So while we’re talking about incarnation, contextualization and pushing some boundaries, how do you see this whole deal?…

Second Life

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is an online ‘game’ where players do literally create a ‘virtual’ second life which they then live out. For some this is serious business and can take up more time than their real life. Scary?… Yes, I think so…

Of course in second life as in real life there is the while gamut of people including ‘believers’ and ‘unbelievers’…Which raises the question, is it possible – or even important – to be a missionary in the virtual world?

And then just to complicate matters, can people come to faith in the virtual world? Can you be a virtual disciple?…

And… then to muddy things a little more, is it possible to be a Christian in second life but not in real life or vice versa?…

Ok, so it all sounds a bit whacked out and nutso, but if you read the article I think you’ll need to ponder it a little more deeply. Maybe there is a whole people group (to use missionary language) who are unreached and this could be simply doing what Paul says ‘all things to all people so that by all possible means…”

Is this something we will need to give genuine attention to in this rapidly shifting world, or is this simply an example of some people losing touch with reality?

A devoted Christian ‘second lifer’ has got involved in the comments section at Ur, so be sure to see what she has to say!

While on the subject David Fitch offers another really interesting piece

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Here’s a post home movie movie

to get you thinking about how you see mission!

As one who writes the odd provocative post I also enjoy reading and engaging with others who do the same.

Read it and offer your thoughts

If you go back only a couple of hundred years in time to be a missionary was a huge undertaking.

For most it meant going overseas to ‘non-Christian’ countries and for many it meant probably not returning.

There was great cost involved in missionary service and if you read the autobiographies of those from that era you feel a whole different mindset in operation. Many who went to foreign shores gave up the opportunity for marriage, or put their kids in boarding schools. They got sick and often died in their attempts to share the gospel. It was enormously costly work.

Yet read their stories and it seems they saw their struggles as a joy rather than a burden. Strange…

As I was reading Hudson Taylor’s biography and journals I genuinely wanted to say ‘Come on buddy – snap out of it!’ The way he took joy in his suffering read as completely foreign to me – almost dishonest. Similar with the journals of Jim Elliot and others from the 19th and 20th centuries. They wrote in a way that seemed to suggest their own wants and desires didn’t matter.

Ridiculous fanatics.

Thankfully we have come to grips with the fact that we need to be fulfilled in whatever we do and that the gospel ought to actually serve my own sense of achieving my destiny rather than getting in the way of it. Those old missionaries were well over the top and the level of irresponsibility and lack of wisdom they showed was appalling. Today we are much more concerned for ourselves, our families and our futures than they were.

Very sensible…

However as I have been preaching on Mark 15 last week and this week, and reflecting on the life of Jesus in an .acom Christology class I was facilitating, I couldn’t help wondering if maybe we need a bit of that old missionary spirit rekindled? But you knew I was going to say that didn’t you?…

In ch 15 Mark presents to us a ‘king’ – 6 times Mark tells us Jesus is the ‘king of the Jews’ – but a king who rules in a very different way over a very different kingdom. He allows himself to die for others when he could have summoned angels to his rescue. He suffers abuse, ridicule and abandonment when he didn’t have to. This king calls his followers to deny themselves and take up their

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cross to follow him. He seems more in synch with those old missionaries than with most of us today.

I tend to think we have replaced the cross with the couch and the life of discipleship with what Bonhoeffer called the ‘happy religious life’. Even those of us who would hope to live differently are still trapped in a culture that has formed us and shaped us to look after our own needs first and to trust ourselves rather than God. We hope to live differently, but not so it impinges on our comfort.

It was Kierkegaard who said ‘It is much easier to be an admirer of Jesus than a follower’.

Whatever we think of the lives of those of those old missionaries and the sometimes bizarre choices they made, there was no question who was calling the shots in their lives. I fear for the generation to follow us, that they will know nothing of a gospel of sacrifice and self denial. If nothing changes in the contemporary Christian psyche then we are in deep trouble.

At least there is a vague memory still there in some of us that all is not as it should be, even if we struggle to reclaim the ground.

Its why we need our prophets – to keep calling us back to the world as God intends and to the life of discipleship as Jesus described it. We need the idealists who won’t settle for a pragmatic ‘oh well this is how it is’, because in their absence we seem to create a world that more closely resembles contemporary western culture with a religious flavour than the kingdom of God.

It looks like this ship wuthering heights dvd download may have left port without me, but I have a few thoughts I’d like to add.

It is a synchroblog organised by Rick over at Blind Beggar and he frames it like this:

“I have a continuing concern that the term missional has become over used and wrongly used. Audio Ur posted a podcast with Alan Hirsch yesterday and I got around to listen to it this morning. Alan takes up this very concern and says things like: It is a critical term. We must reclaim the term. The concept behind missional is really big and it would be terrible to lose it.”

As you would probably know, ‘missional’ was not a word. At least it didn’t appear in the dictionary until recently and it still doesn’t show up on the spell check of the computer.

For a non-word there sure has been some biffo surounding it.

The irony is that ‘missional’ became a word as churches tried to reframe their core business and identity. Today we have ‘missional churches’, but the question you have to ask is instead of what?! Its like having a goal kicking football team or a brick laying construction company… I mean what other options are there?…

Its a frightening thought that for so long this was not an integral part of the church’s psyche – that for so long we forgot about the local arena only to see the overseas need. The current glut of missional speak is possibly an over-reaction to that period of neglect and if we really reflect on on it, then surely its somewhat disturbing to need to use the word ‘missional’ to describe our churches!

There are some interesting variations on the use of this word. As I talk with churches I hear of them doing ‘missions’ and immediately know it will be in a foreign country. I hear them speak of mission and it is local. And the word missional has become the adjective that everyone uses, even if they’re not actually missional.

To its credit ‘missional’ is not an offensive word. People can buy into it and it has excellent pedigree. When I speak with people I usually define missional as coming from the latin ‘missio’ = to send. The church is therefore a ‘sent people’. I think we would all agree on this. Its simple, straight forward and an idea everyone can buy into – even if they don’t do it. Let’s face it – people love new ideas, but new practice is more disturbing and less likely to occur.

Its in the outworking of what it means to be ‘missional’ that most of the disagreement comes. I have come from an evangelical background where there has been a strong emphasis on getting people to come to church and hence ‘missional’ was regularly been co-opted into this paradigm as the obvious intent of a missional church.

Now there’s nothing wrong with wanting people to be part of a rich loving community where they can encounter God, but I believe ‘missional’ is much broader than that. These days I usually describe ‘mission’ as whatever we do that demonstrates God’s love to the world’. And within that ‘evangelism’ is a kind of subset that involves communciating who Jesus is and what he has done – most often in words. I would say that evangelism is ultimately where mission takes us.

While I’m spouting opinions I should add that I don’t like the current trend away from ‘evangelism’ among some of the new expresions of church. It seems like a reaction to the word and its excesses has yet again resulted in a baby/bathwater situation. (FWIW I have been blogging on evangelism over here for the last 4 weeks offering some of my own insights and will be dribbling on there for as long as I have something I need to say)

So in response to the universal adoption of ‘missional’ as the generic adjective to describe pretty much every church you come across, I have been returning to using ‘missionary’ as my preferred descriptorYes, its a loaded one to be sure, as it carries much baggage from historical perceptions of missionaries, but I tend to believe that if we can get people thinking and behaving like missionaries in their own backyards then we must be on the right track.

Hey… missionaries in their own backyards… great title for a blog!

From W.David Phillips:

“At my last doctoral class with Len Sweet last week, he posed a question to us that went something like this: Provide for me the metaphors that will describe how we measure success in the church in the future. We are prone to measure success by how many and how much. And we determine who is a great leader by how many and how much.

So today, I want to share with you some of the metaphors we listed (and some I came up with afterwards), of things we can count as a measure of success. But I need to issue a warning. You will have to think about these and you may push back unless you realize the metaphor. So don’t react…Ponder…

1. The number of cigarette butts in the church parking lot.

2. The number of adoptions people in the church have made from local foster care.

3. The number of pictures on the church wall of unwed mothers holding their newborn babies in their arms for the first time.

4. The number of classes for special needs children and adults

5. The number of former convicted felons serving in the church

6. The number of phone calls from community leaders asking the church’s advice

7. The number of meetings that take place somewhere besides the church building

8. The number of organizations using the church building

9. The number of days the pastor doesn’t spend time in the church office but in the community

10. The number of emergency finance meetings that take place to reroute money to community ministry

11. The amount of dollars saved by the local schools because the church has painted the walls

12. The number of people serving in the community during the church’s normal worship hours

13. The number of non-religious-school professors worshiping with you

14. The number of people wearing good, free clothes that used to belong to members of the church

15. The number of times the church band has played family-friendly music in the local coffee shop

16. The number of people who have gotten better because of free health clinic you operate

17. The number of people in new jobs thanks to the free job training center you opened

18. The number of micro-loans given by members in your church

19. The number of churches your church planted in a 10 mile radius of your own church

Got any more?”

Reggie McNeal reflects on the amazing growth of the church in other parts of the world and then asks – do we really omen the divx want to see God’s kingdom come in the western world. Its a good question.

He says if we do then “we need to shift from looking at the kingdom thru church lens to looking at the church thru kingdom lens.”

That strikes me as a huge key. As he goes on to say ‘this changes everything!’

This is a great video and well worth a look. He reminds us that our strategic planning and clever ideas are not as important as we sometimes like to think.

A few quotes:

“Is God most at home in the church?”

“Does God look at church stats to see how things are going? Does God really count how many showed up on Sunday?”

“God takes attendance by who’s missing.”

“A churchcentric view of the world sees ‘church’ as the destination. If we think the church is the destination then we don’t get it.”

“Why do we spend so much money on ourselves?”

“What’s the point of the people of God, if we are not the point?”

“Don’t have an evangelism strategy. Give up on that! It feels like a drive by shooting anyway. Instead have a ‘blessing’ strategy”

“Bless 3 people this week and make sure one of them doesn’t deserve it”

Last year when I wasn’t blogging publicly I kept my thoughts and reflections in a private blog.

I was flicking thru it tonight and came across some reflections I made after watching a doco on salmon swimming upstream. I guess you can draw your own conclusions…

Some thoughts in no particular order:

* There is a life cycle that starts with salmon swimming downstream (past other mature salmon coming up) and out into the ocean.

* The salmon have an inbuilt sense of where to head and are able to find the smallest river all the way from the ocean.

* Upon return from the ocean, in the river mouth some of the salmon get eaten by sharks because the tide is out and they can’t get past

* When they are actually able to navigate the shallow waters of the river, the bears await and many get picked off there.

* The journey upstream is an immensely difficult one with the salmon sometimes just swimming to stay still

* It is a journey that takes everything they have got in terms of energy and life

* Their intention at the end of this is to reproduce

* The bears at the waterfall are also able to pick off the salmon as they lurch themselves upwards and try to keep going

* The salmon change colour when they get past the falls and approach the mating time

* As they mate and lay their eggs they must surrender their own lives.

* They must die to themselves if new life is to occur.

Reckon there are some great lessons in that?

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I have been chewing on this for a while as the language of ‘selling out’ has been used around the place quite a bit lately and I am not sure its always used appropriately.

There have been (quite legitimate) questions raised about whether Forge is selling out by having a national conference, or by working with established churches and denominations. There are questions raised about whether people seeking to experiment and explore with church and mission are selling out by continuing to allow traditional forms to exist side by side new expressions.

I thought it might be helpful to offer my own reflections on this issue, partly because I am often a target of the comment, but also because I think we need to think clearly about what ‘selling out’ means.

I was speaking with a friend recently who moved to an older established church with the purpose of transitioning it to a missionary community and operating with more of a missional incarnational emphasis. However along the way the church has grown quite considerably as new families have joined and put their roots down. These families now request some level of accommodation to their needs – kids ministry, etc. My friend told me he felt like by seeking to meet these requests he had ‘sold out’. (Note to friend: I realise you are may well be reading this so feel free to correct me if I am wrong in what I heard 🙂 )

I disagreed that the actions he were taking constituted selling out.

I asked him if he was still committed to the original vision and dream. The answer was ‘yes – very much so’. I suggested that along the way we sometimes need to make some compromises to reach the end goal and this is normal in any group. By working with these folks he hasn’t ‘sold out’. He has recognised where they are at and is starting there, rather than expecting them to come to where he is at.

I believe we ‘sell out’ when we stop pursuing our core objectives and allow ourselves to be guided by a) what makes $$$ b) what please others with no regard for the consequences.

My friend is still deeply committed to the same stuff as he when he started – but getting to the destination has proved more tricky than first thought. If he ever tells me that its ‘just easier’ to run a few programs and ‘play the game’ than to pursue the original dream and when he tells me that he can no longer pursue the dream because ‘people are leaving’ or the ‘offerings are down’ then he will have ‘sold out’, because the dream will have evaporated and he will be allowing other factors to shape his actions.

Often in these types of conversations ‘compromise’ is virtually a 4 letter word, but I’d suggest its a word we simply can’t escape if we want to live in reality and work with people. My friend must download rated x free henry poole is here free download make some compromise to take people with him on the journey. Its just good smart leadership.

I believe the key is in knowing what you will not compromise on – and this seems to be the place where disagreement occurs.

As Forge has developed and become more accepted by mainstream churches and as we have run several national conferences and formed partnerships with Bible colleges we have been accused of ‘selling out’.

Some of what is happening is a movement becoming more organised and more recognised / legitimate. Some of it is healthy growth. Some of it certainly does open us to the genuine questions of priorities and direction. But its way too easy to throw the language of ‘selling out’ around just because someone isn’t conforming to your own expectation of how things should be.

But having sat around the room with the Forge national team and having debated for several days the essence of our core business, I am very confident that we have not lost the ‘cultivation of the missional incarnational church’ as our burning passion and driving energy.

Once we get to the place of not rocking the boat because colleges will cut our fees, or when we run conferences because we need $$$ to survive, or when we never critique church structures for fear denominations will sideline us and dry up our funds – then we will have sold out.

But to call running conferences, working with denominations and established churches ‘selling out’ is simply not accurate. There is no question that in all of this there is an element of compromise and a danger of losing our distinctives.

I have often been asked if I could ever go back to being the leader of a normal church and the answer is a no brainer. Of course I could, but it would be as Andrew Hamilton the missionary, who would lead people on the journey of incarnational mission. If I couldn’t be true to that then there wouldn’t be much point in me being around. I don’t get many invites…

I’m interested to have some decent discussion on this because I get very weary of the comments that seem to show a lack of appreciation for the process of leading people and fail to recognise the place of compromise and well chosen battles as integral to any longer term journey.