These are some stories of churches and individuals who have made whole-life discipleship their aim. All see themselves on a journey. There's no one model. But they're all committed to learning how to become whole-life disciples in today's world.

Provoking the Saints: Agnes & Alan

Agnes is the caretaker of Muckamore Presbyterian Church near Belfast. As the caretaker, no one could be more concerned about what goes on in the church building. Alan is an elder in the church and the Northern Ireland Managing Director of a cattle feed company. One day, he noticed that the Peterborough headquarters had started a prayer meeting. Piqued by the idea that those 'pagan English' had done something that the 'godly Irish' hadn't, he decided that he would do the same. Then, as he put it, "I made the mistake of mentioning it to Agnes."

Week by week, Agnes asked him whether he'd done it yet, whether he'd still not done it yet, whether he was ever going to get on and do it. Some people might call this nagging, others encouragement. In any event Alan, spurred on by God's agent provocateur, initiated a prayer meeting in his office.

So then Agnes began to ask him, "How is it going? How can I pray? What happened to so and so? And what about such and such?"

Encouragement can certainly turn into guilt manipulation but this was not what was happening here. Agnes, the church caretaker, was simply doing her best to help Alan fulfil God's purposes in his life - not in the local church, not in any of the activities that they jointly shared - but in his office, miles away, among people she might never meet. Agnes hadn't reduced Alan to his role as an elder in the church. She had a whole-life view of her brother in Christ and a whole-life view of her duty towards him. She had 'considered' how she might encourage him, and had spurred him on to the love and good works that God wanted him to do.'

Alan, for his part, had recognised Agnes' right as a sister in Christ to incite him to love and good works. He wasn't saying, "You're the caretaker of the church. This has nothing to do with you." On the contrary, he was grateful to have someone prodding and praying and cheering him on.

And God has done great things through the prayer meeting in Alan's workplace.

This didn't happen because the church ran certain programmes, it happened because Agnes and Alan had particular values.
These are the kinds of relationships the whole-life apprentice community needs - purposeful, caring, persevering - wanting the best for the other in all their life. Can you be an Agnes to someone?

Building with Scaffolding: Locks Heath Free Church

Some churches say they want to change and really mean it. When Mark and Cathy Madavan joined Locks Heath three years ago the church had a Sunday attendance of 225, but the people knew that the church would die in 20 years if they didn't change.

Mark and Cathy's approach is fuelled by a strategic desire to build a community that is whole-life oriented and helps people grow. To do that, they have fostered a culture of experimentation. They are not trying to build new things out of bricks and stone - programmes, ideas or initiatives that had so much invested in them they needed to be dynamited to be removed. They are, as Mark and Cathy put it, 'building with scaffolding' - structures and ideas that can easily be dismantled.

As Mark says, "An idea or a programme doesn't have to be perfect before we try it, but we try it. And this gives people the freedom to come up with ideas that aren't necessarily ready to be turned into a six-part DVD. It's OK to try and it's OK if it doesn't work. And if it doesn't work, we want to learn from it."

They used Alpha and it helped. But the interest waned. So rather than doggedly persisting they've taken down the 'scaffolding' for now.

Then they used The Purpose Driven Life. Mark says, "We hoped it would build good relationships and it has. Over 90 percent of the church joined groups to do it, and people who weren't in groups before now want to continue. It has opened many people's eyes to the reality that there is more to church than Sunday. Its ministry emphasis is somewhat more church and neighbourhood oriented, rather than whole-life oriented, but it has got people talking about important issues. Not everything we use has to have exactly the same set of values as we are seeking to build - we just have to ensure that people are aware of the differences."

Mark and Cathy have no idea what the church's structures, programmes or building will look like in five years time, but they do have a dream about what kind of a people they will be - fruitful and fulfilled, involved in mission and church life, blessing and changing their neighbourhood and their workplaces.

To this end, Mark and the elders have shifted the emphasis of their meetings from business items to values, and to 'doing life together'. Mark spends a lot of time with his leaders and their spouses, working on values.

But it's not just about others being changed. "I expect them to be changed and I expect to be changed myself. We're simply working together to try to hear the heart of God. And I'm hoping that if we get the right culture in the core team it will spread." An apprentice pastor in an apprentice-oriented community.

And what are the results? A church on a journey. A church where the 70 year old lady who has run the women's Bible Study for years comes up to her young pastor and says, "I'd like to try something new. After all, we're building with scaffolding, aren't we?"

Ruth: An Agent for Change

A disciple is not a passive sponge of media propaganda or the cultural norms of the day but a proactive agent of transformation...

Ruth was recently interviewed in her church. She'd just gone back to paid employment after 20 years and was being interviewed about how it had all gone. She talked about what it meant to work as a Christian woman in a context where it seemed to her that women were either objects of lust; people to be patronised or surrogate mothers.

She said that for the first few weeks her only aim was to survive. But then because she was encouraged by her church that God wanted to use her at work, she started to pray for wisdom. Her moment came when one day at work a young man took her to one side and asked whether she was a Christian - because he'd noticed how she responded to jokes and how she seemed to care for them.

She had humbly resisted the prevailing culture. In a small way she'd made a difference where she was.

Learning from Brookside

Brookside Church is a fellowship of around 250 people in Reading. Their Sunday teaching and cell groups had been exploring the description of the church in 1 Peter 2:5. Each and every member of the church, whether leaders or not, is being built into a 'holy priesthood'. We are all priests, set apart to serve God in whatever situation we find ourselves.

Brookside realised that when they talked about 'the work of Brookside Church', it included the service of every individual member doing what they did in every aspect of their life. But how could theymake this value part of the way they did things?

They began by using their communication systems to recognise, honour and encourage people - bulletins, notice boards, missionary moments in the service and so on. However, the significant change was to that bastion of tradition - their church business meeting. They transformed it into a 'Communication Evening' and used it as a way to inform each other about what the people of Brookside were doing beyond the church.

One evening it was the people and organisations the church supported corporately; a few months later it was people who were self-employed or in small businesses - estate agents, physiotherapists, car repairs, coffee importers. The third time it was what Brookside people were doing in the local community - school governors, charities, sports clubs, Brownies. Members set up stands in the church hall using photos, and information sheets and provided points for the prayer time later.

This small change not only affirmed the whole congregation in their various roles, it generated prayer, created new relationships and a much deeper appreciation of each other as people involved together in God's purposes in the wider world.

Of course, it didn't turn Brookside into a whole-life disciple-making church overnight, but it has moved them towards it. It illustrates the reality that you don't have to change everything at once to begin to make progress. What you do need to do, however, is to make sure the changes are in line with your values and the goals you are trying to achieve - the development of whole-life disciples.

Changing Perspectives

When we asked members of an Anglican church that is part of the pilot project about how the church had helped them in the past deal with the issues that they had faced in life, the overwhelming answer was 'Prayer'. When asked whether they had really cracked corporate prayer, the PCC laughed. 'No we can't get them to come to anything like that', was the response. So were they surprised? Well, the vicar was. But not the church secretary. 'You're too busy' was her succinct appraisal of the vicar. She went on to point out that he didn't notice the numbers of people talking after a service and praying for each other. Even the lady who made the refreshments was routinely interrupted to pray for others.

One of the PCC commented, 'so when they ask what helped, they don't name individuals they reflect that this is the church helping them.

Good news. These people are finding that they can bring their everyday problems into church space, be honest and find support and prayerful responses. This is part of what it means to be a whole-life church. The other part is whether these people can feel sufficiently confident to share this secret of support with their non-Christian friends who ask how life is going. At that point the inside resources of the church can be offered to those outside. Prayer, the world's best-kept secret? Possibly!