I thought the previous post

by this title may have drawn a little more engagement as it quite is a radical position to hold – that ‘we’ is more important than ‘me’.

That as a Christ follower I cannot with integrity, exist independent of committed Christian community. More than that however, within that community there is a healthy practice of mutual submission to one another as we seek to follow Jesus. Translation = I am willing to let others have real input into shaping my life and future and sometimes I will submit to their opinions over and above my own.

Its a dangerous place to be isn’t it?

If we genuinely allow communities like these to develop then we are really seeking a different way to live. We are consciously allowing community to be prioritised over individuality. I think I probably fear the danger of abusive community more than the danger of stupid individuality. But I still think this is the direction the gospel calls us in.

There simply is no future in a faith that tries to exist outside of committed Christian community. By that I mean more than catching up with friends for dinner. That is simply what it says – catching up with friends – and its good – but its not enough. Community needs to be much more diverse than that. Surely it will include people I don’t like and who don’t like me. Surely it will involve ongoing commitment to each other when we would rather not be involved.

I think there is both beauty and danger in the Pete Ward’s “Liquid Church’ concept. The beauty is that church is defined much less rigidly – as a verb rather than a noun even – as the gathering of believers in any form. But the problem is that it panders to the consumer in us (something Ward doesn’t see as an issue) and means that we can do church at our leisure, or with only the people we like.

In the newer expressions of church this idea is the one that concerns me the most – that we can do away with a regular ongoing commitment to one another and replace it with a convenient engagement with those we get on with at a time and frequency that works for us.

For those who tell me they are between churches or just haven’t found somewhere to suit them – I do understand – really – because there are plenty of sick churches out there – but at the same time I find myself saying ‘Oh well – looks like you’ll need to be part of a community that doesn’t suit you.’

And the individualist in us says ‘I don’t think so…’

I have occasionally pondered what I would do if Upstream folded and we were left on our own here. I imagine it would be a case of simply heading down to one of the local churches and joining them in some way. It would not likely be my first preference, but the other choice would be ‘waiting until something developed that suited me’. I would rather throw my lot in with a group of people and find a way to work together, than go it alone and wait until something more to my ‘liking’ emerged.

Fernando has some good reflections on the same topic over here entitled “is it possible to be a post-congregational baptist?” where he struggles with his own journey at the moment.

From Sacred Space today:

“When we speak of ‘letting your light shine before others’ what are we talking about?… It means living in such a way that our lives would not make sense if God did not exist.”

I like this description and find it sufficiently challenging to be an ongoing question for reflection.

In what way do I live that only makes sense because of the God who I believe exists?…divx after school special

After his year in the UK among the Crowded House, Steve is asking some excellent questions about the way in which teaching and preaching functions in churches.

The normal theory is that ‘good teaching’ makes better Christians but Steve says:

“But as I look around I find myself in somewhat of a quandary. If good biblical teaching is as effective as evangelical ministry and bible training centres say it is, why in general is there not an obvious and qualitative difference in the lives of the people who sit under such ministries, compared with the lives of those people who sit under so called “bad” or “poor” teaching?”

In his next post he goes on to describe the behavioural differences between a solid Bible believing evangelical church and a more liberal church:

“One was a conservative evangelical church replete with a good teaching ministry, while the other was what is often called “evan-jelly-cal” bordering on what many would call liberal, with a (not surprisingly) lower view of teaching the Bible. Yet when it was examined which church had more impact in, and involved itself more self-sacrificially with, the local community and all of its no-go lower socio-economic areas, it was the latter not the former that scored the points.”

I guess the advocates of ‘good teaching’ may well suggest that there really isn’t

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good teaching in these churches, but my gut feeling tells me that Steve is onto something important.

There is something about the way we ‘work out’ the teaching we encounter that results in more Christlike lives or not. So it leads to the question that Steve addresses – maybe the issue is less to do with the quality of the teaching and more to do with the way in which is church is configured.

Steve is not working from any empirical data, just subjective observations, but I think he is onto something and asking a very important question.

It begs the question – how we ‘do church’ in a way that actually sees us growing in our Christlikeness rather than our Christ knowledge?

Ok so this is American, but given our tendency to mindlessly follow along its maybe a picture of what is to come in Oz…

These are excerpts from the Barna report – with the full story here.

“For decades, American Christians, who comprise more than four of our every five adults, assumed they had one legitimate way to practice their faith: through involvement in a conventional church. But new research shows that this mind set is no longer prevalent in the U.S. The latest Barna study shows that a majority of adults now believe that there are various biblically legitimate alternatives to participation in a conventional church.”

“The Barna study also found that tens of millions of people are experiencing and expressing their faith in God independent of any connection to a conventional church. In the past month, 55% of adults had attended a conventional church service. During that same month, 28% of all adults who did not attend a conventional church activity did, however, participate in an alternative means of experiencing and expressing their faith in God.”

“In a companion study conducted by The Barna Group among Senior Pastors of Protestant churches, two out of three pastors agreed that “house churches are legitimate Christian churches.” Surprisingly, pastors from mainline churches were more likely than pastors from other Protestant congregations to consider house churches to be biblically defensible forms of church experience. Among the pastors least likely to support the legitimacy of house churches were pastors who earn more than $75,000 annually; African-American pastors; and pastors of charismatic or Pentecostal churches.”

I was preaching today at a local church – a really good bunch of people and a crew who I always enjoy being with. But after my thoughts yesterday, I couldn’t help noticing how many songs were crying out to God to ‘revive us’ or to ‘revive’ the people around us. It is a very significant motif in our western thinking.

I found it very hard to sing the first few songs.

But then there was this song from Matt Redman

I could sing again…

Thanks Matt for a song that isn’t all about me and reminds us that God is still God whether my life is wonderfully prosperous or desperately difficult.

Blessed Be Your Name mulan divx movie online

by Matt Redman

Blessed Be Your Name

In the land that is plentiful

Where Your streams of abundance flow

Blessed be Your name

Blessed Be Your name

When I’m found in the desert place

Though I walk through the wilderness

Blessed Be Your name

Every blessing You pour out

I’ll turn back to praise

When the darkness closes in, Lord

Still I will say

Blessed be the name of the Lord

Blessed be Your name

Blessed be the name of the Lord

Blessed be Your glorious name

Blessed be Your name

When the sun’s shining down on me

When the world’s ‘all as it should be’

Blessed be Your name

Blessed be Your name

On the road marked with suffering

Though there’s pain in the offering

Blessed be Your name

Every blessing You pour out

I’ll turn back to praise

When the darkness closes in, Lord

Still I will say

Blessed be the name of the Lord

Blessed be Your name

Blessed be the name of the Lord

Blessed be Your glorious name

Blessed be the name of the Lord

Blessed be Your name

Blessed be the name of the Lord

Blessed be Your glorious name

You give and take away

You give and take away

My heart will choose to say

Lord, blessed be Your name

Update: My good friend Grendel was a late starter on this ‘synchroblog’ but you can check his post here. Its a beauty.

I’d like to start this post by saying that most of my life I have been an optimist – and have always believed – often for no good reason – that ‘things’ will get better… I guess there is as much irrationality about optimism as there is about pessimism!

However I am not so optimistic about the future of Australian Christianity. In fact I see a very bleak future for several generations to come. I hesitate to post this rather gloomy piece, but I am interested to see if its ‘just me’ or if others also have similar ruminations…

What provoked my thinking on this front was a recent church meeting I attended where the high powered speaker was ‘believing God for revival’… He and many others like him have been prophesying revival in Perth/Western Australia/Australia for more years than I can count now. You know the drill… ‘I believe there is going to be a mighty work of God in this land… a revival of epic proportions… God is doing a new thing… if my people will humble themselves and pray… blah blah blah…”

Some ‘ask’ for revival. Others predict it.

I believe both have missed the point.

I am tired of this revival talk and these false prophets, because in the 30 years I have been old enough to understand the concept I have actually observed the church (overall) in decline. And I haven’t seen any of the revivals that have been predicted ever actually happen. (I do know there have been movements of this ilk among aboriginal people – but these weren’t ‘prophesied’ – and of course because they are not white we don’t count them…)

Do I sound a tad cynical?…

The next time someone prophesies massive revival in your church tell them they are full of crap. Ok… maybe that’s a bit strong… Maybe just politely inquire when the revival will be, what download how the garcia girls spent their summer dvdrip will happen, how you will know it has happened and then bet them a carton of crownies it won’t happen. (Easy way to get free beer…)

No… on second thoughts I was right the first time.

I began pondering why we crave this revival experience and I wonder if it because we are too lazy to get off our own butts and get involved with the people in the communities we live in and do the hard yards of making connections, knowing that many of them will never lead to a person coming to faith? I wonder if we don’t just want God to do the ‘hard work’ of mission (we will hold prayer meetings – until we get bored because nothing has happened) and then when he has done his thing people will flock to our churches to join us… and become like us… and we won’t have to change one bit… we won’t have to experience any discomfort at all. Of course we only want ‘appropriate’ people to join our churches so it would need to be a selective revival of the middle classes.

In many churches the people pray and send God out on mission, when in reality it is us he has commissioned to the task.

Revival as I hear it depicted takes the responsibility off us to be salt and light. Its as if the people pray and send God out on mission, and then complain when he doesn’t get the job done.

I’m so tired of hearing preachers rant about ‘taking our city for God’, or taking the nation’. For one thing I don’t think people like being ‘taken’, and for another I don’t think anyone really wants to do it. Sure you might get a few wild eyed young people fired up and nutso the day after a Planetshakers conference, but talk to them in 6 months about their plans for ‘taking the city’ and chances are (if they are still in church) that they won’t even remember the whole thing.

The militaristic tone of that language harks back to our darkest days when crusades took people by force and needs to be dismantled and retired for ever. I remember when Erwin McManus was in Perth a few months back, during the open question time, he was asked ‘what we need to do to start taking our city for God’.

His response… ‘stop using that kinda language for a start!’

We really have to stop this nonsense talk about taking the world for Christ when most of us don’t even know our own next door neighbours. And we need to stop expecting God to do what we are too lazy or afraid to do ourselves.

I should say that I would love to be around if God ever did do something miraculous – if there ever was a genuine revival ala the Welsh revival. I’m sure that would be an incredible experience. But in the mean time – in the absence of the miraculous – I believe our job is not to pray God will pull his finger out and bring some pagans into church, but rather for us to get our own butts into gear and live the gospel in the worlds we are a part of.

Having said that I don’t think it will make a lot difference to the attendance figures at church. I’m not even convinced that many people will be interested in the gospel or faith. I think for anyone who is engaged in evangelistic work among adult Australians it will be a lean time. There’s no doubt young people are easier to influence, but that knife cuts both ways as they also easily influenced away from faith.

I actually believe the current decline in Australian Christianity will continue for maybe another couple of hundred years. If we are looking like following European trends then Australia is only going to become more secular,and more focussed on the material to bring us satisfaction in life. I can see that at least the next 50 years being ones of decline and challenge for us in the church. There will be some who will be faithful, who will take up the challenge of living for Jesus, but I believe it will be a dry, tough time and many will give the game up.

I have recently been wondering, what if our generation’s contribution will simply be that of ‘holding our ground’?

What if we are entering a period of time where there will be such a disinterest in faith that simply to ‘not give up and join in’ will be a great achievement? I haven’t thought like this before, but increasingly I am wondering if we really are in survival mode as the Australian church – even if our gung ho militaristic rhetoric suggests otherwise?

The optimist in me wants to believe that things will get better – that if we just ‘do more missionary stuff’ people will close encounters of the third kind divx download respond again to the gospel and that we will see a new generation of disciples who will chart the course for the future. But I just can’t see it. And while it disturbs me and makes me sad I feel this is a more accurate reality than revival next weeky…

What I do see is a fair share of Christians getting lured away from faith by affluence and self indulgence and laziness. I do see a general decline in the level of Christian discipleship as people work harder and generally ask ‘what’s the point’? I wonder where this laiodicean kind of faith will take us?…

No one is likely to get excited about being the people who simply ‘held the ground’. As a pastor I would have found that a hard sermon to preach. ‘Come on people! Lets just be faithful to what we know and try not to quit!’ Hmmm…

I believe there are sound biblical and practical principles for how a church is to function and operate in its community, but I don’t believe that just by being faithful we will see a substantial difference in the Australian spiritual landscape. I don’t think there is any easy answer to the current situation we find ourselves in as the church.

I don’t say that to discourage you, but I say it because I am tired of the false hopes that get thrust at us from so many directions. So many conferences with answers and plans and models to fix where we are at – and yet so little changes. Maybe that’s why we go the ‘revival’ route. We know we’re screwed and unless God shows up then in a miraculous way we have nothing left to stand on. And when the conferences and seminars don’t ‘work’ there begins the cycle of blame – its our pastor who can’t lead us – or for pastor’s ‘its our people who just aren’t committed’.

Folks – my Australia day post is somewhat bleak. I do realise that. But I also believe that if it were a prophesy it would have more of a chance of being accurate than the crap we currently get fed.

What do I suggest?

Honestly I don’t have any other answer than to say ‘be faithful disciples’… I think Peter had it right when Jesus asked him if he wanted to leave. Remember his words? ‘Lord to whom would we go?!’

I don’t believe there is a better ‘option’ out there for making sense of the world, but I’m not so sure we as the church believe that like we used to…

p>This post is part of the Christianity In Australia

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synchroblog which a number of Australian Christians are participating in to celebrate Australia Day. For more on Christianity in Australia see:

• Matt Stone at Journeys In Between
• Ben Thurley at Ben’s Blog
• Rodney Olsen at RodneyOlsen.net
• Geoff Pengilly at The Healing Project
• Andy Porteous at Not Yet Finished
• Paul Robotham at A Christian’s Blog
• Chris Summerfield at A Churchless Faith
• Christina Aitken at Sojourn
• Heather at A Deconstructed Christian
• Geoff Matheson at Amateur Theology
• Deborah Taggart at
• Deborah Taggart at The Bright Side
• Rob Hanks at Pump House
• Mike Carroll aka ‘Grendel’ at Sermons From An Atheist