Terry’s comment below was an excellent one.

He reminded us of the old African proverb – ‘it takes a village to raise a child’. Its a proverb I often use and I have to say I am very grateful for the ‘village’ we are a part of who help us with the job of raising our kids. No doubt if we were left simply to our own devices our kids would not be as healthy as they currently are.

For us that village includes:

– extended family especially grandparents who love and nurture the kids.

– our church community who really do engage with our kids in significant ways. We feel privileged to have such a fantastic bunch of people around us.

– our friends in the local community, who may not share our faith, but who love our children and help us as we parent. We have connected with some beautiful people in this suburb and I believe its an essential part of our kids development to be loved by people who are not from a church community. By not separating them away from ‘heathens’ they learn early that there is much goodness and common grace in our world.

– our friends who are outside the local community. There are way too many of these to consider, but this diversity of people all influence our kids in various ways.

– the people we have in our home as guests. I was reminded of the value of this again last weekend when Geoff & Sherry came and stayed. They talked to, played with and loved our kids when it would have been easy to fob them off. The kids now think they are the greatest people on the planet. They even like Alan Hirsch

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… because of his many visits here! 🙂

Its a great ‘village’!

Of course you can choose not to be part of a ‘village’, and many people do. The cost of genuine relationships is high so many will live with superficiality or surface engagement because they don’t want to invest time or energy in more.

Like most stuff in life – you get what you ‘pay for’…

The Christmas story really is a wild one!

It helps to revisit the story in different forms each year to try and see it thru fresh eyes. Today I was writing a script for a ‘re-enactment’ of the story to be done by the little kids in our community. I wanted to write it accurately, but in a way that would hold the kid’s attention as they acted it out.

It meant re-reading the whole thing in some depth again to get the details in order in my mind.

When you grow up with a story there is a heap that you take for granted. There is a heap that you believe to be true that actually isn’t. There are parts of the story that get emphasised and parts that get left out – like Herod’s killing of all the babies and the fact that Joseph and Mary become refugees.

There is something about a fresh read of the scriptures that leaves you feeling alive and refreshed in faith. That’s what it did for me today.

My good Anglican friend over in Sheffield is following the church calendar and reflecting on the story in a systematic way. He is serving up some great insights, so if you’d like to take some time to reflect on the story in a fresh way then Andrew can help you out there.

Over the 3 years we have been living in Brighton we have developed into a great team of people who work well together, recognise each others strengths and who ‘get the job done’.

So yesterday it was sad to finally farewell the Robins family, one of the ‘originals’, who are moving back towards the hills area after 3 years with us. It was lunch, presents and a few tears. It was a great way to sign off on this part of the journey with people who have been devoted, faithful and full of encouragement.

Occasionally there are people you are glad to see go, but these guys were definitely not in that category! We will miss them heaps, and our kids will miss them too, but we are grateful for the time we have been able to spend with them. (That’s them on the bottom left)

Now – if only that stupid house would sell…

We have just got back from our annual Upstream team retreat in the small cray-fishing town of Lancelin. (If you aren’t sure what Lancelin is like then just read Dirt Music by Tim Winton and you’ll get it!)

It was a great weekend with the guys and really valuable to hang out, chat and remember who we are.

That might sound like a weird thing to say, but I think sometimes we can forget. In the hubbub of life we can lose the clarity of our sense of identity – the distinctiveness of our calling – and begin to go thru the motions of simply doing church.

I actually believe its as we retell our story to one another that we are forced back to the founding charism and the original ideas that inspired us. I believe part of the function of the leader in new church expressions is to be the one who reminds us of identity – to be the one who says ‘remember why we are doing this?’ and who helps people talk about it. I say “as we retell our story to one another” because I believe we all need to be involved in that remembering and visioning process. As people tell the stories their hope and passion re-ignites and the dream gets reborn.

Over the last few weeks I have been reading Joshua. It starts off interesting and inspiring, becomes deadly boring as they divide up the land and then re-ignites again in Ch 24 where at Shechem Joshua takes time to re-tell the people’s story to them.

It has always struck me that the Hebrew people put a huge emphasis on re-telling stories to one another as a way of remembering, so we made that a part of our weekend. Not only does he re-tell the story of God’s care for them, but he calls them again to reaffirm their commitment to God leading by his own example:

14 “Now fear the LORD and serve him with all faithfulness. Throw away the gods your forefathers worshiped beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the LORD. 15 But if serving the LORD seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your forefathers served beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.”

As we caught up on Friday night it was good to reflect on this passage and to take time to tell each other the stories that have brought us hope along the way and to remember that we are part of the ongoing story that Joshua was telling his people.

It was also good to be challenged by his bold words – to ‘throw away our other gods’ and reaffirm our commitment to the one we say we follow. Other ‘gods’ are plentiful for Aussie suburbanites – from wealth to work to family to…

Part of the weekend involved telling our children the story of why we left the hills to come to Brighton. I’m not sure I have ever done this with any sense of intention, but it is my hope that our kids know with clarity that this wasn’t about a seachange, a smaller mortgage or some other reason, but that we came here because there was a sense of God leading us – because there are people here who he is looking to connect with.

And so we come back – refreshed and refocused.

Weekends away are often a chore when you have young kids so to have actually enjoyed it, had space to relax and come back more rested than we left is quite an achievement!

I think it was Karl Barth who said “we ought to preach with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.”

The last couple of weeks at our Upstream gatherings we have been simply choosing current issues and connecting them with the Biblical story.

Tonight Herds did a great job of helping us engage firstly with the question of ‘why did so many Aussies love Steve Irwin?’ (interesting question) and then we split in 3 groups to discuss different newspaper stories.

1. There was a letter to the editor from a gay teenager asking that all future anti-gay letters with a religious bias be left unpublished because he felt he had suffered enough already from his time in a church.

2. An article that looked at divorce becoming more common among 50-59 year olds

3. An article on the environment and the consquences if we choose to neglect our responsibility to it.

All 3 generated some excellent interaction as we tossed them around. Its vital that faith and life rub closely against each other and that we deal with real life issues from the scriptures otherwise we risk irrelevant faith or cultural accomodation.download drag me to hell movie

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I recently did an interview for an Oz magazine. Here are the questions and answers if you are interested!…

When was this ministry established and by whom?

[Andrew ] 2003 we arrived – team led by Andrew & Danelle Hamilton, but also 4 other families from Lesmurdie Baptist Church

How did your journey begin to explore new ways of doing ‘church’?

[Andrew ] Didn’t start with a Sunday service – we believe church flows out of mission – agreed there would be nothing that looked like a Sunday service for at least 18 months. We still don’t meet on a Sunday.

Do you consider yourself to be a church planter?

[Andrew ] A missionary is the best description. When people ask I tell them I am leading a missionary team that is planting churches in the northern suburbs.

Briefly, what does your community look like?

[Andrew ] Suburbia – new development – working class for the most part – developers have done a lot of work trying to make the suburb pretty and attract people there – byline in marketing is “Brighton – its what a community should be”( imagine big cheesy grin)

Beyond the week-to-week happenings, how would you explain this approach to “doing church”?

[Andrew ] Simple and seamless – church happens where life happens – we travel light with programs and structure – we hope to stay small and grow by multiplication rather than becoming a large congregation

What has been challenging about this transition/new ‘model’?

[Andrew ] we are familiar with church but not so familiar with living as missionaries ‘in the world’, so we have been learning that there is a whole heap of stuff that is not that important that we have spent time on in the past. Some folks have struggled with no familiar big gig ‘church service’ to attend and found that their own personal spirituality was not as strong as they had hoped.

What has been exciting?

[Andrew ] getting to live as a missionary after so long as a pastor – building real relationships with people I didn’t previously have time for – learning new ways of doing mission and expressing church life

And what has God taught you through this ministry so far?

[Andrew ] Heaps – I am very programmed to think of church in traditional ways and I quickly default to this even when I am trying to move in a different direction – he has taught me that as much as I can connect with people and share the gospel only he changes hearts and I can’t do the work of the spirit – has taught me what is core to the gospel and what is peripheral, what the essence of church is – what it means to love people “. I could go on!

What impact has this community had on those around it?

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[Andrew ] that’s hard to tell – for some very significant – for others they probably don’t even know we exist. My wife (Danelle) won the Citizen of the Year award last year and it was her friends who nominated her. That was a huge buzz because she won it for being a loving caring person.

In what ways does a ministry such as this help to draw people to Jesus who would not be attracted through “traditional church”?

We are much freer and have more time to be with them than we in trad church. I still think it’s a long road to faith and people don’t get there overnight.

Have you//others experienced God in a way you hadn’t done beforehand?

Hmm” not really

Where do you hope this ministry is in 3 years time?

That there were would several church communities established by our mission team all simple self sustaining and indigenous to the local community.

I sent our latest Upstream Newsletter out this week.

If you are interested in what has been happening in our backyard then feel free to drop me an email and I’ll send you a copy.

Tonight at our Upstream meeting it was my turn to teach the kids some stuff.

Its not something I do all that often, but it is one of those things I try to do to occasionally. Last week Simmo had us looking at the creation story and as I sat pondering ‘where to’ I felt it could be good to move on from there to the Noah story.

Suddenly ideas were wooshing thru my mind… it was one of those ‘mini-brainwaves’… kind of…

The plan was to make paper boats – you know where you fold the paper and create a boat? We would make the boats and then put people and animals in them and then have a flood!…

So I went to the shop to buy one of those packs of $2.00 plastic farm animals. Hmmm… couldn’t find em. But what I did discover was a pack of jelly babies and a pack of confectionary animals. Even better!!

So I told some of the story, we built our boats, wrote our names on them and then each placed two people (Mr & Mrs Noah) as well as a pair of confectionary animals inside them.

Once ready we went to the bath to experience the flood…

And it was every bit as traumatic as the real thing! You see after launching the boats and letting them float for a bit, I thought it would be more realistic if I turned the tap on and simulated the water rising…

So I turned the cold tap on and within seconds several boats got sucked back into its surge. Capsizes were everywhere and most critically lollies sank to the bottom of the bath.

I began to hear crying.

I hadn’t counted on this.

It seemed like a great plan to me…

But I am not 5 years old.

Ellie was the one in tears and others were looking like they were about to follow. It was time to call a halt to the flood and rescue all that was in trouble.

Of course by now the ‘point’ of the exercise was completely lost as the kids scrambled to retrieve lost lollies and waterlogged boats.

As I put Ellie to bed she asked “Dad can we please not do a flood again. I was very sad about the lollies”