sustain:if:able kiwi

cafe church planter wanted in sydney

This looks a great opportunity in inner-city Sydney. Hope Street (cool tagline: Innovating Christian Community, Empowering the marginalised) is seeking a ministry team leader for its church planting and community development work in Darlinghurst and Surry Hills. You’ll need to have leadership experience in Christian ministry and an aptitude for working on the margins of church and society.

It seems they have sold a church and are wanting a cafe church planter. I spent a few days with them in 2001 and really like them. You can download full information and application process from here:

postgraduate emerging church research

Bryan has emailed, asking for research citations (ie postgraduate research, not some lightweight fluff) regarding the emerging church, as he begins to prepare for his Ph.D. This is what I am aware of. Have I missed anything?

Baker, Jonny, “The Labyrinth. Ritualisation as Strategic Practice in Postmodern Times.” MA thesis, Kings College, 2000.

Flores, Aaron, “An exploration of the Emerging Church in the United States.” MA thesis, Vanguard University, 2005.

Guest, Matthew. “Negotiating Community: An Ethnographic Study of an Evangelical Church.” PhD thesis, Lancaster University, 2002.

Taylor, Steve. “A New Way of Being Church.” PhD thesis, Otago University, 2004.

Note of clarification: Thanks for the comments already. I too am aware of lots of books and journal articles, but in this post I am looking only for post-graduate primary research. Not to be elitist, but because this was the context of the email request.

note to self: perhaps i’m not mad

I’m noticing this kind of discussion happening over at Steve’s blog since he questioned the APEPT model of leadership as the only model portrayed by Paul in his ministry and letters. After his post Alan commented with:

Perhaps he’s asking questions in much the same way that a Prophet would in the APEPT model? The Prophet is rarely liked, because they ask questions that the others don’t like.

[ironic musing: arguing against the APEPT model by using the APEPT categories?]

Link

a foreign language day

Today I
: finished an article on the emerging church for the september/october edition of a magazine called australian christian women!
: received confirmation that an article I wrote on artist Sieger Koder for a German publisher has just been printed.

Yep, translated into two foreign cultures in one day!

I also did a re-write of a co-authored piece (The Post-Evangelical Emerging Church: Global Innovations in New Zealand and the UK) I am doing with Matthew Guest for the International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church (who are doing a themed issue on the topic of the Emerging Church).

I’m now meant to be on holiday for the next few days, apart from being part of the first ever Holy-wood Free Film Festival, with spiritual films, film church and film debate. So I might not be around my blog much.

I’m probably in trouble but …

I probably just got myself in big trouble, but I made the following comment here, in relation to the APEPT model and so note the comment here (as a sort of obituary perhaps!)

I think the APEPT model is one of the more problematic things I have come across in the emerging church conversation. Read Clarke’s Serve the Church. It looks at the early church within its social setting. It argues that every one of Pauls’ letters has a slightly different take on leadership and that is because Paul is contextual. Leadership structure emerges from the mission context. To impose APEPT is therefore not true to the full range of the Biblical material; it is privileging one letter over the other letters. More problematic, it’s imposing a theoretical model that distorts the true contextual missionality that is the New Testament texts.

trained to preach

On Wednesday and Thursday I hosted local Baptist leaders on the theme:
Mission and the DNA of the church.

Best quote for me, from a long-term minister, was this one:
I’m starting to realise that communication today involves preaching, being part of communal dialogue and allowing individual multi-sensory responses. But I was just trained to preach.

but what do you do when Jesus is attractional?

One of the big dualisms offered by some in the emerging church is that of attractional as against incarnational (here for instance). We are told that the church is attractional in Christendom and so a move beyond Christendom necessitates a commitment to incarnational.

So what do we do with Jesus and the gospels? I’ve been pondering Luke 15 today. Three things are lost – coin, sheep, and two sons. Twice the Jesus response is to go look – for a coin or a sheep. Sounds incarnational. So far, so good.

But once – for two sons – the Jesus response is to prepare a hospitable welcome and wait. Not to “Incarnationally” leave the house or the building, but simply wait. And in time, to find that outrageous love and hospitality will become mission.

The mission to one lost son is to offer love. The mission to the other lost son (the churchgoers who have never left) is to challenge them to join the joyous party happening in their building. Sounds like attractional mission to me. Sounds like mission to those using the building to me.

For a sermon I preached on the prodigal son last year go here.

women and the emerging church

Excellent post by Dan over at signposts, reflecting on women and the emerging church. After a thoughtful and sensitive reflection on a range of issues, she concludes:

I think that we probably have a lot more work to do with the role of women (and men) in the church, and in the new missional church particularly. I am encouraged by the fact that there seems to be a recognition that more work is needed. I am sometimes discouraged by the types of initiatives that are put into place. I am discouraged by the fact that women when they seek to encourage and mentor leadership seem reluctant to adopt and celebrate our most accomplished female leaders. I am discouraged by the way that discussion is often hamstrung by political correctness and the unwillingness to evaluate women in the same way as men.

the spirituality of dissent with poise

“It takes a while to dissent with poise.” A very elegant sentence. Spoken by Duncan, who describes the Forge flavour as one of antagonism; “antagonism towards ‘attractional’ church … There’s not a lot of interest in the engagement with postmodernity found in other quarters. Alternative worship is seen as just a tinkering with the gathered worship model.”

And then the profound sentence (which adds balance and nuance to what is perhaps the negative side of the positive strength in the prophetic gift that is Forge?) Anyhow, the sentence has become for me a breathe prayer for the week;

God, help me become better at dissent with poise. Amen.

2 recent emerging church web articles that I appreciate

One: Excellent response by Jordon Cooper to the consumeristic Ooze article “Behold I make all things stale and boring” and the provocative statement: After reading a bunch of Emergent Church type blogs recently I realized almost no one is saying anything new.

When talking about the future of the emerging church I often show an Adbusters video, supplied to me by Stephen Garner. In a bid to find identity, the person accessorises, seeking to be hip and cool by adding toys and gimmicks and new things. We live in a society which is based on selling the new. So in one sense it’s totally natural to see the same consumerism at work in a person’s approach to the blogging world.

Two: Thoughtful article by Alan Roxburgh (sent to me by ProdigalKiwi) on the emerging church in the context of the April Consult at Fuller. (At which a statement I made – ‘I’m not sure we are really as creative as we think.’” – became a context-less soundbite on quite a number of blogs – here, here, here and here).

As I read the article I reflected on my hope that the new of the emerging is not a panacea for stale and boring, but is the missional Image-ining of Christ . Such image-ining must take time. Such image-ining will search forward, backward and sideways, to our wired world, to our ancient roots and among cultures unlike ours. And such image-ining will often be found in unexpected crevices. Such is the kingdom.

My book has a postcard/chapter on creativity. It is positioned after a postcard/chapter on birth and midwiving. That’s deliberate – creativity emerging from the active image-ining breath of God.

emerging church hui

All the Taylor family are away at the emerging church hui (indigenous word of gathering). Back Thursday. Looking forward to speaking with the family around, rather than alone. Lynne is leading worship and a workshop.

Melbourne

Well, Melbournians certainly know how to work a person hard.

I got off the plane on Wednesday night and went straight to my book launch. Over about 90 minutes, I offered some thoughts from my out of bounds book on spiritual tourism, peg and ethical communities, plus a few new comments on how the emerging church re-weaves forward with integrity toward our roots in Scripture and tradition.

Up early to a breakfast with Forge interns, then straight into a day with about 80 church ministers, tag team teaching with Al Roxburgh. It was intensely tiring – new people, new context, new speaking partners. I never find it easy speaking to new groups, but I think I’m getting better.

Friday I spoke again, doing a 90 minute workshop around the topic of transitioning church in times of cultural change and some implications for environments and leadership. Our move to Opawa was certainly a jumping off point for some rich conversations. Friday I also caught up with a range of people, including Darren Rowse, and then finally got to spend some time with my wonderful hosts.

I flew back today glad of new friends, glad of attentive listeners who offered some rich conversations and warmed by the hospitality of Phil and Dan McCreeden.

Why can’t we dream?

Written at LAX airport: Friday 29th April

In Douglas Coupland’s book, Polaroids from the Dead, is a wonderful story of a skeleton who visits a dying city. There is no water, the buildings are decaying and the artists and creative’s are dying. The skeleton visits and cries, over and over, “Your city is dying because you have no vision of the afterlife.”

I often use the story in my classes, to reference the fact that firstly, even in modernity a spirituality exists and secondly, the power of dreaming, imagining, to release new life, a prophetic imagination.

If we have lost the power to dream, are we in fact enmeshed in a dying and decaying city? Has modernity so corroded our souls, have our insecurities so overwhelmed our creatives, that the skeleton now cries alone.

Or, is it rather that exile is a time consuming process? It took years of grieving before a new way of living, a new spirituality of synagogue and Mid-rash could emerge. Is it too early to dream? Are we still in a time to grieving?

Los Angeles bound

I will be here quite a bit this week;

Allelon and Fuller Seminary are organising a consultation of leadership in the emerging church April 27-29, with people from UK, USA, Australia and NZ. There are lots of blog names I’m quite excited to meet in person.

My church community also allow me a week a year to write, in recognition of that area of my gifting. So I am going to be here quite a bit this week.