sustain:if:able kiwi

Development pastor

The church I pastor is looking for another person to join a staff team of 4. All 4 work part-time, and we want to continue this ethos (0.75 of full/time), as a way of respecting the workplace ministry of church people.

Ethos and context: After a number of rocky years, the church has made significant changes and is looking to a new future. Our vision is to enable people to walk and grow with Jesus, reflecting his love in our communities and beyond.

Our 3 year focus includes the training another generation of leaders, communicating into the community and developing wholistic lifestyle teaching as part of our mission.

We want to employ a Development pastor to:
– Share communication load in Digestion, our evening service
– Network with church community ministries
– Develop leadership
– Develop people spiritually
– Enhance community within church
– (plus some slush for the passion of the person.)

You will need to be able to work with the existing team, be committed to Opawa’s journey of mission and change, be a realist and a people lover, who can work with what is and who is and have a sense of humour when things go wrong.

Drop me a line if interested, or if you know of someone who could fit the bill.

communion colour amid snow

It snowed Sunday afternoon. It was just magic driving to church in the evening, soft flakes drizzling across ghostly bleak trees.

It was communion, so I brought some daffodils. I grabbed some snow and placed these in plates on the communion table. Add some spring flowers and it became a neat image of new life out of the cold, compact places of our life.

hacking the emerging church

We live in strange days, when an Anglican vicar suggests we leave church. There is much about church I struggle with. Yet I stay because church is a space and a resource to hack.

A hack as in an enthusiast who … through clever programming, pushes the system to its highest possible level of performance … a person who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about it.

Hacking has an ethic. It is not mischievious, but is based on … the ethic that all technical information should, in principle, be freely available to all and that destroying, altering, or moving data in a way that could cause injury or expense to others is always unethical

Thus an emerging church hack is about the attempt to create missional spaces; to seek to make the gospel freely available for all, rather than encrusted under layers of modernity, and ossified under centuries of tradition.

A hack does not intend to destroy or alter data. Thus a hack respects the riches of the past. But a hack recognises that church is not monolithic. Rather church is a contextual response of a group of people, uniquely working with the strands of Scripture and culture and tradition in their context. Thus a hack takes the rich strands of past data, and seeks to re-work them to maximize to a highest possible level.

In 2001 New Zealand dub band Salmonella Dub released Inside the Dubplates. In 2002 they gave their mix to 10 different DJ’s, who produced a new mix, titled Outside the Dubplates. Same elements, same number of songs, same song order, but the strands of bass and vocals remixed.

Church hackers won’t leave, despite the invitation. They will stay because they want to take what is inside the church’s dubplates and play it outside the dubplate. They want to take the gospel freedom beyond the centre of church and institution. It’s a missiology that might be hard to grasp at its deconstructive best, but at its constructive best its an adventure that gets me up in the mornings.

Please, despite the invitation, don’t leave. Keep hacking.

Reading text in a new context

The video played and the camera panned over a V8 classic car; shiny, grunty, engine throbbing.

The driver turned off the engine, opened to Colossians 3 and began to read:
Since then you have been raised with Christ
set your hearts on things above
where Christ is seated at the right hand of God
Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things.

Someone said aloud; you can’t possibly read the Bible like that.

Why not? Reading the Scriptures in this context will asks different questions of the text; very different questions than if the Bible is read in abstract in a church context.

And so today, we showed the video and asked what it meant, practically, to live Colossians 3. And I think I touched a male spirituality in a new way.

While church is generally run by a male leaders, by and large it is a feminised spirituality. To show a video of a V8 classic car, to explore Scripture in that context, in some way touched new dimensions of being.

I am not sure of the impact, but I am convinced the car driver enjoyed the ride.

passion
purpose
sensitivity

:: go a long way in leadership

oops! Just realised that in the midst of internet joy, I turned off my comments function. I was wondering why you were all so quiet!! Sorry about that.

the future of the emerging church

The emerging church scene began in New Zealand in about 1994. This was the making waves period. Mike Riddell and Mark Pierson ran Parallel Universe – worship that was on and off the wall. Chardonnay descending from the ceiling, large gas flames at Pentecost. You get the idea; intense creativity and high multi-media. Mark and Mike ran seminars and conferences up and down New Zealand. Lots of agro. Lots of angst.

This was followed by a period of birthing innovation communities. Various worship expressions and communities took shape around participation and cultural engagement and creativity. These included Cityside and Graceway in Auckland, Ilam and Side Door in Christchurch, various communities in Wellington, Soul Outpost in Greymouth, Soul Reason in Dunedin. Not all survived. Birth was painful and babies struggle without good parents. The movement matured.

The period of missional conversation. With a new decade, their was a first, practioners from about 10 emerging churches gathered in Auckland. This was not a conference or a seminar. The emerging church movement was now a conversation, a group of practioners learning, growing, wrestling. The original superstars were now fellow journeyers. Mission was increasingly important; and so the conversation turned from multi-media, to funding spirituality, to visitor experience, to life ritual.

This week we had our third such Converse. We farewelled Mark Pierson to Australia. Perhaps it represents the end of a third phrase. We have moved from making waves, to innovative communities, to a missional conversation.

What might the future hold? Let me suggest three issues.

(more…)

what lurks deep

Storytelling. It’s the mantra of postmodern communication. All roads lead to a story. Stories, stories everywhere.

We explored the place of story and storytelling in contemporary communication in class today.

I get so sick of being told the theory of storytelling ie we need it. Much more practical, much more useful, to run a storytelling workshop. So I did. Lets actually do the storytelling.

I was a bit mean. I threw them a gospel story, gave them 5 minutes to compose a first, last and climatic sentence. Times up, so in 2’s tell your story.

The time pressures bring a number of issues to the surface.

Firstly, to tell a story requires detail … and so the reminder that good storytelling requires good background knowledge, good exegesis. It requires you to read and research, to be in the commentaries and guides to early Biblical times.

Secondly, that the Bible is story. And so I provocatively pushed the class. Go on, be Biblical. Stop preaching and be Biblical. Let the story be a story.

probing my gift mix

The last week has been busy. It has had a mix of joy and ho humm. Since I am made in the image of God, uniquely configured, it is interesting to step back and see what has energised me, and what does not energise me.

I have been organising a gathering for emerging practioners called converse – 3 days to step aside and reflect together on mission and ministry. Energising? NIL.

I have been in conversation with Andrew. He found my paper on postmodern monasteries. He’s been dreaming for a while about turning an abandoned vicarage into a monastery. He lives about 80 kilometres away and is just about to put the proposal to his vestry. Using the internet, he’s found a fellow dreamer and we meet for coffee this week. Energising? TOTALLY.

I am doing a first run on a new course onpreaching and teaching in postmodernity. Alongside students, I have about 15 outsiders, local pastors, joining us for “in-service” training. A chance to talk about imagination and culture and community in the context of Christian communication. Energising? TOTALLY.

Not sure what to make of this in terms of where I put my future energy, but some insights to ponder further.

blogging and theology again or here we go round the blogberry bush

Just when a conversation seems to have exceeded the blog span of attention (2 weeks) Stephen has another go at the relationship between blogs and theology.

At the risk of repeating myself:
the blogging medium allow a conversation,
which is potentially more egalitarian (although don’t most blog conversations essentially occur under a US domain name?)
but provides no guarantee of a conversation either meaningful or worth listening to
and would suggest that the human propensity to insularity might well haunt future conversations as much as it has past conversations.

the blogging medium allows a community approach to theology,
which returns theology to its roots – the essence of the practise of a community of faith
yet I often see little middle ground between flaming and the fawning “best post ever”
and would suggest that future communities will need better manners and better technologies.

the blogging medium is best done in short bursts,
which limits the pursuit of complicated and nuanced arguments, developed over time

the blogging medium allows instant responses to contemporary theological issues
but in so doing, could well become a conversation that ignores those who had the historically misfortune to write in a pre-blog era/error.

the blogging medium allows a “cross-disciplinary/ethnic/cultural synergy”
but having just returned from one such conference, such revolutionary polemic seems oddly ho-humm

when a missionary DJ reads a DJ

wee beautiful pict might read my book. He writes: Steve’s stuff is always accessable – well thought through, incarnation-friendly and dead readable, and then decides he might read the book!

Might! There’s a story in their about him … about a latte on an Edinburgh corner … each chapter of the book starts with a postcard, of me meeting with an emerging church/alt.worship group somewhere in the world … and as I do a global tour, I then reflect on the implications for God, church, life …

internet joy#2

I’ve received over 300 spam through my blog comments in the last 24 hours. No sooner do I clean it up and block the url, than some more appears. So I’ve finally closed comments on all but recent posts.

DJing with spiritual others

In response to this:

It was Maori language week in New Zealand last week. It was a language under extinction a few decades ago. During these painful decades, there was one school of thought that only those who could speak properly and had the right accent could speak. If you tried to use a few words, you were verbally assaulted. A recent article in the local newspaper celebrated the fact that such an elitist, Byzantine attitude had passed. Any use of language by anyone should be celebrated. In other words, if people are using your cultural artifacts, get over it. You can no more stop them than hold back the tide.

Having said that (and to pick up on an earlier post of mine on gospel and culture and the DJ), a kingdom DJ needs a kingdom ethic. There is a community who affirms a DJ mix. When I mix gospel and culture, my community give me feedback on my mix.

A DJ respects their community, the “2 or 3 gathered” because Christ is in their midst. A kingdom DJ will also respect the community of others they sample from. A kingdom DJ will take time to respect the story around the sample (the orthodox prayers, the eucharist etc). In doing so, they will DJ with more sensitivity and nuance.

culture and the emerging church

G wrote: I would love to hear your thoughts about the emerging church and hauerwas, and also the “counter-culture” or “culmination-culture” motif, or whatever alternative you are working with.

Hauerwas offers a strongly counter-cultural approach, using the community as an alternative place from which to challenge culture.

I find it idealistic and unrealistic. It seems to me that people live in multiple communities; not only church communities but work, interest groups. Thus to offer the church as an alternative community seems too pure, to unconnected, to the multiple layering of most people lives. It also tends toward isolation and withdrawal from culture, an approach which tends to minimize Incarnation. The emerging church values creation and Incarnation and thus is seeking to work with a more culturally engaged approach.

For me, I have found the model of DJ-ing culture helpful and I use this in my (forthcoming) book. The DJ samples from multiple places, and lives in a symbiotic relationship with a community, who give authenticity to the DJ mix.

This approach recognises the multiple worlds we live in, and allows us to take different approaches to different dimensions of our culture. For example, we might buy a car, but use it less and to transport a disadvantaged person. Thus we are using the culture, but mixing in an “environmental” and “social justice” ethic.

So I think we need a DJ approach to culture; sampling, always in relationship to a community, because where 2 or 3 are gathered, Christ is among us. Our use of culture is “processed” in the Spirit-discerning community.

I guess there are some parallels to Hauerwas in the importance of community, but in a multiple (DJ) way that respects the complexity and fluidity of our lives and our cultures.

G, I hope that offers some answer to your questions. Too much more and my book publishers might come calling.