Some days I get very ‘peopled out’.

I am there now.

Its been a week spent primarily around people – often new people. Its been a week with family coming and going from our home in various ways at different times. This morning (or for most of today I should say!) we had brunch with 7 other families from our neighbourhood and it was fantastic, but… it has caught up with me.

I am tired.

I am in ‘hide’ mode until the batteries recharge and I can connect with people again rather than merely occupying the same room.

Our last guest goes home tonight and there is nothing in the diary tomorrow.

Note to self: keep it that way…

I have played a lot of sport over the years and this feels like the emotional equivalent of a 5 day basketball carnival or a long weekend surf trip.

I’ll be back.

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I have got the test version of our Upstream love potion no 9 movie download

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website up and running.

It is not intended to be highly interactive, but more of an info base for those wishing to know more.

I’d value any comments from you guys.

Does it make sense?

Does it sound like us?

What works?

What doesn’t?

Thanks…

We are in a process of re-orientation (yet again) with our Upstream community.

The great thing about constant shifts in direction is that no-one can complain that we ‘change’ too often – change is a way of being for us and a ‘given’. To ‘change’ would be to stay in one place / do the same thing for an extended period of time.

One of the shifts coming up is in our community rhythm. We have been meeting fortnightlyon Monday’s as a closed mission team and also on the other fortnight on Sunday AM as an open community meeting ie. anyone can come. However after 8 months of this we have concluded that it hasn’t been what we had hoped. None of our friends and neighbours have been keen to join this gathering regularly.

There are various reasons for this, but we need to accept that this meeting is not doing what it was intended. So… lets not keep doing it. Let’s change it.

As from next week we will be meeting around lunch in the local park and simply looking to engage with the people who are down there. We are operating on a similar wavelength to what Owen is on with his Hyde Park gig, trying to build community but also support those in need around the place.

Will it ‘work’?

Dunno, but we’re about to find out. Will it be ‘church’? Ah… what do you think?…

There is also the question of how we sustain ourselves as we live and serve here. I find my own life is always being enriched by the people I get to hang around in the course of a week, but for others there is less enrichment and more being sapped out of them.

Does it necessitate a weekly (rather than fortnightly) team meeting?

We have been trying to avoid creating a meeting monster, but it seems that it is very difficult to stay in the loop of each other’s lives, cover all the bases of prayer, engagement with scripture, team dev, formation etc in a once a fortnight meeting.

Of course connections ought to happen outside of meetings – and sometimes they do, but there is also a limit to how often we can see each other as we spend time with new friends in the local area. And lets face it sometimes we are lazy and would rather just watch TV than engage with our friends and really talk about how life is going. (Or is that just me again?…)

To some degree this has been an ongoing ‘blind spot’ for me because I find myself thriving on this kind of life. But others in the team have been floundering and need more support. We are looking at how that shapes up. I’ll keep you posted.

‘What do mission teams do? How do they function?’ Those are the questions we are seeking to answer as we discuss this stuff.

On a different note, in two weeks time there will be an annual wine and food festival happening in the Swan Valley. We have booked a bus and will be heading out to the Swan Valley for a day at ‘Spring in the Valley’. It’ll be a great place to hang out with friends and neighbours and enjoy a day together. Hopefully we will be able to fill the bus and not finish up losing a truckload of cash!

Then in November we have our Brighton celebration day – a kind of annual festival for the locals here. I had no ideas as to what we could do – and in fact said we wouldn’t do anything, then… an idea came…

We have three really nice lakes. How much fun would it be to buy some radio controlled boats and have a small fleet that we could hire out to people at minimal cost?!

So I have been researching the dynamics of RC boats and what we need to do. I think its doable. One boat, three battery packs, one fast charger = no more than $300.00 or as little as $120.00.

Sounds like fun to this big kid 🙂

We have called ourselves ‘Upstream Communities’ because we believe the call of the gospel is to live counter-culturally in the suburbs we find ourselves in.

That means rethinking how we do relationships, use our time, our money, our possessions etc.

Our name is a constant reminder of who we are called to be. I find it confronting

Right now Danelle and I face a situation where ‘downstream’ looks pretty nice. The name is actually a powerful motivator for me to choose the upstream way when everything in me screams ‘stuff it!’

Tomorrow is our mid year review of how we are going here at Brighton.

I find I often get anxious about these types of days because its easy to be negative and see all that’s not happening, or to focus on the struggles, rather than to see where God is at work and where the possibilities are.

I am by nature an optimist and dreamer so my hope is we will finish tomorrow with a sense of anticipation and hope and celebration. One of our team was due to run this day, but recent illness has meant she hasn’t been able to do it. Normally I like to particpate in this stuff rather than facilitate it, but its probably easiest if I just pick this up and run with it.

Over the week the team have been reflecting on a series of evaluative type questions that will form the basis for our conversation tomorrow. We won’t be working thru the answers, but they will be the fodder for the exercise.

I’ll be using De Bono’s 6 thinking hats as a tool to help us move thru different stages of reflection in a healthy way. The balance in the hats will help us address what needs to be addressed but also look positively ahead.

The plan is something like this:

* Read Joshua 4 – passage about remembering and passing on story.

* Discuss our sense of calling. I believe it is vital for us to come back to this regularly and ask each other, are we still supposed to be here (individually) and are we supposed to be as a team?

* Explain the Six Thinking Hats as a frame for review rather than problem solving* Define the 6 different hats and what they mean (in this order)

White – facts, information, data

Red – feelings, intuition, gut sense, God speaking, frustrations, passionate feelings,

Black – problems, disappointments, failures

Yellow – wins, achievements, joys

Green – possibilities, opportunities, hope, new directions

Blue – directional, oversight

* Work thru the hats as a large group – reflecting on each hat for ourselves and for the team. Write thoughts on butcher’s paper around the room.

* Pay Attention – from the ‘hats’ conversation summing up what we need to pay attention to (also on Butcher’s paper):

Issues to address

Possibilities to pursue

* Learnings(butcher’s paper)

2 things you have learnt this year so far

Summary (butcher’s paper)

A sentence to sum up what you feel from today

Will it work?…

I dunno. I’ll tell you how it goes!

Do butchers actualy use that paper?… Seems plenty of other people do…

Update: This process was very effective in keeping a balanced approach and also cutting to the chase. We spent 5 mins on each ‘hat’ and that seemed to be long enough. We do need to take more time however to decide on ‘action’ from the review.

Today I started drafting a letter to some established churches who I am connected with and who I am going to approach regarding possibly supporting us as missionaries. We have enough support for this financial year, but I am aware that we need to start work now to take care of 2006/7

As well as the letter I will attach a document describing our journey so far and trying to encapsulate our identity as Upstream Communities.

I have copied it in below and I’d be interested in your reflections, especially from those of you who are based in more established beasts. Is it sufficiently understandable for those not in the ’emerging’ scene? Its about 2 pages of A4.

Upstream Communities – The Story So Far”

Background

In the early part of 2002 a group of 5 families based in the hills of Perth and members of Lesmurdie Baptist Church all felt a distinct sense of calling from God to leave where they were and move to the newly developed Brighton estate, to live and serve as a missionary team and to see new church communities birthed and nurtured in the northern coastal region.

The team has been captured by the dream of reaching out to the vast numbers of Aussies who are unlikely to ever attend church on a Sunday. While the established church is a place that some will seek out as a place to connect with God, an ever increasing number of Australians do not factor Sunday church attendance into their spiritual journey.

To connect with these people there is an urgent need to establish new missional communities willing to experiment with different ways of doing mission and being church. We believe this is our calling – to work in partnership with the wider church, and to serve specifically as a missionary team based here in Perth discovering new expressions of mission and church life that are suitable for the post-christian environment that is now urban Australia.

Distinctives

Over the last eighteen months we have been in a process of shaping our identity as a mission team. Some of these characteristics include:

• Mission over Meeting

We see our primary focus as being what happens during the week in the community and the workplace and this is where we seek to invest our best energies. As such we place less emphasis on the Sunday meeting which for many has become the centre of church life.

• Mission shapes Church

We are seeking to let our understanding of the local Brighton culture determine the shape and rhythms of our church community gatherings rather than coming with a pre-determined model or liturgical preference. We understand this is what classical missionaries do – allowing their ecclesiology to flow out of their missiology. British theologian Martin Robinson has said that most of what passes for church planting in the West is usually ‘Sunday service planting’. We are hopeful that in this process we will develop truly indigenous expressions of Christian community that resonate deeply with the people we live amongst.

• Discipleship the Central Task

We see our core task as simply that of ‘making disciples’ and we believe this process begins from the time we meet a person and develop a relationship with them. As such there is less emphasis on the moment of ‘conversion’ (a slippery idea at the best of times) and more on leading people towards a life of Christ-likeness. Ultimately we want to see the people we live amongst captivated by the life of Jesus and drawn into following him with their whole lives.

• Community Transformation as the Primary Measure of Success

We are seeking to measure our impact and effectiveness by the degree to which we are involved in community transformation and the extent to which we see evidence of the kingdom of God in our local area. While we would love to have people join us in our mission team and community gatherings we do not see increased attendance at either of these meetings as a primary goal. We would encourage new Christians to join other local churches if they identify better with their expressions of worship. As such we are committed to working in genuine partnership with other local churches to see God’s kingdom in Brighton become a reality.

• A Low Level Missionary Order

On a day to day basis we are seeking to function as a lower level missionary order with core practices, a distinct formation process and a high level accountability to one another. A practical outworking of this is that our fortnightly core team meeting is always a closed gathering for team members only, while our open community gathering (also fortnightly) is a place where all are welcome.

• Relationships are Primary

We are intentionally seeking to foster mission primarily through personal relationships and by flowing into the natural rhythms of community life here in Brighton. While we would prefer to become involved with what is already happening in the community if we see a need that we can meet we will happily take initiative and serve the community in any way possible.

• Multiplying Communities

Our longer term dream would be to see a great number of new communities springing up and multiplying in the developing northern coastal suburbs where Aussies who would have little interest in church as we know it, may be able to connect in Christian community and grow in discipleship. To that end we are seeking to make our community gatherings simple and easily reproducible.

Work in Progress

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While it isn’t difficult to articulate the distinctives of our team and community, the reality is that we are still coming to grips with this different way of living our life and faith. We are consciously walking the mostly untrodden path of being missionaries here in the West and discovering along the way what that means. Some of it is refreshing and exciting, while other parts of it are difficult and disturbing. In many ways we are an experimental group, learning and making mistakes but hopefully also making discoveries and providing hope to those both inside and outside our churches who want to follow Jesus but struggle to connect in the current structures.

While we are committed to the path we are on, we do not advocate it as ‘the way’ for the future. We don’t have a model to work from or a strategy to emulate. That is intentional. We strongly believe there is a need for many fresh expressions of church to emerge in the West if we are to fulfil the missionary task God has given us, but they will need to reflect the context they are birthed within and the people who are their lifeblood.

We thank God for being privileged to share in this wonderful adventure with him!

Andrew Hamilton

Around 4 times a year I try to produce an update on what is happening in our lives as we live and work here in Brightn Its a bit of a summary of what we are seeing happening in the local area and where we see God at work. Its mostly Danelle’s and my story as I don’t like sharing too much of other people’s stories without permission, but it’ll give you a sense of where we have come to and what we are about.

I don’t send it to everyone and its not suitable for posting on here but if you would like to read it and be on the mailing list then drop me a line and I’ll be happy to include you.

One of our Brighton community is an 18 year old first year Uni student. Lets’ call her Jane for the sake of anonymity.

Last week during her exam period she got the date of her exam wrong and missed sitting the exam. Ouch! That means redoing the unit. It was suggested to her by one of the academic staff that she write a letter explaining that she failed to front because her car broke down because that would give her a chance to resit it – however it was plainly not true. She simply forgot.

Although fairly devasted, (because there is no leniency for ‘forgetting’ and it means sitting the whole subjet and exam over again), Jane chose to write and tell the truth about what happened and ask for a break.

We prayed for her on Sunday, that she’d be able to re-sit the exam even though these things ‘don’t happen.’

Today she heard that the academic council had given her permission to resit the exam. Nice!

As a teenager growing up I was very influenced by Eric Liddell’s integrity choice not to run on a Sunday and the small slip of paper given to him that said ‘he who honours me I will honour’ has always stayed with me and has shaped my decisions.

This was one of those kinds of decisions that Jane was faced with.

To choose to tell the truth when you could get a better result by telling lies is to put faith into practice – to live by your convictions not because you might get caught but just because it is the right thing to do.

Its the wise woman ‘hearing my words and putting them into practice’. Its decisions like these that build a strong faith foundation for the years ahead.

Very proud of Jane!

This is the response I’ve had a few times as I have told people that we are having a regular fortnightly Sunday gathering for anyone who wants to come.

The loose translation is something like ‘ah… so that church you went to start has now actually started’…

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There’s no question churches gather together. But, in Christendom thinking this has become the end game. This has become the objective – to get as many people as possible in one place at one time. That’s not being facetious. That’s where I lived for a long time. If people were there on Sunday then all was well with the church. If we had a few weeks in a row of low attendance we would ask what was wrong.

Maybe I’m the only one who comes from a church that does that, but when we get focussed on the meeting we often take our eyes off the mission. The western church over the last few hundred years is stunning evidence of that.

For the record, on Sunday we did meet. We had coffee for about half an hour, had a simple worship/prayer experience that Jenny led, I did some teaching on Jesus’ top priority – the kingdom of God – and then Danelle did some stuff with the kids and families that looked at the stuff I was doing but from a more tactile and experiential angle.

We finished with more coffee and muffins. It was a really good time.

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The point I was trying to make as we talked together about the kingdom of God was that "the kingdom is the building and the church is the scaffolding". We spend a lot of time trying to pretty up the scaffolding when it simply exists to ensure the building is created.

As we begin these meetings we are saying that if we find ourselves spending large amounts of time to make them happen then we will have lost focus. I will not be spending the 12 hours it takes to prepare a sermon to get ready for Sunday, nor will we have hours of music practice and everything else that goes into church as we have known it. If we ever get to that stage then we will have lost our way as a missional community.

Its not to say the scaffolding doesn’t matter, but it does help us focus on the fact that the end game is not to have the world’s best scaffolding, but to create an effective building.

So how many people were there on Sunday?

You think I’m really going to answer that?…

Tonight we meet to begin framing up our core practices as a missionary team. We are seeing ‘core practices’ as the things we will agree to do together as a team to keep ourselves focused on the task we came to Brighton for and growing in the faith we want to communicate.

In thinking of ourselves as a low level mission order, we believe its important to set higher requirements for team members in terms of both relational committment and a performative ethic.

Its about shaping up a sodality (to use a technical term) as we will have a ‘modality’ meeting every second Sunday AM.

Its also about doing these things as a covenant – not as a legalistic rule.

A few reasonably obvious ‘practices’ or requirements for team membership would be:

• Living in the suburb of Brighton.

• Long term commitment – 3 years?

• Attend and participate in all team & community meetings

• A personal spiritual formation plan that wil enable you to train yourself to be godly

• A description of how local mission will occur for you that you will be accountable for

• A description of your gifts and how you see these functioning in team/community/neighbourhood that you will be accountable for.

I have others that come to mind but that’ll do for now!

At times it feels quite anal, yet history shows that without some bars to jump people tend towards laziness – I know I do.

The question will likely be whether we can come up with practices that stretch us but aren’t beyond us practically. And then of course we will need to support, encourage and challenge one another in the implementation of these practices.

Anybody else experimenting with ‘core pracs’?

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