Monthly Archives: January 2006

Amway – business or cult?

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I wouldn’t describe myself as the most patient man in the world, but I can put up with a fair bit of nonsense before getting narked.

However one bunch of people I simply cannot abide , are those so called ‘friends’ who call to show me a ‘business plan’, a great way of becoming financially independent.

I remember the first time it happened. He was a youth group leader and I was his youth pastor. I didn’t even smell it coming. I liked the guy and thought he liked me. Then next thing I know he is drawing pictures and asking me what I want more than anything else in life… (For you to go home dropkick!)

Then there was the ex youth pastor, turned church planter, who I hardly knew, who called to see how I was going. I found his interest nice as he was a well known idenity in the Perth scene. Then he asked if he could show me a business plan… I politely told him I wasn’t interested. Sometimes I am too nice for my own good. (No – its true!)

Then two of the folks in my last youth min both hit on me, as well as a friend in the community. I went to a life coaching seminar where I met a guy who wanted to ‘explore things more with me’. I met up with him only to discover it was Amway again… There have been one or two others, but the common denominator is always the same. ‘How would you like to make more money than you have ever dreamed of and live free?’

If anyone asks me that again I think I may just ask them ‘how would you like to kiss my butt?’

I refuse Amway on several grounds:

– there is no get rich quick scheme that works and is ethical. If you want to get fast money then just rob a bank. At least its blatant theft.

– it promotes greed but under the guise of godliness, which makes it even more slimey in my opinion.

– you risk losing all your friends by having to hit on them and get them signed up

– I can’t be bothered spending ’10-15 hours a week’ on a ‘business’ when I am prefectly content. Amway suggests that I ought to be discontent with my life as it is.

– it sounds dangerously like a cult.

If anyone ever calls you to show you the plan then ask them to read this first, then meet with them and ask them how they enjoyed the book!

It is a first person insider account of a man who moved high up in Amway, did not make the momey he expected, worked his butt off in the process and was subject to incredible cultish mind contol and abusive practices.

I don’t think anyone sets off into Amway with bad intentions, but the evidence would seem to suggest that there is much research that needs doing before signing up.

So if you happen to approach me with a ‘business plan’ don’t say you haven’t been warned.

A NON email life?

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I began wondering last night how life would be without email.

I began wondering what it would be like to choose to go a month of normal life without access to email except for business/bulk mail-outs. Could I do it?…

Email is easy, convenient and accessible. It is great for conveying information quickly and simply. But it is becoming somewhat ubiquitous and probably getting used in a way that it means it is now actually detracting from personal relationships.

I wonder what it would be like to have to get on the phone every time I wanted to tell someone something or ask a question. I imagine it would result in some increased level of relationship amongst us because we would have to (at least out of politeness) ask about each other’s lives.

It would be more time consuming not to have email. But then again maybe I would just be content to relate to fewer people…

At times I feel quite overwhelmed with the number of people in my life, so it is easier to fire a quick email and wait for a reply rather than make a phone call and talk. I love email because it has given me the freedom to do that.

Occasionally I wonder what a non-email life would be like. I have been wondering what it would be like to get an auto-responder to tell people ‘Hamo is off email for Feb. You’ll have to phone him if you want to get him!’.

I’m not sure I could do it.

Or maybe I will” I’ll let you know!

Momentum

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…that clear sense that something is on the move – that there is energy and direction and enthusiasm…

I get the impression that there is substantial momentum building for us as a team. There is a great vibe, a sense of common purpose amongst us and we are all enjoying the friendships we have made in the local community.

It has been wonderful to meet people we can truly call friends rather than simply neighbours or ‘connections’.

This may be just my issue” but, when I reflect back to my time at LBC I had no real friendships outside the walls of the church. It was partly my choice to invest so much of my life inside the community, but also a function of how much a church demands of your time and your heart. I am not sure I could have disciplined myself to live differently and stayed in the system. I am fairly confident that part of this re-imagining has been learning a new way to live for myself – learning how to live in the world rather than separate from it.

Indulge me by letting me quote again from Hugh Mackay’s Winter Close on the dilemma of suburbia:

“Rich is fond of saying that the thing about Winter Close is that it fosters a real sense of community. That’s a big claim and I wish I could share Rich’s confidence in making it. Now that Sydney has grown to four million, communities are hard to come by: a common complaint among Sydneysiders is that ‘we don’t know our neighbours’ – as if that’s the neighbours fault. I’ve given up saying ‘why don’t you knock on their door and introduce yourself?’ The puzzled looks I receive make it clear I have missed the point: plenty of people like not knowing their neighbours and only pretend to complain about it. Suburbia offers the wonderful cloak of anonymity for those who want the security of proximity without any of the demands of intimacy” P.10

And on a similar theme

“The contract between neighbours is based on resistance to intimacy, so a quite different kind of closeness becomes possible: easy open, comfortable, but devoid of any ultimate responsibility or any glimpses into each other’s souls. These are adjacent lives – sometimes even parallel lives – rather than shared lives. We compensate for our physical proximity by keeping our emotional distance. These are not like relationships between friends, or even between people who work closely together – I know Maddy better than I know Rich, Abel, or Mrs Spenser, or Joe Riley. Perhaps the thing suburban life offers us is the possibility of living the life of a herd without the bonds of a tribe: proximity, familiarity, trust, support… but not intimacy. When we cross that line we cease to be neighbours and become something else” P.156

Quite interesting given that Dante’s definition of hell is proximity without intimacy… Is McKay suggesting that for many people the burbs can be hell? The last thing I want is another bunch of superficial, froth and bubble relationships. I am certainly up for more earthy, honest engagement with each other (realising of course that this takes time and trust to occur)

It is also refreshing and challenging to spend more time around people who do not see the world exactly as I do, and who at times disagree strongly with me. I don’t mind a bit of debate on the big questions of life! Actually its one of my favourite pastimes and the more I get the more alive I feel. I have always been a person who feels more alive in an Alpha group (or the equivalent) than I have in a church service. One of the fun ventures I initiated in my time at LBC was the Hills Philosophy Café, a monthly forum for armchair philosophers who were keen to debate life, religion and meaning in an agenda free environment. It was a blast!

Our clear hope in coming to Brighton is that people we meet will want to know more of the way of Jesus and will want to join us in some expression of community as we live the life of discipleship together. The challenge for me is that I can no more make this happen than I can make the sun get up in the morning. I can do my part by living what I understand to be the life of Jesus around here, but I can’t make anyone sign up for that life.

I believe this is where prayer becomes a huge priority and I would not rate it as a strong area for us as a team. I am puzzled as to where to go with it. There are various constraints that make regular prayer together very difficult and yet reality is that we will always make time for what we value.

I’d be interested to hear how others make prayer happen, that is more than tokenism and more that rigid obligation. I would love to have a group of people to meet with 2 or 3 times a week to pray for our community, but I’m not sure who they would be or how to implement it

Christocentric Healing

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Coming up on Feb 18/19 is the annual Quinns Rock Healing Festival which we were part of last year and will be part of again this year.

It was a real hoot last year being in the middle of all that was taking place and being able to pray for people’s complete healing.

You can read here free children shouldn t play with dead things if you’d like to know what we will be doing.

We may need one or two more folks for our stand, so if you reckon you can pray for people and are willing to enter a somewhat unfamiliar environment then drop me an email and we can chat.

And then there were 40, 41, 42

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All day offshores…

Sounds like surfing weather doesn’t it?!

I left home at 9.00 and headed for The Spot at Yanchep, somehow thinking it might be a fun thing to do. When I arrived there were around 40 guys in the water, a clean head high swell and many others streaming out. I stood there for 10 minutes, but couldn’t bring myself to paddle out.

Surfing in crowds just doesn’t feel like fun any more, apart from the fact that an unfit 41 year old on a malibu is plain dangerous!

And then there were 5…

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Come April there will be 5 churches in Brighton, 3 existing and 2 relatively new ones.

It began with the Anglicans who got up and running fairly early in the piece. We were next to move in and then Beachside community Church (Pentecostal) started about 7 months ago. Now there are two other Pentecostal flavours about to be added in March and April, one of Apostolic origin and the other an independent pentecostal group with COC links. I made contact with the leaders of both these churches and sincerely wished them well.

However it means that over the weekend in the local primary school there will be Friday night church, Saturday night church and Sunday night church (all pentecostal), as well as Sunday morning church – the Anglicans.

And then there is us, currently meeting in homes on a Monday night.

I am actually not sure if Brighton can sustain so many small churches of the same flavour… It will be interesting to see how it all develops. In typical church plant scenarios there is a heap of pressure on leaders to get things up and running fast so that the crowds come, the pastor gets paid and so you can offer all the goods and services of the larger churches, because if you don’t the punters will leave.

My experience has been that Brighton is not a place where church going rates highly on the agenda of weekend activities. (And why would it for people who do not see themselves as Christian) It is also suburbia where people are busy and where the middle class ethos of ‘just a little more and I’ll be happy’ predominates. Running a church service to pull a crowd is a difficult business – unless you are happy to pull the crowd from other churches.

It will be interesting to survey the landscape in 5 years time and see what has transpired…

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Ravi Zacharias is Concerned

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Mark Driscoll writes alligator ii the mutation dvd that Ravi Zacharias is concerned that the emerging church is a breeding ground for heresy.

It will be interesting to see what he has to say.

I would fairly confidently say that both this and the next generation of Christians are nowhere near as biblically literate as their parents and definitely run that risk.

It is a concern of mine that so may people who claim to be Christians simply don’t read and don’t know the what the Bible says about stuff. If we don’t know what it says then we are at risk of inventing what we think it says.

If we can arrive at heresy after reading the Bible, then I’d say we’d have a much better chance of getting there with no knowledge of it!

However this biblical illiteracy is hardly to be confined to one branch of the church. I’d say its pretty much normal in the church as a whole. While I’d hardly claim to be a biblical scholar, I am now grateful for the degree to which I was grounded in the Bible even if I do see parts of it a little differently to what I used to. (At least i know those parts exist!)

It will be interesting to see what Zacharias writes on this. While we do need to hold to orthodoxy, we also need people prepared to ask tough questions and diverge from the main track and explore if we are to learn new things.

Maybe we need to have our cake and eat it…

How to be an Evangelist

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Guy Kawasaki offers some interesting advice on how to be an evangelist. (From Addison Rd)

Here is the intro to the article…

Out of curiosity, I went to SimplyHired, a vertical search engine for jobs, and looked for openings containing the keyword “evangelist.” Amazingly, there were 611 matches–and none were for churches. It seems that “evangelist” is now a secular, mainstream job title. Indeed, the first eight matches were for evangelist jobs at Microsoft–go figure.

As people hit the streets with this title, they need a foundation of the fundamental principles of evangelism. Fulfilling this need is the purpose of today’s blog.

read on…