Whirlwind Weekend in Sunny Melbourne…

I have just got back from spending Saturday with the NCCC church plant team, sharing some of our learning from the first twelve months in

Brighton

and hearing the journey they have been on. It was a great to meet the guys who will be the missional team in

South Morang

and to be part of their first ever team meeting. We have a lot in common as missionaries to middle Australian suburbia so it will be really good to learn from each other as we go.

At the end of the day Nigel, (the team leader) started his own blog and you can tune into their story a bit more over here. They are a fantastic bunch of people so drop over and tune into their story.

Then today I was with the Forge National team sharing learning from the last 6 months, praying, discussing and dreaming our way into the future. There was a great sense of synergy and the holy spirit at work as we met. It seems that all of us have been arriving at the conclusion somewhat independently that the primary objective of Forge is simply to train first world missionaries who will take seriously the task of creating genuine disciples of Jesus Christs.

We are not primarily a church planting organisation, rather we are a mission training network, seeking to develop people who will be fit for the task of mission in this environment. Of course because we believe church flows out of mission we will be training people in sound biblical ecclesiology so that they are able to develop indigenous communities that are both true to scripture and true to culture.

At the end of the day we had a bloggers meet up for dinner at an Indian restaurant in Northcote before heading out to the airport. Present were Phil & Dan, Darren, LT, Paul, Luke and myself. Again it was great to put faces to the names and stories that I have been engaged with for quite a while.

However as with most short trips I make east I tried to keep my body on

Perth

time, which (with daylight saving) means the equivalent of 4.30am starts each day. So today I am hammered” The Greek family next door to Nigel’s place  decided to party last night and partied loud and hard” They finished around 5.00am. I think I slept a short while in there.

In a perfect world I’d take tomorrow off and relax.

It’s not a perfect world though – its frantic February – so I’ll be rolling along like a mad dog for a few weeks yet.

Rewind Replay?

Here’s a thought for you to ponder while I am away in that wonderful city of Melbourne…

Is the Emerging Missional Church movement nothing more than the Jesus movement of the 60s and 70s revisited?

LifecoverIts a question that has been tossed at me a few times lately and I’m just now doing some research on the answer to it.

I was born in 1964, and grew up in a fundamentalist Irish Baptist church so I didn’t have a lot of exposure to the whole scene, nor would I have made a lot of sense of it. A couple of older somewhat cynical pastors who were around then tell me we are just re-inventing the wheel and painting it a different colour. My gut says we aren’t, but I have nothing to base that feeling on.

I read this

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short blogpost of the same question here and have also been reading here, here and here.

Here’s an interesting quote:

"By most accounts, the Jesus People Movement began in 1967 with the opening of a small storefront evangelical mission called the Living Room in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury district."

Did you know that Darren?

I have been very inspired by Keith Green, Larry Norman (watch the vid intro – he looks olllldddd!) and other products of the movement, but my sense of it all from an uninformed distance is that while there was an emphasis on reaching the lost in contextual ways, the end result was to get em back into fairly stock standard organised churches. There was a mission focus but not neccessarily a missional ecclesiology.

Am I right on that or wrong?

If you are 50 or over you might have more insight than me into this question. Of course chances are if you are 50 or over you won’t be reading blogs 🙂

The Jesus movement did produce some interesting characters. Lonnie Frisbee (is that a real name ) is being remembered here and this bloke gave whole new meaning to Jesus call to take up your cross daily and follow me. He did, and he’s still doing it. He even gives instructions for making your own cross!

If I ever get round to doing my masters I reckon this could be an interesting project.

To finish a quote from one of my heroes:

"The only music minister to whom the Lord will say, "Well done, thy good and faithful servant," is the one whose life proves what their lyrics are saying, and to whom music is the least important part of their life. Glorifying the only worthy One has to be a minister’s most important goal!" – Keith Green

Frantic February Continues

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Another busy day bites the dust!

armageddon online I’m not complaining. I’d rather have more to do than less – January I was almost bored at times.

Today I caught up with Bruce and Lee (separate people 🙂 down at the Boat. It was good to meet up with these guys.

Tomorrow I am off to Melbourne to spend some time with Phil’s church, sharing some of what we have learnt as a church plant team here in Brighton as well as having a meeting of the Forge national team.

Danelle and kids head up to Port Hedland on Saturday so we won’t see each other for about a week… Bummer. I get back on Sunday and then on Tuesday we have an SU retreat down in Busselton.

Then its the New Age Festival that weekend…

Yeh… its a little too busy, but that’s just life sometimes.

Right…

I’ve just been watching an SBS show on the religious right movement, looking at a range of stuff from conservative evangelicals to nutbag fundies.

It was pretty boring. Hmmm…

Desperate housewives was defintely better.

That’s all.

The Whole ‘Day Off’ Thing

Waddya reckon about that?

free harry potter and the goblet of fire movie download As a pastor I always had a day off mid week. I guess it was in lieue of Sunday when we really did work our butts off.

I was going to take Thursday this year, but as I was mapping things out in the diary it just seemed foolish to sacrifice one perfectly good day of the working week when I can kick back on the weekend much easier.

I decided I’d go Saturday like every other man and his dog, but I don’t have one free Saturday in the next 4 weeks – or a Sunday for that matter. Maybe its just about being flexible?…

But then its good to have a rhythm that you slot into.

I think I may need to play some catch up in March to make up for it.

Admin!

Ok, I’m not a big fan of admin, but there are days when you just have to do it. I think I have made 20 phones calls and sent another 20 emails this morning just sorting out the junk that goes with the three different hats I wear.

The good news is I seem to seeing the debris clear.

The bad news is that there is still plenty of stuff to do before a breather!

In Love and Didn’t Know it…

This from Ob1

A budding romance between a Jordanian man and woman turned into an ugly public divorce when the couple found out that they were in fact man and wife.Separated for several months, boredom and chance briefly re-united Bakr Melhem and his wife Sanaa in an Internet chat room, the official Petra news agency said.

Bakr, who passed himself off as Adnan, fell head over heels for Sanaa, who signed off as Jamila (beautiful) and described herself as a cultured, unmarried woman – a devout Muslim whose hobby was reading, Petra said.

Cyber love blossomed between the pair for three months and soon they were making wedding plans. To pledge their troth in person, they agreed to meet in the flesh near a bus depot in the town of Zarqa, northeast of Amman.

The shock of finding out their true identities was too much for the pair.

gladiator divx Upon seeing Sanaa-alias-Jamila, Bakr-alias-Adnan turned white and screamed at the top of his lungs: "You are divorced, divorced, divorced" – the traditional manner of officially ending a marriage in Islam.

"You are a liar," Sanaa retorted before fainting, the agency said.

Source

Coaching With Spirit

street warrior dvd download Ok, I didn’t actually ‘read’ it.

I tried… but it was pretty lame. I skimmed looking for stuff that would be useful, but all in all it was pretty disappointing.

I don’t believe in wasting time reading stuff that just doesn’t fire me, so it will be going back on its shelf in the library.

Key idea?… We are spiritual beings and there is a spiritual dimension to coaching. We agree on that much. Beyond that it gets messy.

Desperate Housewives?

I saw the ad for this and decided to avoid it like the plague…

However last night in a moment of boredom I flicked on the telly and started watching. And… I like it! Its quite different to what I had imagined. I had thought it was a tacky soapie, but its actually a pretty dark comic comment on the emptiness of the so called ‘dream suburban life’ that so many desire to live.

I’ll be following the goings on in Wisteria Lane with some interest.