sustain:if:able kiwi

Pentecost morning

I took some big risks on Sunday. It is Pentecost after all. But I still didn’t sleep well on Saturday night.

Risk one: Pentecost is about chaos. After a confession and a song, I gave space for the kids to blow bubbles and throw balloons around while I played a track about the Spirit for all people. How would people respond?

Risk two: the sermon for the first time gave space for interaction. I gave a number of real life situations and asked for feedback around two questions: where is the spirit of life, where the Spirit of Jesus. How would people respond?

Risk three: we finished with a Latin chant, Veni Sancte Spiritus. Baptists in New Zealand have had a very bad track record of unease around things Catholic. Yes, if Pentecost was about speaking in different languages, that would have included Latin. But how would people respond?

We had 150 people at worship. It’s the most the church has had in over 2 years. Now when you are a church in decline, who has lost 150 people in 5 years and 400 people in 10 years, to see new faces and new faces return is a wonderful, wonderful thing.

And when bubbles lay all over the church floor, and an 85 year old started batting around her balloon, and a semi-retired man looked at me with a sparkle in his eye and yelled “what have you done,” I sort of felt like Pentecost: joyful, chaos.

Some other Pentecost resources on this blog:
– art and theology here
– an annual Pentecost journal here
– global Pentecost resource here
– Pentecost festival 06 here and 07 here

on fire

i am still collecting my thoughts after pentecost sunday at opawa. i will blog them when they sedimentate.

pentecost confession

I wrote this confession to start our Pentecost service::

Breath of God, you are our life
forgive us for our apathy and blandness,
our lack of passion and creativity.
Breath of God, enliven us

Breath of God, fire of God, wind of God,
blow away our cobwebs
light our fire
fall afresh on us this Pentecost,
Amen.

Some other Pentecost resources on this blog:
– art and theology here
– an annual Pentecost journal here
– global Pentecost resource here
– Pentecost festival 06 here and 07 here

Season of prayer

A number have people have asked for more info on what is happening with the season of prayer.

I have just moved to a new church, and it seemed to me that there were many links between us as a church facing a new future, and the Acts narrative, with the disciples facing a new future as Jesus ascends. They gathered, waited and prayed. Why could we not gather, wait and pray? Why could we not pause before God, create some space in our lives, to wait and listen?

I wanted us as a community to live in the Biblical story, to let it shape our lives and our dreams. So I divided the Acts chapters 1, 2 into “bits”; and isolated a theme;

Day ::: Biblical Text ::: Theme ::: Focus of prayer
Thu ::: Acts 1:1-5 ::: Fresh excitement ::: Mission
Fri ::: Acts 1:6-11 ::: Repentance ::: Confession
Sat ::: Luke 4:16-21 ::: Mission ::: Ministries, missionaries of church NB This is kid interactive.

Sun ::: Prayer in worship services.

Mon ::: Acts 1:15-26 ::: Leader ::: Leaders and new leaders
Tues ::: Acts 2:1-4 ::: Ministry for all ::: Everyone in church
Wed ::: Genesis 2:2-4 ::: Day of rest
Thu ::: Acts 2:5-12 ::: Many voices ::: Our community
Fri ::: Acts 2:14-37 ::: Preaching ::: Preaching, teaching, people saved
Sat ::: Acts 2:43-47 ::: Healthy community ::: Small groups, community building occasions, radical lifestyle discipleship

To download the file, go here

I made up a booklet; a prayer guide which I gave to everyone in the church. I will put these up tomorrow.

Each day we gather. A different person leads the prayer each night. I have supplied them with a bit of material from Richard Foster’s Prayer, in order to broaden our concepts of prayer.

At the end of the prayer time, we try and summarise in 1 sentence the main thing God is saying — this is a sort of communal discernment process. This is then placed on a phone number (New Zealand) 0508 -ASK GOD (0508 275 463). It enables those not at the corporate gatherings to ring in and remain part of what God is saying.

It’s not flash multi-media and it’s not rocket science and its not cool emergent sexy mission with VJ loops. It’s just a way of us living in the Bible story and in a hectic world, creating space to sit before God.

ascended

40 days after easter,
Jesus ascends

for 10 days before pentecost,
the disciples pray,

at opawa we are following this pattern with a 10 day season of prayer
it is a project i have put a fair bit of preparation energy into
over the last weeks

i wrote a prayer guide, given to each person, so that the church is reading the same scriptures :: each day there are corporate prayer gatherings, different prayer leaders have been trained with different themes for each day :: each corporate prayer gathering tries to summarise in a sentence what was prayed, and this is loaded onto a 0508 – ASK GOD phone number – so that people can ring in and keep up to date.

10 days, to clear space in our life as a church community,
to wait, listen, be before God.

Update 1: DUH – thanx Tom

Update 2: we also did this 3 times at Graceway, as well as Opawa.

stencilling the spirit in the world

I am leading a worship experience this Wednesday titled Stencilling the Spirit in the world. Inspirational spark via Jonny Baker.

I need prayers and words and images that speak of the Spirit in the world. Any help will be gratefully acknowledged.

Side Door :: Wednesday, 18th, 7:30 pm :: Opawa Baptist

NB: Chalk washes off in water.

hot text

I have been at Opawa Baptist Church 3 months this week. I took the first structured step toward a more communal approach to worship this morning.

I suggested the idea of a regular “hot text” slot, 5 minutes where a community person tells us their favourite Bible verse or song, and how God found them through that text.

This was a deliberate strategy to move toward a more communal voice in our worship, and the telling of God stories in our midst. It was also a missional move, allowing our spirituality to be told.

I passed around sheets of paper, and over 40 people signed up. I now need to find a “safe chair” in which people can sit in, to tell their hot-text God story. Today Opawa took a step toward a new future.

idle musings on creativity and community

“We need to hear stories. Why should we wait until a funeral and a euology to hear the stories of God in people’s lives?” Comment made last week.

“I am so looking forward to church on Sunday. We never know what is going to happen.” Comment made this week.

Readers of this blog over the last 5 months will know that I have been in transition. I have moved from planting an emerging church, Graceway, to a 93 year old congregation, Opawa Baptist.

My move has been made for many reasons. One is a growing conviction that creativity and spaces to hear the stories of life, and of God in life, stretch across generations. That modernity has robbed all of us, not just younger people, of some important ways of accessing God.

I was getting sick and tired of hearing that participation and creativity only worked in church plants with people under 40. That what I did at Graceway was somehow good for youth, or good outside the mainstream.

I am in very early days at Opawa. We are still in honeymoon. Neverthless, I am constantly surprised at the warmth, excitement and acceptance of creativity and community across a wide spectrum of people.

leadership

community development + spiritual leadership + entreprenurial re:emergence =
the leadership task at opawa

it is a significant challenge that demands a wide skill set. i loved planting graceway, which equalled a similar blend. some initial differences include my observation that opawa requires community development across a wider age range, on a wider scale, in a more settled context. spiritual leadership demands more respect for historically formed spiritualities. entreprenurial re:emergence requires a need to lay foundations of missional and cultural understanding.

opawa
re:emerging

sermons, time, engaging

with the loss of a youth pastor at opawa, we have an input/speaking/preaching “hole” in our evening services. crisis or opportunity?

the church has about 150 people at a morning service and about 40-50 people in the evening, some repeats but generally much more youth~full.

we are in the process of looking for someone else to join the pastoral team, but in the short term the hole will not be filled.

i am reluctant to get a whole string of guest preachers in. i work 3 days/week for the church and dont want to serve up 2 different sermons a week.

so i have been thinking. one option is that in the evenings we “discuss and apply” the morning.
so i preach as per normal in the morning.

then in the evening i provide a brief re-summary of what I preached, so that those not there in the morning are brought up to speed.
then i provide a range of options: for example
– discuss what does this mean for a work situation
– discuss what does this mean for a contemporary news situation
– take some paints and express this text in colours.
– write a poem in response to this text
– work on an emotional exegesis of this text.

ie a range of interactive options. what do you think? crisis or opportunity?

Working the art

I did two art installations (of 16) in the 2004 Contemporary Passion of the Christ art exhibition at church. The aim is not high quality art, but interactivity – an engaging Easter experience.

One of the art installations I did was the “last bbq”, complete with tomato sauce, buttered bread and barbeque. People are invited to sit down at a picnic table and write on a plastic plate “what are the last words you would say to this dying man”. Then they stuff their plate in the rubbish, before moving on through the rest of the art installation.

Today I was cleaning the plastic plates (dry-erase markers), in order to recycle them. It was a rare privilege to read what people have written and to sense that people are “working the art,” penning prayer on plastic plates and in so doing, accessing the living God of Easter.

(I will tell you about the other installation later).

Palm sand-day

When you have 7 tonnes of sand in your church, it probably means you have the largest indoor ecclesial church sand-pit in the world. Perfect for Palm sand-day!

The kids stayed in for the entire service. During the sermon they were invited to build a sand castle of the “entry to Jerusalem.”

It was very cool to preach in the middle of 7 tonnes of sand and a 30 metre wide sand-pit with groups of kids all around me building sand castles.

Question to kid: Can I borrow your palm frond?

Answer from kid: That’s not a palm frond, that’s the TV aerials around Jerusalem!

kiwis lead the way again: News flash from joe ker

1 April saw the birth here in new zealand of extreme.emerging church…

it offers fools for christ a unique experience and will make all baptists and other followers of full emmersion exstatic.