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!

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.

download blueberry divx

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 not often you get an essay submitted that makes you want to read on after the first paragraph, but this one sure did! Penny, one of our .acom students from the first Forge intensive has given me her permission to post it on here.

If you are or have been a youth pastor then you will know this scene only too well…

“the last straw??

“The guy with the smoke machine rang and he’s not coming anymore, it’s gonna be crap without it,” says the intern.  It’s 3 hours before a rag-tag bunch of youth arrive at our church. The boys will ogle at the underdressed ‘potentials’ from other churches as they squeal and cavort around. There will be a few blokes smoking pot ’round the back and girls crying in the dunnies.  The dodgy strains of an electric guitar will play too loudly over the sound system. Pizza will be thrown, dozens of sms’s sent…as the hormones rage on.  Close to the end of the night someone will get up and share the gospel.  Emotive music will play and kids will tick on bits of paper that they want to follow Jesus.  The leaders will get excited at the ‘great harvest’, but in two months from now, caught up in the whirlwind of organising the next big thing, we won’t even be able to remember the names of the kids- the kids who we prayed for and hugged as they cried their eyes out.

Lord, there must be a better way. Surely?

——————————————————————————————

• download elvis took a bullet free

Ouch… I’ve been there done that… Penny goes on to look at a better way to ‘do youth ministry’ and does a great job of it.

Phil McCredden got in today and is here for the next two days, with all day seminar tomorrow looking at how he and Dan have developed a multi-congregational ’emerging’ church in Melbourne.

Phil is a bloke I met via blogging so its interesting to see where things have gone since we ‘met’ a few years back!

These are the fantastic bunch of people I had the privilege to spend this weekend with. In 2002 a small group of them moved out of the local Church of Christ in the WA mining town of Kalgoorlie and reconceived of themselves as a house church network, seeking to travel light in regard to building and staffing and also looking to be flexible and open to God in their direction.

My brief over the weekend was to share some of the ideas that undergird a missional approach to church and to offer some tools to help the movement keep (or even re-ignite) a missional edge.

As with most things where a visiting speaker breezes into town and then breezes out, the proof of the pudding is in what happens next – what the people choose to do with the challenges presented. I’m looking forward to staying in touch with Peter and Carolyn and hearing more about the next leg of the journey for them.

Over the last few days an interesting discussion has been taking place on the yahoo ‘reframe’ list concerning this thing called ’emerging missional church’. My friend and co-worker Geoff has posted his thoughts on his blog.

Funnily enough my thoughts are quite different – yet we both live and operate in similar ways…

Here’s my post:

Words are very slippery.

As an ex phys ed teacher I often wondered what I would call my kids because after 10 years of teaching so many names had come to have such negative connotations… there is no way I would ever call a boy ‘Derek’, after the Derek I taught few years back.

Reality is you may like Derek as a name. I don’t. I’m not sure I ever will”

When it come to words to describe things I think they do matter, but the meaning or nuances we attach to words depends so much on our experience and understanding of them.

Up until a few weeks back I wouldn’t have given you two bob for the term ’emerging missional church’, as it seemed to have such a vague meaning. I have always been content to describe our work as ‘missionaries in our own backyard’, however the more I have pondered the term EMC the more it sits very well with me.

Why?…

Emerging – this was the bit I really didn’t like, but” now I actually hope I am always part of the ’emerging’ church – the church that is constantly adapting and taking stock of where it is at. If we are a missionary people then that is an imperative because the world is always shifting. I hope that I will be the 85 year old guy at church who supports the changes the young 50 year old pastor wants to bring in even if I don’t always understand them, because I appreciate the fact that the world changes and we need to adjust our stance too if we are to engage with it.

I hope any church I lead (I’m ok with ‘leadership’ as a word too J) will be constantly ’emerging’. I sense that the moment we stop emerging we ossify. So from seeing it as a ‘nothing’ word I have actually come full circle. I also like its earthing in emergence theory, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence ) with a sense of something coming together that is from the people and not orchestrated from above.

Missional – again this is a difficult word because it’s the ‘in’ word. Everybody is missional now – even if they’re not. But as one who feels his specific calling is to be a ‘missionary’ in Australia its simply an adjective for who I feel I am. (And yes, missionary is a word with heavy baggage too!)

In my experience it doesn’t have the same ‘combative’ tones Geoff mentioned, but perhaps that’s where our paths have differed. Or maybe it’s also that I view and approach mission in a different way? (Then again maybe we don’t – but the word resonates differently for us)

If mission is sharing God’s love with the world then let’s be missional churches – we can’t not be. I sense for some that ‘missional’ with an intentional edge to it feels abrasive or intrusive. However Jesus was the one who came to ‘seek and save what was lost’ – a very intentional act, the one who sent the disciples out in twos to preach the kingdom of God etc. And if Paul or the early apostles are any kind of models, then intentional strategic mission (with a very pointy end sometimes) has some strong roots in scripture.

Church – so” this is also a loaded word, but again I am for redeeming it rather than ditching it. As the body of Christ – his representatives here on earth we are ‘the church’. (I appreciate Geoff’s take on this, but I also see other images of the body throughout scripture.)

Again I have had very positive experiences of church all thru life and have developed great love for ‘the church’. I sense part of my own calling is to be about developing expressions of church that resonate with the people in my neighbourhood and in that I am very content.

Actually as ‘Upstream Communities’ in Brighton, we see ourselves very clearly as a missionary team – much like any overseas mission team – there to do mission and see indigenous faith communities develop. If the EMC is simply about funky new ways to do ‘post-modern’ church then I’ll pass on it. ‘Funky’ churches don’t produce disciples of Jesus Christ any more than meat and two veg churches.

Hopefully as those of us who are exploring new ways of doing mission express ourselves in different ways we will discover healthy ways to make authentic disciples of Jesus. That’s gotta be the end game.

So”all these words sit well with me and they are an accurate description of my experience.

Will we ever find words that fit perfectly our lives and experiences?

I doubt it!

So while it definitely matters what words we choose, we also need to simply step back and appreciate that words that resonate with you may not with me and vice-versa.

FWIW

Steve Said is doing some research over here and would value feedback from people doing ’emerging church’ stuff.

Go over and give him your two bobs worth!

Yes…

You heard it first here. As of today emerging church leaders around the globe have decided to call it quits and go back to what they have always known.

A worldwide blog hook-up was followed by an amazing show of unity, in which every emerging church around the world has agreed to disband, give their cash reserves to an established church, and join them on Sundays.

Emerging church leader Ima Stounded has remarked that "this is probably the best thing for the movement as it will prevent us from becoming just another tired denomination that will need tranforming in a few years time. Now we can kick back, relax and let others do all the hard work. I’m quite looking forward to it!"

I’m a little sad that we have had to close our own church but it does allow for more time to go fishing.

I guess that also signals the end of this blog… Church is over… go home.

If you’d like to read more about all the developments then go here

lost stallions the journey home divx online

. Link via Phil.