Thoughts from Luke 10

Having decided that our next step is to develop a prayer strategy for our community, we've set out a table of streets, grouped by location from our map. We have just over 150 streets in our community and we want to pray for each one of them. It's not that difficult to work out the logistics and a bit of trial and error goes a long way too. But what underpins the principles and ideas? Well I've been reflecting on Luke 10 as I think about this and here's what I've explored so far.

1. Not alone

It's not a solitary mission, but a shared mission. Jesus sent the disciples out in pairs. That's not rocket science, but it is a reminder that taking a partner with you is strategic.

2. No empires

He instructed them to pray for others to join in. This is not about building an empire but sharing a mission. It's not a case of the workers are few so I'll go it alone, but rather the workers are few, let's pray for more workers to join the party.

3. Go vulnerable

Jesus said to go without spare shoes and luggage. When we go it's not about what we can give to the community out of our abundance. Perhaps that's because it forces us to be dependent upon God already being at work. When we turn up with a ready-made solution what room is there for God to do something extraordinary?

4. Always bless

The prayer strategy that we are going to use is simply to pray God's blessing down every street. We're not "treasure hunting" or seeking to drive out darkness. We just want to ask God to bless the people amongst whom we live. There is a time and place to confront darkness and challenge evil, but let's start by blessing people. That seems logical and valid to me.

5. Don't agonise over the response

If a place is not a place of peace then so be it. We're not going to judge, just to bless. whichever way it goes, the kingdom is here whether people notice it or not. I have this intermittent privilege of serving families at a time of loss. That now includes doing the occasional non-religious funeral. I've blogged about that elsewhere. I'd hope that all the funerals are non-religious in a way because religious usually means rites and rituals without any real depth of faith. On the other hand all the funerals I lead are strongly rooted in a Christian faith perspective even when God is not mentioned and prayers are not said. Why? Because I'm there and I pray. Not at the funeral, but at home, in the car, at the crematorium, just not in the service or with the mourners. I don't agonise over the lost opportunity to share the gospel or missing element of fait, I just do what I can and leave the rest in God's hands.

6. Be prepared to be amazed!

God does some extraordinary things. He has the habit of showing up when we least expect him to and doing something equally unexpected.

So, how complicated is it to walk down your street and ask God to bless the homes and businesses in it? Are you afraid you might bless someone who doesn't deserve it or who might be doing something that doesn't honour God? How righteous do your neighbours need to be before they are worthy of your prayer of blessing? I'm sure that somewhere in our community someone is probably making illicit adult films, planning crimes, taking drugs or evading tax. IT seems to me that praying for them is the very thing I ought to do.

Here's one last crazy idea. In our village we have a Kingdom Hall. What might God do if I pray a blessing on that place!

Praying for the community

I guess one of the features of our discipleship over the last thirty years has been a heart to pray for the community in which we live. I can't remember when it began, but I think it has its roots in the Make Way events of the early eighties.

Over the years our approach has morphed into other things, taken sharp unexpected turns, and gone through quiet periods and times of complete inactivity! We're not perfect! We've learnt a lot and seen a lot of different things happen. Some have been big and obvious (there's a vibrant church in one place now and it's good to know our community prayers were part of the planting process), some less obvious.

I'm not sure we've always been understood, too often there's an expectation that there will be "results", and there have been times when it seems that for some our prayers have been neither public enough nor  inclusive enough. But there we go, you can't please everyone.

Our aaron'our new community. Something I've done before is to pray Aaron's blessing every time I turn into a new street when I'm out walking. It's simple and in many ways non-theatening or spooky (spiritually speaking). You see you don't need some special revelation about the family at number four or the old man across the street to pray this way. All you need to have is a commitment to bless people. Maybe there is even a principle about the importance of praying a blessing into a place and not just a spirit out of one.

Although I haven't bought the book or researched the project in great depth, I'm quite excited about a resource that has recently crossed my path called the Neighbourhood Prayer Network. I think we might connect with this and if you're interested you might like to have a look at the website too.

Anything that helps us focus on connecting with our community is a good thing. Right? Prayer is something we can all do, whether we walk the streets to do it or not is less important, although don't despise walking! I've been prompted to pray for things I might never have otherwise thought about just by walking down the street with my eyes open (spiritually and physically!)

A day at Presence

Yesterday, March 24th, I spent most of the day in Watford seeing what God is doing through an amazing organisation and business called Presence. It would take too long to describe everything we saw, the gift shops, the spa, the urban retreat, the worship room, the coffee shop, the business centre... well you get the picture.

What was interesting was the sense that here were a group of people seeking to work out what it means to live missionally in the context of business and an urban setting. It was fascinating. I'm not sure everyone on the visit got the concept of a missional business (mainly because missional is so hard to define at the best of times), but what encouraged me was the way things were structured in order to help Christians live out their faith where they worked.

My favourite place I have to say was the what they called the Watford room. On the floor was a large map, printed onto floor tiles, of the local area. It was far more than just a visual aid, it was an invitation to something that is hard to put into words. It certainly made me thing once more about having a dedicated prayer room somewhere.

CompassionArt

I read recently about Compassionart in an interview with Martin Smith, but wasn't really paying attention to release dates but a friend sent me the link to the site this morning and I wanted to post it here.

Two events of interest

A couple of events came through my inbox this week. Both look quite interesting. The first is a workshop from CAP (Christians Against Poverty). Looking at the information this is an opportunity to both find out about and learn how to deliver a money management seminar.

You can get more information here.

With debt and "credit crunch" being the flavour of the month (albeit a rather unpleasant flavour), it might not be a bad time for churches to connect with their community using tools like these.

The second event is a Spring Harvest one-day conference to be held at King's College in January. The focus of the day is the issue of how we learn. The advertising says:

In the church we’re forever discussing ‘good teaching’ but when was the last time you heard a discussion about ‘good learning’?

Both look quite good, sadly I can't make the first but I may go to the second one.

Church helps ex-porn star

A former porn star has left the sex industry to start a new life as a college student and church secretary, a group ministering to sex workers announced Tuesday.

Sophia Lynn, 24, is now an office staff at Celebrate Community Church in Sioux Falls, South Dakota in the US, where she will work while attending college. The South Dakota church offered Lynn a place to live, a college scholarship, and a job at the church office when they heard she wanted to leave the sex business.

“This is like a dream,” Lynn reflected from her new home in South Dakota nearly a week after her move. “I hope I don’t have to wake up from this. I feel like my life has been saved.”

It's great to read stories of churches actually making a difference. I found this story on the Christian Today feed. Read the whole story here. I wonder if we, if I, could make the same kind of response if asked.

Managing the back (and front) doors of the church

The seminar I attended the other day has got me thinking and maybe even a little inspired. 

Although it was not made explicit in the seminar, I take it that when we talk about the back door of the church we are using it as a metaphor for the exit strategy of those people who leave the church disgruntled or disengaged in some way or another. Now this doesn't necessarily have to be the case. In fact, as the seminar developed through the day, it became clear that for some the back door was simply the exit used by anyone leaving the church.

This in turn generates some confusion because there are times when it is right for someone to leave their church, so why would we want to close the back door on them doing so? It seems to me that what we need to do is to manage the traffic that passes through the back door rather than approach it as the simple matter of keeping closed. I want to help people leave well if leaving is what they need to do.

So, I'm going to begin work on developing a strategy for how we manage our back door. Maybe this is, in part, a defence mechanism so that we can say that we've done everything we can to help a person to leave well, but it's surely worth having a plan. Even more so in our highly mobile and low commitment society where people move on with apparent ease. I've had a few thoughts that I need to get in some sort of order, but I'd be interested to know if anyone has a strategy that works well, or ideas about what might work well. 

As someone who has left a few churches over the years (that's because I'm a minister I hasten to add) I've had my share of good and bad experiences. I know too that it's just plain impossible to please everyone, so even the best strategy won't work for all leavers. 

To drop a pebble in the pond of your thinking, I suspect that the best strategy for managing the back door might just begin with our strategy for managing the front door, the entry point to our churches.

Interesting welcome message

Click here to visit the Worship House Media website and watch this video. 

Might not to be to everyone's taste, but it got me thinking about what kind of message do we present about what it means to come to our church.

An opportunity we can't afford to miss

For the last couple of years we've been watching the progress of a project to build a new community just two miles from our village. Almost 10,000 homes will be built over the next 10 years or so and currently the infrastructure is being prepared. The first residents are expected to move in some time in 2008.

By comparison the village in which we currently and minister has 300 homes and the nearby village of Shortstown has about 1,000 homes (set to double in size in the next year or so). It seems obvious to me, and to others at church, that this is a God-given opportunity to engage with a new community from it's very beginnings. An opportunity to do mission in new ways with new people.

This has demanded a lot of thought and prayer about what this might mean, and I believe it's really important that we get committed Christians into the community as early as we can. This is an opportunity to serve a new, emerging community. It's an opportunity to contribute to the DNA of a neighbourhood, a village, even a town from its beginnings and as it grows.

Will you pray with us that God will bring to these new communities Christians who will connect with their neighbours, Christians who will be able to connect with us and partner with us in reaching this new community?

If you're interested in what's happening in these developments, you can visit the main developers site here.

The Character of Community

I didn't get a lot of reading done on holiday. That's no bad thing, since I was supposed to be on holiday! But I did read a little more of The Connecting Church by Randy Frazee. In his chapter on Finding a common place he list five characteristics of community built around a common place. Here they are:

Spontaneity: This is about unplanned contact. In our modern-day, high paced, highly mobile society, we've lost the space and time simply to bump into people as we walk to the shop or the the school. There are very few unplanned moments in our lives and most, if the surveys are true, are taken up with with watching TV. We don't "drop by" anymore.

Availability: To make spontaneity work you need availability. I'm as conscious as the next person about how often I have to consult my diary to see if I'm free. When we organise a meal with friends or a visit with our families, it usually has to be booked a month in advance. This cannot be good for us.

Frequency: If Acts 2 is a defining paradigm for the church, then we can no longer afford to say we don't have time for community. Okay, so things are different, but how often is often enough when it comes to building true, biblical community?

Common meals: I wonder if half the attraction of Alpha is the meal. Common meals are important to community. We have a monthly fellowship meal at church after our Sunday morning celebration. I'm always saddened by the number of people who choose not to be there. Common meals provide a place for some of the spontaneity and availability and frequency issues that affect our communities.

Geography: Frazee argues that: The simple fact is that in all places of effective community people live in close proximity to each other-and the closer the better!

The world deserves better

You know how it is, you're standing in front of the congregation preaching away and you hear yourself saying something that stops you in your tracks. You keep going of course because it's usually important to do that given that there are people waiting to hear what's coming next! But in the back of your mind and somewhere deep in your heart and soul you've heard God speak something into your life.

In my experience this doesn't happen every Sunday, but it did this last Sunday.

We were exploring our third big theme: The community. We thought about how we understood community and how we could relate better to our wider community I talked about becoming part of the DNA of the community. I talked about how a cell is defined by the DNA it contains and that our communities are defined by their DNA. If the church is at the heart of the community then the com unity should be different because of it. And then I said it, a little phrase that God used to penetrate deep into my soul.

The community deserves a better church.

Now this is in no way a criticism of my church. I think we're on the right track, I think we're holding on to a dream and vision that God has given to us that is deeply rooted in this idea of being the DNA of our community. But the world deserves our best shot. The world deserves the church being the best that it can be at being the family of God. I don't want to settle for anything less.

I haven't figured out what it means yet, but I know deep down inside of me that God has something profound to say. Church can no longer be mediocre and irrelevant, the world deserves better than that.

As I spoke those words on Sunday I felt the emotion rise within me, I felt as if I'd touched the heart of God and shared, for a moment, his passion for the missing members of his family in a way I've not felt it before. Call them lost, call them missing, call them unchurched, it doesn't really matter, Jesus misses them and they deserve a church that points them back home and shows them what it means to be reconected with God.

The Connecting Church

I'm working on the third in our series of big themes (The Community) this morning and I ran a search on the internet to see what might be out there. I came across a really new blog called The Connecting Church. It's really new, nothing much on it at the moment, but it might grow.

If you're interested in the concept or have some questions, stories or ideas, then you might want to visit the blog here or at the very least monitor it through your feed reader.