One of the best decisions we made in the last two years was to recruit a team of people specifically to pray for us as we live and serve here in Brighton.

I won’t claim it as my own wisdom.

Not at all… It was only after the first three weeks of living here when everything seemed to be going wrong for us, that my friend Stu asked who was praying for us? “I don’t know” I replied… “sure hope someone is!”

Shortly after that we decided to recruit a small team of people who would commit to pray for us at least weekly if not more often and really see it as part of their ministry to support us. There are only 15 or so on the team, but they are people who we are very open with and to whom we divulge whatever is going on – good and bad. I send a weekly email that tells the truth about how we are going. Lately its been quite positive and enthusiastic, but earlier in the year it was pretty gritty for a while.

There are no members of our Upstream team on the prayer team, because frankly sometimes the issues are our own inter-personal relationships and I don’t believe its fair to discuss that sort of stuff within the team.

We have seen about 1/3 of the team drop out as we have gone along, but we have also recruited new folks as we meet people who we see love us and are committed to us.

I am about to write an email asking people to consider staying with us for another 6 months (I ask people for a 6 monthly commitment) and hopefully we will have a positive response. I am quite ok with people signing off as we don’t want to be sending personal emails to people who are not genuinely committed to us.

My learning in this has been a) we need pray-ers (duh!) b) by staying in touch weekly people really do feel like they know what is going on in our lives. I am not convinced irregular contact is of much value.

I never had a prayer team as a pastor. I think I assumed (hoped) someone was praying for us – thank God for little old ladies – but now that we have been here I wouldn’t do anything differently. I am such a crap pray-er myself that its good to know people are praying for us!

The prayer team is made up of family, a couple of life long friends, folks from the eastern states, the USA, other missionaries and church planters, people from our home church and just a couple of others who care enough to pray!

If you are in this game and don’t have a prayer team then its time to get started. We kid ourselves if we think we can do God stuff without God…

I am a bit over the ‘incarnational / attractional debate’ and find myself yawning most days when it is raised, however this article highlights the dangers of simply doing whatever it takes to pull a crowd. If the aim of the game is to get more punters in the house on Sunday then why not attract them with the offer of a free house?… What the?…

FWIW Justin has done a good job comparing three different forms of evangelism – the confrontational, attractional and incarnational. Yes yes… I know these are not mutally exclusive etc etc… but what he does is actually highlights the strenghts and weaknesses of each mode.

I have always said that the way we (upstream) are choosing to approach things has some inherent weaknesses – because every system does – but as I look at the options, the ‘missionary’ approach to developing a church community (which is not neccesarily exclusively incarnational) is the one that I believe has the most currency theologically.

Yes its slow in its start up, but it does avoid the temptation to simply put on a better show so the crowds will come. Local Perth folks may be interested in the reflections of Andrew Dowsett on his time here in the land of Oz. Andrew is no mug and has some interesting observations from the point of view of one looking in from the outside. (I haven’t agreed with all of his thoughts – but I appreciated the way he put them out there)

Next year will be interesting in Brighton as we get another new church moving in. The Apostolic crew will be here as of April and they will be doing essentially the same kind of stuff as the Anglicans and the AOGs. I dropped in to see one of the church plant team yesterday – a really nice bloke – and I hope it goes well for them – but that will make 3 small churches all doing very much the same thing in this community alone and it will inevitably make competition for ‘market share’ fairly rigorous!

While I respect the leaders in these different churches – one has become a very good friend this year – and appreciate that their call is from God, whatever form it takes, I not at all convinced that Australia simply needs more of the same in the realm of church forms.

My mantra for a long time has been ‘many kinds of churches for many kinds of people’.

Please…

I am reading The Divine Conspiracy for the fourth time.

Its not that I enjoyed it so much the first three – but rather that I never got past the first 50 pages each time. I just couldn’t get what he was on about. I would read… read…. daydream… daydream… and then give up. I came to the conclusion that Willard was boring or I was really dumb.

My last attempt at this book was 2 or 3 years ago, just before we began this adventure here in Brighton. It still didn’t make sense.

Two nights ago I began again and in one sitting read and understood 100 pages. I couldn’t believe it!! Either Willard was no longer boring or I was no longer dumb…

Or…

What I believe is more likely the case, is that my experience over the last few years has put me in a place to understand the ‘gospel of the kingdom’, rather than the ‘gospel of sin management’ I had been part of for all my life. I think I didn’t ‘get’ Willard the first few times because I just didn’t understand the significance of what he was saying about the kingdom of God and how the gospel we communicate must focus on this rather than ‘eternal life when you die’.

As we have moved into missionary mode the gospel of the kingdom has become our gospel more and more and the ‘heaven when you die’ – while still a part of it – has ceased to be the dominant focus. It actually makes sense to me. Big sense.

In fact I am somewhat astounded at how I was unable to comprehend Willard before hand. It is a constant reminder against any kind of intellectual/theological arrogance. To think you hold the whole truth on an issue is a dangerous thing, not because truth changes, but because we can only look thru the lenses we have been provided with.

So, I think I now understand Willard because my own experience has shifted sufficiently to help me. The stuff he speaks about is not a foreign language any more. What bothers me is that it took me this long to really comprehend.

How much more do I think I know and actually have no clue about?

Someone told me recently that they would like to see a ‘clearly articulated 5 year vision’ for our adventure here in Brighton.

So would I.

But it aint gonna happen.

A 5 year plan assumes we know what will happen over the next 5 years and that we can do stuff to fit in with the developments in community/world/culture etc. I don’t think this is true any more. Life is much less linear and predictable than it was even 10-20 years ago.

The phrase ‘rapid discontinuous change’ is way overused these days, but it is a good descriptor of the world we live in. To make plans to accomplish a pre-determined vision is (in my opinion) fraught with difficulty because we are not able to predict what shape the future will take – in fact we are less able to than we ever were.

A real danger then of a ‘5 year vision’ is that we end up ‘serving the vision’ (to use ‘churchspeak’) rather than being able to adapt with changing cirumstances. We become locked in to a pre-determined imagination of what we have to do. I would suggest that for missionaries particularly ‘5 year plans’ are anathaema, because we can only progress as we get to know the context and as we observe what the Spirit is doing. To do otherwise would be fatal and would actually sabotage standard missionary principles.

There is much of me that would love a 5 year plan – because I am practical and like to work towards a predetermined goal – but when you live and serve as we have been doing you simply come to the point of realising that it is futile and even foolish to attempt something of this nature. This is something I just have to ‘get over’ and move on with.

I wonder, did the early church have a 5 year vision?interview divx download

Ok – last post for today!

Lately in our education system we have heard a lot of talk about ‘competency based’ courses where the goal is to be able to ‘do something’ ie. achieve an outcome.

What would competency based discipleship look like?

And if there was a test would we ‘pass’?

Maybe I am declaring that I am not altogether sure that discipleship has been competency based.

Today at FORGE we dug around in the APEPT (apostle/prophet etc) stuff for quite a while with Hirschy and Andrew doing a great job of sparking our thinking.

Part of the exercise was to locate ourselves in the APEPT matrix, something I never find easy.

I was sharing with Alan on the way home that my sense of calling is very clear – to communicate the gospel to ordinary Australian people in ways they can understand and then to create church communities that they will want to be part of.

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download this is england movie That has been my sense of calling for over 10 years now and I have no doubt about where I am to be investing my life.

But… when it comes to trying to fit myself into an APEPT framework it gets tricky. I feel like I am driven by a passion for seeing people come to know Jesus (evangelism), but I am also deeply aware of the need to develop church communities that are indigneous to them (apostolic). Both these things seem to sit in tension for me. Some days I am more apostolic, some days more evangelistic. Currently its a pretty even game between these two functions in my own life. Of course then you add teaching and it gets confusing. I actually feel a significant aspect of the apostolic role is to be a teacher – to communicate and protect truth. I do a lot of teaching – enjoy it and feel like I am pretty ok at it.

There are also times when I feel called to be prophetic – to call a spade a spade even if it is going to annoy a few people. I do this less, but by the nature of what we do there is a prophetic edge. Lately I feel this has been growing rather than lessening.

Then there’s the pastoral side of things. I don’t think this is my primary calling at all, but I can do it. Its not that I don’t care, its just that it doesn’t rate as high a priority as the other stuff in my psyche. I am not a gifted pastor, but I would strongly argue that if we don’t care, then we don’t look much like Jesus!

So – I feel the tension that always exists between being an evangelistic apostle who loves to teach or an apostolic evangelist who loves to teach. At times I wish the whole thing was simpler!

But I wonder if this isn’t how God intend it…

Let’s face it – whatever gifts he has given to me – whatever the make up – at the end of the day it is up to me to do what he calls me to, and be that any part of the APEPT schema.

After catching up with Sheridan I had a meeting with a small group of people to discuss an idea for a new church plant.

I have been working in the Leederville area all year and as I have observed the rhtythms of life there I see that for many people the cafe strip is a ‘home base’, its ‘their space’. I began wondering if we could start a church in a cafe in that zone – maybe with a particular focus on the professional crew?…

It was just an idea gestating quietly until one day I sat down with my good friend Stuart Wesley and I shared it with him.

“That’s great! Lets do it” he said.

“Ok – let’s” I said suddenly feeling like the idea had sprouted wings.

And in that moment the idea went from gestation to birthing.

A few people have asked me what it will look like. And that is still an unknown. The small group who came together last night were all professionals who are able to help shape something that will actually connect with that crowd. (If left to me it might be a bit low brow and grungy!)

Funnily enough a name has gelled ‘Inter-mission’, which focuses on the idea of equipping people for mission together in the Leederville office area, but also plays on the idea of a ‘break/space in the day’.

As we talked last night it seemed that we were feeling most drawn to connecting with those who are fringy Christians or spiritual seekers – people who may have dropped off the edge, but who have not lost faith as well as those who are still exploring. Our goal is not to create a weekday alternative for those Christians who can’t be bothered ‘going on Sunday’, but to create a genuine expression of church for those who may never connect in a Sunday.

From here the deal is that we will catch up again to pray over the remainder of this year and see what we sense God saying with a view to kicking something off next year some time.

It was as I went home from that first conversation with Stuart that it began to dawn on me how Paul may have done things. As I speak of planting a second church I don’t feel at all divided in my loyalties or energies. My heart is in the Brighton community, but I do feel I can lend some creative grunt to this baby to get it up and running and then leave it with a bunch of competent people to develop and expand.

I felt excited at the possibility you could plant more than one church at once! (Is that in the church planter’s handbook?…) and also excited that I could connect with folks in my work zone.download simple plan a

Fr’nklin has an interesting post here on whether we are trying to plant the gospel in bad soil.

He quotes Neil Cole as he writes:

So, if we’re planting our churches in the latest and greatest upscale subdivision…more than likely, says Cole, we are planting good seed in bad soil. However, this seems to be the default of church planting: plant your church in a nice neighborhood with nice people where you can make a nice income and your kids can have nice friends and you can have a nice budget to do the things that nice churches do. We seem to be searching for those few “camels” who can fit through the “eye of a needle” so that they can pay for us to live like them and have the things that God “needs”.

1 Corinthians 1: 27But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. 28He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things-and the things that are not-to nullify the things that are, 29so that no one may boast before him.

So what’s all that mean for a missionary in aspirational middle class suburbia?

Is this a dead end trip?…

Should we just pick up and go where there are some people a bit more willing to hear?…

I think if nothing else it causes us to question how we use our limited time. He goes on to say that ‘Cole doesn’t suggest we should abandon planting churches in bad soil, but that it shouldn’t be our focus.’

So… is suburbia ‘bad soil’ territory?

Perhaps.

In terms of hard to reach people groups, I reckon middle Australia is right up there with the toughest. When people believe that they have ‘almost made it’ and just a little more will see things right, the gospel message of self denial and cross carrying is pretty unattractive.

Of course middle Australians want their kids to have good values and to grow up ‘nice’ so we could look to snare them that way… but… I just don’t see Jesus or Paul functioning like that. Can you really imagine Jesus runing a kid’s ministry to ‘get the parents’? as I sometimes hear suggested. You have to admit it doesn’t sound much like him does it?!

I don’t think there’s any question that in a secular world its pretty tough to compete with the religion of consumerism, especially when our own lives are so infected and we live with such a high degree of syncretism. If we follow Cole’s message then we ought to put less focus on middle Australia and more on those who recognise their need and who are open.

My problem is that middle Oz makes up the great bulk of the population and someone has to have a crack at reaching them – not just running church services for Christians as good as they may be – but genuinely connecting with people in their worlds and pointing them to Christ.

Some days I would rather work with what might seem a more ‘open’ demographic, but my guess I that while the grass may look a bit greener elsewhere, the mirage of ease would soon evaporate when I arrive. I imagine that mission to different people groups simply presents different challenges and at the end of the day the key question for me is always the same.

Where has God called you to be?

When you know that the rest is pretty much a case of just getting on with it.

A good mate has just begun a new project and its web home is http://www.feedfivethousand.com jerry maguire divx online

Owen Beck is a Brighton local and has a dream for helping people in need get a feed and a few mates, so each Sunday he is heading down to a park near the church he part of with a portbable barbecue, a few sausages and some salad, cooks up a feed and invites people to join in.

The park is in the inner suburbs of Perth and he’s looking to connect with some of the people in that area who are finding life tough.

His dream is to see people doing similar things in parks all over Oz and I know he’d love to hear from people who are willing to engage in a simple act of kindness and show God’s love in practical ways.

He’s also got some confronting T Shirt designs on his website – you might like to print out an iron on sticker with some of his logos, like… ‘Jesus loves Muslims’…

Owen is a bit of a legend round Perth for his time in the Rockin Rabbi’s, a band who were a both a prophetic voice and a hell of a lot of fun. He is now a media teacher at Swan Christian High School, and still a prophetic voice.

What I like about Owen is that he simply gets up and ‘does it’. He quotes an old aboriginal man on his website who he met in the park last Sunday who says “nothin will happen if you don’t do sumthin”.

Goodonya for ‘doin sumthin’ mate!

There’s a fair bit of truth in this post.

If the aim of the game is to ‘find a decent church’ then this rings fairly true. However if we accept that church is aways going to be a fallen community, with all sorts of flaws, then maybe we can just get on with the job of mission and do our best to love those around us and be somewhat lovable by them.

Is that too negative, or does it just set us free from idealism and unrealistic expectations?