.
These two accounts give practical witness to the teaching of Jesus in Matthew 5 and Matthew 13 in which He says that believers are like light, salt and leaven – they interact with their environments, making a transforming impact as darkness turns to light, salt has a catalytic effect in numerous ways and leaven brings dough to life. An implication common to all three metaphors is that the light, salt and leaven seem insignificant in comparison to the size of the environment into which they go, yet they have tremendous power to effect change.
So also the believer who is scattered. He appears weak and insignificant when compared to the unbelieving world into which he goes, yet by the power of God the kingdom is brought near, witness is made and lives are changed. That this is what Jesus had in mind for the church is confirmed by the early history of the church chronicled in the Book of Acts. The early church, absent any church building, lived the life of the church scattered as believers brought their testimonies to the transformation that Jesus had made in their lives, to the marketplace in which they worked everyday. They talked about what Jesus had done for them and they demonstrated how he had changed their lives. The result was the furtherance of the kingdom and the growth of the church.
The believer who is scattered in obedience to Jesus Christ brings more than a spoken message to the world in which she lives. She brings life that is noticeably changed and directed by God through faith in Jesus Christ. The life changed by Christ is one that proclaims that sins are forgiven through faith in Jesus who died to pay the penalty for those sins in His death, that the Holy Spirit is remaking the image of Christ in one’s life every day, that living under the lordship of Jesus is Job #1, that the power of the Holy Spirit enables one to do “all things through Christ” who strengthens the believer by transforming human weakness with divine power, and, that loving the Lord with all one’s heart, soul, mind and strength is completed through loving one’s neighbor as oneself.
The scattered believer claims that territory for the kingdom of God, taking responsibility for sharing the light of life in Christ as God directs and enables.
However, these divine resources are appropriated by the believer only through a personal and daily walk with Christ, who calls us to be plugged into Him by faith even as the branch is connected to the vine in order that the essence of life itself might stream from the Source to the one who, by grace, is engrafted through a vital relationship of personal, obedient and dependent faith.
The church gathered is like a MASH. Men and women who live 98% of their lives in the battle for the kingdom of God as the church scattered, come to the church gathered for worship, nurture, fellowship and challenge for mission. They can’t live there, however; they can only stay so long before it’s time to get back out into the fray.
The church scattered does not devalue or diminish the role of the church gathered. On the contrary. The church scattered uplifts the church gathered. It helps to shape its ministry. It challenges the church gathered to make the most of the 2% it will give to its activities because that 2% has got to count for the 98% of the time when believers are out in the world, living as light, salt and leaven, out in the fray where the battle is fought for the lives of men and women and for eternity.