Category Archives: Around the place

Faithfulness and Fire

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I was chatting with ‘R’ last week about what the coming year looks like for our church (QBC). In some ways its more of the same – a keeping going in the same direction and being faithful to what we feel God has called us to.

As we talked I had to agree that faithfulness is good, but as ‘R’ said, we really want to see some ‘fire’, some passion in the lives of people, some spiritual battles fought and won, some adventure and faith expressed in risk rather than doggedness.

We have stablilised nicely as a church. We have a healthy bunch of people who seem to get on well together and we can be grateful for that, but wouldn’t it be great to see a ‘bomb go off’ under QBC that ignites it into a dynamic community of people inspired by God and willing to take great risks of faith?

Just a balance to the need for faithfulness…

Its good to be faithful and I think we have done that one pretty well for a while now, but as we come to the book of Acts early in the year I’d like to think we would be asking ‘why doesn’t the 21st C church look a bit more like the 1st C church?’ Of course there are differences due to context, but I get the sense there was energy, conviction and power in those first Christians that is strangely foreign to us here and now.

Let’s have some fire along with the faithfulness I say!

Direction Setting or Culture Setting?

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If you had asked me what leadership was about a while back I think would have leant much more heavily towards direction setting rather than culture setting. Not that either is unimportant, but I have always tended to see the role of the leader/s as being that of choosing the direction and then planning how to implement the various strategies to move towards that direction.

And while I still do that stuff to some degree I’d have to say that I’m coming to see culture setting as way more important in the scheme of things. If we get the direction right and the culture wrong then chances are we aren’t going to head anywhere anyway because the people haven’t gelled. But get the culture right and create an environment people want to be part of and my hunch is that the rest will flow out of it much more easily.

By ‘culture setting’ I mean framing up the kind of people we will be and then living that out. Some would say this is just a natural by-product of any leader in a role, but I think we can let the culture of a community shape us, or we can endeavour to shape it.

So these days my question is less ‘where are we going?’ and more ‘who are we becoming?’

As part time paid church leaders its sometimes difficult to see in tangible terms just what Danelle and I do – at least that’s how I feel – but I know that a big slice of it is just this – setting a culture. Its been a couple of years now and I feel like we can see some of that culture taking shape and our identity becoming a little clearer and stronger as a church community.

Choosing a culture means we won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but then we aren’t trying to be and in that there is a great freedom to let ‘church shoppers’ know that if its glitz, pizzaz and shiny happy people with nice teeth and no problems they are after then we probably aren’t ever going to make you happy.

New Year’s Confessions

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I have a theory that new year’s resolutions are better called ‘new year’s confessions’. Generally new year’s resolutions are us saying ‘I really suck at XYZ and I want to change something about my life. This is where I am failing.’

Of course most people also know that new year’s resolutions are typically short lived and we tend to fall back into old patterns fairly easily.

Do you ever wonder why that is?

If there was one thing most of us would love to be able to do it is make a decision to change our behaviour and the stick to it.

I am wary of making any ‘resolutions’ these days partly because I know I am setting myself up for failure, but also because I want to make changes regularly – not just at the end of a calendar year. I have noticed that change becomes more difficult with age and that habits become more ingrained. But if we can make ‘change’ and conformity to Christ an ‘ingrained pattern/habit’ then we have hope

Without the grace of God and the camaraderie of others on the road of discipleship I am left with sheer will-power, and often I am not that ‘willing’ to do the things that need to be done.

Familiarity

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Lately in our church gatherings when I’ve been reading from the Bible I just pull up the text on my iPhone and read it like that. I never carry a Bible with me these days and don’t use my old blue NIV much at all either. It has served me faithfully for around 25 years, but now even at home I sit with my phone or laptop and use them in preference to the hardcopy.

Its just words – and how you access them doesn’t matter right?

I believe that’s a completely true statement, but this morning in church as two different people read the Bible – one from phone and the other from book I noticed that I felt different.

It felt strange seeing ‘the Bible’ read from a phone, whereas seeing it read from a leather bound book felt ‘right’ and maybe even curiously more authoritative…

What’s with that hey?…

I am guessing its just conditioning. Similar to what someone might experience if they went from spending all of their life meeting in a cathedral to meeting in a family room. But it also served as a reminder that these familiar physical objects, spaces and experiences trigger things in us that may be helpful or unhelpful to what we are trying to achieve.

I imagine we will see more and more Bible being read from phone, iPads and the like, but I imagine it will take a while to ‘adjust the settings’ in our psyche to give it the same legitimacy as hard copy.

Funny creatures aren’t we…

A Walk Down The Road

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How do you make decisions?

How do you know which way to turn in different circumstances?

My advice to people has been to ‘walk down the road a bit’. By that I mean imagine yourself in the various situations that may possible. Really feel/visualise what it would be like to be there and ask ‘is this what I want?’

Last weekend we went away to Bridgetown for a good mate’s 40th birthday. No kids, no noise, no agenda, just relaxing and catching our breath with some old friends. Nice…

If you’ve been a regular reader you’d know that I am a bit discontent with life as it stands for me at the moment. I have been wondering is there a ‘next step’ I am missing. Is there something more for me to do.

Lately my retic work has been overwhelming to the point where I have offloaded a bunch of work to a mate and then actually asked a guy to subcontract to me. I have considered expanding before but rejected the idea as out of keeping with what I want to do in life.

But I’ve been re-thinking.

So Danelle and I chatted about it. And we took a ‘walk down the road’. We began to imagine what life would be like if I expanded the business and really ramped it up. I identified 5 advantages:

a) We make more money

b) We develop a genuinely saleable asset

c) I ease the stress on my own body

d) We provide work for others and have an opportunity to help people

e) I get a new challenge in life

Each of those advantages is very appealing in its own right and the combination of the 5 looks like a no brainer. Except that when I consider expansion I actually feel ill.

We discussed the plan of putting one car/trailer on the road each year, ramping up the marketing, moving me into quoting etc etc. I reckon we could do it…

But I don’t want to. It’s partly that I don’t want the added stress, but partly too that I doubt I could effectively lead a Christian community if my primary focus was in another project.

We gave it some thought. We really ‘walked down the road’, but while we were there we didn’t really like what we saw. The somewhat obsessive aspect of my personality would be fired up and I imagine I would be mono-focused for as long as it took to make it a healthy thriving business.

To get to there means that emotional energy gets stripped from other places. Danelle, family, church and so on…

There’s a price to pay for success and its a price I’m not up for.

We took that walk down the road, but we didn’t particularly like what we saw… so we continue on where we are at. but we took the walk. If you never take the walk then you never know…

Kinda Like Potatoes

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For as long as I can remember I have been one of those focused, passionate and at times driven people, who finds it hard to sit still for long and is always embarking on some kind of new project. Right from the early years of high school I have had a very clear sense of what I have wanted to do with my life and the jobs/roles I have wanted to play. I was always going somewhere, working on something or other and definitely couldn’t understand people who couldn’t clearly articulate their life’s calling and direction.

So the last few years have caught me off guard and I am still not sure what to make of them. Now instead of having that laser clear sense of purpose in life I feel like I have some big general objectives, but what I do to move towards them is less important. Also less important is the pace I move at. Its ok to jog rather than continually run hard.

Its been hard to trace the source of the shifts. I know some of it is stage of life. I heard it said ‘we climb mountains in our 30’s and we enjoy those mountains in our 40’s’ so I get some of that, but I’m still feeling somewhat disoriented by the new space and not even sure if its a place I want to permanently live.

Right now some of it comes from my struggles in my paid employment. My business is going well, really well and I could easily expand it, but I have made a conscious choice not to. I don’t want or need the headaches and responsibility that go with a bigger organisation, and right now the financial pay offs would not even close to being worth the emotional and time investment. But lately I’ve been struggling to enjoy it. I find it hard to get out of bed some mornings and the thought of another day of hard physical grunt work makes me weary before I even move. That said, I love the freedom that comes with being my own boss and the decent income that the business provides.

The other hat I wear is that of paid church leader and lately I have been enjoying that much more as our community has begun to get healthy. I asked friend who has been part of the church just for this year what he saw in the church when he arrived and he described as ‘something of a fixer upper’. A great image I thought and this year we have been involved in trying to restore some of its beauty. Its been an enjoyable year and after coming close to giving it all away in January we are feeling much more connected to the community and optimistic about the future.

But around this time of year I regularly have ‘I don’t want to be a pastor anymore.’ days. They are directly proportional to the amount of retic work I do and the increase in temperature. For 3 days of the week I go very hard at physical work so come Friday morning I am usually pretty wiped out. Thursday night has become my ‘Friday’ and Friday my day when I try to bash out a sermon. In slow retic times this wasn’t an issue, but now that things are firing again I’m struggling to keep up and conscious of just wanting to say ‘bugger it’.

Some days I want to quit the business and do something else but I have no idea quite what… I think during my Forge days I worked well as a coach / consultant, and I wouldn’t mind some of that sort of work again. Those roles are typically hard to find and I am not sure quite where I would fit these days. It would also mean a huge drop in earning and having to navigate that to make ends meet. Then there are days when I figure I will just quit being a pastor and run my business for an extra day a week. I sometimes feel relieved at the thought of that scenario and then there are days when it feels like one huge backward step. I completely ‘get’ the importance of living our faith in every aspect of life and making work and faith sync but I am not convinced that my business is making a huge contribution to the world and is much more than a source of income.

I do know God has gifted me to lead and communicate so I feel a responsibility to use those gifts in some form and at present ‘quitting’ my church job isn’t seriously on the radar. Its just something I’d like to do when I feel weary and swamped.

As I look around I see my peers in church leadership broadly heading in two different direction. Some are really ramping it up and doing everything they can to make the pastoral role a life ‘career’ and then there are others who seem to have ‘been there done that’ and have moved on to other work, sometimes willingly and sometimes because the church wasn’t what they had hoped it would be.

So in terms of vocation life feels somewhat hazy and seems to be in the same holding pattern its been for the last few years. I’m not actually convinced there will be any thunderbolts out of the blue to knock me off my feet, but I wouldn’t mind one all the same.

I occasionally think of Moses and the years he spent as a shepherd with Jethro before he saw the bush. I am guessing they were fairly unexciting years and possibly he wondered to himself ‘where is this all headed?…’ Maybe he just resigned himself to a shepherding life…

I feel like I have lived and worked out of my ‘sweet spot’ for about 25 years so this is still unfamiliar territory. Its not that its bitter, or distasteful. Its kinda like potatoes. It does the job and you can make the most of it, but there are days when it just doesn’t have the spice I would like.

Still potatoes are better than no potatoes…

I Probably Shouldn’t Tell You This But…

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… living in Yanchep is paradise.

We have been here for 4 months now and some days find ourselves wondering ‘why did it take us so long to do this?’ Ok, so when you’re a pastor/church planter you are somewhat limited in where you can live by the geography of your missional community and up here we are a little further away than I would usually choose, but, we are loving life and wishing we had done this years ago.

In the thinking it thru we were worried that maybe it would be too far out, maybe the driving would kill us, the lack of convenience would annoy us and we may end up disconnected from everyone else.

And there’s no question there is a price you pay for quietness, seclusion and a different pace of life.

But I’d have to say that for us the benefits far outweigh the costs. We live in a house that feels like a holiday home – even 4 months after moving in. We live just across the road from the beach and we make sure we get full value from that. We wake up to dead quiet every morning – not a sound can be heard at 6.00am except for the waves breaking on the beach (and occasionally the crows going nuts.) We have good friends nearby and our church community just down the road.

But its something more intangible that we feel here and I don’t know that I can articulate it well. There is something in the geography, something in the ‘architecture’, something in the ethos of the place… I dunno I can’t really nail it.

We had hoped to one day live in a country town, but the possibilities of that are slimming as we bed down for a bit longer in the city and as the kids put their roots down. But living here really is the best of both worlds. We are a 10 minute drive from civilisation, (shops, take aways, movies…) but in the little pocket of ‘old Yanchep’ that we live in you feel like you could be in a little coastal town far away.

For the last 4 months I have been using ‘Pray as You Go’ each morning as I drive from home to Butler down Marmion Ave. I love the meditative aspect it offers and the way it make a 10 minute drive a beautiful way to start the day.

As yet we have no plans to try and kick start any kind of church up here. (It still surprises me that we would move into an area with virtually no churches and not want to start one) But we feel very committed to our friends and ‘family’ at QBC and to the community that is building there. So at least for now we are well bedded down there.

So if you’re wondering ‘where to next?’ I have to say that Yanchep might surprise you. Maybe not the new parts which still look like suburbia but with a longer drive. Instead somewhere in the old section where you can smell the seaweed and where the sand dunes dictate the shape of your block – where you might have a fence… or not… where you can hideaway if you want to, or come out to play…

Its good…

A Teacher Again

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I must admit I find it hard to imagine re-entering a school classroom again, but I have been really enjoying teaching my kids creative writing on Monday mornings.

It started because Danelle was feeling a bit under the pump and needed a break. We ‘job share’ with our church roles and she has had a lot to do lately. But it has also come to be something both I and the kids enjoy. I love writing and especially the creative aspect, so it taps into one of my passions and its been great to share it with them and see them really try to produce some good writing.

For a while I was adjusting my expectations from year 11/12 standards and work rate to year 4/5 but I have just decided to expect a lot from them, because typically you get whatever you expect and I think most students are capable of more than they ever know. They just tend not to get encouraged, inspired or stretched.

When I gave teaching away it was because I had lost passion for it, so it has been nice to feel some of it return and to be able to invest that in some lovely little people who actually want to learn.

So now I look forward to Mondays and the opportunity to teach and foster creativity in my own kids. Quite a buzz really!

The Unblogger

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There was a time when I would write 2 or 3 posts a day on this blog. Much of it revolved around theological stuff, but there was plenty of ‘general silliness’ to keep it human.

These days I don’t write much, mainly because I don’t seem to have the same headspace to create ideas and then the time in the day (or the energy) to articulate those thoughts.

I often find myself having a bloggable thought while I’m at work, but by the time I get home it has either faded into distant memory, or I’m too weary to sit at a computer and try to articulate something thought provoking. So the blog is on a ‘go slow’ indefinitely. I’m not going to shut it down as I’m guessing there will come a time in life again when I have time to focus and write coherently. I actually love writing and would like to get back into it, but for now I’m in a different space in life

Part of it is the drain that physical work puts on me. I enjoy grunt work, but by the same token I often come home exhausted and on the days I’m not doing physical work in someone else’s yard I am likely to be working around my own.

I think the advent of facebook has also contributed to a decline in my own blogging. Now its easy to offer a snippet of an idea rather that fleshing it out. I’m not convinced its a good thing – but that’s just how it is at the moment. I occasionally consider ditching my facebook account because it is a time waster and it is like ‘junk food’, but for now the benefits of connection outweigh the negatives.

So if you’re still reading then I will be in touch occasionally, but probably not that often.