It was a great 4 days at Forge. We developed a genuine sense of community in the group, covered some serious ground in the emerging missional church stuff and gathered a bit of momentum for the next stage of the journey.

I feel really pleased with the result.

Today Alan and I met with a local entrepreneur who has agreed to support us significantly with real $$$$$, which will make next year a hell of a lot easier. That is a huge answer to prayer.

We also met with the Seventh Day Adventist pastors to share the Forge vision. They were a great bunch of guys who are definitely looking for answers and I reckon we might have started something good there. We had a Forge team meeting this afternoon to celebrate and reflect on the intensive before heading home for a nap. That’s how we are feeling… very weary…

Dinner was at the local Indian restaurant tonight and both of us are in for an early night.

Mission accomplished.

Yay God…

We had a discussion this evening over dinner as to whether we ought to stop using the word ‘church’ to decribe what we are doing, or, whether we just need to redeem the word and embue it with a more healthy meaning…

What would you do and why?

Its been a sensational 2 days at the Forge war of the worlds free intensive. You may have guessed I was feeling a tad apprehensive at how it would go with just 20 enrolled.

But I guess it all depends on which 20 people you have. This group are an incisive and engaging group who have really dug into the stuff and interacted with it. Its been an inspiring and valuable time.

Today Al did his stuff on missional spirituality and then Kim followed with two sessions on the chaos of family and mission as well as telling the story of the junction.

I reckon the ones who really hit the mark today were the 3 Brighton girls though!

We have created a 30 min slot for what we call ‘local heroes’ – people who are out there doing it in our own backyards. It was great to have Bec, Heidi and Danelle there from our team today and rather than me talking about Brighton, I got these guys up to share their experiences. The feedback from what they had to say has been awesome. People loved hearing the stories of what ordinary people have learnt and done as they have set out as missionaries.

Bec shared the genuine struggle of being the youngest, having no kids, and finding themselves so busy travelling to and from work, but also having discovered a real niche with Andrew’s football team. These guys have been getting to know the football team he pays for and loving it.

Heidi told her story of thinking how easy it would be, and discovering it was harder than she thought to make friends and connect. She shared some of what she and Mike and have been doing – again it was inspiring!

And then Danelle shared some of what she has been learning about loving people and really connecting as friends with those outside of our Christian closet.

I felt inspired just to see the journey these guys have been on with God over the last year or so.

A friend who we are on the faith journey with asked me this tonight…

“So how does Jesus’ death on the cross actually deal with my sin?”

How would you explain this to someone with no church background? I reckon its a pretty good question.

Why are our churches like they are?

Why do we meet on Sundays?…

Why do we have separate kids and youth ministries?…

Why do we take communion as thimbles and crackers?…

Why do we meet in big buildings?

Why do programs and committees seem so prevalent?

As one who is right in the formative stages of a new community and tossing around a heap of questions about the form we will take in our gatherings I have often had glimpses of why things have shaped up as they have in the established church.

Read on if you dare…

Currently we meet as a team on a Tuesday night, usually at 7.30pm and its normally just the adults who participate in the meeting.

Recently we spoke about the place of kids in our meetings and agreed (not surprisingly!) that we value our children and want them to have the opportunity to meet with us in some form. Hmmm… 7.30pm on a Tuesday night. Kids go to sleep on week nights at that time… When might be a good time?… the weekend?… Maybe… Saturday?… Nope too busy… Sunday?… Sunday!?…

And there are kids of different ages spread right thru from 16 months to 17 years old. Can we genuinely engage them all in what we do? Can we do it every week? Will the kids enjoy it? Will we? Maybe enjoying our time together isn’t the key. Maybe togetherness is, so we will all have a lousy time but have it together?… You think?!…

Or maybe we need age specific groups for them?… A kids minist… and a yout… Come to think of it, its kinda hard for all us to feel ‘close’ when we meet as a big group and to really peer into each other’s lives. I know! Why don’t we have smaller groups?… no! – not small groups – ‘smaller groups’…

We are currently a ‘closed group’ while we weld together as a team and establish some directional stuff, but once we become open it’ll be increasingly difficult to meet in homes when we all want to get together – and while we may be able to split into multiple groups there will be a need for big gatherings at some point. So… Maybe we could hire a venue… a hall… or start a building fund!…

Are you seeing where this baby is headed?…

Eating together is great – we can have communion over a meal. Food really helps us gel and just hang out, but it does mean work each time for people – work that I know Danelle has sometimes found hard, with kids to bath and other stuff to do. Maybe we can still have communion, but make it a more symbolic act… What about we get some small cups and cut up some cubes of bread?…

And what to do each each week? We can’t make it up as we go and we can’t leave it to one person. Why not develop a team to oversee it? The team can pull the gatherings together and get other people involved as appropriate. Actually we might need lots of teams for different things at different times…

Looking ominous?…

Now quite frankly I don’t give a fig if we meet on Tuesday nights at 7.30pm, Sunday mornings at 9.30am or Wednesday afternoons at 2.00pm. I am not worried if we do things all together or sometimes in age groups. I am fine with cheap grape juice and cubes of wholemeal if that is where we finish up. I made a decision a long time ago to do whatever works for the mission and the team, so while I have my preferences I’ll do what works for all of us. Count me in and kick me if I complain!

Folks we have to be careful not to fall into old patterns because they are comfortable, but, we have to be equally careful not to reject old practices simply because they are what we used to do. They may actually be well established for good reasons.

Mindless reactionism and wild pendulum swinging that simply cause us to cynically see the negative in all tradition are traits that do the emerging church scene no favours at all. We often look like petulant adolescents refusing to do what our parents do, simply because we can.

That’s not to say we simply fall into line, sing hillsongs, put on dramas and have 6 point ‘how to’ sermons. (BTW songs can be a good way to worship, dramas often communicate what teaching can’t and ‘how to’ sermons can often be helpful…)

So what do we do?…

Just admit that we are eventually going to follow the well established pattern, book a venue and start a Sunday gig? Come on! You know me better than that.

I keep coming back to the fact that we are seeking to be urban missionaries, and in that we are creating gatherings that are suitable to the context we find ourselves in. We have to think like missionaries and ask what is appropriate to this community. If at the end of the day as we do the serious work of missional reflection it turns out to be Sunday morning with wafers and grape juice and all the trimmings then I’ll be there.

Honestly…

I hope it won’t come to that… partly because I am selfish – I like having Sundays free of regular committments, but moreso because I really do hope we discover new ways of expressing our ecclesiological convictions that are true to both scripture and the context we are in.

It seems many of the emerging churches I have come across are funky, ‘singles clubs’ that don’t need to consider the impact children or young people have. However as we move beyond catering for the disgruntled gen-xers (and as they grow up, get married and breed) we will need to do some serious work of re-imagining church for the families.

It aint easy…

Starting this Saturday is our second Forge intensive.

Alan Hirsch is coming from the east along with Kim Hammond to be the key presenters and we wil be looking at Mission, Discipleship and Spirituality, discussing the whole deal of developing a healthy spirituality within a missional context.

Both Kim, Alan and Brian Stitt have some great stuff to contribute on this theme and I think it will be good for us to think differently about spirituality. Rather than seeing it as purely a contemplative exercise we can see it as something that happens in more normal every day experiences as well as in the active practices of mission and service.

Lately I have been using the car as a place to pray. I never used to do that – it seemed like a cop out for simply stopping to be with God (and it probably was) but when it takes 40 minutes to get to the city and you do that a few times a week its a great place to connect with God. I do a lot of intercessory prayer in the car now.

Its interesting trying to assess the momentum Forge is generating over here at present. I have been a little disappointed that only 20 people have enrolled for the intensive as we were hoping for 30ish, but maybe that’s just par for the course as you look to get something off the ground amongst a fringe crowd.

I reckon there are people out there who would find this stuff inspiring, but geting them to commit four days is sometimes a big ask.

One of the things Jim Collins discovered in ‘Good to Great’ was that momentum was gained very slowly. There was no momentus event that changed a company from good to great, but just a whole heap of small things over a long period of time. So far we have been operating a short time, but I am sometimes impatient and want to see things come along quicker.

I guess its another case of ‘get over it Andrew’…

free police academy 4 citizens on patrol

This is a bit of mantra for me as I talk about church with people.

When it comes to ‘what works?’ I agree that your meat and three veg (sing and listen) Sunday service does ‘work’ for some people. The stats would show maybe 10% of our population.

That is a sizable chunk.

But 90% is a signficantly more sizable chunk… And within that 90 there are probably 50 who think what we do on Sundays is anything from slightly lame to totally ridiculous (no matter how we funk it up.)

Some days I really feel at all at sea with what we are doing and I seriously question whether it will make a difference at all. Are we just kidding ourselves? in making it up as we go are we going to make a mess? The fact is that the path we have chosen may actually prove less fruitful than the path chosen by 99% of our ‘meat and potatoes’ churches.

But what keeps me going in my moments of doubt (can you tell I’m having one?!) is the fact that someone, somehow, has punisher the divx to ‘have a go’. Someone somewhere has to leave plan A and move on to plan B, C, D, W until we begin to discover new ways of being and doing church that resonate with the communities we live in – with the people who think churches are for nutbags.

I’m not one for failure – I hate to make a mess of things or come out at the end of the day with nothing to show for my efforts, but I know that’s a very real possibility for those of us who have chosen to take the missionary route.

I’m grateful for all my Forge mates and fellow missionaries who help me keep focused on the goal when I feel like dropping the ball and sticking with the 10%.

I actually don’t think I could look away now. I don’t think I could honestly say ‘let someone else figure that one out. I’l just run a church’. My focus has shifted too much.

But will it ‘work’?’

Dunno… dunno… sure hope so… but it might not…

At lunch time today the conversation turned to church, which is quite unusual for us, even though we are teachers at a Christian school.

As staff members each person (I discovered) has to get an annual report from their pastor stating that they are a regular attendee at worship services.

We began to discuss the implications of this…

The assumption seems to be that attendance at worship indicates all is well spiritually with the person and of course vice versa. I know I have made that assumption as a pastor at times. Its pretty dumb really. On the plus side it does offer some degree of assessment as to whether they are in community with other believers.

Then we began to discuss how often ‘regular’ is… I offered the thought that having been a pastor of a church I grew to ‘expect the average punter to front up once every three weeks or so. Not that often, but it seems to be more and more the trend’. The days of weekly Sunday AM and PM attendance are long gone for most people.

Should we expect more?… I know I did, but was more often than not disappointed…

We began to discuss a church plant that one teacher is a part of – which is an offshoot and still under the leadership and authority of the mother ship. It sounded like church by remote control. ‘Ah… a franchise?’ I suggested…

‘Andrew you make the church sound like a business with this talk of punters and franchises!’

‘No!…Surely not…’

It wasn’t intentional, but its funny what cynicism lays latent ready to rear up!

Why are we doing this?…

Every now and then I need to go back to the core reason we are doing what we are doing. Why aren’t we simply following the ‘church planters handbook’ and getting a funky Sunday morning service off the ground with a quality kids ministry, cool music and dynamic preaching?…

Why have we been going 6 months and still haven’t got a name?

Why don’t we take an offering?

Tonight as we spent time in worship together Heidi led us and took us back to the original call – the time when we heard God calling us to leave LBC and head for Brighton.

Those feelings stirred again… What about the vast majority of Australians who really don’t care how much we funk up Sunday? Who will connect with them – unreached people groups who make up 90% of our population? People who are unimpressed with our musical talents and oratory capabilities and programming skills?

If what we are doing isn’t making the connection then chances are we need to explore different ways rather than doing the same thing better. De Bono says ‘if you want to dig a hole over there, you don’t do it by digging the same hole deeper over here’.

In my mind there is a definite place for what we know of as church – the ‘sing and listen’ gig. There are some non churchies who will find it appealing, but if the stats are correct and 90% of Aussies don’t give a toss about our churches then that just doesn’t cut it for me.

I believe we desperately need more men and women willing to be missionaries in their own lands and willing to see it as a life calling – not a hobby.

There are times when I find this whole journey exhilarating – and times when I genuinely would prefer to do something familiar and predictable (never thought I would say that…) but, I can’t look away from the people God has called me to connect with – those who will never wander into a church building, those who think we are crazy and those who Jesus loves just as much.

That’s why I’m here.

It seems one of the toughest questions in the emerging missional church scene (there has to be a quicker way to say that!) is the ‘what do we do with the kids?’ issue.

Obviously they are part of who we are and what we do, but certainly for us at this point they have been neither seen nor heard, most of the time. We have recognised the issue, but have needed to do some other stuff before hitting this question.

Last week we formed a small team to look at the subject and then come back to the group with their suggestions and ideas for how we integrate children into what we do as a team.

Its a question fraught with difficulties because whatever we choose to do means we will compromise on something else.

We need to approach the question both biblically – (what do the scriptures say about children and family worship?) – and culturally – (what is appopriate in the setting we find ourselves in?)

Essentially it becomes a values question. What is important to us?
* Do we value the presence of children more than their separation from us during times of worship and learning?
* What degree of personal dissatisfaction with worship and learning experiences are we prepared to have in order to have them present? (Because once kids are in the room they will demand attention!)
* If we don’t have them present, but have a separate activity for them does it say we don’t value them, or does that say we recognise that different groups have different needs and not all can be met in one setting?
* And as a missionary team, how do we integrate kids into the missionary experience and not just a worship gathering?

One of the first issues is that Tuesday night is a lousy time to try and integrate kids. Lets face it – we are all tired in the evenings as it is – but the kids go to sleep as we start or they get grumpy…

So, when could we do stuff to integrate kids?

Ummmm… Saturday or Sunday?… (You can see where this is headed!…)

And then we slice into prime time for hanging with friends and neighbours. That concerns me as I use both mornings as prime connecting time.

Can you sense the tension of the whole question?

How do we remain true to the missionary calling, yet incorporate the whole family in effective ways?

Its easy to see why so much of the EMC has been for singles and gen xers who don’t (yet) have the kids question. Its also easy to see why the established church has formed up the way it has. Practical issues shatter brittle idealism and force us to practical solutions – even if we don’t always like the solutions.

At the end of the day we must balance what is ‘right’ with what is ‘practical’… and then accept the limitations of any decision we make.

I don’t like that…botched dvdrip