sustain:if:able kiwi

urban theologies with visual power

Two wonderful contemporary urban theologies emerging from UK cities at the moment. I love the way in both these projects urban space is being mapped, the way the visual sparks possibilities, the fusion of prayer with concrete realities.

Lou Davis
pioneering in Edinburgh
mission crafter
lino cuts, sound track: City of Stone
for prayer

Ric Stott
minister to Sheffield
mission as artist
curating Soul of Sheffield

the spirituality of justice: Loyal to the Sky

One of the great things about Kindle is the chance to read in new areas. This has emerged for me primarily because of the resourcing this website, which lists free and vastly reduced books. I’ve found myself looking books on trends in beer, production of comics and the history of salt. If they were paperback, I probably wouldn’t touch them, but being electronic, they seem worth a browse. And some of them get read and as a result, my world becomes larger.

One I’ve just finished is Loyal to the Sky: Notes from an Activist. (Sorry, the free deal on Amazon is long gone). Marisa Handler, born in South Africa, has a passion for justice, which has become her life’s work. From protesting against the war in Iraq, to free lance journalism that exposes multi-national companies in South America, to street theatre against covert US military involvement in Central America, this is a fascinating insight into a person and a spirituality (sadly) rarely seen in church.

What makes it appealing is the autiobiographical window into the growth of a protestor. This is not a book filled with anger, but a search for a better world, through the evolution of a passionate, caring person.

Here are some of the quotes that struck me:

The impact of protest

For a single day, our action carved out a space for justice—a space to remind people, in the midst of their busy lives, that there is a larger canvas. That the Palestinians are suffering. That our tax dollars are fueling an occupation. And people on the streets listen. Bystanders take our flyers. Supporters honk their horns as they pass. Journalists record our words. Priests and officials come to speak. The police try to negotiate. We make the evening news. I spend the day high on adrenaline

About a new way of leading

For larger actions, affinity groups gather in clusters. Decisions regarding specific actions or campaigns are made via consensus process at spokescouncil meetings, which are attended by representatives from affinity groups. While consensus process can be thorny and at times protracted, what consistently amazes me is how well it works. A proposal is offered, clarifying questions are asked, discussion is held, concerns are raised, amendments are made, concerns are resolved. Each person’s needs and qualms are heard and incorporated into a process that arrives at decisions and moves forward.

About a new type of leader

Soft-spoken and temperate, David exercises the sort of understated leadership that consistently provides wise guidance and strategic acuity to a movement that is relentlessly nonhierarchical and anti-authoritarian.

About the fact that new forms of church need not be large

In the global justice movement, the affinity group is the basic unit of direct-action organizing. Groups are composed of five to twenty members; the prevailing idea is smallness and, by extension, trust

About the busyness of life in Western culture

I think of my life back home: constantly rushing to meetings and appointments, constantly feeling pulled between activism and music and social obligations and every other essential thing on my endless list. I have to pencil in “nothing” when I want an evening off. Every activist I know is similarly overburdened and stressed, staggering around like Atlas beneath a world only we can save. It can’t be helping our work.

About the ethics of change

Is it possible to effect change without dehumanizing others? Without someone to hate? Can we connect with each other as we have this week—can we build a movement—without a common enemy?

How much of my activism has simply been a vehicle to justify my own anger and hatred?

The mission framework I make is this: that often new forms of church emerge around gathering and worship. But these are not the only forms of spirituality. There is also an activist spirituality and one of the fertile areas for fresh expressions to explore is new forms of church that cohere around mission, around combined Kingdom projects.

indigenous communion words

This afternoon I’m off to a gathering with local Kaurna speakers (the local indigenous language). On the agenda is the possibility of translating some communion phrases into the Kaurna language. This would enable us at Uniting College, who meet on Kaurna land, to acknowledge traditional owners by using some of their language in our worship.

Words that are commonly said, like the Lords Prayer, or communion, are obvious starting points, because they are used repeatedly and thus enable not just a one off, but regular usage. For example

The peace of the Lord be always with you: And also with you
The Lord be with you: And also with you
Lift up your hearts:We lift them to the Lord
Let us give thanks to the Lord our God: It is right to give our thanks and praise

Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might, heaven and earth are full of your glory. Hosanna in the highest. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest.

Christ has died. Christ has risen. Christ will come again.

Go in peace to love and serve the Lord. In the name of Christ, Amen.

In March, at our monthly leadership formation day for candidates, we explored cross cultural issues and I suggested the use of the Kaurna language at our chapel.

It turned out that what I thought was blindly obvious was quite new, and that communion words were not available. But there is a regular language gathering, and today I get to meet with them. I hope to check that they are happy for their language to be used in this way. I hope to locate some words. I hope to be able to make a recording, to help us Anglo’s get our tongues around these new words. And I hope that it might nourish and enrich our worship at Uniting College, honouring those who have been made so voiceless within Australian culture. (Which for me, is a crucial part of missiology in Australia)

Of course, liturgy is always much more than words. (I’ve been exploring this here). It is also patterns and gestures and relationship. But words are a start. And the simple question – can we use some words, is leading me into some new and interesting territory!

rural church mission models

I had a lot of fun on Wednesday, working my way through Rural Theology journal, researching current study of the rural church in mission. During Thursday, some of that research was synthesised into my current fresh expressions, mission and church thinking. Today the results go public, as I gather with 30 folk from across South Australia.

One thing I’m taking some time to explore with them is rural churches in the Bible. While the mission of Paul is often portrayed as urban, there are examples of rural churches in the Bible. As I thought more about them, I became to find them really thoughtprovoking and began to I wonder what patterns of life they might suggest for rural churches today.

For example, Israel in the Old Testament was primarily a rural church. Their pattern of gathering revolved not around weekly worship but around three large festivals. This suggests a very different pattern of worship, community, mission and interconnection. (I wrote about this in 2005 with my The Out of Bounds Church?: Learning to Create a Community of Faith in a Culture of Change but never related it to rural church life until this week. Duh!)

Similarly, the church of 1 Peter was primarily rural, scattered in house churches across Asia Minor. Their call was to be “wildflowers” – distinctive in behaviour, drawing questions.

For those interested, my notes for the two hour session are here

Update: the Old Testament model really brought some energy into the room. “So, could we stop doing weekly church and move to a festival gathering?”; “So how would we resource better the home table?” (well, Faith inkubators is one place to start); “So could we connect rural youth with state-wide three or four festivals and skype networks in between?”

msm Adelaide final “report” in video format

Mission shaped ministry Adelaide. 40 folk from three denominations gathering over five months to reflect on mission and spirituality today. How did it go?

Well, we asked participants that very question on the last night and here’s the result: a final “report” not in words, but in video.

Also wondering if this might serve to promote mission shaped ministry throughout Australia – it’s a first being with Australian rather than British accents :).

Big thanks to Stephen Daughtry who gave his time to shoot and edit.

fantastic read: From chaos to mission

On the plane yesterday to Sydney I started reading Gerard Arbuckle’s From Chaos to Mission: Refounding Religious Life Formation. It is fantastic.

It is not exactly recent (1997), but Jonny has often mentioned Gerard, so last year I brought a copy and it arrived earlier this week.

Gerard is a Catholic, yet his writing has so many echoes – the priority of context, the call for pioneer type ministry, the challenge to face society rather than church. In From Chaos to Mission: Refounding Religious Life Formation he explores these themes in relation to training – (in Protestant speak) how to train missional leaders.

He does this out of personal experience, having tried to reshape a Catholic Seminary for mission. He uses cultural anthropology as a lens, what is happening in the shift to post-modernity and how this influences both the task of mission and those who candidate; plus the cultures of what is happening within organisations, how they respond to change.

For myself, working at Uniting College, which has embarked on a change process around leaders in mission, it was like I’ve found a kindred spirit, albiet from a totally different space. When I become Principal, I think I might suggest we as staff and as a leadership council read it together as a way of looking at ourselves from another perspective.

Oh, did I forget to say, Arbuckle is a Kiwi (but currently works in Sydney, for the Refounding and Pastoral Development unit!

what is mission? a story of paying attention to the missing

The question is not: what is the church? but who is the church? (Natalie Watson, Introducing Feminist Ecclesiology).

What is mission? As a missiologist, I am always looking for ways to answer this question clearly. I can give you the definitions. Like this one from the Commission on Mission of the National Council of Churches in Australia.

Mission is the creating, reconciling and transforming action of God, flowing from the community of love found in the Trinity, made known to all humanity in the person of Jesus, and entrusted to the faithful action and witness of the people of God who, in the power of the Spirit, are a sign, foretaste and instrument of the reign of God.

But they tend to make some people’s eyes glaze over. So what about this for a story from a local pastor, working with an elderly congregation, as a way of defining mission?

The pastor thought a lot about who in the community was missing from the church. And how to help the church remain attentive. This generated the idea of making some life-size cardboard cuts out of people typical of their community, but missing from their congregation. In their case, a boy aged 5, a girl aged 11, a parent aged 35.

The pastor found some photos, blew them up life-size, printed them in colour, stuck them on some plywood, cut them out and built a stand. A boy 101 cm tall, a girl 132 cm tall, an adult 163 cm tall.

And then the pastor began to take these 3 figures to every leadership meeting. And when key discussions were being made, the leaders would be asked to stop and consider the impact of the decisions on those 3 cutouts, the people absent from their church.

And the pastor also took these cutouts to church. So that as they gathered, and when they prayed for others, their prayers would include those figures, the people in their community.

Which is commendable because we follow a Jesus who paid attention the missing.

(Hat tip)

What is mission? Mission is the deliberate act of paying attention to those who are missing. It does this through inviting our prayer, our time, our talent, as individuals and as a communities.

story weaving conference

I’m off on Monday morning (early), to be part of Story Weaving, an international conference on Colonial Contexts and Postcolonial Theology. It is being hosted by Whitley College, Melbourne. They are Baptist, so I’ll be able to breathe deep that Baptist air 🙂 Apparently the conference is over-subscribed, which is great. For me, being part of these types of conversations is an esssential partnership that needs to lie alongside fresh expressions, as a concrete expression of being a stranger, of surfing the edges and entering into the marginal spaces.

My paper, which I’m delivering on Monday afternoon, is titled:

This is my body? A post-colonial investigation of the elements used in indigenous Australian communion practices

The introduction is here. What is most fascinating is how the paper has evolved. As part of my research I got into conversation with Tim Matton-Johnsto, a Congress (indigenous) leader in Tasmania. Some email, some skype, some shuffling of drafts back and forth, some negotiation with his local elders and the result is that he will be sharing the paper with me, telling a story from his indigenous community of one of their communion practices.

There’s something very personally satisfying about a process which will mean I, as a recent migrant, am part of theologising alongside indigenous communities here in Australia, and am to co-share a paper in this type of way.

being consumed (at Christmas)

Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire is a great little book. At only 100 pages, there is both a depth of theological reflection, yet an incredibly practical edge. It is an attempt to “sketch out a view of everyday economic life with the use of Christian resources.” (viii)

“The Eucharist tells another story about hunger and consumption.” (94).

The argument is that the Eucharist provides an alternative imagination to globalisation. It’s not just theory, because the assertion that the “church is called to be a different kind of economic space and to foster such spaces in the world” (ix) is followed by some really concrete practices

• turn our homes into sites of creative production, not just consumption (such a practical alternative perhaps to Christmas)
• donate time to those in need
• deposit in community development banks
• buy locally
• Christian business practices and
• Fair Trade

I reckon it’s a sort of Catholic equivalent of Andy Crouch’s Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling in the sense that both seem to provide an integrative center for mission. So in Being Consumed, that integrative centre is the eucharist, while in Culture Making it is the invitation to play in culture that allows a mission, whether it is a minister leading a change, a teenager engaging in social justice, a retired person crafting for charity or a Council worker enacting legislation for the sake of a cleaner city.

(For some of my commentary on this a great little video, see here).

Both seem to provide ways beyond the church-centric imagination that plagues so much of contemporary mission (including fresh expressions) thinking. What is more appealing about Being Consumed, in contrast to Culture Making, is that the eucharist is more more communal, much more social, than the tendency to individualism in culture makers.

Further links:
Consumerism at Christmas (part one)
Consumerism at Christmas (another here).

mission and leadership postgraduate offerings 2012

These are the postgraduate (Master and Doctor of Ministry) offerings for the Uniting College of Master and Doctor of Ministry, just emailed to our postgraduate students, plus are in Uniting church ministers mailings all over South Australia over the weekend (Full PDF download go here).

I am really pleased with them, especially the focus on mission, leadership and culture and the range of voices (including from interstate and overseas) and approaches we’re building into the programme. A highlight is one of the world’s leading ecumenical voices on the Spirit and mission, Kirsteen Kim, author of the fabulous Holy Spirit in the world , who will be teaching an intensive – Spirit-ed missiology for a globalised world – from July 23-27, 2012.

the place of apt liturgy in fresh expressions

In marking, I tend to engage in student work with at times quite extensive written comments. Here, with an introduction to give some context, are some thoughts I wrote in an assignment I marked today.

“Apt liturgy” is a wonderful phrase, from Ann Morisy in her book, Journeying Out: A New Approach to Christian Mission.

“Liturgy if it is to be described as “apt” needs to express people’s deepest fears and hopes. Apt liturgy should also enable people to put their fears and hopes into a wider context by sensing the resonances between their own situation and humankind as a whole. One of the costs of the low level of religious literacy in our society is that people are deprived of the conceptual tools which could help them to locate their circumstances, both positive and negative, in a more universal framework. Apt liturgy is a way of providing a framework of understanding which helps people to move beyond self centered and narrow horizons.”

This invites the role of poet, the gift of seeking to name/give voice to the work of Spirit. I find it helpful to frame this by considering the work of the Spirit. Such thinking will begin with Romans 8:23, the Spirit groans in the world. Thus, good apt liturgy will give voice to this groaning. To be faithful, it must start by listening to people, to popular culture, to the world outside the church and to naming their groanings.

This listening must be seen as part of a process. As it is in Romans 8, for after verse 23 comes verse 27, in which the groaning of Spirit is always a groaning toward God. Thus apt liturgy is a way to participate in the Spirit (the One who is at work in the foundational domain, to use another term from Ann Morisy) in the journey from Romans 8:23 toward 8:27.

Another way to understand “apt liturgy” is in reference to Luke 10:1-12, and in light of the proposal “any experience is an educative experience” (Robert K. Martin, “Education and the Liturgical Life of the Church”, Religious Education 98:1 (Winter 2003), 61). Luke 10:1-12 assumes that mission begins with the ability to listen. As this happens, one will recognise healings, interpreted in light of the speaking of peace/shalom. This draws on the Old Testament understanding of God who cares for people and place and thus healing can include physical, spiritual, relational and with the whole of creation. In Luke 10, it is only after healing is recognised that the Kingdom is named as near.

This is “apt liturgy”, recognising healing in a context and linking it with the Kingdom mission of Jesus. In this way, the experience, the participation in healing, becomes educative of the Kingdom.

This calls for a different kind of liturgy leader skill set. One still needs to know the tradition, to know of the Kingdom, and not just superficially, but at such depth, that we can connect it with experience ie what is happening, rather than bringing a liturgy package from the shelf/book/internet.

Reading Scriptures missiologically

Chris Wright has an essay Truth with a Mission: Reading the Scriptures Missiologically, currently free for download here. It is a really good, concise introduction to the idea of the Bible as a missional book. It starts with the concept that mission is something we do, because the Bible tells us so. Wright argues that this is not because of a few favourite key texts, but because the whole Bible is itself a “missional” phenomenon. He suggests that

• the very Bible is a product of God’s mission
• evangelicals have been good at reading the Old Testament in light of Jesus, but poor at reading the Old Testament in light of mission
• God with a mission; humanity with a mission; Israel with a mission; Jesus with a mission
• a critique of Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission; because of his failure to find mission in the Old Testament, because his understanding of mission, as boundary crossing, is simply too narrow
• so a look at the missiological implications of Old Testament themes of monotheism, election, ethics, eschatology.

This is a really helpful introduction to Wright. At 15 pages, it is much more accessible than his 580 page The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative; or his The Mission of God’s People: A Biblical Theology of the Church’s Mission, which my missional Masters students have worked through this year.

(Hat tip via here)

tell show be. a useful way to intro evangelism?

Evangelism. Generally a word that freaks people out. Both Christians and non. So here’s an interesting resource from the Methodist church in UK.

TELL.SHOW.BE. is an invitation to rethink evangelism, to dispel the myths that hinder many and to challenge our understanding of what it means to pass on the good news.

It’s designed to be accessible, multilingual and free, inspiring us to tell somebody, show somebody and be somebody.

Video runs for under 2 mins. What do you think?

TELL.SHOW.BE. – English from Tell.Show.Be on Vimeo.

out of the closet? or just the closest I’ll ever be to Barthian?

I’ve just had a short piece published on Share, a UK fresh expressions website. Titled “Welcome home? Hospitality as mission”, (a cut down piece from something I wrote here last year), I explore how often the church hears hospitality as welcoming people who come to us. I start with a New Zealand singer, Dave Dobbyn, move to Jesus and then to fresh expressions. I conclude with a mission question

“I wonder what it means for the church to see itself as homeless rather than home-owner? To forget practising welcome and instead go looking for welcome? To make ourselves reliant on people to make space for us?”

Which, as I reflected today, might actually make me a closet Barthian. I’ve never read all of Barth, but am informed that it was he who describes the Father’s sending of the Son into the world as “The Way of the Son Into the Far Country.” (Church Dogmatics Vol IV 1 and 2). Just as the prodigal son traveled off into “the far country” (Luke 15:13), so in Jesus, the Son takes the same journey (While the Son of God, in contrast to the Prodigal Son, carries out this journey in total obedience, this journey into the far country is radical, risky, excessive and prodigal.

So there we are. Am I a closet Barthian? Or simply a missiologist coming close?

Anyhow, head on overand see what you think of the piece. Or go here, for another – David Fitch – angle on the whole Incarnation-mission thing.