The last church I was at decided it was going to build a community centre.

The idea was that rather than build a bigger church building to get used one day a week for services, we would build a community facility that could be used as much as possible by community groups with church just meeting there on Sunday. It was deemed a ‘mission project’.

All well and good, and a pretty common idea for churches in the 90’s…

Where it got interesting though was when we began to discuss the question of who could meet there. Who would we allow to use our facility?

And here’s where the theo-logic began to get fuzzy…

Would we allow:

The local rotary club – yes of course!

The P & C – yes…

The book club – uh huh…

The philosophy club – yep…

The yoga group – hmmm… maybe… yoga does involve a spiritual aspect… not so sure, but we think so…

The Mormon choir – hmmm…. again a tricky one… they are cult after all and what if they use our building? what would that say?…

The Freemasons – too hard basket…

The Reiki group – oh I don’t think so… reiki is a new age practice and not compatible with our beliefs. They also do things that involve spiritual power.

A tarot reader – nope – definitely not.

The witches coven – absolutely not! They are against everything we are for. It would not be appropriate.

So, does it matter who meets there?

Does a tarot reader make it somehow corrupt? Or even a witches coven for that matter?

If witches pollute things then should we go to the shops, because after all witches have been known to go to shops?…

And what if the book club were to read a book like the Exorcist? Would we still allow them in?

If its a mission project are there certain kinds of people we want to outreach to and some we would prefer to avoid?

Ok, so my point of view is showing in my cynicism!

What do you think though?

Should there be any boundaries on which groups can use a community facility?

For the last couple of months I have taken Sam on Tuesdays while Danelle has taken the day to do whatever she wants. Often this involves some time reading, praying and tuning into God in a more focused way than is possible with fatboy around.

We were talking last night about this practice of taking time to read/reflect/pray/dream/think and I suggested that maybe it should be normal for everyone – that we all need to create significant space in our lives to listen to God and to think beyond the day to day.

Danelle wasn’t so sure.

She wasn’t convinced it was either possible or important for everyone to spend substantial time in reflective types of activities. She wondered whether it is down to some of us to do more thinking on behalf of all of us in a church / mission setting.

Its an interesting question.

You see in my observation people want two similar but at times disparate things. They want to be able to think thru decisions and processes, but they also want to be led with conviction. Sometimes leading with conviction can over-ride the importance of people thinking for themselves. A charismatic leader can convince people of a direction by the power of persuasion. But if people go along with a convincing idea without really owning it then ultimately it is doomed, because it lacks genuine ownership.

Maybe the skill of leadership is in doing both effectively – thinking deeply, broadly and well ahead, but also facilitating a process that helps others engage significantly with the questions.

It does mean that one or two people end up doing the bulk of the thinking.

Is this a problem, or is it just a reality that we need to face?

The idealists (see previous post) will always want everyone engaged in every decision and signing off on it with concensus. The pragmatist just does whatever works.

In our setting I accept that I do way more thinking than anyone else. I have the time and I also love thinking. (This blog is often the spill out of the thoughts in my head.) Maybe we just need to accept that those in full time jobs cannot give the level of thought to our community processes that someone with my time can. Maybe we need to factor that in to our decision making in some way.

I’d be interested to hear some other insights on this as we (Upstream) began with something of an idealist perspective on this (i.e. we all make decisions) but reality is that we don’t all think things thru as thoroughly and it often ends up that I give a pretty strong steer.

My friend Wayne Pethrick is a futurist and has some great insights into how the world is morphing.

He sent this clip thru yesterday from the article entitled. “Faith = Illness Why I’ve Had it With Religious Tolerance”. It’s a piece written by Cultural observer / critic / pundit Douglas Rushkoff about why he sees the Bible as being much more useful as a metaphorical guide to life than as a literal document.

Like any other public health crisis, the belief in religion must now be treated as a sickness. It is an epidemic, paralyzing our nation’s ability to behave in a rational way, and – given our weapons capabilities – posing an increasingly grave threat to the rest of the world…

Perhaps the best way to kill their God, in fact, is to take charge of the Bible. It is – in my own opinion as a media theorist – the Greatest Story Ever Told, and deserving of our continued support and analysis. For my part, I’m writing Testament, which I hope will bring these stories – told both in their Biblical context and as a near-future sci-fi fable – to people who might never have stumbled across them before

What’s it all mean?…

You can read the full article here.download bird on a wire dvd

One of the really valuable pieces if research done in the last few years was Alan Jamieson’s A Churchless Faith that explored why people were leaving church, but still following Jesus.

Now he has a follow up book coming out entitled Five Years On. You can read about it on Prodigal Kiwi.

The blurb says:

“This follow-up to A Churchless Faith is both fascinating and disquieting – fascinating because it shows that people rarely stand still in their journey of faith, whether or not they attend church. And disquieting because it underscores once again just how irrelevant or unhelpful the institutional church has become for so many reflective and intelligent believers today. This book provides further valuable insights into the growing phenomenon of church leavers, whose protest the church ignores at its own peril”

It comes out soon so stay tuned!

One of the things Neil Cole said last week that I deeply resonated with was that ‘most Christians don’t believe that light is more powerful than darkness’ or words to that effect otherwise it would show up in the way we live.

I have seen people stay away from ‘dark places’ and ‘dark people’ out of fear.

Fear of what?…

Why do we talk so tough and live so weak?

I was chatting today with Brad, one of our interns from the Seventh Day Adventist church. They have just completed a serious 4 day church plant training camp with 30 key leaders.

During the experience he was speaking with an aboriginal church planter who told him that when it comes to statements of faith, they use stories rather than statements.

So rather than saying ‘We believe God is the creator’, they tell the creation story. The exodus is a deliverance / salvation story. I found this a really interesting way to do things and very ‘un-evangelical’. I liked it…

It got me thinking, what stories would we include and which would we leave out?

Update: Part II is now online here

I have come back from the week in Queensland with a question that is disturbing me more and more, so I’ll try and describe it here and see where it goes.

Here are some stats I am sure you have heard:

1. 80% of young people make a ‘decision for Christ’ before the age of 18… therefore this is where we ought to invest a huge amount of our resources. I completely agree that this is a time when people are usually most open and receptive to new ideas.

2. Of those young people who make ‘decisions for Christ’ around 80% will dump their faith altogether when they get a car, go to Uni and are exposed to ‘the world’ outside of the Christian youth scene.

Hmmm… what is going on here?

While I don’t have the sources for these (the first is quoted ad nauseum in youth ministry texts and the second is based on a reliable New Zealand study which eludes me at the moment) they are somewhat true even anecdotally.

There is no question that if you want to get your ‘conversion rate’ up at church, you need a decent youth ministry where you can pull young people in and get them to respond to the ‘gospel’ in some way. Usually these will be high schoolers, but this openness can extend to early University age.

But then what?…

What on earth happens that somewhere along the line the vast majority will bail on faith and ‘go try something else’?

I don’t believe I am overstating the case. As I meet with youth pastors from all around the city and as I reflect on my own time in the youth ministry at Lesmurdie Baptist this appears to be normal. Even amongst bigger churches, while the ‘front door’ might be big, the ‘back door’ is swinging wide open also. It just isn’t quite as evident while the flurry of activity continues to mask the problem.

Noticeably the ones who stay around longer are typically either those from church families, or those who have been drawn into significant leadership roles. But for those without the ‘fences’ around them of family or structure they are very prone to wander and it seems there is little we can do to stop it.

During my 5 years as a youth pastor at Lesmurdie we saw the number of people in the youth scene grow from 30ish to around 250ish in a period of 2-3 years. It was a freaky period where we seemed to be flavour of the month for church hoppers, but there were also people saying they wanted to be Christians. There were young people regularly responding to evangelistic appeals as well as people coming to faith in one to one situations. I personally baptised a heap of new Christians and I know our youth leaders also baptised a lot. In that 3 year window I’d say that of all the new faces at church on a Sunday night around 60-70 were new Christians.

But within one year we had seen the number present on a Sunday night decline to around 120 before I finished in the role. Some simply moved on to funkier churches but most of the new Christians evporated into the ether and just gave it all away. A few hardy ones survived and are still going today, but of those from unchurched families who seemed to choose to follow Jesus very few remain.

This dilemma has disturbed me for years now and I honestly don’t know if there is a solution. But I am tired of seeing this cycle repeating over and over and feel maybe its time to say ‘enough!’ Surely we must be able to do better when it comes to discipleship of young people – because this would appear to be the core issue.

Of course…

Maybe this is what we ought to expect in the teenage years?…

Maybe its not as I describe?… Maybe we are actually reaching young people and discipling them to maturity. What do you think?

Maybe we are actually doing something wrong and need some radical shifts in our paradigm of youth ministry?…

Some thoughts to percolate discussion:

* Are teens really responding to the gospel? If so what

divx gangland

gospel would that be?

* Do we set ourselves up for this kind of situation by having youth services that can only ‘keep them’ until they are in their early 20’s at best before they feel ‘too old for the youth service,’ but also feel ‘way too young for the adult service?’ They are left in a consumer’s vacuum.

* Do we set the bar high enough for them? Do we ask enough of them? Someone has said ‘Christianity in the west won’t die because we ask too much of people, but rather because we ask too little’. On a similar note Tony Campolo once said ‘Youth is made for heroism not for pleasure’, yet much of youth ministry seems to focus on bringing young people fun rather than calling them to a life of self denial and counter-cultural living.

* Are we as their leaders too much a part of the problem to be able to offer solutions with integrity? Have we bought the whole Jesus as ‘accessory’ mindset – (Jesus as an addition to my otherwise happy middle class life) so that now we are not able to challenge young people to a life of authentic discipleship?

* Are youth pastors concerned that if they went harder on the discipleship angle that it could mean their jobs? I have seen otherwise mild mannered parents go like pit bulls after youth pastors who don’t do the expected meat and 3 veg youth group / Sunday night church gig. Do you dare to break with protocol and risk incurring the wrath of the tithing parents? Lets face it this is a real issue. Working with a handful of truly devoted followers won’t pay any bills, but I seem to remember someone speaking about the way being narrow and few finding it… Maybe we need to say ‘Screw the paycheck. We are going to have a crack at this from a different angle’.

Just for the record, I have seen so called ‘fun based’ youth ministry models produce disciples and I have also seen apparently ‘discipleship based’ models lose young people. So I am not convinced the model is the problem.

I want to chew on this question for a while and I’d be interested to hear what others think. Is it actually all rolling along nicely for us and I am missing it, or do we need to do some serious thinking about this question?

Update: Part II is now online here

One of the interesting concepts Andrew Dowsett shared at our Forge intensive last year was his belief that the various gifts mentioned in Eph 4 are part of the ‘creation order’ – ie we are born with certain unclinations and talents, (which is why non-Christian people who are entrepeneurial would appear apostolic, caring people would appear pastoral etc) however as a person is regenerated these gifts then become reconfigured and used in the ‘redemption order’. (Correct me if I have misrepresented you Andrew!)

I can certainly buy the notion that we are born with (or maybe more accurately develop in) certain gifting areas. A sensitive person is more likely to be pastoral. So… if Andrew’s theory is accurate, and it may well be, what does that mean for people with gifts of knowledge/prophecy etc.

Is it possible that a ‘pre-faith’ person is able to accurately discern spiritual stuff and may have a gift of ‘prophecy / word of knowledge’?

Matt, a Baptist youth pastor in Victoria and fellow Forge fellow asks this question

• free drop dead gorgeous

on his blog. Some interesting debate here.