About

Hello, thanks for visiting churchisoutthere.com

My name is Kevin and this is my personal blog and journey discovering what it’s like to really follow Jesus outside of the four walls of Church. I hope these posts encourage you to think about what Church means in 2020 and how we can together take the Good News of Jesus out of the building and to the lives of those we encounter around us everyday.

I became a christian when I was 28, and it made a radical difference to my life. Since the age of 30 I have served in a Leadership role in church, firstly in the Middle East, and for the last 32 years in church in the UK. In that time I have seen many ups and downs. I have seen seasons where God has moved powerfully in the church but frustratingly, that has never spilled outside into the world around. Like many other Leaders, I have longed to see the gospel have its full effect among those who don’t yet know Jesus. I have seen churches adopt patterns and models and systems that have had some success elsewhere, in the hope that “this will make our church relevant/successful/full.”

Inevitably these different ‘methods’ have not produced long term fruit or change, and more often than not have left christians disillusioned with God, the power of the Gospel and their Leaders. Everybody settles back down to ‘normal’ church life until their Leaders come up with the next new thing that will change the church and the world. I know, I have been one of those Leaders!

The fundamental problem is that we have spent our lives trying to build the church in the hope that the church would then change the world. Jesus never said to do that, but we’ll come back to that in a minute.

In 2015 I was able to visit Causeway Church in Northern Ireland and I discovered something that I had not seen before. The church there was unashamedly sharing the gospel with people wherever they went, and discovering that people were open to Jesus, but not particularly interested in church. I, like many christians – certainly in this country, had a world view that christians were in a minority and that the majority of the population were not interested. Whilst it was true that many people were unashamedly interested in spiritual things – other religions, new age philosophies, even the occult; no one was greatly interested in christianity any longer. Whilst at Causeway, I began to realise that the problem was that often in many of our churches we were presenting people with Church rather than with Jesus. “Come to our church” we would say, “there you will meet Jesus” and the implied message was that then you can become like us.” The trouble was that most people didn’t want to ‘become like us’, although they might possibly have been interested in becoming like Jesus. We were a bit too conventional, a bit too conservative (with a small c), a bit too proper and not that exciting.

Jesus on the other hand……well He is something else! He once said that we could do the same things He did and even more than He did. To heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers and drive out demons, open blind eyes, set captives free. His life was one long adventure. His folllowers didn’t know what He was going to do next – but it was always good.

When I came back from Ireland I began to taste some of that adventure for myself. I saw people healed on the street when I prayed for them. I found that people were open to Jesus and His presence and power. I trained teams to go out on the streets in several towns in the North East and bring the tangible presence and power of Jesus to people who would never go near an institutional church. The training is more focussed on a willingness to go, and give this a try and see how God turns up. rather than formal book learning and study. Any believer can do this!

We have seen people healed. Many times we have seen them sense the presence of God and feel His love for them. These mostly are people who do not know God and have no experience of Him. They are beginning to encounter the Kingdom of God – the place where He rules and has His way. We took the Kingdom out to them. We began to do this not just on the street, but in our work, in our daily encounters in the shop, with our families and with friends. This is Church out there – outside the four walls. As we do this some people decide to follow Jesus. They need discipling to be people who do what Jesus did, take the Kingdom wherever they go, find those who are ready to follow Jesus and then disciple them the same way – and so it goes on. We reveal the Kingdom, Jesus saves people and builds His church.

My heart is to see lots of smaller house based churches, local to where people live, full of the presence and power of God and affecting the people whom they live among. They will be less formal, places where people are released quickly to minister and function as Jesus intended and where women function equally alongside men as they did in the early church. They will be places where every person understands that their calling is to continue the ministry of Jesus, learning to move freely in the supernatural gifts. They will be autonomous – free to do what needs to be done in their street/estate/village with the ability to seek resource and help from other ministries as they need, but free from hierarchical control. They will be places where once again we can turn the world upside down – which would actually leave it right way up! It’s time to go back to our roots, recover the DNA that God has for us in those roots, and then begin to truly expand and grow throughout this nation, reaching into the corners of our society that institutional church has not managed to penetrate.

Time for a new adventure!