sustain:if:able kiwi

bi-vocational realities

Si Johnson writes: I would also want to suggest that it might be right for that person to opt out after 5 years and live ‘a life more ordinary’ so that a.n.other might step into that place for a season … I think our new terrain for mission requires a serious look at the training grounds for leaders, the growing of new streamlined infrastructures for supporting less full-time leaders which in turn must be coupled with a pro-active move towards ‘bi-vocational leadership’ for more people. Link

Reading this, I suddenly realised that I have been bi-vocational for all of my (11) years of church ministry life.

Year 1-3: Planting Graceway 2.5 days/week while studying at Seminary.

Year 4-5: Pastoring Graceway 3 days/week and househusband to our first born daughter, Shannon.

Year 6-8: Pastoring Graceway 3 days/week and doing my PhD.

Year 9: Co-pastoring Graceway 1 day/week and completing my PhD.

Year 10-today: Pastoring Opawa 3 days/week and lecturing 2 days/week.

Some observations 11 years down the track:
I am richer for the experience. The reality though is that I have a unique skill set and I am not sure I want to make my skill set the norm for everyone.

My community is richer for the experience. Six months after I arrived at Opawa, one of the church leaders said, “Steve, you’re like us. You work outside the church too.” At that retreat we adopted a core value: a workplace reality and a worship that engages with life 24/7: And we decided we would seek part-time staff as the church grew. Now we have 7. The reality is that it is really hard for me to now effectively build relationship and I don’t feel I’m doing all that well being team with 7 people, let alone 10 ministry leaders.

I am richer because I feel less owned. Church is not my life. I have to walk away, to close the laptop and move to another employer. It has made it easier to build a team and has freed me from a number of traditional church minister expectations. But the reality is that serving two masters is hard, hard work. I rarely do less than a 50 hour week.

The worst time is when both demand a bit extra. Like last week. It requires a pretty flexible family. I know that most workplaces demand more than 50 hours. But I worry that all I am doing is modelling the “hey, I’m important because I’m busy” culture rather than a Kingdom culture.

easter journey

Opawa Baptist is amazing. As preparation for our Easter Journey they gut and redecorate the entire church. The worship space has become a garden, complete with lawn, fog, lighting, two pools, 1000 colour pannets, trees and shrubs. The Easter narrative is told through art. It’s beautiful and haunting and communal and stunning.

I’ll try and post some pictures during the week. Some observations:
– for people who, by trade are landscape gardeners or builders, setting the Journey up is worship.
– inviting people to tell a story through art invites the immediate question; “what is the story?” This is serious spiritual formation.
– so much church worship is wordbased. The Easter Journey invites the eyes to worship God.

Open 7-11 every evening this Easter week; plus 1-11 pm Easter Friday and Easter Saturday. Every evening we are holding short services, 7-7:20 pm. For more resources go here

on being emergent

Paul McMahon has an absolutely excellent post on being emergent. Paul comes from a political science background and sort of stumbled onto Opawa about a year now. (I might be wrong, but I don’t think Paul would have known what emerging was pre-Opawa so his is a fascinating take). He (and his wife Ann) have helped us pioneer one of our emerging congregations at Opawa called espresso. He recounts his own spiritual journey and concludes:

At its best the emergent church brings people into community and back to Scripture to read it in the context of the overarching Biblical story of God’s love for His Creation, to listen together and share their stories in pursuit of truth and the Spirit’s guidance in their lives. It is not an abandonment of absolute truth, but instead a rebalancing and embracing of the relational nature of truth. At its best the emergent church is the essence of the three golden rules of biblical interpretation: Context, context, context.

wedding scripture

I have been asked to choose and read Scripture at a wedding today. What a privilge, to weave a Biblical narrative into a day of joy and celebration. Somewhere in the back of my mind was a thought that I had once read a Psalm that blessed a wedding. So I went digging and adapting and I’m struck again by the way that the Bible so accurately reads our lives.

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community discernment

One of the challenges at Opawa (Sunday morning) is how to allow community discernment to play a part in our life. It has historically been a “preach” and go home church, which offers a fairly individualistic approach to the Bible. Further, our size works against us. There were over 200 people at our blended Sunday morning service last Sunday. So the church has basically doubled in size in the last 2 years. Unless we ask them to go away, we have to think carefully about the different dynamics this presents for a conversation.

We’ve made a number of shifts to date;

1) introducing communal interactive involvement in response to preaching (heaps of examples under this heading)

2) sharing a combined lectionary reading among pastoral staff and inviting the church to join us (for more go here);

3) a home group that uses my sermon as their basis for discussion;

But it’s just a start. Later this year I’m going to try another approach; in which we gather not for a church “business” meeting, but for a church “Scripture” meeting. We would hear a sermon. Then we will use a process to enable application to be discerned as a community. What emerges will then be integrated into our focus and vision for the year ahead. Here’s some more detail of what I presented to our ministry leaders today

podcasting Steve

The Red Herring interviewed me last month. It proved to be a fascinating conversation that is now up as a podcast; in two parts, complete with mixed in background music.

Part One: Steve outlines the links between the United Kingdom and New Zealand. He points to the role played by alternative worship communities in initiating emerging churches. We talk about globalization theory, particularly the idea of “glocal,” suggested by Roland Robertson. Steve reveals the role of women played in emerging churches in New Zealand.

Part Two: Steve’s one blog contains “postcards” from emerging churches around the world, including the Philippines and Japan. During Brian McLaren’s recent visit to Christchurch, Steve interviewed Grace McLaren about her take on the emerging church in New Zealand. Steve reviews three movies in relation to the emerging church, and summarizes his blog about 1 Peter as a feminist tractate.

If you’re bored, and want to listen, go here.

how to win friends and influence people

I love my American friends; so instant, so action orientated. So one of my American friends emailed yesterday. They need to tele-conference with me. A group is meeting and they love a missional project I had suggested to them. Could they talk futher?

Sure I said.

But they could only talk at 6 am my time.

I groan. That’s when I’m asleep. Surely it can wait.

Not it can’t.

So I set up alarm and I’m up this morning.

The call comes. And then they let it slip. Oh, we had trouble ringing you. The first time was the wrong number.

How to win friends and influence people:) At least I was up. But imagine being woken by a toll call at 6 am in the morning only to find it was the wrong number! 🙂

more on DJing gospel and culture

Last week I blogged some images, built around the image of DJ, that I think provide a more helpful way to understand how the emerging church responds to culture. The usual stereotype offered by critics of the emerging church is the assumption that because we pay attention to a postmodern culture, we are therefore assimilating into this culture. Instead I think that when you examine emerging practices, you see complex pattern; moments of juxtaposition, subversion and amplification;

Anyhow, my post has attracted some good blog engagement. It’s inspired some worship in Germany;

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kiwi in US

Booked for some June and July US trips last week. All groups are keen for the word to be spread about these gigs, so please spread the web-word if you can. Here are the details;

June 19-22; Ministry in the Postmodern. Tutoring at the Allelon Summer School. Details here (and note; they are using my book, -tee he).

June 25-29. International Think Tank on Mission to Western Culture. First step in a 10 year project seeking to re-focus the missiology of Leslie Newbigin, with a particular emphasis on congregational practices. Details of the project here. This mix of missiologists and congregational practioners is really exciting, as is the intentionality and long term commitment.

July 17-21. MP541 Living the Text in a Postmodern Context.

Lecturing a one week intensive at Fuller Theological Seminary (not 2 weeks as I first indicated here). This is the course description I have put together (download file).

congregational innovation and missional texts: a snip from an email I wrote today

great question: how might a ‘missional reader’ in a local church innovate the bringing into public discourse the real, lived narratives of the people in our local churches? For me there have been key biblical texts and “questions” around which great energy has been released at Opawa. They are texts that we have lingered with and keep returning to. Four that immediately spring to mind are;

1) Luke 1:39-45 – what is God growing and birthing – how do older bless younger – how to speak words of courage and hope?

2) Peter vs Paul – what would it look like to be intentional about evangelism to Peter’s ie process and the invitation to community discernment around this process.

3) Change is best sourced in organic metaphors rather than narratives of decline.

4) The different responses of Peter, Mary, Thomas, John to the Risen Jesus and what does it mean for us to create spaces that acknowledge this diversity and allow this contextual freedom of expression; as a pre-cursor to our multi-congregational model as a concrete way of bringing about change in an established church context.

But these are unique to Opawa. So how transferable are these “texts”?

DJing gospel and culture

I was with a lecture class a few weeks ago, talking about gospel and culture. We tend to polarise into two camps; withdrawal from culture or assimilation into culture. This duality blights the emerging church. We get accused of assimilation; of buying into postmodernity. I think a much more subtle process is at work, and I offered the class the following three symbols (gift from Steve Collins).

Juxtapose: placing two contrasting things alongside each other. In doing so, we allow a new mix to emerge from the contradiction.

Subvert: using one thing to alter the meaning of another thing.

Amplify: two things that together enhance and compliment.

The emerging engagement with postmodernity is complex. At times we amplify the culture (e.g. we wonder if Web 2.0 amplifies what it means to be the body of Christ); at times we subvert the culture (e.g. we become passionate about creativity and imagination because we realise that creativity is sourced in God. In this realisation, we declare that creativity is not for Holywood pleasure, but it is to respect the image of God, as seen in the poor and marginalised); at times we juxtapose the culture (e.g. while respecting the full embodiment of humanity, we choose not to follow the increasing sexualisation of women in contemporary culture.) Reducing the emerging church to “assimilation” totally bypasses these realities.

Anyhow, students found the concept helpful. And I like the visuals, so I thought I would post it.

For a QT e-video of me being interviewed about this in relation to culture, download here (11 MB); for more on DJing, including where I explore how this is happening in 1 Peter, and engage with the work of Miroslav Volf, read out of bounds church? book); also check out the outofbounds blog.

Leading through change

Effective leaders understand that change is a reality of life and ministry. Leading through change is a one day seminar led by Dr Steve Taylor. It will explore the dynamics of leading change, grounded in Biblical and theological understandings, contemporary leadership insights and Steve’s experiences of transition and change at Opawa Baptist Church.

Details: Friday April 7, 9:30-12:30; 2-5 pm, Bible College of New Zealand, 70 Condell Ave, Christchurch. To register phone 3544270 or chch at bcnz dot ac dot nz

what dreams may come 2

This week he emailed, wondering, could he explore combining theological formation and his internet skills? And yes, he had read, and resonnated, with some of my thinking on the place of cybermonks in the future church.

“Cybermonks: Internet use is a form of tourism. Cybertourists search for identity in an arena so vast it acts as a level playing field in which all have equal access to its riches. Traveling in cyberland involves a form of pilgrimage, including the ritual of leaving home (dialing up) to wander an interconnected world of conversation and spiritual resources, before returning home by logging off.

In this world, the emerging church needs cybermonks to act as spiritual guides. They blog their stories with image, narrative, and experience. They design websites to provide spiritual resources online. This is not a modern “come to us because we have a great worship service.” This is a postmodern “here are our spiritual resources, feel free to try-before-you-buy.” The cybermonk is a new missionary calling.” (Excerpt from my out of bounds church? book, 95.)

And so we talked; about ways to integrate technical and spiritual, about “economies of grace” and ways to subvert the market and express the Kingdom.

Might this be the first “monk” in an Opawa postmodern monastic order?

For more on cybermonks and postmodern monasteries; read out of bounds church? book. For the first draft of my concept of “postmodern monasteries” (written a year before the book) go here. For additional, updated, resources (written since my book was published) ; go to (postcard 7) of my book blog.

a must read

I don’t normally blog reviews of my out of bounds church book here, because I didn’t want this blog/my personal blog to become some sort of pimp. Hence I maintain a separate out of bounds church book blog where I record reviews, discussion, further resources, stuff that got edited out of the original.

But this recent review was a real encouragement;

The Out of Bounds Church has revolutionized my thinking about the Church as it relates to college-aged people… If you are interested in making the church work for teens and twenty-somethings, I think this is a must read.

For the full review go here here;

For all reviews of the out of bounds church? go here;

To buy the book go here.