I like this post from Phil Cooke who suggests the secret to having great ideas is to have so many that sooner or later one has got to be good!

It might sound obvious, but I think we often give up on thinking creatively because we have never had a genuine whizzbang winner pop out.

As we consider how we can connect with our communities and how we can think innovatively about our church communities, we probably need to allow many ideas to come to the surface realising that most of them will never go beyond the whiteboard.

Phil suggests that of 100 ideas, we can expect

– 10 are totally stupid (you have to have those)

– 50 sounded good, but won’t really work

– 30 will maybe work in some other way

– 5 were ideas I REALLY liked for awhile, but then got old

– 3 are quite good, but not ready for prime time

– 2 I’d actually be proud to pitch

It makes you realise that unless you are uniquely gifted, creative thinking will be infinitely more productive in a larger group. We can sit around, brainstorm and then write every idea up for consideration before even passing judgement on their worthiness. Often these are laughter filled times as we allow ourselves to imagine the impossible and to verbalise the bizzarre.

We have often found that the wackiest and wildest ideas while laughable at first, do prompt us to ask ‘what if?…’ And from there a stupid idea gets re-shaped to be a something still unique and captivating, but now within the realms of being doable.

Anyway, may you have many many many wonderful ideas….

We are at an interesting point in our journey where we wait to see what develops and where we head next. We are hopeful that good things will emerge from the current difficult situation, but whatever happens our own sense of calling hasn’t shifted one bit.

Both Danelle and I still feel deeply called to be missionaries to the western world and to lead other people on this journey also – to explore what it means to be the people of God in this place at this time and to be faithful to that.

A few friends have asked me why we would even consider re-enaging with an established church and try to help them on the missionary journey. And they would say that our recent experience at Quinns ought to serve as sufficient warning not to go back there.

Hmmm… Maybe I’m a masochist, but I don’t find myself deterred by people resisting what we are about, opposing or even getting downright ugly about it. Perhaps its just part of my nature, but the convictions that guide us are deep, so we aren’t about to be knocked off kilter by a handful of people who see things differently.

One of the things I have learnt thru our journey with Upstream is that most people are not all that adventurous. The majority of people are willing to be stretched (to varying degrees) but to jump right out of their comfort zones into something totally unfamiliar is more than they can manage – and if kids are involved then its considered a much bigger ‘risk’. After 7 years of leading our missionary team we discovered that we had shrunk in size and our inability to recruit new members was our major hurdle.

Interestingly none of those who moved on from our team did so because they disbelieved in what we were doing or had conflict with other team members. It was other external and unexpected factors that forced them to leave, but we have not been able to easily replace them and hence I have been doing some re-thinking of our approach.

I have said a number of times that on a scale of 1-10, if normal established church life is ‘1’ then we probably ‘jumped’ out to around an ‘8’, to a place of unfamiliarity and to an environment that made most Christians uncomfortable. (Its ok for overseas missionaries to jump to ‘8’ but not local ones!)

What we would hear from people we invited to consider joining us were questions or comments like:

– no kids or youth ministry? What will happen to my children?… This was by far the biggest obstacle. Ironically research shows that a significant majority of young people in evangelical churches (YFC estimate 80%) dump their faith upon hitting the university context so we surely have to try something new?…

– no ‘teaching’? – This one gives me the irrits because it such a narrow perspective and reflects a poor understanding of how we learn. Basically unless there was a monologue from a qualified person then ‘teaching’ hadn’t occurred.

– how do we get fed? – You pick up a spoon! What are you… a baby?! This one gives me bigger irrits than the one before although they are linked. I can’t believe the degree to which mature Christians (who have been devouring sermons since the date they were converted) are still unsure of their ability to ingest the Bible for themselves and to take responsibility for their own spiritual formation.

– no worship? – argh… well we don’t sing a heap, but does that mean we don’t worship?…

You have probably noticed that all of these are paradigm shifts, but even those who did ‘get’ things conceptually were still unwilling to make the leap from familiarity to foreign territory.

I have found that disturbing and discouraging. I don’t resonate well with that mindset. It’s like being on a sinking ship just within swimming distance of shore and some would rather go down with the ship than take a punt on making the swim, or building a raft out of the wreckage. (This metaphor has its problems so don’t extrapolate too far with it…)

I realize that my own apostolic nature leads me easily to swim, but some of the desire to go down with the ship is simply laziness, cowardice and selfishness. This always needs to be challenged.

Anyway… I feel like I am coming at this the long way…

Part of our willingness to go back to work with some form of established church is that we want to take people on the journey of missionary living, but we realize we haven’t been able to get them to come to us. So we are willing to experiment with ‘going back’ to them and journeying with them towards a different understanding of church and mission. We aren’t for a moment interested in heading back to a ‘meat and 3 veg’ affair and just doing all the stuff we did 10 years ago. We couldn’t do it. Our hearts wouldn’t be in it and it is not our calling.

But we are willing to ‘meet people half way’ and attempt to re-shape a local church into a missionary congregation. It means us being willing to do some things we haven’t had to do for quite a while and being willing to re-enter some environments that we haven’t had to be part of. But it also means a church consciously, willingly attempting to explore its identity outside of the established paradigm.

As an optimist I am hopeful that when people say they want to do things they actually do want to do them… I imagine wherever we find ourselves in 6 months time we will be there for this purpose and we will give it our all to help people on the journey.

It seems there has been a shift in the centre of gravity of many local churches towards a more missional ecclesiology (at least notionally) so it will be interesting to see if this will translate to a shift in praxis.

Should we discover that the church’s commitment was token and that people were not willing to move, I imagine we would simply seek to find another way to lead people on the journey. But for now I am hopeful and that is a good thing.

Perhaps we all need to ‘stretch’.

This is the topic of my talk this Sunday.

The sub-text says: “In church life it seems that ‘bigger is always better’ but is it really? Perhaps it depends on what we are trying to do… On this day we will try to convince you that for the church to genuinely accomplish its mission its primary expression must be small.”

I haven’t stretched people’s thinking too much in the first few weeks but I imagine this will get some push back…

My observation is that the Sunday event has become the primary

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focus for most whereas I believe that much of what constitutes ‘church’ as it is described in the Bible is very difficult to do in that setting. Its not to say there is no place for a Sunday gathering – a larger expression on occasions – but it is to say that if we are to do the things that church is to do as the ‘family of God’, then our primary expression will need to be in the smaller setting.

So what I am proposing (in theory) is that our first port of call – our top priority – will be our smaller communities – I don’t want to call them ‘home groups’ because that already tags them in a certain way – and our secondary community may well be the larger group, but if you never get to the larger group, or if you don’t want to attend the larger group then that is fine.

I will write more on this later as I have already listed ’13 reasons church must be small’, but the biggest challenge by far is not simply inverting people’s paradigms (although that will be tough).

It is that the secondary expression has snaffled the best timespot of the week! Over the last 7 years in all of our experimenting and tinkering we have discovered that Sunday tends to be the most accessible time for people to come together, especially if kids are involved.

Honestly, I am not sure how to overcome this because we are not about to stop meeting on Sundays in the near future – if ever. But I am not convinced we will actually shift people’s imaginations unless there is a dramatic change in behaviour. If we simply roll on with Sundays as usual and the ‘option’ of re-imagining church then I doubt very many will do the hard yards of actually re-inventing – because it will not be easy.

I am not intending to even act on this until we get back from our trip, but I do want to plant the thought seeds in people’s minds and let them know that this is core to our future.

Perhaps the most ‘accessible’ expression of church is Neil Cole’s concept of Life Transformation groups where 3 people = church. It is easy for 3 people to find a time to meet and virtually all the ingredients of church can be present in a small community of that ilk. However I would still argue for a more ‘household’ / ‘family’ orientation in our primary communities so that we experience greater diversity in relationships.

I am interested in whether others have made this paradigm shift in reality rather than in theory and how you have gone about it.

Its said that there is many a serious word spoken in jest…

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sydney white free at ‘what’s next’ in Church World and one of their offerings was that the next ‘big word’ (following on ‘post-modernity’ and ‘missional’ I am guessing) will be ‘post-missional‘.

It was only as I read further that I realised it was satire… but that is because it has tapped into something I have been feeling increasingly over the last 12 months or so.

Maybe we are

getting into a ‘post-missional’ stage. By that I mean a period where our emphasis shifts off provoking the church to be missional and on to something else that needs attention.

Its been a worrying thought (a splinter in the mind perhaps…) that maybe we have so emphasised and drilled home the need for the church to be ‘missional’ that we have negated other aspects of discipleship in the process.

I wonder if anyone else has had this similar feeling?

Kinda like a ‘what now?’

I feel like I have been reading and writing, practicing and reflecting on this same issue for the last 7 or 8 years and to be honest I’m a little weary with it all. As I write this I am conscious that this could even read as a betrayal of all that I have been focusing on and given my life to, but its not that.

I believe we were very much on the money to call the church back to its missional agenda and now it seems that the message has very much taken root and that some are even acting on these ideas. I know there is a long way to go to see the church truly embrace its missionary identity and I am not advocating we stop leading in this way, but I am beginning to wonder if maybe its time to turn down the heat here and turn it up somewhere else?

I realise I may just be reflecting on my own personal journey, but I take the risk of sharing this publicly because I wonder if others may feel similarly?…

I still have a deep sense of calling to be a missionary in the western context, but I am sensing some changes coming in my own focus and trajectory. No doubt some will see this as co-inciding with my return to meat & 3 veg church life, but I think its much more than that. Please don’t write me off with that simplistic suggestion.

I remember back in the 80’s the Vineyard called us to re-engage with some of our core identity as the church – signs and wonders – intimacy with God – the poor – the kingdom of God and to many their message was radical and ground-breaking. Yet within 10 years the uptake of their message was huge. Now its uncommon to find an evangelical church that hasn’t been significantly influenced by the Vineyard in some way – at very least to acknowledge that there could be a sane approach to signs and wonders and that it is ok to feel things when we engage with God.

I feel the ‘missional’ message is heading a similar path. Most have accepted it as vital and normative for a church to be engaged in mission – not just ‘mission-s’ (read ‘overseas’). Many leaders have picked up the language of mission and we seem to be well beyond the critical mass indicator for acceptance of ‘missional thinking’ as mainstream. Hopefully behavior will catch up and I have a feeling that for many it will.

My own journey into this arena began a long time ago with a sense of discontent at how we failed to be able to develop church communities where those from outside typical middle class backgrounds could feel at home. I saw many younger Christians leave the church because it was so stodgy and conservative and culturally foreign. And I was determined to find ways to help them connect and feel at home. My time in youth ministry involved a lot of work on this front – but it was about ‘getting the meeting right’ so that people would come.

Then around 7 years ago I realised that I had basically become a professional church leader with few friends outside of that environment. Even if the meeting was good it still didn’t scratch where most of the world was itching. I knew I needed to address that and began to take steps to get more involved in my community, but I found the local church environment too constricting and demanding to be able to re-orient my behaviour. There were too many expectations and boundaries already in place that I needed to conform to. I realise others have been able to change within, but I am not wired that way and so I jumped out completely to learn from scratch what it means to be a missionary in Oz society. It was probably one of the best things I have ever done.

I feel like after 7 years of serious practice and reflection I have a pretty good grip on it now – not just intellectually, but practically. I have moved from dissatisfaction with my engagement in the world to a position of genuine satisfaction. I feel like I have been re-learning how to be a Christian again with mission as the guiding motif. It is a great place to be.

However as with many new learnings there comes a time when they become second nature or automated and now I don’t feel the need to ‘push myself into new places’ or attempt new things in the name of mission. I feel like I have come to appreciate how God has shaped me as a missionary and where my spheres of influence are. It has been so woven into the fabric of my life that I don’t need to consciously ‘do some mission’. (I also realise that for some there has been no need to go on this journey as this is how they have always lived their lives)

I have a small fear of becoming a church manager again but I think I have moved too far to go back and honestly if it ever did happen I imagine I’d jump ship again very quickly.

But now that the missional issue is very settled within me I have less passion for reading and reflecting on it. I am in a sense listening to God and asking ‘where to now?’

I have a sense that I am being taken to a place of more healthy balance as I am conscious that in the pursuit of mission activity we have at times done it at the expense of community or at the expense of spiritual formation. I know we would argue that these things ought to be happening in a genuine missional context, but I think we did them in quite small proportion to what we called mission. So sometimes we had fractious communities trying to love and serve their local neighbourhoods – often fractured because a disproportionate amount of time was given to mission compared to that given to growing a healthy community. Or sometimes we would have people with no spiritual depth or strength ‘doing mission’ and then either burning out or having a moral failure because they were pure activists and were not well connected with God in scripture and prayer.

Calling the church to mission is a necessary, even essential correction, but lately I have found myself drawn to exploring more intently how we nurture really strong and healthy communities of faith as well as wondering how we move beyond lip service in spiritual formation and development.

At Upstream we agreed that the life of discipleship really boiled down to 3 things – loving God – loving one another and loving the world. If you can imagine a diagram with three intersecting circles then I would say that at times we need to place emphasis on different aspects and recently ‘loving the world’ has (quite rightly) been the place of greater emphasis.

If I were to ask you which one was of greater priority I honestly don’t think you could pick one ‘imperative’ above the others easily. Maybe we aren’t supposed to.

So are we moving to a ‘post-missional’ era?

Not an era where mission is off the agenda – not at all – but perhaps an era where the emphasis shifts?

I have rambled here for long enough.

Hopefully long enough to convince my friends that I have not ‘abandoned the ship’, but equally I hope the length of this post will serve to frame my inner disturbances in a way that makes sense.

So over to you.

Some of you have been as deeply engaged in the missional journey as I have and may have similar inner questionings. Or you may see that I am just tired and in need of that long holiday we have scheduled for April this year…

Either way let me know your thoughts…

I heave a bit of a sigh as I write this, but I’m a little weary of the way these words get used interchangeably to describe church, when I would suggest they have quite different meanings. I hear it and read it regularly so for what its worth here is my explanation of the difference.

As one of the crew (Forge

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) who – as far as I know – began the use of the word ‘attractional’, I’d say I probably have a fair idea of what we mean by it – and certainly in our understanding it doesn’t mean the same as ‘attractive’.

Not at all.

In missional church lingo the term ‘attractional’ refers to the way a church seeks to do all it can to get people to the service. This might be better music, more comfy seats or a free car (serious…) It is all about marketing and developing a way of getting people ‘in’. It operates on the assumption that people actually want in… a bloody big assumption if you ask me…

I am not a fan of church being attractional. I believe the foundational assumption is flawed. People are not sitting at home just waiting for us to get the show right and then they will come. This approach will lead us to more focus on style and less on substance.

However I believe Christian community ought to be attractive. If there is genuine Christ centred community happening where we are loving one another deeply and sharing life then it will be attractive to people. Perhaps not to all however. Community can be frightening – exposing us and leaving us vulnerable – it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea.

But the foundational assumption here is not that people are waiting to join us if only we could ‘get things right’. It is simply that if we are a genuine community then chances are that will be very attractive to many. And if they encounter our community then they will find it life giving.

So am I saying we should have crap music, lousy teaching and poor coffee?

Nope.

We don’t need to do these things poorly. But doing them with ‘excellence’ will not be the difference between people coming or not coming. I’d say that doing these things well will probably make us more attractive, but if these are the factors drawing people to us, rather than the depth of community we experience then those people will not be genuinely connected and discipled and will disappear as soon as someone else offers better quality preaching, music etc.

This is not about church expressions. Large, small, alternative, traditional etc. It is about the imagination of church that shapes us.

Anyway I hope that’s cleared up what I find to be an ongoing confusion when it comes to missional ‘terminology’.

Driscoll

says some very challenging things about the Sydney Anglican brand of Australian Christianity.

However his comments cut more broadly across the Australian church as a whole and point to some of our glaring weaknesses as a wider body.

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I’m not a Driscoll fan at all, but I think he says some useful stuff here if we are prepared to listen. HT

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I think David Fitch could well be onto something here. I like this bloke and the way he thinks and writes. Read on…

Can the gospel be too big? For some of us in the missional church movement, this question borders on heresy. We regularly caution that the gospel is not only about what Jesus can do for me. It is primarily about the transformation of our very way of life into God’s mission for the world. We resist any temptation to turn the gospel into anything that might be too “user friendly.” The mission of God (missio Dei), so we proclaim, must be all-encompassing, and we must become participants in it.

Yet for all the good in this approach, there may be another heresy beneath the surface. For in protecting the bigness of the gospel, we risk making the Christian life inaccessible to those outside of it. As a result, amid the current swell of appreciation for missio Dei theology in American churches, and the outcries against a gospel that has become too small, I find myself concerned about the ways we may unintentionally be making the gospel too big.

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“Christianity is now almost impossible to explain, not because the concepts aren’t intelligible, but because the living, moving, speaking examples of our faith don’t line up with the message. Our poor posture overshadows the most beautiful story and reality the world has ever known.”

Hugh Halter & Matt Smay in The Tangible Kingdom p.41 HT Mark

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