I discovered this week was national continence week.
I reckon I could have had some fun with that!
For those who need it this is an invaluable resource… Never get caught short again.
National Continence Week
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Monthly Archives: August 2004
Tis Good
Just spent the evening catching up with Al Hirsch and chewing over all that’s been going down the last few months. Its always good to sense a kindred spirit and a person on a shared wavelength. Its nice when its not hard work to hang with someone.
Looking forward to the start of the Forge intensive tomorrow!
In 50 Words or Less
Can You See How it Happens?…
Why are our churches like they are?
Why do we meet on Sundays?…
Why do we have separate kids and youth ministries?…
Why do we take communion as thimbles and crackers?…
Why do we meet in big buildings?
Why do programs and committees seem so prevalent?
As one who is right in the formative stages of a new community and tossing around a heap of questions about the form we will take in our gatherings I have often had glimpses of why things have shaped up as they have in the established church.
Read on if you dare…
Currently we meet as a team on a Tuesday night, usually at 7.30pm and its normally just the adults who participate in the meeting.
Recently we spoke about the place of kids in our meetings and agreed (not surprisingly!) that we value our children and want them to have the opportunity to meet with us in some form. Hmmm… 7.30pm on a Tuesday night. Kids go to sleep on week nights at that time… When might be a good time?… the weekend?… Maybe… Saturday?… Nope too busy… Sunday?… Sunday!?…
And there are kids of different ages spread right thru from 16 months to 17 years old. Can we genuinely engage them all in what we do? Can we do it every week? Will the kids enjoy it? Will we? Maybe enjoying our time together isn’t the key. Maybe togetherness is, so we will all have a lousy time but have it together?… You think?!…
Or maybe we need age specific groups for them?… A kids minist… and a yout… Come to think of it, its kinda hard for all us to feel ‘close’ when we meet as a big group and to really peer into each other’s lives. I know! Why don’t we have smaller groups?… no! – not small groups – ‘smaller groups’…
We are currently a ‘closed group’ while we weld together as a team and establish some directional stuff, but once we become open it’ll be increasingly difficult to meet in homes when we all want to get together – and while we may be able to split into multiple groups there will be a need for big gatherings at some point. So… Maybe we could hire a venue… a hall… or start a building fund!…
Are you seeing where this baby is headed?…
Eating together is great – we can have communion over a meal. Food really helps us gel and just hang out, but it does mean work each time for people – work that I know Danelle has sometimes found hard, with kids to bath and other stuff to do. Maybe we can still have communion, but make it a more symbolic act… What about we get some small cups and cut up some cubes of bread?…
And what to do each each week? We can’t make it up as we go and we can’t leave it to one person. Why not develop a team to oversee it? The team can pull the gatherings together and get other people involved as appropriate. Actually we might need lots of teams for different things at different times…
Looking ominous?…
Now quite frankly I don’t give a fig if we meet on Tuesday nights at 7.30pm, Sunday mornings at 9.30am or Wednesday afternoons at 2.00pm. I am not worried if we do things all together or sometimes in age groups. I am fine with cheap grape juice and cubes of wholemeal if that is where we finish up. I made a decision a long time ago to do whatever works for the mission and the team, so while I have my preferences I’ll do what works for all of us. Count me in and kick me if I complain!
Folks we have to be careful not to fall into old patterns because they are comfortable, but, we have to be equally careful not to reject old practices simply because they are what we used to do. They may actually be well established for good reasons.
Mindless reactionism and wild pendulum swinging that simply cause us to cynically see the negative in all tradition are traits that do the emerging church scene no favours at all. We often look like petulant adolescents refusing to do what our parents do, simply because we can.
That’s not to say we simply fall into line, sing hillsongs, put on dramas and have 6 point ‘how to’ sermons. (BTW songs can be a good way to worship, dramas often communicate what teaching can’t and ‘how to’ sermons can often be helpful…)
So what do we do?…
Just admit that we are eventually going to follow the well established pattern, book a venue and start a Sunday gig? Come on! You know me better than that.
I keep coming back to the fact that we are seeking to be urban missionaries, and in that we are creating gatherings that are suitable to the context we find ourselves in. We have to think like missionaries and ask what is appropriate to this community. If at the end of the day as we do the serious work of missional reflection it turns out to be Sunday morning with wafers and grape juice and all the trimmings then I’ll be there.
Honestly…
I hope it won’t come to that… partly because I am selfish – I like having Sundays free of regular committments, but moreso because I really do hope we discover new ways of expressing our ecclesiological convictions that are true to both scripture and the context we are in.
It seems many of the emerging churches I have come across are funky, ‘singles clubs’ that don’t need to consider the impact children or young people have. However as we move beyond catering for the disgruntled gen-xers (and as they grow up, get married and breed) we will need to do some serious work of re-imagining church for the families.
It aint easy…
Forge Intensive Coming…
Starting this Saturday is our second Forge intensive.
Alan Hirsch is coming from the east along with Kim Hammond to be the key presenters and we wil be looking at Mission, Discipleship and Spirituality, discussing the whole deal of developing a healthy spirituality within a missional context.
Both Kim, Alan and Brian Stitt have some great stuff to contribute on this theme and I think it will be good for us to think differently about spirituality. Rather than seeing it as purely a contemplative exercise we can see it as something that happens in more normal every day experiences as well as in the active practices of mission and service.
Lately I have been using the car as a place to pray. I never used to do that – it seemed like a cop out for simply stopping to be with God (and it probably was) but when it takes 40 minutes to get to the city and you do that a few times a week its a great place to connect with God. I do a lot of intercessory prayer in the car now.
Its interesting trying to assess the momentum Forge is generating over here at present. I have been a little disappointed that only 20 people have enrolled for the intensive as we were hoping for 30ish, but maybe that’s just par for the course as you look to get something off the ground amongst a fringe crowd.
I reckon there are people out there who would find this stuff inspiring, but geting them to commit four days is sometimes a big ask.
One of the things Jim Collins discovered in ‘Good to Great’ was that momentum was gained very slowly. There was no momentus event that changed a company from good to great, but just a whole heap of small things over a long period of time. So far we have been operating a short time, but I am sometimes impatient and want to see things come along quicker.
I guess its another case of ‘get over it Andrew’…
Good to Great III – Confront the Brutal Facts
This is something we need to do more of as churches.
Collins research discovered that companies that excelled were those who were not afraid to hear tough truths about themselves.
I’m not sure who it was that said the ‘first task of leadership is to define reality’, but Colins would agree. He sees it as vital that companies deal with truth that is hitting them in the face – not the reality they wish were true.
He advocated creating a culture in which every person can be heard and respected because the ‘brutal facts’ may not (an probably won’t) come from those high on the food chain. They will likley come from those ‘on the ground’.
To create that culture he discovered that leaders:
– lead with questions not answers (that doesn’t mean the leaders didn’t know the answers but rather they heloped people explore the questions)
– engage in dialogue an debate – not cooercion – we don’t use power to achieve our ends
– conduct autopsies without blame – blame will limit our discovery of truth
– build ‘red flag mechanisms’ that turn information into information that canot be ignored. (too long to explain – but a magic idea!)
I guess if our churches genuinely confronted the brutal facts it might be way too scary…
Today I am…
Today was one of those identity crisis days!
I spent some time this morning at the beach praying (that was nice) before heading off to Sorrento Quays to meet with ex blogger Bruce Stuart. Bruce and Sarah (who is Andrew Jones’ sister) came back from Prague last year and have started a new business here in Perth with a pastoral mission edge. We were catching up to hear how it was all progressing and to discuss the possibility of the Baptist denomination seeing them as church planters. It was great to catch Bruce and see someone who is doing what they love doing. While Bruce is a mate I was also wearing my denominational church planters hat during that meeting.
From there I sat by the beach and wrote some emails while the surf pounded in – big swell today! The first was to our local residents asociation regarding the youth work around here. I have recently got involved with the key players to try and help the youth group get itself better established. Its not a church gig, but just a bunch of people wanting to make something good happen. That was my Brighton mission hat
There were also emails to those who have signed up for the Forge Intensive with all the final details. (WA Forge director’s hat)
From there it was off to Karrinyup shops to grab some lunch. While eating lunch I was reading over some netball lesson plans. I am currently trying to teach netball and know very little about it. Yep – Phys Ed teachers hat!
The afternoon started with a ‘Baptist Church Growth Meeting’, a team I sit on which oversees mission type stuff in the denomination. I am the church planting rep so I changed hats again.
Getting home I made phone calls to our community development officer and a team member. Then I spoke to someone who wanted me to come and preach at their church later this year.
I intentionally made all the calls so that after dinner I could chill and be a dad, husband and couch potato. That said I have just got back from a 4 km run!
Its not often I analyse the day quite like that, but it is fairly typical of what happens in a normal day for me. Sometimes I love the variety and other times it feels like I am spreading myself thin and not acomplishing as much.
But… that’s my life!
3 New Blogs
Check the sidebar for 3 new blogs that I have been reading lately – all local Perth people.
1. SaintGaz – one of our Forge interns who has just started planting a church called Myriad. A top bloke having a crack at something very adventurous.
2. Phil Baker – senior pastor of the Riverview Church, the biggest church in Perth. Phil’s blog is a real mix of current affairs, spirituality and trivia. (Yes… an ’emerging church’ pastor linking to a megachurch pastor… get over it those who are ‘anti-big’!…)
3. Lionfish – local bloke who surfs and attends Riverview church. That’s about all I know of LF.
I find I tend to read local blogs as often as some of my favourites (you know who you are!) simply because we live in the same backyard.
Good to Great II
Continuing on from yesterday…
Just before I do, its been said a lot lately that we shoudn’t emulate the business world with our practices in the church. Another pendulum swing… (yawn) I would say we shouldn’t emulate some of the practices of the business world but there is a hell of a lot of wisdom we can learn from. This book is full of it.
The second criteria of companies that made the cut as exceptional was that they worked on ‘who first then what’.
Collins discovered that it is critical to get the right people on the bus before you decide where the bus is headed. he believes that the right people will sort out the ‘what’ questions easily.
They discovered that the right people are not motivated by money. They don’t come or hang around because of the pay – they are intriniscally motivated and would be great if there were no money involved at all.
They described companies that chose the right people as ‘rigorous but not ruthless’. In that they made the tough calls if people weren’t shaping up, but never in a callous fashion.
Three practical disciplines in this area they suggest:
1. When in doubt don’t hire – keep looking. How many churches just grab the closest fit, rather than the brst fit because we need someone in the driver’s seat?
2. When you know you need to make a people change, act. He says when you need to tightly manage someone you have made a hiring mistake… Oh yes. I have been there. Its easy to get people into positions but it can be hell to get them out. On the other hand he says people can still be valuable, but just sitting in the wrong seat on the bus.
3. Put your best people on your biggest opportunities not your biggest problems. Its about using talent wisely and freeing those gifted people to fly rather than bogging them down with problem solving.