I’m not sure quite what to make of this period of time we are in as the church in Australia.

It seems many years since we used words like ‘seeker sensitive’ or ‘seeker service’. It feels like another lifetime when we were discussing the significance of postmodernity and using words like ‘deconstruction’ in the same breath as youth ministry and before all that there were the ‘worship wars’ (which I understand still rage in parts of middle earth) In more recent times what was labelled ’emerging church’ has gone off the boil and with the closure of Forge in most parts of Australia the conversation has fizzled somewhat, although I think we had all said enough and needed to ‘do’ a bit more.

If we sift thru the debris of the different themes/emphases/foci over the last few decades (and I have been involved with them all) the common element seems to be a desire to see the church somehow gets it’s butt into gear and be more effective at ‘mission’. The word is in inverted commas because I don’t think there is consensus on what this word means. For some it is as simple as getting more people into church while for others it has a very strong social action flavour. Personally I see mission as whatever we do that demonstrates and proclaims the love of God for the whole world. Its a pretty expansive definition, but I think it needs to be to allow for the different nuances and expressions.

My take from where I sit today, is that we can learn from each emphasis and that the combined wisdom will be of more value than the simple adoption of one schema as our only way, although it’s natural that we will have our preferences.

When I look back to the worship wars (and cringe) I can see that much of the debate was in-house. I don’t think anyone in our community was getting concerned that we weren’t singing the right songs… I remember our approach was to try and sing songs that sounded like middle of the road radio 94.5fm style stuff. But giving up hymns was a battle royale and plenty still wear the scars of this time. At best we were trying to make ourselves more ‘relevant’, but if anyone outside the church knew the way we carved each other up in the pursuit of relevance then I don’t think they would give a toss what we were singing – they’d just think we were nuts and avoid us like the plague in case they got caught in the crossfire. On reflection I don’t think there was much of a missional motivation here at all.

Then the discussion turned to how we could get non- Christians to come to church and enjoy it… The first part of that task was a big enough ask, but the second was mammoth. Willow Creek and Saddleback showed us how this could be done and as a result pale imitations of their glory sprang up around the world. The value of this time was definitely the emphasis on evangelism and the focus on those who were ‘not us’. It was a challenge to reinvent ourselves so that church was not all about us, but rather was focused on those we wanted to reach. We embraced these ideas at Lesmurdie and had some real wins with seeing many young people come to both church and faith – and even enjoy it – but it was a system that derived it’s ethos from consumerism so when we stopped being flavour of the month, or werent able to ‘outdo’ ourselves each week those young people moved on. I’d suggest that every church that has tried to build it’s congregation by attracting people to a class act Sunday gig has sooner or later had to deal with the challenge of the ‘bigger and better’ somewhere else in the city, or the burnout of those seeking to stage the weekly event. For those with the desire to compete this approach rolls on and there are still plenty who retain this as their primary approach. If you can do it really really well then chances are you will see some ROI, but if not be prepared to get carved up by those who do.

I also remember the long talks on postmodernity – post-modernism and other permutations of the word. I think it’s great value was to make us engage at a more thoughtful level with popular culture and broader thought patterns. It was important to recognize the framework that was shaping contemporary thought, and as a result we adjusted our church services to try and cater for post moderns who sought truth thru experience rather than thru fact, who valued relationship, process, mystery etc etc … I’m sure you remember the conversations, concerns and debates that this topic created. The ‘fear’ response was quite astounding here as many evangelicals saw truth apparently unravelling before their very eyes. It is tragic that fear is so often the default evangelical response to the unknown. Wonderful opportunities to learn and grow fly out the window when fears presides.

The post-modern emphasis led naturally into the emerging church movement as it was concerned largely with questions of missiology and gospel/culture. At it’s best the emerging church – or emerging missional church as we preferred to label it – broadened peoples view of mission and rattled their assumptions about church. It called the church to be more focused on getting people back into the community rather than getting the community back into church. The voices leading the movement were primarily prophetic and as a result quite prickly at times, but I tend to think they needed to be if they were to be heard. And they were heard. You only have to read some pretty standard denominational fare to see that much of what was said has been taken on board and is now accepted wisdom.

The biggest struggle for the EMC was in finding ‘effective working models’ of missional churches. While the ideas had great theological and practical currency few seemed either willing or able to re-imagine church and mission in a compelling way. With most Christians still motivated by the ‘what’s in it for me?’ question it was hard to draw people into a very activistic community and then to sustain that over the longer term.

I noticed that many showed interest in new expressions, or cheered them on from the sidelines, but very few were actually willing to put their balls on the line and give it a crack. Quality pioneering leaders were hard to find – in fact I think they are always hard to find – and even those who did try found the going very hard. I think what those of us who were out there discovered the harsh reality of a deeply secular community with little sense of need for a Christian expression of spirituality. Part of this is likely due to misconceptions of church and faith, but part of it is also due to the wealth and self sufficiency of this country we find ourselves in. Its hard hard soil here in 21stC Oz and no matter what approach we take to mission the going will be tough.

Part of the struggle in establishing new expressions of church is that for many the powerful shaping of their heritage (and the consumer desire for a happening kids/youth ministry etc) prevented them from actually trying anything new. We often heard ‘I wouldn’t want to put my kids at risk in a church without a dedicated kids min or youth min.’ Churches are by their nature risk averse institutions, a posture that desperately needs addressing.

As one who now leads a pretty normal little Baptist church in the suburbs while running my own business, I find myself a product of all these experiences and learnings and am grateful for how they have contributed to my own journey. If we could combine the ‘willow creek’ passion for evangelism with the emerging missional church missiology, and get rid of stupid arguments over stuff no one cares about then I think we would do well.

But I’m not sure what all that means in this current landscape. I am deeply convinced that the way of the future is not the way of the past and that the only way we will new green ecclesial shoots emerge is by some serious R & D.

But R & D means investment of time and resources – it means experimentation – and inevitably some level of failure as not all experiments will work. Generally speaking we don’t like to risk our resources on new ideas that might not work. We would prefer to invest them in ideas that worked once in the hope that they will work again. Its the fear response kicking in again.

I remember as a basketball coach watching games where one team was slowly losing its grip on the game, but it refused to change tactics. It was comfortable with a zone defense. It had worked for them in the past and they weren’t about to mess around with half court presses or full court man to man. Crikey they were losing. So why would you play risky defense?!… Of course with 3 minutes left in the game and absolutely no chance of winning a team would try anything. So you would observe ragged full court presses being implemented when all hope was long gone. Inevitably the team got caned by even more and drew the conclusion that that stuff doesn’t work… Of course the horse had long bolted and there was no way anyone was ever going to turn that game around.

My own coaching strategy was to vary the defense and offense to suit the team we were playing against – to contextualise you could say – and when we were losing to make changes long before things were unsalvageable. Of course we didn’t win every game, but as we got better at adapting and innovating and working with new offenses and defenses we became a more formidable opponent.

I feel like there are now many churches around who are 40 points down and deep in the last quarter of the game. They too are finally at the point where they are willing to try anything, but the game may no longer be salvageable.

Surely the lesson here is that we need to take risks when we are healthy as a dying entity simply doesn’t have the recovery power if the experiments fail.

Having said that all of that whichever paradigm we work with, the hard cold reality is that we lead as broken selfish people and we also lead others who are just as broken and selfish. It’s a reminder to me that whatever does actually occur is likely to be more a divine act than any genius on my part.

Just last night I was pondering the people I have come across this week in my work. We call them ‘customers’, but really they are people – with real lives and hopes and fears and problems.

When you see customers its easy to do a job, perform a service and move on to the next customer. When you see a person you have to take notice and wonder about that person and their life. Its easier to deal with customers, but more rewarding to engage with people.

I don’t think its been an unusual week by any stretch, but it began with the pensioner who told me about her breast cancer and how that had changed her life. The next day I was working for the woman who had been divorced 3 times and who went to great lengths to tell me she didn’t need a man around. Ironically 4 of us blokes were working on different projects around her house that day…

The next day was a local bloke my age who had just been diagnosed with bowel cancer and had to excuse himself regularly from our conversation as all was not well. As we talked I discovered this news had shattered his life and changed everything for him. I stopped in on the grandmum who’s daughter had died tragically and who, in the absence of a father was now ‘mum’ to the 5 year old child left behind .

And then yesterday I got a call from Betty, an 80 year old woman who lived the last 25 years in Two Rocks and worked most of her life as a barmaid. She’s a tough old stick and knows more swear words than most blokes. As we got talking, she told me (thinks) she has 11 kids, but one was murdered. She went to tell that story and the tragedy of a wasted life. It was still pretty raw.

Its not always easy to treat customers as people, because it is more time consuming and when you’re a task oriented person with a lot of stuff to get done in a day it can slow you down, but if we called to be salt and light in the workplace then maybe this is just one way we can love those people we come across.

I offer these thoughts because I often hear people saying they make no impact for the gospel in their workplace. Usually by that they mean that they haven’t presented the 4 spiritual laws to anyone, led them to Christ and got them to join a church, but that’s a pretty narrow take on how we can be the people of God in the world we live in.

Perhaps slowing down, taking a genuine interest, asking questions and then listening is as good a way of demonstrating the presence of Christ as any…

You could read this story two ways…

West Ridge Church along with 77 other churches in the Atlanta area are canceling Sunday services the weekend of July 23-25 in order to do community service (something we’ve seen before). It’s called Community Makeover, and it’s an event that creates an opportunity for the church to get outside of their walls and do some good. Much of this idea really puts a smile on my face, but I think a part of it should give us a bit of a kick in the butt.

Its great that churches are seeing ‘church’ as more than songs and sermons, but serving the community once a year?…

I want to both applaud the endeavour – because it is something that I see as a genuinely good thing and yet I feel conflicted because an annual event somewhat misses the point, if the rest of the year its simply business as usual.

So while I cheer for the initiative I also lament the fact that we see things as we do…

The comments on the original post reflect similar sentiments. I guess my pondering is around how we make acts of community service more natural and how we dissasemble such a rigid imagination of church and allow it to grow into something more dynamic and fluid.

Out the front of our house we have our lawn, then a pavement and closest to the road a 2 metre strip of lawn that spans our block and is considered council property.

I was reading Simon’s blog today and the neighbourhood initiatives he was writing about and couldn’t help wondering what would happen if we were to start a veggie patch in the front of our yard rather than the back – and what if we got others in the street to do similar and we allowed people to come and take what they wanted from what was created.

In his excellent book on neighbourhood mission and spirituality (God Next Door), Simon wrote about how we have lost the ‘front porch’ vibe in our streets and how most living is now done at the back and of course the end result is that we finish up living much more separate lives. It prompted me to consider how we design our homes and whether we could create homes that help us ‘live out the front’ a bit more.

Perhaps using that verge area for a veggie garden could be a starting point in redressing the balance and who knows, if it caught on it could change the whole vibe of a street.

Of course it has risks and associated problems, but wouldn’t it be a fund experiment?…

Now, if only I had the smallest interest in gardening I’d give it a go!

I often think David Fitch says it well and he does again with his comments on whether the whole ’emerging’ scene is dead, sick, passe or whatever.

I really couldn’t give a rodent’s posterior whether nametags gain traction or die, but that the church is renewed and re-inspired to focus on the things that are close to God’s heart… well that’s a biggie.

I was a missionary before I knew about emergent, missional, organic churches and I don’t think anything is going to change that. I have been blessed to be heavily involved in the conversations, training and agitating to see the church re-imagined, but I’m not going to die for a brand or a name tag.

In fact the need to sustain a brand is in my opinion one of the potential undoings of any move of God. We then ossify what was once dynamic and in doing so drain it of the potency it once held.

Let’s keep focused on the stuff that matters and that gives shape to the kingdom and let’s not waste time on the stuff of ego and empire.

Here are some great thoughts on world engaging holiness from my good friend Alan Hirsch. I think he says it clearly and succinctly.

Before we move on to some of the many wonderful expressions of the Holy Spirit, we thought it important to address some of our misunderstandings around the issue of holiness. As mentioned in chapter 1, often our understanding of biblical holiness is one that leads us to see holiness from a negative perspective or as a list of “don’ts” and prohibitions. One of the key roles of the Holy Spirit is to oversee the change process by which we become holy, and when holiness is properly understood, it is actually an incredibly redemptive, highly missional concept.

Part of the problem with our understanding of holiness relates to the fact that we understand the word “holy” as a passive adjective when we refer to the “Holy” Spirit. But there is another, more distinctly Hebraic way of translating the original language that emphasizes other dimensions of the work of the Spirit in our lives. Rather than translating hagia as a passive adjective (“the Spirit who is holy”) we can legitimately translate it far more dynamically as “the Sanctifying Spirit”—that is, it is the Spirit who is actively engaged in making the world a more holy place. Isn’t this who God is, and doesn’t it far better describe what he is doing all the time?

When we talk of God as being holy, or of Jesus as holy, or of the Holy Spirit, we must resist the temptation to see holiness in moralistic terms, or else we do violence to the idea of the redeeming God and end up seeing God as the ultimate moralist! That is simply bad theology. God is the model of holiness and we must become like the One we love. “As obedient children, let yourselves be pulled into a way of life shaped by God’s life, a life energetic and blazing with holiness” (1 Peter 1:15 Message).

A Hebraic understanding of holiness suggests that all of life is actually in the process of being redeemed and brought into the sphere of the sacred: Holiness begins with God, flows into our own hearts and our lives, moves from there into the community, and eventually reaches every aspect of life in the world. God is extending his sanctity over ever-increasing portions of life until all is made holy. God is never a detached observer, but is deeply involved in the sanctification of the world. In fact he leads the charge!

This way of understanding holiness is far more world- engaging, and is best exemplified in the life, teachings, and ministry of Jesus. As we have seen, the biblical concept of holiness provides us with a much more active, and therefore missional, understanding of holiness than we are used to in the Western tradition. Holiness is not gained by withdrawal from the world, but by active, redemptive, engagement in the world.

Instead of looking at holiness as a list of “don’ts,” see it as a list of “do’s”; for every prohibition in Scripture actually implies its positive. In fact, positive virtue generates the prohibition. For instance, in the Ten Commandments, “do not kill” actually teaches that we should value and preserve life. “Do not commit adultery” implies we should actively pursue holiness in relationships, and so on.

My last post only garnered two responses but they both challenged me to rethink whether we can stop ‘beating the missional drum’ and I think they are right to say ‘no!’.

It is our default setting to think ‘me first’ and to enjoy comfort rather than sacrifice so I think the commenters were right to say ‘we will probably never really get it.’

Perhaps what I was expressing was a bit of my own weariness after 10 years of saying the same stuff. I’d like to think people have heard it by now and are moving forwards, but that may be more wishful thinking than reality.

Perhaps those of us responsible for leading Christian communities simply need to keep saying this stuff over and over and over until we see real significant change in the communities we are part of. Having mulled it over, I have actually been re-inspired to add my voice to the cause yet again.

I do long for the day when we ‘get it’ and we can ease it back a bit, but for now I reckon some of us will need to keep on banging that drum!!

“Lesslie Newbigin, born 100 years ago , launched a new career at age 66 by calling Western churches to act like they were in the mission field.”

Read the whole article here

Newbigin has been a huge inspiration behind the recalibrating of church and mission all around the western world over the last few decades.

Some days suburban transience really does give me the irrits.

We have been gone 6 months and on Saturday we arrived back in our street and caught up with friends and neighbours and the church community we will be leading. It was beautiful to see those people again and yet what strikes me this morning is just how much has changed in just 6 months.

While we were gone a family who were amongst our closest friends and who lived nearby left – for Spain – not to return. We didn’t know they were going when we left, but we discovered it on the trip. That made us sad, the girls especially who were very close. Good friends would not be there when we got home. While we didn’t feel their loss so much on holidays, I imagine we will now that we are home.

Two other close friends from Upstream have also decided to move on – interstate – not to return – friends we love dearly and will miss greatly from our lives and our Christian community. They won’t be replaced overnight and we feel that too. We have been friends for 25 years and those relationships are like gold.

And then there’s our street… Since we’ve been gone 4 houses have sold and yesterday we discovered that the last of our original neighbours is selling and leaving. In a street of 12 houses we have now seen over 30 families come and go in the 6 years we have been here. We have some great neighbours and we all get on well, but I sometimes wonder how long they

will be around… and I suspect they may wonder the same about us.

As we wandered into church yesterday and sat quietly towards the back, we recognised many familiar faces, but were also curious to see plenty of new faces. I imagine there will be many more new faces in the year ahead as people move house and go church shopping (blech).

I don’t have any great insights on this, except to say that at times it erodes my own sense of permanence and commitment to the area, as the hope of longer term significant relationships seems quite remote – but maybe I was foolish to ever imagine that as a possibility?

And then at other times it strengthens my resolve to hang in and be some semblance of permanence and dependability in a shifting world.

Some days it just gives me the shifts…

I remember vividly the first Forge intensive I attended at BCV in Lilydale way back in 2002. I had just transitioned from being a youth pastor to a team leader in my church at Lesmurdie and I was grappling with how we lived out the missional calling both individually and corporately. Those 5 days rocked my world and I have never been the same since.

It was the early days of the current ‘missional’ movement and the word ‘missional’ itself was rarely being used if at all. Prior to discovering the Forge tribe I had been on a parallel journey wandering a lonely path and wondering if there was anyone else out there who questioned the way we did things and who saw the church as a community of missionaries rather than just a cosy family who studied the Bible, ran services and loved one another.

I was inwardly dissatisfied with so much of what I saw in church life – a lip service adherence to evangelism, but an every day avoidance. An inordinate amount of time invested in trying to get people to come to us, while all the time avoiding going to them unless it was absolutely necessary. I realized that even as the pastor, I didn’t want to go to church half the time and I sure as hell wasn’t about to invite anyone else to share the experience. The dissonance disturbed me and I lay awake at nights wondering what had gone wrong, wondering if it was just me.

The extent of our Christian sub-culture made me ill and I found myself revolting against it. Some of my critique was quite intentionally acerbic and incendiary – I had had enough of the nonsense we accept as normal – but some of it was also necessary and was my way of finding a different way of being a disciple of Jesus in a system that really didn’t like non-conformists. By and large conservative evangelicalism is a tradition that ‘tells’ often, listens little and questions even less. I found myself doing the things that made me ‘difficult’ and a little odd. I know some questioned if I had lost my way.

I hadn’t. I was just beginning to find it again.

Way back in 1996 I felt deeply that God had called me to be a cross cultural missionary and I thought I was going to end up in the Philippines, a place where I had completed several sports mission trips. But in a convoluted series of events my ‘missionary friend’ from the Philippines who I was supposed to meet with didn’t show up to discuss the next leg of the journey with me and my home church needed a youth pastor right at the same time. So I drifted into being a ‘pastor’ and my missionary calling became subservient to the pastoral role.

I began to change into who I wasn’t.

I led a youth ministry, ran programs, met with leaders and young people but my natural focus was always on those who weren’t involved rather than those who were. This continued into my next role at Lesmurdie. Parents sometimes complained because I seemed more concerned for the kids in the school than I was for the kids in the church. I knew both mattered but my heart was with the people who didn’t know Jesus – even if those who did happened to ‘pay the bills’. Those who had grown up in Christian families knew their way around, but some had chosen to simply rebel and leave their faith. I wasn’t interested in being the person responsible for cajoling them back even if some felt that was ‘why I was being paid’.

Throughout this time I used to have strange experiences whereby every time I would meet with a missionary and hear their story I would find myself choking back tears. The sheer mention of unreached people groups would cause a physical reaction in me and I wondered what was going on. I remember one morning I had reluctantly agreed to meet with a mission agency rep feeling that it was a waste of time, but just not being able to say ‘no’. As I sat with this relatively uninspiring man and listened to his dreary spiel I once again found myself moved by the sheer thought of someone giving their time to reaching the ‘unreached’. I shed some tears again as I thought of those who lived their lives far from God, but who were still seeking spiritually. I began to pray and ask God about what was happening to me and I had a kind of revelation. I felt like God said, ‘the way you feel about those people is the way I feel about them’.

Pretty simple really, but it begged the question, ‘what am I going to do with that?’

In leading a church I was busy with so much internal business that I didn’t have much time to connect with those who were outside that realm. My life had become consumed with my ministry and most of it revolved around the already convinced. They paid me well, encouraged me and supported me, but I began to realize than I was a square peg in a round hole.

Overseeing the day to day operations of a church was not where my heart was, nor was it what God had made me to do. It wasn’t bad stuff to do. It just wasn’t who I was supposed to be, but I had been assimilated into this role by circumstance, training and the fact that I could do it reasonably well.

I couldn’t conceive of a different way of being myself as a vocational Christian leader but I knew I needed to start.

When I ventured into Forge almost accidentally at first I had little knowledge of what I was exploring, but the further I went the more I realized I had found a tribe who intuitively ‘knew me’ and were like me. They ranged from the edgy and wacky to the plain jane middle class, but they all shared that same core missionary identity that I had unknowingly suppressed but was now beginning to listen to again.

It was a group of people who gave one another permission to ask questions – big gnarly questions that would get us in trouble in the wrong company. We were encouraged to experiment and learn without fear of failure – which is easier said than done. And we were challenged to ask what of our church upbringing we needed to keep and what we needed to jettison if we were to be faithful to the gospel and the missionary task.

The journey since then has been the focus of this blog – discovering what it means to be a ‘backyard missionary’. Were it not for my experience of Forge I would probably have never begun this journey and I may still be living in the dissonance of being a missionary in pastor’s clothing. Instead I have experienced the great joy of living in the centre of my calling and truly being the person I was created to be.

After 13 years of operation we have recently decided to make some significant changes to Forge in Oz, that involves a closing of some operations and a scaling back of others. These were big decisions and not made lightly. The official spiel is here and I won’t copy and paste it below as this post is long enough already.

Personally I will be taking a break from my own involvement in the organization after 7 years and focusing my energy on both my role as a missionary leader in Quinns Community Baptist Church and in my business. It will be interesting to see how my last 7 years of missionary learning shapes the way in which I lead within a church context these days. It’s a new adventure – again.

In case anyone is wondering ‘what really happened’ you should probably know that there isn’t much to say. There hasn’t been a split in the ranks or a loss of conviction about what we are on about. We simply felt the time had come, the context had changed and that was about the size of it.

So while the organization scales back the missional movement is very much alive and the same passion burns deep in all of us.

So, I give thanks to God for the impact Forge has had on my life and the friendship of all the crew who have shared the journey with me. The two best known names are Hirsch and Frost – two blokes who have inspired me greatly, but there have been plenty of others also who are not so well known, but who living faithful missionary lives in the places God has them.

I’m looking forward to seeing what the next chapter brings