sustain:if:able kiwi

Discerning the emerging church

I have just playing around with what I might say on Tuesday at Tabor College. I am due to give a 2 hour seminar, titled Discerning the emerging. The audience is meant to be a mix of under-grad and post-grad. So it needs to be simple, yet have some intellectual depth. A free night after a relaxed weekend has allowed me to pull together quite a few threads on my hard drive, which will ensure an all new, “fresh bread” presentation.

Here is my current working outline

1. Defining the emerging: some humour, some definitions.
2. Discerning the emerging in history: Acts 5, Acts 15 and an overview of the insights from The Holy Spirit in the World: A Global Conversation
3. Carson’s duality of truth from experience in Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church: Understanding a Movement and Its Implications
4. John Drane’s marks of maturity: old and new.
5. LeRon Schults reforming ecclesiology: the emerging as one, holy, catholic and apostolic church
6. Post-colonial mission: Luke 10:1-12 and an overview of An Introduction to the Study of Luke-Acts
7. Conclusion: Discerning is a gift, which we can nourish by working on our skills. Part of this working at our discerning skills is becoming aware of the methods of others – their strengths, their weaknesses. It is fascinating to see the development in the last few years of a range of approaches to discerning the emerging church. We need these resources, for discerning is an essential Christian discipline.

missionary order of voluntary local community ministry bridge builders

On Wednesday evening, I shared with the church about the development of bridge builders in our midst at Opawa. It is one of those “I have no idea where this is going, but I do wonder if God is up to something” moments in the life of Opawa Church.

Picture person A. who comes to see me, with a real heart for the community, who is in a business in which all staff, because of the economic climate, have been asked to consider working a 4 day week.

Picture person H. who for years has dreamed of working in the local community and has a job with some flexibility.

Picture person J. who has worked part-time for many years, and in recent years has found herself growing in ministry and in confidence.

What if God is stirring up in people a passion for loving people outside the church, and if, in our current economic climate, and in an era of increasing job flexibility, they are being offered more leisure time. What would it mean to be the church in such times? What would discipleship, take up your cross and follow me, discipleship look like?

Hence bridge builders. At Opawa we have “boxes” in which we put pastors (part-time) and ministry leaders and volunters. And perhaps we need a new “box.”

– Bridge builders would give one day per week into Waltham community.
– All bridge builders would be expected to seek out some 1-1 input (supervisor or mentor or spiritual director) to grow them.
– All bridge builders would be expected to gather with other bridge builders for shared missional practices of prayer, Scripture reading.
– Each bridge builder would undertake a unique individual ministry, based on their gifts and passions. They might deliver firewood, offer discipling for kids after-school, visit the struggling, gather parents around parenting issues. The scope is unlimited, as long as it is accountable, focused and outward.
– In response, the church, who wants never to use people, but always to grow people, provide an office to work from, a coffee machine to gather around, a person to run the shared missional practices, training opportunities to improve skills and caring capacities.
– The church will also provide a “ministry enhancement allowance”, our way of taking growth seriously and which the bridge builder can invest in books or supervision or art galleries, or whatever feeds and sustains their soul.

Currently we have three people who have said yes. It is enormously humbling as a pastor to have person A. and H. and J. sit in my office and process this somewhat costly, radical step. It is enormously exciting to be offered the gift of three days of “community” ministry to add to our capacity as a church.

Bridge builder might just be a way to honour this sacrifice and resource these people and respond to such an economic time as this.

But I suspect it’s much more than than. I suspect we might have found a way of calling Western, middle-class people to radical discipleship, of offering the possibility that at some time over their working life they can take a bit of a financial squeeze in order to love their community, knowing they will be resourced and working in a community with others.

Anyone else getting just a bit excited?

mission and missional. Why the “a” and the “l” is more than a typo

There is some useful discussion rolling on in the “What is community ministry?” post. I’ve just written a comment, which I think is worth clarifying as a separate blogpost.

It regards the difference between mission and missional. You see, missional is about mission and mission is missional but mission is not missional. Clear aye! 🙂

The Christian impulse for mission is for all time and all place. It emerges from a God of triune love who dwells in relationship, celebrates diversity and is unified in love.

But mission is outworked in different ways. We know this because Scripture give us diverse pictures of mission.

Ruth is the story of God’s work through the outsider; Lamentations is the story of faith in black; Daniel is a story of marketplace faith in exile; Jesus is the wandering prophet; Paul is the community builder; Revelation is the persecuted dreamer.

Or take the book of Acts. In chapter 2, mission is at work as people flock to Jerusalem interested in God and when there are spaces in society where people notice the church. But later in Acts, Paul takes this gospel on the road, is tentmaking and creating cultural connections on Mars Hill. And then he is the suffering prisoner, using his chains to proclaim faith. In each of these, the Christian impulse is mission, but the outworking is diverse.

This is made most clear when we consider the relationship between church and society as it it played out through the Bible. The task of the church is to reform in Dueteronomy, to protest in Mary’s song, to be counter-cultural in lifestyle in 1 Peter. This response is based on how much society listens to the church and whether society has the ear of the powers that be.

This relationship continues to be played out through history. David Bosch in Transforming Mission looks at mission over 2000 years and notes how at different times, different Scriptures became commonly used to describe the mission of the church.

It is this plurality that makes our task exciting today. What Biblical and historical pictures will most accurately encourage and challenge us in this time and place? In Christendom, when the church is at the centre, then “temple models” of being large and attractional work. But the church is no longer at the centre and so we are back to Scripture and church history, wondering what are the texts for our time.

This is what the word “missional” means. It is prophetic voice. First in flagging mission for what is essentially a Christendom church and second in pointing to cultural change – that the 2000’s are not like the 1970’s, and that the relationship of church and society has changed. Given these two factors, missional is a Biblical voice, seeking to excavate the Scriptures that will serve a post-Christendom church.

Hence: missional is about mission. And mission is missional. But mission is not missional because “missional” is the attempt to speak of “mission” today.

Have I confused or clarified myself?

what is church? emerging forms in Aotearoa New Zealand

Welcome to Laidlaw students from Theology and Praxis in Global Ministry class. Here are the video’s I used: Firstly, how to move a 100 year old church

and secondly, We need to change everything.

The use of Dwelling in Word as an approach to Scriptural engagement gets some coverage here and here.

Links to some experimental Kiwi emerging church forms (based on the class reading Taylor, “A Kiwi Emerging Church? Yeah Right!” New Vision New Zealand, Volume III, 2008, Tabernacle Books, 311-324) include the Kitchen, Cathedral of Second life, Stations of cross (with specific videos here) and Christmas journey.

Thanks for all your energy and questions, I thought it was a great class.

sense making faith as a great missional resource

Sense Making Faith. Body Spirit Journey is one of the best missional resources I’ve come across in recent years. If asked to explain it in one sentence, I’d call it an Alpha course using the senses, not the intellect. And since God made us whole bodies, Sense making faith is thus a great gift to the church.

I ran the course twice last year, once at Opawa for about 15 people with a range of faith experiences, and once with a local community group working with mental illness. Both time I was astonished at the ability of the course to open conversations, to connect with those inside and outside the church and to enrich people’s lives. The open-ended exercises allowed each group to find a life of their own.

The highlight for me is week one, which introduces the course by inviting people to wonder. One of the exercises involves spreading photos around the room and inviting participants to take the one that most catches their attention. Three simple questions become quite transformative: What caught your attention? What caught the attention of the photographer? How does looking at this make you feel? In so doing, participants are introduced to the heart of the spiritual search: to notice the beauty that surrounds us. And so our eyes, ears, noses, skin and mouths are in fact the gateway by which we can be struck, aroused, challenged by God. This is not an intellect pursuit, but a embodied engagement with the God of life.

Sense making faith originated in the UK. During Lent 09, the BBC are using it as a Lenten resource. A supporting website is here

It’s not a perfect course. The book seems to suffer from an internal conflict. Having started with the challenge to wonder, the book then devotes considerable time and attention to critiquing current church practice, and the lack of attention to the senses in churches today. While the criticism is valid, it turns the initial “hermeneutic of wonder” into a hermeneutic of critique. It also tends to push the resource toward being of more use to those who enter churches, which is a shame. However, this is where the extensive appendix becomes really useful, providing lots of exercises that in fact allow the book to recapture it’s original ethos, a journey of sense making faith. Essentially I bypassed the main material, and simply used the exercises as springboard into shared group learning experiences.

If you’re looking to engage with spiritual seekers, Sense Making Faith is one of the best resources I’ve found. I’m planning to run another course later this year and hoping that this might be a stepping stone to a new congregation, probably based more on monthly retreat days than weekly church services. This is because the course covers 7 weeks (introduction: sight : sound : smell : taste : touch : imagination) and thus it offers a framework through which to keep gathering, not around content, but around what each participant is learning as they simply pay attention to their senses in the journey of life.

practical theology for the liquid church

Last week I blogged about our images of church: as supermarket provider of product or as retailer of seeds. I noted practical ways that Opawa was framing itself as a provider of spiritual resources- through courses and takeaways and internet resources.

Today I picked up Participation And Mediation: A Practical Theology for the Liquid Church. He is wrestling “intellectually” (albiet with some nice earthed stories about the culture industry around Shine Jesus Shine, Hillsong and Taize) with the same issue.

“The mediation of theological expression in popular culture represents a vital and missiological challenge. How can theological capital and the Christian habitus be developed in this context of an extended ecclesial life? This is a complicated issue and will require further reflection that lies beyond the framework of this book. What seems clear is that the mediation of the divine life that has allowed the Christian community to extend and make more fluid its ecclesial being, suggests that such an enterprise may be possible. The clue to the way forward lies in the freedom of God to be present both in the Church and beyond it through participation and mediation. So like a light beckoning us forward the Spirit is inviting us to find a way to ‘go with the flow’ of the liquid church.”

spiritual resourcing or church as kings seeds

I blogged a few days ago about my vegetable garden. I contrasted the limited range of vegetables on offer at the local supermarket with the fantastic range of vegetable seeds on offer from Kings seeds. A blog comment also noted the Kings catalogue, and the way it stimulated teenage students they were working with.

A few hours later, I dropped a Lenten spiritual resource into a letterbox. For a joke, I wrote on the back “Opawa Baptist Spiritual resourcing centre” (or words to that effect). As I drove back, I thought about the different ways we at Opawa are resourcing people for Lent this year.
– a individual, at home resource, upon request
– Bible days, offering resources to encourage lectionary reading
– Life shapes, an evening course during Lent.
– flax spirituality, (still under development but we are tossing around a creative idea that takes us from Lent, through Easter, to Pentecost.)
– a number of emails, from churches in Wellington and Minneapolis, asking us for our Lenten (07) spirituality resources.

I wonder if some churches are like supermarkets – they offer a limited number of items, come to us, attractively presented, gently misted.

Then I look at Kings seeds – pick your own, grow your own, get your hands dirty, enjoy the catalogue in your time and space. I’d like Opawa to be more and more of the later – that there is not one way, one time, one place, come to us – but there are multiple ways for people to grow their own, and that our energy goes into being a producer of spiritual resource. I think we’re making progress and it’s a great joy to see so many different types of people taking advantage of our range of resources over the last few weeks. I also realise that it’s probably not either/or, although I suspect that generally, more church energy goes into the come-to-us models than the resource-from-us models. (This is another way of getting at some stuff in my (2005) Out of Bounds Church? book, in which I talked about the church as a “funder” of spiritual tourists.) Buy it here

questions I’m searching for answers too

0. Spiritual formation in our world today
– How do themes of “journey and discovery” fit with the realities of life today?
– How do we foster life processes when church is shaped around a regular gathering? And when people are at such a range of stages and places, from no-faith to set-in-faith?

1. Emerging church and indigenous non-Western voices

– How do groups find enough space to find their own unique voice again?
– Can a culture find their own voice in isolation, or must their be wider conversation to find full identity?
– How to have mutual conversations when the history has been of powerlessness?
– What habits might I bring to the table that might in fact simply continue oppression (and is the very fact I am engaging with the issue actually in fact a continuation of marginalisation)?
– And finally, why, if this is about full-participation, are there only men on this video?

2. Time and focus
– How do I find time to attend to my own passions and life gifts, when there are so many worthy causes to engage with in our world today? (more…)

creative sparks

Experienced this out door art installation at a winery a few weeks ago. From the outside, it was a black polythene structure, about 2 metre high and 3 metre long with a door, and intriguing puffs of smoke that snuck under the polythene every few minutes.

From the inside, it was this;

They had obviously pierced the polythene, in patterned shapes, and the use of dry ice enhanced the swirl of light.

It got me thinking about how we can engage people in public spaces. (At Opawa, we’ve got our Christmas Journey coming up, which takes Christmas outdoors.) These are stand alone, safe, secure spaces, which evoke mystery and invite experience. Perhaps one for the four weeks of Advent? Perhaps one at a Day of Remembrance or Hiroshima Day or at the opening of a Wine and food festival?

calling aussies regarding family faith formation

I met someone today who wants to grow in the area of ordinary congregations exploring spiritual formation across generations. They don’t have many kids, but they don’t want to send those they have got out of the building. They want to experiment with providing ways for families – young and youth – to grow together.

And he wanted to know if he was alone. Are there any Aussie churches exploring this, trying experiments, having a go?

redeeming consumer culture

Can consumerism be redeemed by Incarnation?

I hear lots of Christains railing against consumer culture, about how bad it is, about how the megachurch is a sellout to it.

I listen from a gospel/culture perspective. No culture is solely good. Nor is culture solely bad. All cultures are both and all cultures are open for redemption.

A quote from Eugene Rogers: “Culture” introduces multiple ambiguities … [it] …. can be unfallen, fallen, redeemed; essential or constructed; individual or corporate. …. Mobile as water, [culture] is not static, but dynamic. A creature of the Spirit, it is to grow … Christian culture-narratives require a dynamic and differentiated account. (After the body, page 149)

The question is how? How did Jesus redeem? Well in the Incarnation, he entered the world. Some things he embraced. Other things he shook the dust of his feet. But his starting point was entering. Doesn’t this give a missional impluse to how we approach consumerism? Rather than finger pointing, we affirm that it can only be redeemed as we Incarnate ourselves within it.

I’m off to shop. Incarnationally.

a shifting mission?

Currently, three evenings a week, smaller gatherings occur at Opawa. They provide a snapshot of our changing mission

: Tuesday is espresso, a conversational congregation. Over the last few years, it has provided a place for those inside and outside Christian faith to talk, argue, learn, laugh.

: how to read the Bible is a 8 week block course on a Wednesday, that includes a number seeking faith and wanting to consider the place of the Bible.

: Sense making faith is on a Thursday and has a different set of participants, who bring with them existing spiritual experiences outside of organised religion.

It is fascinating to realise how mission has shifted for us as a church: away from Sunday attractional services to smaller, more relational groups. Each group has a different interest, funds a different type of conversation, engages with a different way of spiritually searching – questioning place, thinking place, experiencing place.

In saying this I do not want to advance an Incarnational VS Attractional divide. Sunday remains important because it is our most visible place and people often start there.

The image I use is of a physical presence. Most businesses have shops, most clubs have clubrooms, most cafes have seats. Without these, you would struggle to find them. So mission as the funding spiritual search needs a place in which people can “land.” But what is key for us is the development of multiple spaces, so that when people “land,” they are not offered a one size fits all, but a variety of ways to continue their search.

sharpening the edge

Last week I was part of Sharpening the edge conference, wondering what God is up to in New Zealand by gathering around 8 mission stories. There are now some video highlights up on youtube, including part of my presentation, storytelling some mission stories about our multi-congregational approach. (Wow, do I ever wave my arms when I speak. Is that distracting?)

There were 7 other stories. You can catch Rich Johnson talking about St Pauls here, and Duane Major talking about 24/7 here.

So what might God be up to in New Zealand today? Here is an excellent written summary, by the prodigal Kiwis.

: Changing primary biblical mandates. A few years ago I suspect a similar gathering would have emphasized the great commission passages (e.g. Matthew 28) or the mercy/ compassion passages (e.g. Luke 4 v16) that under girded the move into community ministries but none of these mandates seemed to be primarily informing the new initiatives described as this gathering. More in vogue were Acts 2, Luke 10:1-12, and the parable of the prodigal father coupled with biblical images of friendship.

: The conference as whole offered avenues of hope for older established churches and new fresh plants. There were expressions of re-awakening and re-emerging Missional life and new mission endeavors. Both were encouraged and examples of both were shared by way of stories – memorable for many was youthful Anglican Priest, Rich Johnson’s telling to the St. Paul’s Symond Street story over recent years. Another example was the Opawa story, narrated in part by Steve Taylor. As we’ve noted above, both offered (in different ways) hope for long established mainstream congregations.

my most significant emerging and missional books

Just had an interesting email from a graduate student, asking my opinion of the most significant emerging and missional books. So below are the texts I consider significant, with a brief comment as to why. For me, significant is different from popular, which if you want that, you can check through google rankings and blog crushes. I have also separated out emerging from missional.

Can anyone spot the thing that disturbs me the most about this list?

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