sustain:if:able kiwi

made it

Listener – this week – Repackaging Christmas – I got the first quote, the last quote and a good chunk in the middle. Follow on from the phone interview a few weeks ago.

Yeeha!

(Sorry, not up on the web)

a christmas journey

Eight shipping containers, around a common, paved courtyard. Like a Christmas gift, waiting to be opened. Each shipping container explores a different part of the Christmas journey – interactive, tactile worship. It’s like moving in and out of 8 different worlds.

Open 7-11 pm; every day this (Christmas) week. Last year about 1000 people came through a similar exhibition. (Done with straw hay bales as a labyrinth)

Liquid thinking: Many congregations, one mission

How to be church in a diverse city? How to resource congregations for change? How to be one body, sharing Christ’s love into our communities?

A one day seminar exploring mission in our contemporary world.

Saturday 22nd January 9:30-4:30 pm

with: Phil and Dan McCredden, ministers with Church of Christ, Northern Melbourne.

Sessions will include:

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blue christmas

Christmas, for some people, is a blue time. It’s not joy and presents, but a time when they remember absent loved ones, face dysfunctional families or financial hardship. So last nite, I ran a Blue Christmas service.

As part of it, I invited people to tie a knot (using blue twisty tie) onto a white sheet, suspended in the middle of the room. This served to allow us to remember what makes us/our friends “blue.”

I then projected the art image below onto the cloth and onto our “blues. (My sister-in-law sent me the link last week).

Painted in 1515, its titled the Adoration of the Christ Child. The painter is unknown. Look closely at the faces of the angel beside Mary and the shepherd standing. Psychiatrists have diagnosed them both as having Downs Syndrome.

Angels and shepherds, as Downs syndrome, adoring Christ. This raised some fascinating reflections.
1. Is the stigma of Downs Syndrome a recent societal phenomenon, and were such people an accepted part of the artists world of 1515?

2. Can we accept Downs Syndrome as part of the birth of Christ? Can we accept the love and worship that such people offer? What does it mean for our church communities to be places that include such people?

3. What does this art piece do to our notions of a Blue Christmas?

For a high res version from the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, go here.

For more information on the medical background go here.

sand and containers

New Zealand Listener, a national magazine, just rang, wanting to interview me about church and culture today. So we talked about Jesus having a step-dad, the foreshore and seabed issue, 20 tonnes of sand inside the church and 9 shipping containers, parked outside the church, as part of the Christmas Journey at Opawa Baptist Church.

And I tried to emphasise that the Christmas story demands we set outside our nice safe walls. The stable after all, was a long way from safety.

symbols of life

We had another baptism on Sunday morning. It’s been our 7th in the last 3 months, our 4th in the last few weeks. The person being baptised, previously unchurched working class male, made his own shrine; symbols important to him – a dove, a roster, rose petals, an image of Jesus.

One of my increasing convictions over the last few years is that Christians have our symbols all wrong. I once turned up to an Easter Sunday service in a strange town. I thought it was a funeral. Such long faces. I wanted to yell, He’s alive.

But I was a visitor. Instead I listened to a meditation on death and sacrifice and pain. The church was trading on a death symbolic.

Yet Jesus was in the birth business and came that we might have life to the full. We need to trade in life images.

Stations of the Cross are quite popular among emerging churches. My worry is that they trade in the death symbolic.

And so around a baptism I anoint with oil and I get children to throw rose petals into the water. When the baptism is complete I crack open a bottle of sparkling and toast the first fruits of the Kingdom. For me, it’s a deliberate attempt to capture the life symbolic of Jesus ministry.

three baptisms on Sunday

networking

The local school has a new principal, so we invited him down for morning tea today, to welcome him to the area. It was neat to have him sit with the rest of the staff, to talk about his transition and about the needs he sees in the community.

It went so well, that I am thinking of doing this regularly with local community leaders.

with a passion for community and discipleship

“Congratulations on just appointing a great, great pastor.”

Opawa unanimously, yes unanimously, voted to call Jason King to join the team and focus on developing people.

labour day worship

This weekend in New Zealand was Labour Day Weekend, with a public on Monday in celebration of the 40 hour working week.

In order to let this weekend shape our worship, I taped 25 metre long and 30 cm wide rolls of paper to the floor, down the centre of the church aisles. The whiteness of the paper was broken by Micah 6:8; See that justice is done, let mercy be your first concern, and humbly obey God, and caused discussion and comment as the community gathered.

Leading up to the offering, I invited people to write on the Post-it stickers “ways they had laboured”; and to “post” these onto to the white paper rolls close to them. (playing Dido’s Life to Rent)

Then as we collected the offering and brought it to the front, there was a sense that we were gathering up not just money, but gathering up all our lives and all the ways we labour. The offering became a tactile and communal response, embedded in a New Zealand celebration of Labour Day.

The white sheets, now brightly decorated with our “labours,” can now be hung at the front of the worship space.

spiritual formation and the emerging church

The church I pastor has been, for the last few months, searching for another pastor. We’re looking for someone who can grow people. I just have this hunch that growing people is a really important task. So rather than appoint a general purpose type role, we are looking for someone to coach and mentor and develop people.

At first glance this might not appear emerging. I mean, there are these buzz words around like missional, all dualistically opposed to attractional (not, of course, that postmoderns are meant to be into dualisms!:)) Yet spirituality is big in the culture. So is life coaching. So it seems to me that if we focus on growing people, we can actually move beyond dualisms of come/go; attraction; missional – and get on with growing people. Some will be in the church, some outside; it won’t matter because the focus is a mission discipleship that spiritually forms people.

Anyhow, since we started looking back in August, I have been quite amazed at the level of interest. We’ve had 5 applications and over a dozen expressions of interest. Of even more interest is that almost all have been younger, and there have been a pleasing number of women. It has been neat to take a punt, in what seems a fairly unique position, and to have such a good level of response.

We are in the final days of sifting three ideal candidates; pray for wisdom.

lighting the church year

The church has these white, straight, block walls. To be fair, it looks like a telephone exchange.

So I have been “dreaming” with some lighting friends about some external colour. And I also mentioned that the Church Year has different colours for different seasons; purple=Advent as we prepare for the King etc. My lighting friends were suitably inspired and went for a play.

It’s 19K if you want to have a look …

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he made my day

“Would you like another slide projector,” the voice on the phone asked. “Because I’ve just brought you one from a garage sale.”

One of the innovations I have introduced at Opawa over the last month in the evening service is two 20 metre long sheets of white cloth that hang on either side of the church. With the artful use of hooks and elastic, we can erect these sheets in about 1 minute flat. We can then rear project slide images and use simple Par 38 coloured bulbs, and in a matter of minutes, create visual and ambient space. Very simple, very effective.

So a notice in the church newsletter and all the returned missionaries and wise old-timers have been steadily, Sunday by Sunday, dusting up and dropping off their old slide projectors. Place a slide in each and you have tiled images, rear-projected, all around the auditorium. Which basically makes those old slide projectors the heart of visually creative worship.

And then the phone call. A wise old-timer, actually buying me projectors, scrounging garage sales, thinking of Sunday on a Saturday.

Makes my day. I’m sure they think I’m barking mad, but there is something slightly redemptive about this whole process; dusting off slices of history and re-using them visually.

missional discipleship as Growth Coaching and spiritual stepping stones

Ann Wilkinson-Hayes emailed a few weeks ago:
Got to do a lecture next week on missional discipleship. Something about missional church requiring a different way of learning faith. Any thoughts/resources?

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