I had heard about Steve Addison from Alan hirsch and now he has a blog where he is sharing some of his insights into healthy ‘movements’.
Lots of stuff that is worth reading
While I’m mentioning folks in other denominations, I should mention that ‘Father Bob’ has a blog and it even looks like the real mc’coy.
If you watched John Safran v God you would have met Father Bob, the priest of South Melbourne in the second episode when John was ‘roadtesting catholicism’.
He’s a character…
In Saturday’s West Australian, the Catholic archbishop Barry Hickey actually placed a large ad calling all catholics back to church. ‘You won’t be disappointed’ he stated in the ad and there was a phone number to call to ‘re-enrol’.
Then the front page leading headline in today’s West was this story from our Anglican friends.
Church May Drop Sunday Service
If only it were as simple as changing the day we meet on!
Seems the Anglicans are asking the question and the catholics are just calling the people back…
How do we effectively and genuinely be the church in a world that doesn’t get all that excited about coming to a church service?
Its been a while since we have been front page news!
One of the things I actually like to do is listen to sermons – good sermons.
I like to think and engage that way. In fact it doesn’t have to be just a sermon. But I am seeking pointers to any decent stuff out there that is in MP3 format so I can download it and listen on the train or while walking etc.
Leave your hot tips in the comments section pleeze
Yeah baby!
The Forge National Summit is happening sooooon. July 1-3 in Melbourne will be the dates. You can see the flyer below for details.
This will be a significant event on the EMC landscape and it would be great to pull together people from all over to share the experience.
Drop Sally an email if you wish to know more. Click on the image to see a bigger version of it.
I sense I have I may have concerned a few of you with my questions. You may be wondering if I am struggling with what we are doing or maybe just lost.
Maybe…
download creepshow dvdrip Maybe not…
Either way I’m not feeling overly concerned. I don’t mean that flippantly or arrogantly. I think there is a time to push the questions harder and further and I presently need to do a bit of that. In fact if I don’t do that I will have just made noises about ‘rediscovering church and mission’ and not really done it at all.
That’d be a shame… and a sham.
I’m not about to make any rash decisions (yet) and may never make any rash decisions, but I am keen to keep pushing the boundaries on the questions. I don’t think I am finished asking questions and experimenting yet.
So stay tuned. I have asked these questions before but I was in a different place then myself. It seems that when you move your own position the questions change also.
Maybe we’ll be churning them thru in 3 years time again!
Yeeha…
You may be wondering… ‘why all the questions about church?’ lately, especially from someone who is theologically trained and has been in paid ministry for 15 years.
Well those two ‘disclaimers’ are actually enough reason in themselves!
A conservative evangelical theological education (as good as it was) is still an education through a very specific lens. Even though they tried to teach us ‘how to think’, there was still a lot of the ‘what’ involved. Actually come to think of it I never did an ecclesiology unit… There didn’t seem much point, we all know what ‘church’ is… don’t we?… So I thought when I was at college.
And then the reality is that 15 years of paid ministry does not put you in a position to critique a system easily. When the system pays your bills you tend to see the bright side more than the dark side. You have also invested 15 years in the system so you’d like to believe in it.
But… what if?
What if everything is not as it seems?
What if, when you take the red pill and scoot down the rabbit hole you start to see things and think things you never have before? Things that make you something of an oddity to those who are quite comfortable within the current framework, things that other who haven’t taken the red pill simply can’t see?
Well remember that the whole deal of the ‘red pill’ is that you ‘see how deep the rabbit hole goes’. You keep going and keep exploring because it is reality you seek not ‘the world as we have always known it’ (Matrix allusions ended!)
I think that theologically I can articulate what I believe the church to be, but it seems that ‘church’ has taken on a definition of its own over the years that relates specifically to its institutional framework.
Now, if you’ve read here before you’d now I am not a ‘big’ church fan, nor a ‘house’ church fan, nor a ‘funky’ church fan. I couldn’t give a toss what adjective you place on the front of the word ‘church’. I am passionately concerned with how the church (universal and local) can best operate in the world as it is now and in the local context it finds itself in. I am concerned with how we live as the people of God in a way that reflects the trinitarian nature of God (to get all theological on you) as per John 17, and how we engage in our mission in this world.
One of my real beefs with the way we have always done things is that there is a lot of time spent ‘meeting’ and getting ready to ‘meet’ and then assessing if the ‘meeting’ was any good or not. If we could take all the time spent in ‘meeting’ and convert it into time spent in contact with our local communities then we might see church in better shape.
Having said that I am convinced we do need to meet. Everybody meets and its hard (impossible?) to be a community of people if we don’t meet. The crux of my questioning does not relate to the function of the church, but more to how we can best achieve our desired outcomes while remaining true to the scriptural criteria of what constitutes a church.
I understand the church to be ‘the body of believers’ where we need each other (1 Cor 12, Eph 4), the ‘family of God’ (1 Pet 4) where we are all brothers and sisters, as well as a broader community of believers (2 Cor 1) where Christ is the head. I understand our purpose to be that of being disciples and making disciples (frame that any way like, but that’s my simple rendition of it)
So that then brings me back to the question, is our current way of being and doing church the most effective way to retain the biblical integrity of what it means to be a church and also be and make disciples?
This is where it really does help to have been outside the ‘city gate’ for a little while, to have seen the whole thing from a completely different angle. As we try to be a church and do what a church does here in Brighton we discover how difficult it is not to succumb to meeting mania – not to default to what we are familiar with – if for no other reason than it makes us feel like we are doing something worthwhile!
Perhaps the question that I am distilling towards is what is the absolute bare essential that constitutes ‘church’? What must exist for a real church to exist and then how fluid can we be with how that church is expressed so as to achieve our outcomes?
Perhaps the questions that I am also struggling with are ‘can I imagine a church that I haven’t yet seen?’ Quite literally do I have the ability to mentally concieve of anything different? I’m not sure I (or we) do. And then ‘am I willing to move towards it – and lead others towards it – even though it might look disturbingly ‘unlike’ church as we know it?’
Its a public holiday here in Perth.
A mate rang up yesterday to see if I wanted to head out on a deep sea fishing charter. I said ‘no’ thinking the weather would be lousy and also because I wanted to spend the day with Danelle and the kids.
We were both right about the weather. This morning there were light offshores and it was very nice, but by 1.00 the rain was coming in and the wind was kicking up. It would have been a fun trip home from 80 kms out, not to mention very very cold!
So instead we took the kids to the model railway exhibition an event I expected to be fairly sparsely attended and hosted in a back room somewhere. I was wrong on that one!
It seemed every man and his kids were out to see the trains today and it was a big gig. We finally found a parking space and hustled into the show area where we spent the next hour jostling for a close up spot in front of the train displays.
They were very good and the kids were fascinated, but I had no idea it was such a popular pursuit. A guy standing next to me at one point said it well ‘its a whole little subculture all of its own isn’t it?’
mmmm hmmm…
Here are some more thoughts on my recent post where I raised some questions about church and how we do it.
I was discussing this last night with Danelle and some friends. My friend’s church has a recently been experiencing a ‘fading attendance’, with 110 or so ‘on the books’, but only 50 or 60 there on any given Sunday. Ironically their offerings are going thru the roof and they have a huge cash surplus. It seems the people are still committed enough to give large slabs of money even if they can’t get to the service each week. Are they really committed to the community if they don’t front at the Sunday AM gig or is their offering just a conscience appeaser?
I tend to lean towards believing the people are very likely committed to the church in their minds, and they don’t notice or don’t get concerned if they miss a few Sundays. Its usually us as pastors who notice most if people don’t come. It raises the question again ‘what priority do we need to place on attendance at a service?’ Maybe it is worth asking do we expect people to attend too many services?
As I was driving home with Danelle we began to talk about her creative memories stuff (scrapbooking) and how that operates.
As a committed consultant she has the opportunity to attend 2 or maybe even 3 meetings a month to help her develop in her skills and abilities. She goes to just 1. It is enough to help her feel connnected and to keep her inspired. She said that if she were able to go to more she would probably feel more inspired and would be a better more effective consultant.
As well as these meetings she catches up regularly by phone/email/coffee with the other girls ‘up’ from her and ‘down’ from her. It seems this is all she needs to keep cruising along in her position.
Some girls have dropped out of their consultant roles, usually because they are not committed to the task firstly, but also because they do not access the support services that will keep them charged up.
The parallels are obvious.
Danelle is a passionate scrapper and very committed to the whole scene, but it doesn’t take two meetings a week to keep her focused.
Maybe we need to learn from that. Perhaps we can also learn from the way scrappers spread their virus. Of course once you add in $$$ everything shifts in balance a little.
I guess I am still wondering about how we really discern what is our tradition and what is core to the gospel. Perhaps even beyond that I ask ‘what is good healthy tradition?’ and what is binding us up?
We had a really good meeting this morning as a ‘church’. It wasn’t rocket science, but it was as significant as we were willing to make it. Something is stirring in me as I wonder what we need to cling to and what we need to hold loosely. The struggle for me is that in holding some stuff loosely we may ‘blow it up’, whatever that looks like. But I sense we need to push the boundaries of our ecclesiology quite a bit more to see ourselves functioning healthily in this culture.
