sustain:if:able kiwi

1 + 1 + 1 = ?

Fact 1: In the rush to the airport last Saturday, to catch a flight back to my home in Christchurch, my overnite bag was left in a friends car in Auckland. It included my alarm clock.

Fact 2: While waiting for the bag to be returned, I decided to use the alarm on my cell phone.

Fact 3: I received a text on my cell phone while at a gathering on Wednesday night. To avoid disturbing the gathering, I simply turned down the sound on my cell phone.

Fact 4: Needing to rise at 5:30 am today to catch a plane to Wellington to speak …

(more…)

facing the mission challenge

I think I’m in a Wellington phase of my life cycle. I am up there 2morrow at Sharpening the Middle with the Baptists. Then April 22 at the Wellington Diocese Clergy Conference. Then May 21 at the Executive Leaders conference of the Salvation Army for New Zealand, Fiji and Tonga Territory, on the topic of New forms of church and mission.

I was working on some notes today and was reminded of the quote below, quoted George Lings. It is not easy affirming what is, providing appropriate next steps, without dumbing down the enormous implications of this quote.

Few churches
• have experience of this profoundly different shape to mission
• know how to travel out from Church in “go” or apostolic mode
• can envisage how to be fresh imaginings of church at the end of the journey

practicing communion with storytelling

Last Sunday the sermon text had been the Emmaus Road. A number of challenges were given: to seek the Risen Jesus on the road, to practice Christian practices, to depend on the Spirit.

So on Sunday we decided to provide time for storytelling.

3, not 1, communion tables were placed up the front and chairs added to ring the tables. I read from the Emmaus text. Bread was broken and thanks offered.

I then reminded people of the sermon and placed the communion elements on all 3 tables. I invited people to participate in two ways.

They could either remain seated and be served. Or, if they wanted, they could come to front, sit at a table, share communion and tell a story, of either meeting Jesus during the week, a Christian practice they were finding life giving, or a way they were needing the Spirit. A sung item was played.

And it worked well. Appropriate numbers of people responded and some encouraging stories were told. People talked afterwards about how helpful it had been. It was a worthwhile way to practice communion with real live stories around table.

plotting healthy mission conversation

Sharpening the middle kicked off on Saturday in Auckland, and was one of the best mission events I’ve been at in a long time. It is not often I return from a full day of work with my heart singing, but I did yesterday. Here is why ….

Intersections – mission history, then mission theology was followed by 4 mission stories. The day then ended with two people, designated listeners, who sought to name some of the Biblical narratives heard during the day. In other words, practioners were listened to by Biblical missiologists, and enlarged by wider ranging contextual overviews. This mix provided a wonderfully rich set of conversations. So often Biblical missiologists talk to each other at one conference, while practioners listen to practioners at another.

Space – each bit of input was followed by time in groups, processing the implications. A highlight was seeing church teams, pastors surrounded by lay leaders, grappling with mission in their place. Input was given time to take root.

Breadth – we heard stories from ordinary churches through to established churches in transition, through to incarnational missional communities (groups of young adults living in community in poor streets). All were affirmed and sat easily alongside each other. We’ve moved well beyond one size fits all in mission.

Team – this was not a one guru-show. It involved 7 different speakers, ensuring diversity. Yet all spoke in humility and in ways that affirmed a diversity of approaches.

Denominational ownership – this was Baptist run and Baptist funded. People in the room included the Baptist national leader, the national consultant, the President and denominational lecturers. Resourcing for mission currently lies at the heart of our denomination.

Sharpening the Middle continues in Wellington on Thursday, then Christchurch on Saturday. It is being vidoed, and a DVD will be released, along with a discussion guide, for use by church groups. This could end up being a highly significant Kiwi resource – a sort of homegrown Fresh expression type mix of history, story and Biblical frameworks. I am also working on writing it up as a paper (given that I was both one of the listeners and one of the storytellers).

the missional God is an ordinary God

This place was build so that people who gathered can read their hymn books. A comment made to me recently as a person gazed around the Opawa building. It was a reminder of the history that faces us everyday.

I enjoyed my time with the Board also – it helped to make me more aware of your context and the ‘ordinary’ things that you face in the journey. Another comment, another person, a reminder that amid all the mission changes is the ordinariness of everyday.

As one who has made a journey through alternative worship to community development work to parish ministry I find it disheartening to read your seemingly gleeful evaluation that ‘now the parish system has been legally blown open’. A comment made here. It’s a heart cry that God might be considered missional among plain parish and not only sexy fresh expression.

The organisers are looking for alternative worship… but, of course, since it’s a conference, I have no control over the space at all – over the lighting, seating, where the focus of attention will be… i can’t do stations, there will be limited multimedia capacity… up until now i’ve been fighting the limits and getting nowhere. today i’ve just given into them, and stopped thinking it needs to be alternative. it just needs to work with the people and the context. A blog post naming the stress of being asked to be emergingly alternative in showcase settings.

Can God be a lifegiver among the ordinary, in the plain parish, in the places where the hymn books go, in the limitations of conference settings? Is resurrection really that powerful, that inclusive, that revolutionary?

This is the real challenge for missional church. It’s not to start a hot new thing for 20 years olds, or to import the latest flash song/video clip/alt. idea from another context. It is to truly live the claim that God is life-giver in our here and now. This is surely the heart of Incarnation – God with us – not in some idealised, abstracted other.

be:holden wedding prayer

I did an outdoor wedding a few weeks ago, to a couple mad keen on cars. On the morning of the wedding, I sort of scribbled the following prayer, and it seemed to connect well.

God of love and passion, God of commitment and promises,
We pray for xxxx and xxxx today,
That, they will treat their marriage like a well-maintained Holden car,
They will pay attention to each other’s oil and water and tire pressure,
That they will be quick to forgive, well able to listen to the best advice from their pit crew.

May God’s grace rest on their life as they drive life’s road together,

May they grow in peace as one,
Always faithful to this model of 2008,
May the love that we see today last through all their life,
through every S bend and hairpin they negotiate,
so that at the end of their days,
they may just feel as they do now.
Very happy to be in love and married. Amen.

needing sermon help

I need some sermon application help. Church ministers are NOT allowed to respond. I am working on a post-Easter sermon series titled Biblical pictures of witness. It is based on a honey of a book, Picturing Christian Witness by Stanley Skreslet: Using a wide range of Bible texts and some great art, Skreslet outlines 5 different images of witness used in the New Testament.

Announcing good news, for example the public speeches in Acts where the role of the Christian is to share publicly and in vulnerability
Sharing Christ with friends, for example, Mark 2:1-12, friends of paralytic man, where the role of the Christian is to walk with and alongside.
Interpreting the gospel, for example Philip and the Ethiopian Enuch, where the gospel crosses cultural barriers and the role of the Christian is to link and translate.
Shepherding, for example Luke 15 where the shepherds goes searching for the lost one and the role of the Christian is to carry the hurting,
Building and planting, for example 1 Corinthians 3, where Paul is building and planting and the role of the Christian is to ensure at all times that the medium is the message.

Now I am doing this series because I think the 5 images remind us that there is no one way of being a witness and thus frees us from rigid stereotypes to be ourselves.

But here’s the rub. I’m stuck with application in regard to the first one. What, practically, does announcing good news mean today? As a minister, I get to announce good news most Sundays. But what might announcing good news mean in home and workplaces outside Sunday? Love to have your comments ….

resurrection door kicker

Jesus, door kicker, strides out the tomb
hinges swinging
door banging
in Spirit’s breeze

Jesus, walks our world,
loving on sandy beach, gathering on grassy knoll,
calling “Followers, to me”

If you walk away, will we follow?

Church,
inside 4 walls,
contains, confines,
holds, hoards
doctrine?

Or

Church,
jogging through city street,
laughing, listening,
stretching through house and home,

Til Kingdom come

defining your missional life

So in Luke 10, Jesus sends out the 70/2 in mission. And he suddenly looks around his empty church. Stink. This won’t look good next Sunday. Who will do sound? What will visitors say? What will the denomination think?

And then he wakes up in a cold sweat. Can those 70/2 be trusted? What if they don’t get the mission right? What if they aren’t faithful in gospel transmission? What if they don’t come back?

So much of our life and identity as church has historically been defined by Sunday. Yet missional church is about following Christ outside the building, about inviting ordinary disciples into God’s purposes in settings beyond are physical control.

It suddenly occurred to me this morning that so much of Opawa’s life actually now happens outside Sunday morning church.

Every year the denominational statistical sheet arrives. They want to know our attendance and our baptisms. Yet you can no longer simply can’t define us by Sunday. You need to count the community kids enjoying mainly music or watch us at the Waltham Community Fair on Friday. You need to note the visitors at the family movie night. You need to check out our other 4 congregations. You need to interact with the God at work group, quietly practising spiritual practices in their work place. You need to be part of the Thursday nite youth forum, and watch parents, pre-teens, grandparents, youth group leaders and community youth, multiple small groups all over our church foyer, talking, dreaming, praying.

How are those things named? How do we keep Sunday morning up to date with all of this energy? How do we share the sheer enormity and diversity of these stories when we gather? What practices sustain this type of scattered energy?

evaluation multi-media in easter worship

Email from Jeremy Williams (UK Programme Development, SGM Lifewords): I’ve just been writing up a debrief on our Easter project, and I came across the mention of the films on your blog. Thanks for the link, and for the resulting traffic!

I’m going to be writing a short news item for our magazine too, and it would be great to include a quote from someone who has used the films on the ground. Can you tell me a bit about how you used the animations, and how they were received?

My response: Hi Jeremy,

Good work and kudos to whoever was the creative catalyst and project manager.

mission storytelling roadshow

Over the next few weeks I am part of a mission roadshow, Baptist initiated, called Sharpening the Middle. It is a follow up to the Sharpening the Edge conference last year (short youtube video clip of me in action here), telling the stories of grassroots missional experiments and classic church planting going on here in Aotearoa.

The roadshow consists of three regional workshop days, in Auckland (April 5), Wellington (April 10) and Christchurch (April 12).

Topics include:

* The challenge of Mission facing the church in NZ today – Murray Robertson
* Thinking Biblically about Mission and Church in NZ today – George Wieland
* Discerning the biblical frameworks – George Wieland, Steve Taylor
* Local church stories – including Opawa story.

This day is specifically aimed at our existing churches (defined as the ‘middle’). For me this is quite meaningful, as it’s nice to have emerging church conversation tucked up within Baptist mission and life.

easter workloads

Fascinating Easter workload reflection from here.

Until this year I had thought that the intensity of Holy Week came from the business involved, but this year has made we wonder in a positive way.

So far I feel very little different than previous years – which perhaps indicates that the intensity comes from the experience rather than the work-load

Easter simply wipes me out and the week after is really hard work. This year we paused our Easter Journey, yet I am still wasted. Is it just church leaders? Does Easter take an emotional toll on worship participants?

imaging resurrection life 2008

The door is open, and Jesus walks out, into our city, calling “Come, follow me”

and in response, the invitation to reflect on resurrection by placing flowers – symbols of colour, life and potential – on maps of our city, in the places where we live and work, as our commitment to live resurrection life to the full.

resurrecting the resurrection

Went to see the movie Vantage Point and it helped me make sense of the resurrection. The movie is tagged 8 points of view: 1 truth. It’s a soft form of postmodernity, affirming eyewitnesses as subjective, without losing history as truthful.

In a similar way, the Bible has 4 gospels. Each offers a uniquely different point of view – Mark is fear and trembling; Matthew is earthquakes and angels; Luke is burning hearts; John is a new start. Each is subjective. Each adds insight, without losing truth.

Vantage point (the movie) ends with an 8th scene, an extended narrative which provides the big picture. In the same way, Christian hope is a big picture, or in the words of N. T Wright:
the events of Easter Sunday are no less than “a full, recreated life in the presence and love of God, a totally renewed creation, an integrated new heavens and new earth, and a complete humanness … in worship and love for God, in love for one another as humans, in stewardship over God’s world.”

In between the 4th and 8th perspective is the church. Each of us, in our homes, workplaces, city, living out the resurrection in our lives. Each of us subjective eyewitnesses, adding insight.

I wonder if the evangelical captivity to historical truth means that we jump to quickly from the 4th to the 8th perspective. I wonder if evangelicals are so concerned about the historical truth of the resurrection that they reduce the resurrection to an intellectual set of categories. Thus the entry to the 8th perspective is reduced to a set of beliefs that get you into heaven.

Yet the resurrection is so much more than an intellectual historical search. It is the affirmation of life, and life to the full. That is a truth to be lived, through your own unique point of view.

Full sermon manuscript is here.