Last night we did a ‘lectio divina’ using the passage below. We followed this format and it seemed that God spoke to different people in different ways.

(Luke 17:11-19 NIV) Now on his way to Jerusalem, Jesus travelled along the border between Samaria and Galilee. {12} As he was going into a village, ten men who had leprosy met him. They stood at a distance {13} and called out in a loud voice, “Jesus, Master, have pity on us!” {14} When he saw them, he said, “Go, show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went, they were cleansed. {15} One of them, when he saw he was healed, came back, praising God in a loud voice. {16} He threw himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him–and he was a Samaritan. {17} Jesus asked, “Were not all ten cleansed? Where are the other nine? {18} Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” {19} Then he said to him, “Rise and go; your faith has made you well.”

The phrase that stuck with me was ‘they stood at a distance’ (v.12), but I wasn’t able to articulate why, or what God was calling me to do.

I feel one of the real values of the lectio process is that now I get to chew that thru for a few days / weeks and ask God ‘what are you saying?’

I am finding I am still very much adjusting to new ways of doing church gatherings.

Tonight was our regular weekly team meeting. Last week we were going to discuss our findings on leadership, but four people were away so we decided to wait until this week. Then this week another 4 people were away.

That’s life. People get sick, have work committments etc.

When there are 100 of you its no big deal, but when there are 11 of you it is very noticeable. We began with a time of corporate worship tonight and all thru it I felt myself disturbed that there were only 7 of us present.

I began to ask ‘Why?…Why does this disturb me?’

I think I was concerned because I wanted to get thru this leadership stuff and move on, but at this rate (and more than likely people will be sick next week too) it will take ages!! Then again… there really is no rush.

At the end of the worship time I asked the group ‘so what now?’

I figure if I’m ‘feeling it’, then I’m not the only one. Sure enough we were all feeling something of the strangeness of the situation.

We discussed how it is important to have as many people there as possible for significant identity forming discussions whereas ‘hang out’ nights are not so critical. In the end we agreed to collate the info from the discussion two weeks previous (not easy as even though there were notes two weeks dents the memory a bit!) and then have the ‘so what’ discussion next week.

On the one hand there’s no rush… but on the other, if we take that approach then we may never get thru this!

I think we are all learning what it means to function as a smaller group. While we’ve all been in ‘small groups’ this is different again.

I imagine Darren, Steve, Phil and Dan have all had experiences of a similar nature where the fragility of a smaller group becomes evident. Would love to hear your insights guys!

Learning, learning, learning…

We had a great team meeting tonight.

Jenny led us again in a brilliant worship experience and then we spent some time grappling with the question of what incarnation means and looks like here in Brighton.

For the worship experience Jenny gave us all a piece of chocolate to eat (slowly) and as we ate to savour it and to reflect on the goodness of God – to savour it. She asked us to reflect on the day and see where God had been present – she read a selection of scripture passages, then we shared some God moments and finished with a time of group prayer.

The chocolate idea (which she told me she stole off the phuture

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website really connected with me. I didn’t hear much of scripture, because I was reflecting on the whole sense of being with God as something to savour and enjoy slowly.

We began exploring this word ‘incarnation’ which gets a fair bit of airplay in emerging church circles and started to grapple with what it means and what its implications are. I believe its the core theological lens for us to view our mission thru.

I must confess to simply and unabashedly ripping off Mike Frost and Alan Hirsch’s stuff from chapter 3 of their book, but it really is some of the best stuff out there.

We got thru about 1/3 of what I had planned, but that didn’t matter at all. The discussion was really engaging and some excellent questions were raised about our role as missionaries.

We finished by looking at Paul’s call to be ‘all things to all people’ and were discussing what that means for us when we came to a close.

The question for us to reflect on this week is what does all things to all people look like?

How do we do this and remain true to who we are?

Can we really be all things to all people?

I am a huge Paul fan! I love seeing his missionary heart and his ‘whatever it takes’ attitude. Next week we’ll spend some time on the remainder of the stuff. We still might not get thru it. That said, the aim is not to ‘get thru’ but to really key into the issues that are live for us.

I love a healthy discussion where we seem to be learning and stretching one another so tonight was a lot of fun for me!

For a few weeks now I have had a gut feeling that something is wrong with the way we have been functioning as a team.

Essentially it relates to a lack of cohesion/sense of ‘team’ and the need for us to establish more clearly some of our identity. It took me a while to articulate exactly what I was feeling, but I’d say those two issues are central.

We spoke about it on Saturday night and it would seem we agree as a team that we need more time together to ‘knit’ (no…not that kind of knitting!!) and more time spent on earthing our expressions of church and mission in biblical theology.

The ‘how’ is a little more tricky.

Currently we do this. We have been experimenting with a 4 weekly cycle and while we have been able to generate some positive stuff from our primary communities, it has been very difficult to develop a team rhythm with the focus meetings and big gigs.

Life being what it is, it simply isn’t possible for everyone to be present at everything so we have experienced some disjointedness and real slowness in making progress towards nutting out some issues for us as group.

We agreed early in the piece that as a learning community we will explore ideas and practices and if they don’t work for us we will change them – simple as that. And when they run past their use by date we will change them again.

The loose proposal out there at present is for some sort of weekly gathering for the team members (now 6 families) that helps resolve our lack of connectedness and allows time for input and interaction.

It means sacrificing what we have known to be ‘primary communities’ for the time being, or we could do both… which gets very ‘meeting heavy’.

The suggestion is that perhaps we look at meeting fortnightly for teaching/input/discussion together and that the other fortnight be looser perhaps based around a meal and prayer for our community.

It might work… then again… I’m actually not worried what form it takes so long as we address the deficiencies in our system at present.

The beauty of what we are doing is that we can flex as we like. The struggle is that we don’t have a road map so sometimes we take dead ends or go the long way.

I realise two months doesn’t seem like a long time to experiment with something, but my take is that if we know its not working then we are better off making immediate changes rather than hoping that things will improve.

Tonight Jenny led us thru a brilliant Easter Friday experience.

It involved imagined readings from the people who were there – Peter, Pilate, a bystander, Thomas etc. They were not cheesy at all and really captured some of what it would have been like to be there. With the mix of reading and music I found myself very drawn into the scene and the question I found myself confronting was ‘where would I have been standing when Jesus was crucfied?’

It was great to spend our first Easter together as a team and to be part of such a significant experience.

Tonight in our primary community we looked at Luke ch 2.

As I read it thru I found myself suffering from familiarity fatigue – yawn yawn – Christmas story yawn yawn…

But the discussion was actually very fruitful as we looked at Luke’s christology taking shape and how his approach differs from the other gospel writers.

We asked the question about what a childhood Jesus would have been like. Hard to guess really, but the Infancy Gospel of Thomas download l a confidential online gives one rather bizarre take on it!

A vindictive & strong willed omnipotent child – what a combination!!

It was good to reflect on the fact that we are Jesus to the people around us – and to then ask what kind of Jesus do they see?…

Today was our second focus meeting – the once a month whole team meeting where we come together to refocus on the mission, tell stories, worship together and learn together. Its the key meeting for helping us stay on track and stay together.

Today we ate lunch, discussed some up and coming stuff like a backyard blitz we are doing, Easter, supporting one family in the team with finance and then had a go at some corporate worship and some thinking thru what leadership is about.

Bec is a great worship leader and took up the challenge to lead us today in a ‘corporate worship’ experience. She did a fantastic job – although I’m not sure she’d necessarily feel that! Doing new things and experimenting with new methods can feel a bit awkward at times – it did today in places. It was also really difficult with 6 or 7 kids clanking around and screaming in the background! But what she led us thru was a genuine worship experience where we had to engage with God and were given the opportunity to participate. Great stuff!

From there we looked at these words:

Institutional

Tradition

Hierarchy

Control

Leadership

In groups of three people were asked to do a bit of word association. Not surprisingly many of the words that emerged were negative – yet all of these words have positive aspects also. It seems that our experience has often caused us to see the negative more than the positive.

Today we were focusing on leadership – something that has copped some pretty bad (I would say ‘reactionary’) press in recent years. After going thru the late 80’s early 90’s where the pastor teachers were marginalised in favour of the gung ho visionaries we have seen the pendulum swing to marginalise the gifted leaders and see them as bully’s/dictators etc rather than team players. from this came the idea that we don’t need leaders or that we can have a completely flat leadership structure.

As usual it is likely the truth is never an either / or.

Rather than simply ‘teach’ what I believe leadership to look like (and I do have some pretty strong views) our plan is to split into three groups to explore the New Testament teaching on the topic – especially leadership structure in Christian communities.

We will do our own research over the next two weeks then meet as a small focus group to share learning and crystallise what we have seen together. Then in 4 weeks time we will come back and share that learning together and work to-wards developing a biblical leadership structure.

The 3 groups are 1. Gospels 2. Acts & Romans 3. Epistles and the rest

I’m looking forward to seeking how it all works out as we do this research together. My hope is that when we arrive at some conclusions we will do so with clarity and consensus recognising that we have delved into the scriptures and grappled with the issues rather than simply reading the latest trendy book and following what it says.accidental husband the divx download

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Over the last few months we have been discussing how we will gather as a ‘church’.

We are aware of the need for the mission to shape our gatherings and not the other way round. But we need to do something now…

So what we came up with is the following 4 week cycle.

Week 1 – Focus Meeting – only the missionary team can attend and it is intentionally about equipping for mission, prayer and bringing us back the core reason we are in this area. On this week if you were visiting the area and ‘wanted to come’ we wouldn’t let you!

Weeks 2 & 4 – Primary Communities – the term ‘primary’ is intentional as these smaller groups will be ‘church’ for us – our primary place of nurture, teaching, worship and mission. I sense (know)that in most of our churches Sunday is primary and a smaller community is optional. We have opted to go for a fortnightly meeting as our base point. These are intended to be open meetings, but meetings that support us in our won spirituality as we serve in mission

Week 3 – Big Gig – Simply put a bigger event where we really do broaden the scope of what we do and who might feel welcome. It might be as simple as a party, it might be an easter celebration, a baby dedication, a community work project. A priority in big gigs is to run things that our neighbours and friends will feel very welcome being a part of. They will rarely be overtly ‘churchy’ but they will be very missional.

Outside of the structures we expect that we will relate to each other as friends. If we don’t see each other except for when we meet up then we need to question the genuineness of the friendships anyway.

Above all we need to keep coming back to our calling to be a missionary team here in Brighton. A ‘church’ may see gathering as the primary concern – we need to see relationships with neighbours as the primary concern.

What’s exciting is that I can see our team have really got it and are enjoying being the people God has called us to be.

I’m not sure if the rhythm we have set will work, but if it doesn’t… we will change it! Simple as that…

The previous 4 posts have contained the nuts and bolts of what we discussed on Saturday and I share them with you because I m believer in ‘open source’ learning. If we share our stuff then we all grow and we might even develop ideas that help us better do mission and church in this changing climate.

I do share them a little bit reticently because I am only too aware of our tendency to look for ‘models’ and ‘plans’ and easy answers when what we should be doing is seeking God and letting him form the plan for us.

We have no idea how or even if this will all work. It might be that we get 6 months thru the year and change everything – it might be that we have stumbled on something that works for us for quite a while.

I’m not too worried – its all part of the adventure!download american outlaws dvdripdownload universal soldier movie

Al Hirsch & Mike Frost (of Shaping of Things to Come rocky v free download fame) are in the process of writing a new book but this time telling the stories of emerging missional churches in the land of Oz.

I got an email this morning asking if Id like to write a chapter about our adventures as backyard missionaries here in Brighton.

Sounds like fun – there will be about 25 different stories as well as some undergirding philosophy stuff. I’m not sure when they hope to get it out.