Inter-Varsity Press

Contents

Introduction

1. Living at the margins (1 Peter 1:1–12)

2. Everyday community (1 Peter 1:13 – 2:8)

3. Everyday pastoral Care (1 Peter 1:22 – 2:3)

4. Everyday mission (1 Peter 2:9 – 3:16)

5. Everyday evangelism (1 Peter 3:15–16)

6. Hope at the margins (1 Peter 3:8 – 5:14)

7. Conclusion: The next steps

Introduction

In 1915 Tim’s grandmother moved to a two-up, two-down terraced house in Darlington, an industrial town in the north of England. She was one year old. The street was still being built when she moved there. So too was the Methodist chapel two streets away. That house became her home for the next ninety years, and the chapel became a second home.

When my mother was a child, the congregation was 100 strong, with a choir of twenty, plus another fifty children in the Sunday school. More than that, the church was at the heart of neighbourhood life. Church concerts, church teas, church outings – these were the only working-class alternatives to the pub. My grandmother and my mother grew up with the church at the very centre of their lives.

My grandmother was still playing the piano on a Sunday morning in her nineties. Her increasing deafness meant she had trouble hearing the singing, but there was no-one else to take over. The congregation has now dwindled to just a dozen or so, none of whom are under fifty. Local people have other things to do on a Sunday morning. Choir recitals cannot compete with the Xbox and The X Factor. The building, freshly built when my grandmother started attending, has become a relic, a monument to a former way of life. It plays no part in the lives of all but a handful of people. It is part of the neighbourhood’s history, but not of its present.

Christians today increasingly find ourselves on the margins of our culture. In fact, we live in a post-Christian culture. The majority of people in the West have no intention of ever attending church. Most only utter the name of Christ as a swear word. Some prominent churches are growing, but much of this is transfer growth rather than true evangelistic growth.

Yet many of our approaches to evangelism still assume a Christendom mentality. We expect people to come when we ring the church bell or put on a good service. But the majority of the population are disconnected. Changing what we do in church will not reach them. We need to meet them in the context of everyday life.

Our previous book, Total Church, argued that the Christian gospel and the Christian community should be central to every aspect of our life and mission. This book builds upon that foundation. It is a call for us to be an everyday church with an everyday mission. We need to shift our focus from putting on attractional events to creating attractional communities. Our marginal status is an opportunity to rediscover the missionary call of the people of God. We can recover witness to Christ, unmuddied by nominal Christianity.

Our marginal status is also an opportunity to reconnect with our Bibles. The New Testament is a collection of missionary documents written to missionary situations. It was written by Christians living on the margins of their culture. Throughout this book, we will enter into a dialogue with the first letter of Peter. Peter was writing to Christians who found themselves ‘strangers and exiles’ in the first-century Roman Empire. They were on the margins facing slander and abuse much as we are. This book is not a commentary. Instead, we want to offer some missional reflections on 1 Peter, to explore what the Holy Spirit would say to the Western church today through this portion of God’s word. Above all, we have tried to write a practical book that shows what everyday church and everyday mission might look like on the ground.

In calling the church to everyday mission, we recognize that this is what many, many Christians are already doing: being good neighbours, colleagues, family members, doing good in the face of hostility, bearing witness to Christ in the context of ordinary life. Our aim is not to dismiss this. Quite the opposite. We want to celebrate it and put it back at the centre of the church’s mission. And perhaps also give it more direction and show how it can be more intentional.

One final note. We have written this book together and so generally use plural pronouns (we, us). But where we describe an experience or story particular to one of us, we have used a singular pronoun (I, me).