Soon after we came back we ran into more unexpected conflict. Bizarre, weird stuff and we wondered just what the heck was going on in this church.

I had been appointed to ‘lead’ – there was no job description other than that – and it was what I intended to do. However it seemed I wasn’t leading in the direction or the manner some of the folks wanted to go. More tension – suspicion – mistrust.

By the middle of the year we were bogged. We were up the axels and going nowhere fast. I don’t want to say too much about it all on here as it isn’t appropriate, but the reality was that we had more and more conflict and just seemed to spend more time spinning our wheels than actually going anywhere.

I had no idea it would be so hard. When I was running the ‘Re-Imagine’ stream at Forge I felt like the theory sounded reasonably straight forward for helping a church get focused on mission. But we couldn’t seem to get focused on anything. Great ideas had little currency in such a messy place. We really needed to deal with the ‘mess’ before we could move on to more positive things.

On Sundays we were preaching thru John, a book that points us straight to Jesus and his life and mission and hoping it would catch fire. But reality was that we needed to deal with some of the ugliness and evil in our own community before we were going to go anywhere. And yes I realise ‘evil’ is a harsh word, but as we prayed and discerned we felt there were evil spiritual forces at work and needing confronting.

Part of that process was accepting that what happened during the church split the previous year was just plain wrong and needed to be confessed as sin and repented of. There’s no question that there were no easy answers to the conflict the church found itself in, but the choices made and the actions taken to remove several families were not the stuff that Jesus would cheer for. That we gave assent to it was to our shame.

As a pastoral team we felt that we needed to draw a line in the sand and say that we would no longer allow control, suspicion and division to be forces that shaped us as a church. We called for a day of repentance, that turned into a month. We went and visited each of the families who had opposed us and been removed from the church and asked their forgiveness. We started to feel like maybe we were dealing with some of the demons that had been snapping at us and crippling us.

We wanted to lead with honesty, integrity and transparency. We didn’t want to shove people around or just get our own way. We didn’t want to let the loudest voices rule either. There was a significant shift that happened in that process.

One night at a monthly leader’s meeting half of our leadership team resigned unexpectedly. As far as I know none of them knew each other was going to make the decision, but 3 people who all found it hard to come to grips with the way I was leading pulled out together. It was a strange night, a bit awkward and confusing, yet also freeing. I believe they made good decisions and actually chose to step aside to allow us to pursue what we felt was important.

Shortly after those of us left began to meet weekly to eat breakfast and pray as a leadership team. We held a retreat and began to dream again – although after a year of conflict and opposition I was feeling pretty weary. We were beginning to gel a good team of leaders and holding hope for 2011. But I knew I was hanging by a thread. I felt like a bloke who had run half a marathon – weary – but with the end still a long way off.

Just as our leadership was starting to gel one key family left to become pastors at another church. That one really sucked. Another 2 key families headed off on holidays for a month and by December of 2010 we were a very small bunch, meeting on Sundays – 15-30 on a good day. Morale was low and we were genuinely considering our own viability.

Our youth pastor and I took it in turns to want to resign. On weeks when he was flat and dispirited I would have found some energy from somewhere. On weeks when I was ready to walk away he would be inspired and have a reason for hope. It was a cycle we laughed about, but it was real. We were tired and had lost a fair bit of hope.

At this point the plans for establishing and devloping a missional community that genuinely blessed and served the local community was far from my mind. I really just wanted out – and wanted a break from the shit that goes with church leadership – the draining sense of responsibility that accompanies leading a church that has lost its way. It wasn’t hard to run a Sunday gig, but it was hard to feel any kind of hope and energy in the middle of it.

But – and this is the nub of it – God wouldn’t give us a green light to resign. I was ready to be a full time retic bloke and live a quiet life away from church politics, but nothing in my being felt right about the decision. Framed more positively we felt God wanted us to lead the church thru the difficult time and to begin the process of establishing a new culture.

So we pressed on… and prayed. We prayed especially for some people to come and join us and share the load. We prayed that some like minds would come along and that we would have some friends in the church – real friends who we could hang with and have fun with… people who would like us and who would resonate with our hearts and hopes.

Then shortly after there was that Sunday in January 2011 when I thought it would be inspiring for our small crew of people to hear again the story of Gideon…

I chuckle now, but that was a tough day.

The beauty of being in a quiet place with work is that I get to blog again. Its not just the time I have, but rather than mind is actually active again in this space, so I’m going to write a series of posts on what I have been learning since returning to an established church.

I’m not sure how many posts it will be, but there are some things I want to get ‘on paper’ before I forget them, or get too busy again.

When my friends Al Hirsch and Mike Frost wrote Shaping of Things to Come way back in 2003 their very first chapter was entitled ‘Evolution or Revolution’, an incendiary look at the question of whether the current Christendom framed form of church can be recalibrated missionally or if it was simply unfixable and needed jetisoning for new expressons of mission and church.

The clear and overwhelming conclusion from Al & Mike was that evolution (slow gradual change) was not an option and the only way forward was revolution. The existing forms were essentially declared dead in the water and new paths were needing to be forged if the church in the west was to have any hope at all. I don’t think that’s overstating the case and not surprisingly the book created a huge furore all over the place, both inspiring or infuriating, depending on how you saw their message.

I was one of the inspired and I still am. I loved the book, loved what it stirred in me and what it stirred in the western church. It was a literary hand grenade and a much needed one.

While I was never convinced of the rather black and white either/or nature of the first chapter, I didn’t need much convincing to leave the stodginess of the old and go after the opportunity of the new. As a leader in an established church I observed all of the struggles that Mike & Al both wrote about and talked about and I had felt in myself for years. The idea of reforming an established church was not attractive and certainly didn’t seem viable to me 10 years ago. I still think its a pretty tall order.

I didn’t end up leaving from frustration or indifference – although it may have come to that had I hung around for another few years. My leaving was a genuine God experience – a ‘calling’ that I still remember with goosebumps and disbelief (but that’s another story).

So after 5 years of youth pastoring and 2 years of leading Lesmurdie Baptist Church, Danelle and I left without really trying to reform an existing church. Sure, we did a lot of teaching, set up some new initiatives and spiked people’s minds with new ideas. I felt people nodding at what I was saying, maybe even cheering for some of the new things we did, but there wasn’t real ‘buy in’. There wasn’t a fundamental shift in the DNA of the church culture. I often compare it to an elastic band. I think we stretched that elastic band a fair way when we were there, but once we left it simply shot back to its original shape.

That’s not to say LBC is a dodgy church – not at all – it was one of the richest experiences of ministry I have had, and with some wonderful people. I’m grateful for those 8 years and what I learnt. But it is to say that church cultures are incredibly resilient and real systemic change certainly does not come from a burst of good teaching, a bit of stirring and a few new initiatives. To really get to the sub-structure of the community it clearly takes something else or it takes longer than a couple of years…

We left and went to experiment and innovate and learn. And for 8 years we did. Another 8 years of great joy, learning and a fair bit of frustration. The ‘revolution’ didn’t go to plan… Perhaps the greatest challenge we faced in leading a new missional community that didn’t resemble anything familiar or established was simply that (by and large) existing Christians didn’t want to join it. It was too far ‘out there’ for them to be able to engage with. It didn’t resemble what they knew or where they felt safe, so it was perceived as a gamble, a risk, or maybe even a novelty.

In the end not being able to recruit new team members was where we found ourselves struggling. We hadn’t seen people come to faith as we expected and our numbers grew smaller each year, as for various reasons those in our team moved house and left the area.

in 2009 we were due for a long break, our 6 month jaunt around the country, and that coincided with an invitation to lead Quinns Baptist Church, our local Baptist community that was on the hunt for a pastor. For me it was a fairly easy decision to say ‘sure let’s try it’ because I was struggling to keep my energy alive in Upstream. For Danelle it was a huge shift though. The move back to a more structured and established church community didn’t really sit well with her and it was with some reticence that she agreed.

We went with a clearly defined purpose – we wrote it in a document, preached on it and gave people opportunity to come to our home each week and talk about it and were fully intent on mapping a plan for QBc to become a missional community. However within 6 weeks of being there we had encountered some significant opposition (secret meetings to discuss us, copies of my blog got circulated with naughty words highlighted, and various other things) and by the time we left in April our position was fragile at best. So it was no surprise that while we were in Townsville we got news that we hadn’t been recalled and in fact had been voted out of the tribe…

Side Note: A big lesson in all of that is not to do ‘test drives’ with churches, particularly if you are likely to be provocative and cause people to be concerned. Either go or don’t go – but by allowing people a chance to vote we actually facilitated division. Reality is we turned up to a church where two groups were already on a collision course and we simply catalysed that reaction, but it would have been a different story had we simply been voted straight in. Then we would have had conflict, but of a different kind.

Its a long (and very ugly) story of how we came to be invited back into the ‘tribe’ again, but by the time we had come back from our trip we were appointed leaders of Quinns and so got stuck back into it. The families who had opposed us had left and the church had been through a nasty split.

Our hope on returning was do to much more than stretch the rubber band a bit further, but the question was where to start and what to focus our energies on. I wasn’t about to back away from the things I had called important previously, but now we were half the size we were before we left and the people left were weary.