On moving

The penny is slowly but most definitely dropping that we are moving in the autumn. September is not that far away, and the enormity of the decision we've made casts quite a shadow! I guess that ministry has few peers when it comes to the factors involved in the change process.

Not only do you change jobs, but you change location, you change house, you change friends! The last of these is sometimes the hardest to bear. Maybe it's just me, but I always consider the people around me as friends more than "clients", so moving has quite an emotional cost. The truth is that busyness takes over and no matter how deep the friendships might be, busyness can rob you of the relationships you once enjoyed.

The nice thing is that you know that there are people all over the country, well at least in 6 places for us, with whom you have a strong connection. A connection that can be renewed through a chance encounter or an intentional visit. Just recently I bumped into an old friend at the Christian resources Exhibition. I hadn't seem Ian in a long time and it was great to pick up a conversation that rumbles on through our lives whether we're together or apart.

So here's to more friends with whom to enjoy the journey with God and for the many friends we already have who still mean much to us and who we miss now and will miss in the future.

Great Commission Resurgence

This is interesting.

I came across the GMR through a Google alert I have set for anything missional that pops up on the internet. If you've not tried using alerts, give it a try. It's a useful tool to capture themed ideas and resources.

Anyway, back the Great Commission Resurgence. GMR sets out ten core commitments for Southern Baptists with the intention of refocusing SBC churches on fulfilling the great commission of the church. Restoring the missional mandate to the church you might say.

Whilst not all the points would translate for every church, clearly some arise directly from recent debates within the movement (I'm no expert on SBC history and debates), there are some valuable core commitments that we should all take note of and consider.

I'm particularly drawn to the principles of Biblical communities, a clear focus on the great commandments and the great commission, gospel centredness, the Lordship of Christ and diversity. But it's all good.

Wood storage

It was high time I did some sorting out of all the accumulated bits of wood from last summer's projects and this year's woodworking. It had become a bit of a mess, and given that I work outdoors, it was getting unsightly too for anyone sitting in the garden.

The problem is that off-cuts always have a potential use someday!

So, with the able assistance of Ally, we made a bit box for all the off-cuts. In fact we made it from off cuts in the first place. A truly green woodworking project.

Now at least the waste wood looks tidy and the bonus was sorting out all the little blocks I'd cut for protecting surface during gluing and clamping.

Tool Chest Project (update 4)

Not much to report. I still need to decide what I'm going to do about the "tote" that goes in the back of the tool chest. I'm considering a sort of parts case of some sort, but then again, a simple tote for screwdrivers and bits and pieces that you don't want to go searching in the drawers for might be a good idea.

The thing is, I haven't actually decided if this is a workshop caddy or a portable tool chest. It's a bit on the heavy side for lugging around, and when it's got tools in it, it will obviously be even heavier!

It looks quite nice sitting on top of my router table cabinet, so maybe it will become a workshop cabinet for chisels and other things. So that begs the question, what would go in a tote for a workshop tool chest? Hmm. The metaphysical conundrums of woodworking!

The finish is yacht varnish, just two coats has produced quite a nice surface.

Dreaming of lathes

Well, I can dream can't I?

I've been looking, longingly at times, at lathes over the last week. I'd sort of settled on the one I was thinking I might buy and then I came across this Axminster lathe that looks exceptionally well priced.

Of course it doesn't stop at a lathe. I'll need a good set of turning tools (£100-£130), a decent scroll chuck (£100), a face plate and revolving centre (another £30-£40, although some lathes come with these and some don't) a bench grinder (£50-£60) and some wood to turn!!

Still, if I can sell the cross trainer, the airwalker and my golf clubs...

Maybe it's time I took the plunge and investigated ebay?

Daniel's Prayer

In chapter 9 of the story, Daniel prays a prayer of repentance on behalf of the nation. He associates himself with their failures, although he himself has lived a life of dedication and wholehearted commitment to God. He understands the times and knows that God spoke through Jeremiah about how long the exile would last.

In all of this there is no hint that Daniel judges the people for their sin or that he adopts a attitude other than that of a fallen human being desperately seeking grace from the God ho has come to know and trust throughout his faithful life.

When we pray for our nation, do we pray prayers of judgement or repentance? Do we pray for others the prayers they cannot or will not pray for themselves?

I wonder what difference it might make if we took Daniel's approach in our time?

Create Booklet

Ever since changing to a Mac I've been looking for something that will produce a booklet nice and easily. I've tried a couple of things including Clickbook which worked brilliantly on the PC but never seems to do what I want it to do on my Mac!

I may have found the solution courtesy of a friend of mine who pointed me to this neat little utility. It may not have the bells and whistles of Clickbook, but at least I get a booklet at the end of it in the format that I want.

The next step, and I hope the author finds it in his heart to do this soon, is to be able to shift the margins so that when I print out my address list for my diary, there is a suitable margin for the hole punch!

Missional Renaissance

A few quotes from Missional Renaissance by Reggie McNeal:

Missional is not a place you arrive at but a direction in which you are moving.

The role of the church is simply this: to bless the world. In doing this, the people of God reveal God's heart for the world.

The true vitality of a congregation rests in the abundant lives of its participants and in the blessed lives of the community it serves.

Our acts of service and love, not our oratorical brilliance and institutional success, will intrigue people with our message. Jesus followers live the truth; they don't just study it. Because of this, others are invited into truth and life.

Q&A from "The Church Must Change"

What was interesting, and not really surprising, was that many of the questions about engaging with the world beyond the church focused on "doing evangelism". It was as if the only way we can think of engaging with our far from God peers is to share the gospel with them.

Sharing the gospel is important, why wouldn't we want to tell them the truth about who God is and what he's done or them? But it wasn't what I was trying to get at. 

It was really interesting and challenging to hear and see that we haven't really got it yet when it comes to what living missionally might mean.

I hope I can make it a little clearer when I preach for them tomorrow morning. We shall see!

The Church Must Change

I went to speak at a nearby local church's weekend away this morning, although they are staying home for it! My topic was "The Church Must Change" and I was asked to be provocative! In brief, this is what I said.

I believe that the fundamental shape of that church is missional (and I’ll define that in a moment) and it’s focus is not internal, meeting the needs of the gathered faithful, but external, influencing the world through sharing kingdom life.

I would not argue with those who quote the creed and say that the chief end of man to worship God, but I would dispute that as a definition of the church. That, it seems to me, is where we have gone wrong. We have turned the missionary movement that we were meant to be into a gathered community of like-minded people who share their sense of collective disappointment that the rest of the world doesn’t realise how wrong it is.

The missional church refocuses our attention where it ought to be, on God’s redemptive work in the world he made amongst the people he loves. To be a missional people means simply:

To be partners with God in his mission.

That mission is redemptive (restoring the broken relationship between humanity and God through the cross of Christ) and it’s active (God came looking, Jesus said, “Go!”). God’s intention was made clear through his covenant with Abraham when he declared that he would bless Abraham in order that Abraham’s descendants would be a blessing to others.
Time and time again this principle of the people of God being a blessing to the world beyond the confines of the people of God is seen in the Old Testament story. Jonah is sent to Nineveh, Daniel serves in Babylon.

Fast forward into the New Testament and although the Gospels make it clear that Jesus focused his ministry on the Jewish people, he consistently blessed those beyond the nation of Israel. The Roman Centurion’s servant, the Syro-Phonecian woman’s daughter, and a Samaritan woman of questionable moral standards.

More telling than that was the derogatory title the religious people gave him: Friend of sinners. Not only did he bless people beyond the confines of the nation, he also befriended those within the nation but excluded from the religiously faithful community.

This is the kind of church I believe Jesus wants to build. A church made up of people who will partner with him on his mission to bless the world and share the message of his redemptive love and sacrifice.

What must Change?

Two fundamental things have to change. The church’s view of the world, and the church’s view of the church. Alongside these fundamental perspectives, our motivation for evangelism must also change.

The world is not the enemy, and it’s not the fault of the world that it finds itself as it is. Let me explain. Darkness is by its very nature dark. The problem is not the darkness, but the lack of light. When light shines, darkness disappears. Darkness does not overcome light, but where there is no light, darkness will rule.

Most church rules set out the responsibilities of members somewhere. They are almost always internally focused. It is heartbreaking that the expectations on members of the greatest missionary movement of all time makes little reference to the mission in which it's supposed to be engaged.

Secondly we must stop seeing ourselves as the faithful few who remain, but as the kingdom task force we are called to be.

Finally we must reshape the church. We need to adopt the principle of Christology drives missiology which drives ecclesiology. In other what we believe about Jesus determines how we understand our purpose and this in turn shapes the kind of church we become.

More than one way to use a post-it

Thank you Michael for pointing out this video.

Woodturning project 3

This is my final piece from the course.

It was meant to be an ornamental shaving bowl for soap. I'm not sure it will get used for that purpose, but it certainly was interesting to make.

The body and the lid are formed from two pieces of maple (I think it's maple), the body first. That's left in the chuck and the lid is turned from a separate piece of wood.

Very carefully a rebate is formed in the lid.

 The body is pushed into the lid as a tight fit and seated in the bottom of the rebate.

The whole thing is then put back in the lathe and the outside of the lid is shaped.

It has a oil finish.

So that's it. Two days, three pieces and a whole lot of fun.

If we had hamsters they would have enough bedding for a decade. 

Will I get a lathe? I think I might, I will need to talk nicely to the senior income earner. Maybe I can sell a few bowls, do you think that will persuade her it's a good idea? 

Woodturning project 2

Having made a bowl, I began work on my second project, a candlestick. 

Roughing down the rectangular blank to a cylinder sends small chips of wood everywhere. In fact you end up with a shirt full of little bits of wood. At the end of the day, you have to untuck yourself and shake all the chipping out before you go into the house!

The candlestick is made in two parts, the shaft and the base. The base is turned in the same you turn a bowl.

And this one is finished with shellac and canuba wax, which I'm told has many uses in the sweet industry possibly even to polish Smarties! But that may just be a rumour!

Woodturning project 1

Here's the bowl I made on Thursday under the excellent supervision of Chris Child.

It's sycamore and the finish is a simple wax finish.

It's rather nice and a great first piece. 

Hollowing out the bowl is one of the most tiring things I did. You just have to keep going and going until you get the shape you want. I particularly like the wide rim on this bowl.

Woodturning Course

I've spent most of the day doing the first part of a wood-turning course, learning all about how to sharpen a gouge and practising with all sorts of tools on a lump of tree that was cut down only last week! 

After that I was given a nice piece of Sycamore to turn into a bowl. It's quite a challenge to learn how to control the cutting edge of a turning tool, but hopefully practice will make perfect! I'm really grateful to Trevor, David's grandfather for letting me have a go on his lathe, and the course is adding to my desire to give turning a decent go.

I'm the only one on the course, so I'm getting individual attention. I guess the tutor must get quite bored only having one student!

Tomorrow's project is going to be a candlestick, so we will see how that turns out (excuse the pun!)

The Changing Church

This article arrived in my inbox as part of the Preaching Today newsletter. I thought it was worth sharing wholesale:

THE CHANGING CHURCH

In his new book The New Shape of World Christianity (IVP), Mark Noll illustrates how dramatically the face of world Christianity has changed in recent years. He writes: "The most important thing to realize about the current situation of Christianity throughout the world is that things are not as they were. A Christian Rip Van Winkle, who fell asleep under a tree midway through the 20th century and then woke up this past week to the sound of church bells (or a synthesizer with drums) on a Sunday morning, would not recognize the shifted shape of world Christianity. It is as if the globe had been turned upside down and sideways.

"A few short decades ago, Christian believers were concentrated in the global north and west, but now a rapidly swelling majority lives in the global south and east. As Rip Van Winkle wiped a half-century of sleep from his eyes and tried to locate his fellow Christian believers, he would find them in surprising places, expressing their faith in surprising ways, under surprising conditions, with surprising relationships to culture and politics, and raising surprising theological questions that would not have seemed possible when he fell asleep.

"A series of contrasts can underscore the great changes of the recent past.

• This past Sunday it is possible that more Christian believers attended church in China than in all of so-called 'Christian Europe.' Yet in 1970 there were no legally functioning churches in all of China; only in 1971 did the communist regime allow for one Protestant and one Roman Catholic Church to hold public worship services, and this was mostly a concession to visiting Europeans and African students from Tanzania and Zambia.

• This past Sunday more Anglicans attended church in each of Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda than did Anglicans in Britain and Canada and Episcopalians in the United States combined -- and the number of Anglicans in church in Nigeria was several times the number in those other African countries.

• This past Sunday more Presbyterians were at church in Ghana than in Scotland, and more were in congregations of the Uniting Presbyterian Church of Southern Africa than in the United States.

• This past week in Great Britain, at least fifteen thousand Christian foreign missionaries were hard at work evangelizing the locals. Most of these missionaries are from Africa and Asia." 

Is Daniel Missional?

I'm currently reading the story of Daniel as part of my devotional time. I love the story as it unfolds across 70 years following Daniel from youthful commitment to elderly faithfulness. 

But one of the things that can go unnoticed as we focus on Daniel's faithfulness is God's mission to Babylon. Daniel rises to prominence, not on account of his faithfulness, but because God speaks to the kings of the empire and uses Daniel to interpret the dreams, visions and signs he sends. At least that's one reading.

If we are willing to look, we cannot ignore that fact that God speaks beyond the confines of his people into the lives and situations of the nations and peoples around them. His purposes are fulfilled and his plans worked out through them.

So it would seem that Daniel is missional, dare one say even incarnational, as he lives out the mission of God in exile. 

Church Membership

I've been working on some questions to ask an informal gathering of all the folk at church. The idea of the meeting is to have lunch together one Sunday and talk about membership. About what it means and how we can better engage in membership as a meaningful part of being a local church. 

So far I've generated a lot of questions and they need to be narrowed down. I won't even be surprised if they are not replaced by a few new ones too as we process them as a leadership team.

But I wouldn't mind finding out if anyone who reads my blog has any thoughts about membership and what questions we should be asking ourselves.

So here are my initial 16 questions! I did say there were a lot, and they will be narrowed down I promise they will.

1 What is Church Membership
What exactly is a church member? Is anyone who comes to church a member?

2 How should you become a Church Member 
Is it by faith or by vote?

3 What should a Church Member do?
Is this something that is internally focussed, ministry and service within the church, or does it have a wider, mission-focussed heart?

4 How do we make Membership more meaningful?

5 If we had a membership covenant, what might it look like?

6 Should it be easier to become a member or harder?

7 How often should we meet?

8 What kind of church meetings should we have?
How much prayer, worship, sharing should they include? What should be on the agenda?

9 How should we make decisions?
Should we vote more? Are we supposed to be doing things democratically? What principles should apply?

10 How should the church meeting and being a member relate to the church leadership?

11 Is church membership just about having your say or are there other things that should apply?

12 What should we do about “inactive” members?

13 How would you feel if you had to opt into membership each year?

14 How do we express membership beyond the church meeting?

15 What kind of members does God want us to produce in this church?

16 What kind of experiences do people need to have in order to become these kinds of members?

Interesting opportunities

A couple of interesting opportunities have come my way recently. Next weekend I'm taking part in a nearby church's weekend away, except they are not going anywhere! 

I've been asked to take a session on the Saturday morning looking at the church and the need for change, and then to preach on the Sunday morning as a follow-up to the Saturday.

The other opportunity came about through a conversation at a CWR event in March. I've been invited to do a training day about pastoral care and about the health-check document I introduced to the church last year. In fact it's time to do the check again, which I hope we will do in a couple of weeks time.

So, I'm rather looking forward to doing these things. It will be different and a challenge too. But then what's life without a challenge?

Leaving Bedford

This morning at church we made the announcement that we are leaving Bedford. It was an emotional time as I shared with the church how God has called us to a new setting. We've been here for 8 years and we love living here and being involved in local church life and local community life too. 

The anatomy of moving church in Baptist circles can be quite a long process, but God has once again be gracious to us and what began in January came to its conclusion last week with an invitation to become the pastor at Upminster Baptist Church. I've wanted to blog bout the spiritual process, but I haven't been able to do that because of the circumstances that surround moving.

I may look back through my journal and see if there is anything worthy of posting, if only to let you see the process from the inside. As it is, I can at least begin to blog about preparing to move and how we handle moving etc.

So a new chapter opens up. I'd have happily stayed in Bedf0rd until retirement, but it wasn't to be. Perhaps we'll come back in 13 years time when I reach 65!!