sustain:if:able kiwi

be cool with your space

Back up in Auckland again, for the second week of teaching in the Church and Society, University of Auckland intensive. It’s been my 5th flight in a week and I am starting to tire.

It is listening to the music of Salmonella Dub that keeps me going. The first track of their album, One Drop East, has had the most profound impact on me. It celebrates travelling on
we all you knew you had to go
to spread your wings and let the wind take your flow
and relationships;
its good to see you again my friend (call out to Stephen and Rachel who I get to see today)
its been a long, long time

and has such a great chorus;
dont you fall from grace
be cool with your space
check your pace
it ain’t a race

This is hard to explain and deely personal and I might not make any sense, but I’ll have a go. Often I feel placed in a dualism regarding time – you can either be busy or not be busy. If you have some deadlines, somehow you are bad because you are not taking time to relax, to attend to family and spirituality. It happened yesterday. I was introduced as a busy person and the guest spent the next 5 minutes checking the state of my marriage. A very intimate introduction which I found way too intense. And the dualisms were at work; oh you’re busy, your marriage must be stressed.

Well the Dub song says to me that you can be not busy while busy. It is about one’s internal clock, how you manage the pace in the midst of letting the wind take your flow, how you treasure relationships in the midst of boarding calls. It’s not either or, but God in the midst of. Does that make any sense?

define emerging church

Andrew Jones is trying to define emerging church. Here is my second attempt (I did this last year in an email to jonny baker, but deleted it (and so did jonny I imagine)):

Define emerging church (theologically) – a journey toward a corporate expression of Jesus Christ birthed in the amniotic fluid of postmodern culture. Note that the sheer diversity of postmodern culture means that while characteristics of community, participation, imagination, cultural awareness and appreciation are shared, their expression is diverse.

PS Riley Kern likes this definition also. Thanks Riley.

NZ impacts UK anglicans

café church ‘is an approach that originates in New Zealand. It’s particularly aimed at young adults who might want to explore their spirituality in a welcoming environment. It’s much more about dialogue.’ from UK Guardian

smiling

From here :: Critical reading of the draft of a friend’s book: inspiring – and no small privelege to be asked. (I’ll blog on it when it’s published.)

stone in my shoe

One of the big arguments of my PhD, and of the book I am working on for emergentYS, is that people “make do”; that in the face of cultural change, people are creative, transformative, adapting the bits from the world around them to create their own unique mixes. It is based on the work of French Jesuit Michel de Certeau.

The only flaw in the argument is this article on the disappearance of languages from around the world, via they blinked

How many languages have disappeared in the last century? About 60 or 70 per cent of linguistic diversity in the north-western region of Brazil has gone in the last 100 years. On the Atlantic coast of Brazil it’s worse – about 99 per cent – and around the world the figure is 60 to 70 per cent. It has been very rapid.

Being brought up in Papua New Guinea, a country of over 600 languages, the loss of even one language saddens me.

ez on by

Yesterday Graceway, the emerging/ent church I planted and then pastored until late last year, welcomed it’s new minister, Mark Barnard.

Mark is 26 years old and is married to Bridget. He has a background in social work and community development, a love for the poor and was the lead singer of a band. Bridget works in promotion for a Christia n Aid agency and is really good value. They have both been part of Graceway for the last 3 years.

I flew up to Auckland for the day to share in the celebration and occasion. It was a day of a huge range of emotions for me. I gave the best of 9 years of my life to Graceway. I developed an internship scheme to train leaders and Mark was one of the 6 emerging leaders I directly worked with. I am very proud of him.

The transition from founding pastor to new pastor is a fragile time for a church and a number of church plants in New Zealand have not made the transition. So there is huge relief for me to see a very competent leadership team at Graceway welcome Mark and Bridget on board.

I sat at the back, marvelling at the goodness of God. Half way through last year God ezed me out of Graceway. It was a hugely traumatic decision. 8 months later God is ezing a new leader into Graceway and I have become a cheering bystander.

A toast:
to the Graceway leadership team, who ezed in a new pastor
to Mark and Bridget, may they ez Graceway into a new season
to God, whom I love.

Blogging from the bach

Wine glass full (Gisborne Chardonnay) and fresh garden salad open. I am at Auckland airport, at the bach café.

Bach . n. colloquial New Zealand term referring to secondary abode/beach house/temporary escape/sanctuary/

It has been an excellent week with the Church and Society class. However, 3 days lecturing 4 hours a day, and I am stuffed. Glad to be coming home.

Owen Marshall’s South Island Prayer
God
Don’t let me die in Auckland
Rotting in the heat before your
eyes are closed: a greasy take
away after the soul is gone.
Jesus, no.

From Spirit in a Strange Land: A Selection of New Zealand Spiritual Verse, edited by Paul Morris, Harry Ricketts and Mike Grimshaw..

The last hour of class today we went to Borders.
1. To explore Borders as a contemporary shopping experience – the creation of ways for people to interact, the multiplicity of choice, the democratisation of information – and its implications for both church and society.

2. For coffee, and to give space for students to interact with me in a different setting. Increasingly I am convinced that it is around informal settings that students really process material and that my task as lecturer is to both give material to process and create spaces for that processing to happen. Again today, as in my lectures last year, café space allowed far deeper learning and interaction to occur.

Ello comes to church and society

Ello-opolisgodly play.

Last week I offered a prize to anyone who could guess the link between Ello and Church and Society.

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Church and Society Summer schooling

First day of my lecturing Church and Society at the University of Auckland Summer School; 33 students, good cultural and gender and age mix. It is really nice to be doing it in the heart of Auckland; High Court just down the street, Old Parliament buildings across the street.

Today was introductions and learning styles; then how we can find God, not only in the Bible, but also in society and church communities. After lunch we explored the various ways that church has responded to society.
complete with a few case studies including Faithless, God is a DJ and this fascinating comment on contemporary attitudes to church;

It’s a pity their [church] withdrawal from society at large has become so complete they sought out a solution without communicating with society.

A snobs journey

OK, so I’m a snob. Now that’s clear, I need to weed through my life. How did I end up a snob?

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I am a snob according to andrew jones

Andrew Jones is a good friend. He saved me in Seattle when I was undergoing extreme US and emerging church culture shock. The tall skinny Kiwi gently tucked the cultureshocked short Kiwi under his arm and lead him away for coffee.

Andrew is like the wind- he has promised/tried to meet me twice in London and once in Paris, but has been blown in other directions.

Alas, our friendship appears poised on the abyss, as I am a snob. I commented here of a certain amount of irony in a megachurch seeking an emerging church pastor. Andrew in response called the commentsnobbish here, and defined his position about megachurches here.

I love you Andrew, but I’m not changing my position. There is too large a gap between the command and control structures of most mega-churches and the both the chaos of the internet and angst of European postmodernity for me to put the two together.

Can 1 short Kiwi and one tall skinny Kiwi still hongi (touch noses in peace, a ancient Maori way of greeting), even if one consider the other snobby?

a new start

Today is Shannon’s 1st day at her new school. Today Kayli (our 3 year old) is choosing her kindergarten. Today I fly to Auckland to teach a 3 week intensive, Church and Society at University of Auckland. I will fly up Tuesday evening’s and return for the weekends, for the next 3 weeks in a row.

church, belonging, membership .. more

A couple more comments on church, belonging and membership.

1. I don’t think it’s fair to juxtapose community formation and membership. Don’t they go hand in glove ie membership is a way of expressing community formation?

2. The easy answer is to say, have no “membership”. But that frankly, is bollocks. For 2 reasons. Firstly pragmatic, when you want to make decisions, who decides. You have to have some criteria and “membership” should be as closely aligned as possible with that criteria. Secondly, even opensource (thanks Nate for the url), have “membership”, its called entering your log-in. The question is how we can make accurate and real our levels of participation.

3. I would not want to read membership as inwardly focused. At Graceway, one of the survey form options including mission, both stuff we did as a community and people’s involvement in their workplaces. In other words, your sole “membership” commitment at Graceway could be service in God’s world.

4. I have a nagging question. If we tie membership to involvement, are we reducing spirituality to doing – ie you are noted because you do something in this place. And sometimes I wonder if this is the opposite of grace?

new blogs

I’m adding some new blogs to my blogroll. I’ve known about them for a number of months and after a stutter, they have both now started a regular rhythm, so check out
http://spiritedconversations.blogspot.com/
and
http://www.maggidawn.blogspot.com