The amazing promise

Along with the great invitation, we talked on Sunday about the amazing promise Jesus made to Nathanael.

I tell you the truth, you shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.

What I didn't mention on Sunday was that the 'you' is plural, and so it does not refer to NAthanael alone, but to all those who were listening at the time. Probably Philip, possibly Andrew and the others too.

But the point is this: heaven opened. Imagine that for a moment. Heaven opened right over your community. Heaven and earth connected. The kingdom real and present among the people. Powerfully at work transforming lives.

I guess Nathanael and the others might have thought about Jacob and his vision of heaven open and the angels ascending and descending. Heaven touching earth. In the arrival of Jesus, heaven certainly touches the earth. But there is another Old Testament passage that comes to mind too.

 Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this," says the LORD Almighty, "and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that you will not have room enough for it.

Malachi 3:10

Perhaps there is more to seeing heaven opened that we might have first thought.

If only we could make this

When I listen to stories like these, I wonder just what it would take to see this kind of fruit in our community.

Every day I pray that God would add to the church those who are being saved. And I ask too for the boldness and awareness we need to engage our community with God's great invitation.

Asking questions about prodigals

It was actually the reference to cats that caught my attention. Being the home help to Pip and Jade, two extremely comfortable cats, I immediately recognised some of the trauma of a cat that wanders off. But there's a more serious point to Jeff Christian's reflections.

So much of what has come to represent "the church" in America either looks like a stadium concert on one end of the continuum, or a rhetoric of out-of-touch-book-burning lunatics on the other. And while there are churches here and there who just want to be a simple community of faith who loves God and one another, they seem to be getting harder to find. Sorry if that sounds nihilistic. But it's the truth as I see it.

What is the church going to do in this generation to welcome home those prodigal Christians who still love God and the faithful ministry of Christ, but who view the church as nothing more than an irrational talking head that has almost nothing to do with the concerns of those who lost faith that God's people could ever gather together without fighting over the color of the carpet? It is probably a safe bet that if we could ever get them to come home, God would be waiting on the porch for them with a robe and a ring with a steak already on the grill.

And what is true of "the church in America" is just as true of the church in the UK.

This is why Alan Roxburgh's call for a new imagination is so apposite. Our "modern" mindset produces new variations of old patterns. We might call it cell church, seeker-sensitive church, emergent church, house-church, but it remains the same old church.

Welcoming prodigals demands a different imagination of church indeed.

The Great Invitation

We began a new series on Sunday. Based in John's gospel, we're exploring the impact Jesus had on people's lives. We began with Philip and Nathanael. As part of our study we looked at the great invitation, here are my notes:


“Come and see”, and “Follow me” form one of the greatest invitations you will ever receive. As followers of Jesus Christ, we can offer this great invitation to others by simply inviting them to “come and see”. That’s our part. It’s not up to us to convince them to follow. As Ally reminded me yesterday, one of my tutors at college says in his book about Jesus that Jesus was not in the business of persuading but in the business of presenting opportunities. We can present the opportunity to come and see, Jesus will present the opportunity to come and follow.

But we also need to remember what it is to which we are inviting people. We may invite them to church, but church is not the thing to which we are inviting them. It’s not about Sunday. It never should have been, it was never meant to be. We are not inviting people to join a social club of like-minded individuals who enjoy the same things. We are inviting them to meet Jesus. To encounter the Son of God. Sunday is not all that we are. We are so much more, the invitation is to so much more. Jesus talked about abundant life. I think that sounds like an awful lot more than 90 minutes in church once a week.

For me it’s summed up in a poster that’s been on the notice board for some time now. Matthew designed it, and I gave him the text. It says this:

Don’t go to church, come to life.

The invitation Jesus offers you is an invitation to a transformed life and a restored relationship with the God who loves you passionately and misses you immensely. He crossed space and time to reach you, and he reaches out to you and says: Come and see, come and follow me.

Leading a church or developing a missional community

I often wonder about my role. I'm sure my concept of my role is altogether different from the concept many members of the congregation have of it. Indeed I suspect it's quite different to the way many fellow ministers see it too! So I'm always interested in reading stuff about leadership and church and community.

David Fitch has written an interesting post about Senior Pastor versus Community Organiser. He proposes three goals for the first one or two years of a new church plant. These goals got me thinking about the challenge of leading an established church into a new expression of church as a missional community. His three goals are:

• Establish a small community of fellowship in the neighbourhood who can pray together for the Kingdom. 

• Get to know the neighbourhood. 

• Facilitate hospitality. 

Now, I'm not too worried about the actual details that he uses to define these three goals (although they are very valuable and interesting), but I am interested in how they might shape what it means to become a missional community from an established background. For example, reshaping the prayer focus of the church so that we spend more time praying for the local community, or rather for the kingdom to find expression in the community.

In other words these three goals seems to run counter to everything an established church might understand to be high on the agenda. So, instead of fretting about why people don't come to church anymore, we concern ourselves with connecting the church, ie the people, to the wider community, ie more people. They move us away from being programme bound and into relationships.

So much more to think about, but I have to get ready for a meeting, a deacons' meeting no less! How established church is that!!

Why Making New Maps is Hard

This is an extract from Alan Roxburgh's book Missional Map-Making. I'm quoting it in full because I think it expresses well what it says and doesn't need me to rewrite or precis it. That makes it quite a long post, but worth reading I believe.

Why Making New Maps is Hard

Have you ever made a resolution to lose weight? Have you stood on the treadmill determined to work hard to change your eating habits only to discover, weeks later, how hard it is to change habits? If journeying in a new space were as easy as knowing that things have changed and that we have to act differently, change would be easy. But change is not easy–not for you personally, not for your local church, and not for a denominational system. Most of us are wired to resist change–just ask the Israelites as they headed out into the desert. Our inborn resistance to change partly explains why we see intelligent, skilled people reading information about a changed world and still living as if nothing had really changed. The North American auto companies aren't unique in this. When we marvel at how a company as big and filled with bright people as General Motors could be pushed to bankruptcy because of its inability to respond differently in the face of a new reality, we scratch our heads in disbelief. In actuality, GM behaved the same way most of us behave most of the time. When confronted with new information, when convinced that the world has changed and we are in new space (take, for example, the information and data we have about the environment and the melting ice caps), we agree that there is a need to change, but we keep acting in ways that got us to where we are. Why? Because habits, skills, and experiences have served us well in the past (or at least haven't seemed to hurt us), we're comfortable with them, and we want to hang onto them because we really don't want to go through the pain of learning how to behave differently, That is why good, well-meaning  leaders can provide endless information on how the world has changed and still come up with programs and answers that are just more of the same.

We learn to function at high levels of performance using our preexisting maps; we know the rules and have become good at being successful within those rules. Our ingrained habits give us not just success but identity because they have provided us with a place in an organization or community. Continuing to do what has worked for us in the past is what makes for stability, and as humans, we value stability. But when the world has really shifted, doing the same old things won't preserve the steady, predictable environment we are used to. As the Procter & Gamble executive said to me, we keep coming up to the plate and swinging but nothing alters the fact that we keep declining. An executive I met recently expressed it well. About three years ago, he was brought into a denominational system that was in serious decline and embroiled in conflict, with the mandate to turn around the decline and overcome the conflict that had caused previous executives to resign in frustration. Everyone in the denomination agreed that something had to change or there would be no future for the churches of that denomination in that city. Three years in, the executive is bruised and beaten by all the resistance to almost everything he has proposed.

It is one thing to agree that some kind of change is needed in churches and denominations, but if we don't see the complex forces that have propelled us into a new place of uncertainty, we will try to navigate our way forward on the basis of existing maps. Without understanding these forces of change, it will be difficult to see why we need new maps for navigating in this new place.

Missional Map-Making, Alan Roxburgh, p88-89

A greater imagination

Ally and I are watching an episode of Voyager. It's the one where they encounter species 8472 for those who know these things. In the search for a solution to a problem, Captain Janeway visits her holographic mentor, Leonardo Da Vinci. This is what he says to her:

When one's imagination cannot provide and answer, one must seek out a greater imagination.

I continue to believe that the challenge we face in the church today is not in the designing of new programmes but in the search for a new imagination. Maybe Janeway's imaginary friend has some wisdom for us in the search!

Burning books

Jealousy and strife are ruining Welsh non-conformist Christianity reports one headline, bishop expresses sorrow after vicar jailed for sham marriages says another and in Florida a local church pastor plans to burn copies of the Koran on the anniversary of September 11th.

It doesn't look good for the church.

The first two stories sadden me, the third frankly appalls me. That a pastor can actually believe that burning books is an appropriate act of remembrance beggars belief. Where is the grace in that? I saw a brief interview with him where he talked about not backing down in the face of radical Islam. "When do we stop backing down," was his argument. When we run out of grace apparently would seem to be the answer.

This is the kind of defiance that caused the American and UK governments to "declare war on terror". They concluded that the only way to deal with the perceived threat was to enter the same world and use bigger, more sophisticated weapons. No desire to ask why, just a drivenness towards retaliation.

It won't do.

This pastor seems to be working from a theology of retaliation. To do something that is guaranteed to incite a violent response.

What happened on September 11th was terrible. There are no other words to describe it. But burning the Koran is not an appropriate response. When people burn our flags, our pictures, even our Bibles, let's not become like them in retaliation, but let's show them a different way. Forgiveness and grace are not signs of weakness but signs of a deeper strength, a conviction that violence (and burning books is an act of violence) is not the answer.

Disciples, followers and onlookers

How many conversations have you had about church that have found their way into the arena of disciple-making. You know the kind of thing I mean, the conversations where we talk about focusing on disciples not just conversions, about how we need programmes and strategies to get "our people" into the Scriptures and into a deeper prayer life.

Setting aside the simple truth that programmes are okay, but in truth they don't actually achieve a great deal. Okay that may be an overstatement, but the whole Reveal study that the WCA has done seemed to demonstrate something I've always suspected: people don't grow through programmes, they growth through a deepening personal relationship with God.

This brings me to my question, a question that I wish I had an answer to and one that if I had an answer, and a book, DVD and small group programme available, might make me shining star in the universe of fix-it leaders. Oh yes, the question.

Why is is it that one person will persevere and grow in their faith, despite a whole array of false starts, life challenges, health pressures and other things, whereas another person gives up at the smallest set back or simply drifts away.

I can't fathom it. Even with all the collective know-how of a thousand highly skilled leaders, I still don't think we'd ever fully comprehend why this happens. And it bothers us. Some people think that because we don't bang on about it all the time, we are somehow immune or uncaring about the people that slip out of fellowship and off the discipleship path. Well we do care and we sit broken hearted all too often as we watch the once deeply committed and active fall by the wayside.

And there is so little that we can do about it.

So we pray and we cry and we fast and we weep and we take the hits and the criticisms because we know others miss them too and are bothered and concerned, but they don't know what to do either. And deep inside we know that but for the grace of God we might just find ourselves drifting away from the discipled life we long to cultivate.

So I still don't have an answer to my question, perhaps it is just part of the bigger mystery of the narrative of redemption history.

Don't go, be

Loving stops leaving is a new post from Jeff Noble that's worth a read. Too often we say the church is the people and then we do church like it's an institution. Jeff's call to be the church is of course not new, but it is always timely to remember.

Perhaps the simplicity of "Don't go to church, be the church" surpasses all the clever mission statements that churches spend hours developing without ever changing the ethos of the church. If we could embed this simple principle in our churches, what might we become?


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No more planning?

Reading Missional Map-Making by Alan Roxburgh, I realised I needed to write down an idea before it gets lost again in the busyness of life and ministry.

Arguing that strategic planning is useful but not defining, he says:

The task for leaders is more about how we cultivate environments that call forth and release the mission-shaped imagination of the people of God in a specific place and time. If cultivation of environments and facilitating the work of God's people is the vocation of mission-shaped leaders, then strategic planning is not simply an I'll-fitting tool; it will never assist us in forming such people.(p77)

This is the same argument he made in Introducing the Missional Church. Hardly surprising, but I made a note of it then and I just felt the importance of it again as I read it here too.

Of course the question is how do you do that? How do you create environments, and what do those environments look like? What does it mean for churches that are still working with old models of strategic planning that treat the future as a predictable outcome of a well oiled plan?

Somehow the plan has to support the mission not define it, but all too often the plan defines the mission because we measure our success or failure against the plan. So, if we are going to change the church then we will have to change the measurement criteria. We need a different scorecard as Reggie McNeal would say.

And we will need to be brave. It won't be easy making these changes. We will wonder if we are measuring the wrong things, diluting the gospel imperative of the church or reducing evangelism to serving the community.

There are no easy answers to any of the questions that arise from these concepts. But the truth is that many of us in leadership and in congregations know that something is wrong, that business as usual doesn't work anymore and hasn't worked for some time, that people no longer share our story or are ready to conform to our preferred future.

Still much to consider and ponder about what comes next for the church in the 21st century.


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Location:Parkland Ave,Romford,United Kingdom

Reading the Psalms

Having read through Mark's gospel and aware that I'm about to start a major series from John, I thought I'd spend some time reflecting on the psalms. When I first became a Christian reading the psalms usually involved picking a number between 1 and 10 and starting there, reading every tenth psalm. Needless to say not many people chose 9 as their number!

Well it's been over 30 years since those days and my appreciation for the psalms has grown and developed over those three decades. Today I read psalm 3, a poem written by David when he had to leave Jerusalem at the time of Absalom's coup. I don't suppose David knew whether he would ever return to the city, or rule as king again. To be honest he probably was more concerned that his life was under threat than either of those two things.

So it is that we read a prayer of hope and trust and submission to God's purposes. Leaving the city as he had, David looks to God rather than the military might or the army for support. It is God who lifts my head high. He also remembers the people as he seeks God blessing upon them as the psalm ends.

There are times when David seems to call on God to destroy his enemies and to shatter his opponents, but not this time. This time it's all about trust and assurance that God will do what God alone can do.

Docklands

The more time I spend around Docklands the more I actually find myself liking it!

This picture was taken as the sun was setting over the city. We were walking along the riverside to Limehouse, having had dinner near Canary Wharf.

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Strawberries and seaweed anyone?

While we were talking about our next All-Age Celebration this coming Sunday, Dave mentioned this bizarre story of a scientist in Japan who has developed n "electronic tongue". Apparently it recreates the small electrical differences that identify taste. The acid test (excuse the pun) is when he gets someone to do a blind taste test. Strawberries and seaweed produce the exact flavour of kiwi fruit. Which might explain why I'm not fond of kiwi fruit!

Read all about this amazing invention here!

August Step Challenge: The results!

So it's the end of the last day of the August Challenge to walk 200, 000 steps over the month. And here are the results of my efforts.

Total steps: 340, 007 (that's approximately 170 miles!)

Average per day: 10, 968

Counting the first 10K only: 297, 168

Number of consecutive days over 10, 000: 18

So my official total for the purpose of the challenge works out at 9, 586 steps per day, which is quite good I think. As you can imagine, some days have been easier than others, but overall it hasn't been a drastic change to do this. Keeping it up through darker, wetter winter days might be a challenge, but it's certainly been an interesting exercise and it's contributed to my overall falling body mass!

Did you take up the challenge? How about trying in for September.

Another London Walk

We all decided to hop on the train again yesterday afternoon and go for another walk around the city. Leaving Fenchurch Street we headed of in the direction of St Pauls once more, stopping at Costa Coffee in Cheapside for a drink and to escape the rain.

From there we made our way past St Pauls,  a place that both worries and inspires. It is a quite remarkable piece of architecture, but then again it's a church. So many people go to see the building, I wonder how few go to meet with God. Ah well, this wasn't a philosophy walk!

From St Pauls he headed off to Fleet Street, pointing out to Ally where Anne used to work in Shoe Lane and just beyond. From there we went up to Kings College and looked at all the picture of the more famous alumni. Maybe, if I do my DMin there I might become a famous ex-student too!! We also had a wander around a very busy Covent Garden on our way. Eventually we decided to get back on the Tube at Embankment and make our way home.

I'm sure there are lots more things we could do and sights we could explore. Maybe we will have a few more Sunday strolls, visit a few of the parks and maybe explore the Thames path. You never know!

All this is of course very good for us. The August step challenge has been a little responsible for our expeditions. Tomorrow is the last day and I'll probably post my results at the end of the day. I've been doing quite well, only four days below the 10K target and quite a few 11-13K days, although only the first 10K count towards the challenge. I'm sure someone has managed 10K every day, but not me alas.

Why pigs?

As I've been preparing through the week for this Sunday I find myself pondering the fate of the pigs in Luke 8. Typically the explanation usually offered is connected with Jewish dietary laws and the fact that pigs are unclean animals and that they represent a suitable host therefore for unclean spirits.

That aside, I still wonder about the significance of what happened. Then it struck me as I thought about this, what does this all mean for the man who had been under the influence of all these spirits or the singular powerful spirit called "Legion"?

He was humiliated, isolated, feared and tormented. And all that for a long time. Matthew talks about two men who are so ferocious that no one dare pass that way. What a state to be in. The torment through which this man went was so intense that when the evil spirits entered the heard of pigs, the pigs went wild and ran down the bank into the lake and drowned.

Perhaps the significance of the pigs is in their demonstration of the power of the evil spirits that had ruled this man's life.

And Jesus set him free. Jesus broke that powerful hold on his life. The wild man became the calm man. Let's not forget that this story is about the power of Jesus to transform lives radically and not primarily about a herd of pigs.

The Rhythm of Life

I've been thinking about the rhythm of life and how a Christian rhythm differs so much from the world's rhythm. We start the week on a Sunday with worship and celebration. We look forward to living lives of availability to God. Or at least we should. Our week flows from celebration through work and leisure back to celebration.

The world starts on Monday with work and longs for the weekend to spend how it wants. The week is defined by the job you do and not the person you are. The week serves the weekend because it's the week that provides the resources to enjoy the weekend.

Like it or not, we've allowed the world's week to invade the Christian week. The rhythm has been upset and we are drawn towards the same view of life as our secular counterparts. It's not good. Worship and celebration now are things we fit in around all the other weekend activities. It is no longer the essential starting point. It has become an inconvenience to be managed.



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Location:Parkland Ave,Romford,United Kingdom

Discipline

I remembered something I heard Jim Collins say a few years ago at the Global Leadership Summit about disciplined people doing disciplined thinking and taking disciplined action. We are mostly not keen on discipline. It smacks of punishment, of reminding us that we've done something wrong. But of course that's not what it means in this context.

It's interesting though how the choice of a word can make such a difference to the way we perceive what we are doing or experiencing. We can understand an athlete having a punishing training routine in order to prepare for competition, but we find it difficult to translate that idea into developing a deeper walk with God. And maybe that is why, at least in part, we shy away from the thought of using discipline in connection with discipleship too. It sounds like hard work and we don't really want our relationship with God to be about hard work.

But discipline is not just about hard work and self-denial and pushing oneself harder and harder. It is simply a matter of the choices we make. Make it even more simple. It's about choosing to make a choice rather than just letting things happen around us.

I'm learning a lot about discipline at the moment.

Anne and I have both embarked on a programme to lose some weight. Over the last five years or so I've been monitoring my mass as it's steadily gone down. It has wandered up and down, but the progress has been downwards over all. It takes discipline to do this. Old eating habits that were fine when I was running and playing squash and riding a bike, are no longer helpful. I've had to make some disciplined choices about what to eat and when to eat it. Our current success is down to a more rigourous and disciplined approach to eating than we've had. It is in essence about establishing long-term habits and not just about a quick fix.

What I find fascinating, and obvious really, is that it is easy to remain focused and disciplined when you can see positive outcomes.  So the fact that my weight has dropped over 8Kg in something like 6 weeks and some of my clothes are distinctly loose encourages me to remain disciplined in my habits.

The problem with spiritual growth is that the outcomes are often less obvious and harder to measure. That makes staying disciplined much more difficult. I don't have an easy answer for that one. But what I do know that is that it can often be the little things that can make a difference. If only growing spiritually was as easy as shrinking physically!

Anyway, I ought to stop blogging, get changed, and get walking. Otherwise I won't achieve my other target of 10,000 steps today!

What kind of preaching do we need?

I came across this quote in Countdown to Sunday by Chris Erdman. Not  name I recognised, but the subtitle of the book caught my eye: A Daily Guide for Those Who Dare to Preach.

"But what I think we need most is for the preacher to get away from the notes, look us in the eye and help us see."