I do my seminary studies in England, and I always find it interesting to read about American culture, politics, etc. from a British perspective.

This semester I’m taking a class on History of Christian Worship, and one part of this describes the development of different ways of “shaping Christian time” in worship.

Here’s an excerpt from my reading about the “Frontier Church model”:

Frontier or Revivalist Groups

This term is used by White to designate a type of Protestant worship widely recognised in North America which spread to the UK. As already indicated, it is a nineteenth-century form of the Service of the Word in which worship became simply equated with evangelism. Its roots were Puritan, Reformed and Methodist, and it was born out of a prevailing spirit of its Victorian times – didactic, stripped-down commonsensical. To meet the challenge of how to mediate Christian faith to the scattered and independent people moving west across the North American continent, evangelists developed a pragmatic, free-style, anti-tradition form. This kind of worship had one purpose and that was to make converts.

The service had a three-part form:

• 􏰂the warm-up or preliminaries – easy-to-sing emotional hymns;
• 􏰂 the Word – the sermon, preparing for;
• 􏰂 the harvest – altar call, an emotional appeal for conversion.

Frontier-type worship is evident in evangelistic ‘crusades’ and in many independent church services and Pentecostal meetings.

Sound familiar?  This gives interesting perspective to the “common” way of doing church in America today.  I know that this is the MO of many mega-churches. However, the question is begged: where is the discipleship? I know of large churches which have no strategy for discipleship beyond their Sunday morning preaching times, which are focused on proclamation of the Gospel with a focus on evangelism.

On the other side of the spectrum, I was speaking this weekend with friends in Canada who told me that the services in their church are focused wholly on the people of God and are not at all evangelistic (something they regretted to admit).

This seems to be one of the big questions: Who and what is the church service designed for? Discipling believers, or preaching to unbelievers for conversion?  But what if everyone is converted already?  Do you just keep preaching the same invitation to receive salvation to the already saved, because there just might be 1 or 2 unsaved people?  Or is it then always an invitation to “re-committ”?  Where does the instruction of believers come in?  Is that really “church”?  BUT – if you never preach and invite people to respond to the call of the Gospel to commit themselves to following Jesus, then what happens when new people come? Is your service simply not for them?

Clearly every church is trying to find this balance. I find that teaching through the Bible systematically, like we do at White Fields, is one of the most effective ways of both instructing believers and giving calls to action and to repentance. I also believe that having Christian instruction outside of the Sunday morning gatherings is an important way of doing this too. One of the things I’d like to start at White Fields is something along this line, because after all, we are called to not only make converts unto Jesus Christ, but disciples of Jesus Christ, teaching them to observe all that He commanded us (Matthew 28:20).