Northern Lights: Resurrecti
ng Church in the North of England
Jason Byassee
Cascade Books, 184 pages
Better Than Brunch: Missional Churches in Cascadia
Jason Byassee and Ross A. Lockhart
Cascade Books, 138 pages.
Reviewed by L. Roger Owens
There was a time when the most popular church leadership books were written by successful pastors offering recipes for church growth. More recently, leadership books have emphasized principles for navigating the rough seas of change. These two books represent what I hope might become a new trend: Books that tell the stories of congregations discovering new life in the unlikeliest of places, stories that draw our attention to a God who never tires of surprising us with resurrection.
Funded by a grant from Canadian Presbyterians, Jason Byassee, a professor at Vancouver School of Theology, traveled to northern England to study growing congregations in the hope that churches in North America might learn from them. “Northern Lights: Resurrecting Church in the North of England” is the fruit of Byassee’s research. It’s a winsomely written and genuinely exciting book, describing the multiplicity of ways God is bringing new life in a region most known for church decline.
Byassee’s introduction establishes the book’s throughline: Churches that intend to grow tend to grow. In other words, renewal is not an accident. The book describes new church starts, revived Anglican churches, immigrant congregations and independent churches from across the theological spectrum. What unites them is their intentionality, rooted in the belief that God is not done with the church.
Another thread running through the book is the importance of leadership. Byassee profiles top-down leaders, like archbishops John Sentamu and Rowan Williams, who used their positions to encourage churches to experiment with evangelism. But he also interviews leaders in local congregations, such as British Methodist pastor Alison Wilkinson, whose small congregation has doubled in size since she became pastor in 2016. “Lots of ministry in our church is about managing decline,” Wilkinson told Byassee. “We’ve lost belief in the gospel as transformation, in the good news as good news.”
The chapters on the Alpha and Fresh Expressions movements struck me as particularly significant. Byassee helps us to see these two British exports to North America with new eyes. He admits that his mainline bent created a bias against the more evangelical Alpha, but he couldn’t deny the good work he saw God doing through the program, which invites people to spend 10 weeks in small groups watching videos and talking about Jesus. Alpha, he says, is a gift from God, “bearing fruit in ways both intended and unexpected.” Fresh Expressions names the movement to establish micro-communities of faith that jettison the traditional trappings of church. Rather than trying to attract people to existing congregations, the Fresh Expressions movement supports ministry that allows communities to encounter the gospel afresh, in their own languages, and to grow organically.
After reading the stories in this book, it’s hard not to share Byassee’s own understated conclusion: “Maybe we have a chance, church.”
In “Better Than Brunch: Missional Churches in Cascadia,” Byassee teams up with colleague Ross Lockhart, a professor of mission studies, to profile congregations in the Pacific Northwest. “Better Than Brunch” asks what missional Christianity looks like in a region that has never known an established church. Lockhart’s expertise allows this book to engage more explicitly than does “Northern Lights” with missional church literature. Folks like me, influenced by Darrell Guder’s seminal work, “Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America,” will find this book a necessary sequel, showing what missional Christianity actually looks like in a challenging context.
The authors discovered eight commonalities in the missional congregations they studied. I found the chapters exploring the evangelical/liberal paradox, the “craft church” and missional metrics to be most enlightening. In the chapter on metrics, they show that missional churches, rather than relying on traditional measures, pay attention to their incarnational engagement, investment in their communities and the intentionality of their shared life together to help them measure their “success” in missional ministry.
Folks expecting in-depth accounts of congregations in these books might be disappointed. These books profile so many communities, there’s no space for deep ethnographic study. So readers might want to read these books alongside others, like Scott Hagley’s “Eat What Is Set Before You: A Missiology of the Congregation in Context,” which focuses on one congregation. Because the authors rely primarily on interviews with leaders, the emphasis on leadership in these books might be an expression of the authors’ convictions about how much leadership matters, but it might also result from the fact that leaders are easier to access and interview. I suspect it’s something of both.
Acclaimed writer Barry Lopez once wrote, “Everything is held together with stories,” and I believe there is some truth in that. But when it comes to congregational renewal, it’s not just any stories we need, but stories that witness to the power of God’s Spirit to bring new life. These books offer those stories. In that way, they can be considered sequels to the book of Acts: fresh witnesses to the Spirit-led spread of the good news in ways that surprise and inspire.
L. Roger Owens is associate professor of Christian spirituality and ministry at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and author of “Threshold of Discovery: A Field Guide to Spirituality in Midlife.”
