Everyday Church

As I think about what to do next in terms of Sunday mornings, I began to think about a series based in Peter's letters. To be honest, I've often shied away from them so that I don't have to try to explain about spirits in prison and the place of the ark in salvation history!

But those things aside, Peter's first letter has alway struck me as an important reflection on life as a Christian in a non-Christian world, and that's just the kind of world in which we generally live in the Western world. We may have some modernistic view that the world around us was once Christian and that the church ought to have a preeminent place in society, but such a world, if it ever truly existed, is long consigned to the past.

Anyway, thinking about Peter's letters, I came across Everyday Church along with one or two other resources and set about reading them through. I haven't got too far into this book, but I do find it refreshing and interesting and thoughtful and helpful as I prepare to outline my ideas.

The book is not a commentary but rather a reflection from a missional perspective on the implications of life for the Christian community in a hostile environment. Seven chapters cover the ideas of life and hope on the margins, what "everyday church" looks like in this context ad some thoughts about the next steps to take. Community, pastoral care, mission and evangelism are all explored.

A few things have caught my eye in the early pages. firstly the idea of storying. Storying is the process of understanding the culture of the people you are trying to reach and then creating a set of Bible stories that cover the key turning points in the story of salvation, along with bible stories that address the barriers and bridges to belief in that culture. I want to find out more about this, o I will need to do a bit of research but it sounds interesting.

The second thing that has caught my eye is a series of questions we need to ask ourselves. Boiled down, they become:

• Where are the places and activities in which you can met people ('the missional spaces')?
• What are the patterns and timescales of your neighbourhood ('the missional rhythms')?
• What 'gospel' stories are told in the neighbourhood (stories about why we are here, what has gone wrong, what are the solutions and what are the hopes)?

There are of course many more questions, but these questions draw us into a deeper engagement with the world around us. It forces us to ask "What does the gospel lok like and sound like for the people of my neighbourhood. It forces me to stop asking why they don't conform to my story and to ask how I can influence their story with God's great story.

I shall continue reading!

June Walking

I thought at one stage that I might have done another 100 consecutive days, but that came to an end after 46 days when I took a rest! With one thing and another, I've had a few more days that below 10k, but then again I've had 6 days that were over 20k, so the average for June turns out to be 13, 709.

So, the numbers for June were:

Total steps: 411, 271

Approx. miles: 206

This takes my total step count from August 1st last year to 4, 134, 206, which is about 2067 miles! That's only the second month when I've passed 400k steps, March was 405k.

July will probably be my last month of record keeping, but I will keep walking. I wonder if I could do 500k steps in a single month? That would be over 16, 600 a day or about 8 miles. Maybe if I played tennis everyday I could manage that, but I doubt that is going to happen!

The Trouble with Fair

It always bothers me when I hear myself or someone else begin an argument with, "It's not fair." I try to avoid it because I've long since given up on fairness as the measure. That doesn't mean that I'm happy with injustice and inequity, quite the opposite, but fairness just seems overrated or even dare one say a little selfish these days.

Fairness is on the agenda today as Public Sector workers take industrial action. We're told it's all about protecting pensions and there will undoubtedly be lots of debates and discussions about the fairness of change or the unfairness of change depending upon your point-of-view.

It seems to me that it would be much more productive to talk about what is equitable rather than fair. Perhaps what is righteous and God-honouring. In our current studies of Isaiah fairness doesn't get mentioned but righteousness and justice are constant companions throughout the text.

To some of us it doesn't seem very just that the very institutions that gave the highest quality rating to very suspect financial practices and instruments which in turn took us into the wort recession we've experienced, should also be dictating the policies of the government of Greece in it's current crisis. To some of us it looks less that righteous for highly paid executives to retire on handsome pensions while others who are significantly less well provided for pick up the pieces and the price-tag.

I'm not at all sure what a more equitable solution might look like, but all the time we debate what is fair I'm not sure we will ever come close to finding it.

I wish I had an answer!

Doing well?

John Ortberg has written an interesting piece on the Leadership Journal website. Here's a quote:

It is not acceptable to Jesus that hell prevail. Your job is not to meet a budget, run a program, fill a building, or maintain the status quo. Your job is to put hell out of business.

That's what it means for your church to do well.

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Simple ways to be missional

It can be very frustrating trying to define what is missional when by it's nature it defies definition in a programmatic way. It can also be frustrating trying to understand it when it can't be defined with ease. So, in the end you just have to keep describing it in the hope that eventually everyone will get it.

Enter a helpful article by Jonathan Dobson on the Verge Network. In this post he outlines the following 8 simple ways to be more missional:


1. Eat with Non-Christians.

2. Walk, Don’t Drive.

3. Be a Regular.

4. Hobby with Non-Christians.

5. Talk to Your Co-workers.

6. Volunteer with Non-Profits.

7. Participate in City Events.

8. Serve your Neighbours.

Take a step back for a moment and you will quickly see that you cannot be missional and remain locked into the Christian ghetto.

Neil Cole on Imagination in mission

Cufflinks

We have a wedding coming up in a few weeks now and as both father of the bride and the minister officiating, I thought I'd get myself some new cufflinks for the occasion.

I rather like wearing cufflinks, not sure why, but I do. I suppose I think of them as something rather smart.

Anyway, I came across Cufflinkman via Google and I just wanted to say what a great service I received from them. I only ordered some nice mother of pearl inlaid cufflinks yesterday and they arrived this afternoon.

Very impressed.

Liked the site too. Plenty of choice and now I'm the proud owner of five sets of cufflinks, not all bought yesterday, and including a rather nice pair that actually came out of a Christmas cracker, I bought a storage case for my growing collection. And I'm rather pleased with it all!

Mind you, I've just checked and today's shirt of choice doesn't have cufflink friendly cuffs!

Conduct Gospel-Centred Funerals

This book is part of a helpful series of practical guides to ministry. If you've never done a funeral and you are just starting out in ministry, then this book could be a really useful resource.

Written for an American market, it still has lots of hints and tips that apply in a UK context. However, you will need to find someone who can help you put it into a UK context if you are untrained in conducting funerals.

Of course the best advice and old hand can give to a novice is to trust the funeral director to help you be in the right place at the right time. I've always found them really helpful, and they have much more experience that I do!

There are a few concerns about the book. The section on choosing music seems to place the responsibility with the minister to vet all possibilities and although one is encourage to accommodate the family's wishes, the emphasis is upon music that promotes the gospel as far as possible. I take a rather different position. I see the funeral as a reflection of the personality of the one who has died and a time for the family to remember them and choose music that fits with those memories. I've yet to have felt the impulse to veto an choices made by the family.

Doing funerals is one of the privileges of ministry, and the responsibility is not to taken lightly. Weaving the story of God's grace and the good news of Jesus into the service can be a challenge. This short book will help you think these thing through as well as help you consider the practical side of this important ministry.

Some helpful questions

I've bee reading a paper on missional church and came across these questions:

How did you see God at work in your life this week?

What is God been teaching you in his word this week?

What conversations are you having with pre-Christian people?

What good can we do around here—and how we get some of our neighbours in on it?

How can we help each other in prayer?

These aren't just questions to put in your journal, they are meant to be used as accountability questions within the church family too.

Any questions that causes us to stop and think is probably not a bad question. In the past I've used such questions as the basis for a morning or day in prayer.

In fact it's high time I did another such day. I feel pretty frazzled at the moment and a day's reflection would be a good thing. There's a place not too far from home that I could use.

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Attempting and Expecting

What have you attempted for God recently, and what have you expected from him?

I was recently reminded of William Carey's quote "Expect great things from God; attempt great things for God", and asked myself just that question. The honest answer is probably the same for most of us. We've probably only attempted what we can safely accomplish, and we've expected little. Too busy and too tired, we don't push our faith to it's limits.

Years ago I was in a small Bible study group, not long after I became a follower of Jesus. In one of our studies we had an illustration of two people. One was standing on a frozen lake holding a large book with the word "faith" on the cover. It was meant to represent the amount of faith this character had. The sign by the lake read "thin ice". The other picture was someone with a small amount of faith standing beside another frozen lake with a sign that read "thick ice".

We spent a lot of time talking about the implications of these two pictures. Who was the person with faith? Was the man on the thin ice our model because he took the bigger risk, or was the man who applied his small amount of faith to thick ice more reasonable. I don't remember us coming to any absolute conclusions.

In the end I'm not too sure that faith is the determining factor when it comes to taking risks, to attempting something great for the kingdom of God. I think fear has a lot to do with it. Security is also a factor. Most of all perhaps we just don't spend enough time allowing the Spirit of God to inspire us to adventure. Perhaps we are too busy taking care of business, getting through the day, that we just don't have the time to become a pioneer for the kingdom.

William Carey was ignored, chastised and rejected for his radical assertion that lost people in other cultures actually mattered to God and ought to matter to the church. He was told in no uncertain terms that if God wanted to convert the heathen, he would do so in his time and without Carey's interference. But Carey persisted in dreaming a big dream. He persisted in preaching a missionary message about a missionary God and he offered himself for the task.

Eventually his persistence and commitment saw the birth of a missionary movement and he became its first missionary. He attempted something great for God and God did something extraordinary through him.

So where does that leave us, where does it leave me? Perhaps we need to remember our dreams, to revisit our passions, to seek first God's kingdom, to get on our knees and ask God to inspire a fresh wave of radical discipleship that will settle for nothing less than a big vision of God accompanied by a willingness to risk everything for the sake of the kingdom.


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May walking stats

It looks like May was my third highest month for walking since I began counting steps back in August last year. March was the only month that I passed 200 miles, but this month I managed 195. That means another 390, 000 steps have been taken, taking my cumulative total in the year to 3,731,935. That's equivalent to a total distance of 1866 miles.

I managed my 10k steps every day in May, which was quite pleasing, and I've had a run of 41 consecutive days. I might just make the effort to get to 50 and then see where we get to from there. Another 100 days seems possible, but that would take me into August, so it still has to be a day at a time at them moment.

At least I should pass the 4 million step mark by the end of June!

Sunday School

I only went to Sunday School for two weeks. After the second week, when I arrived home, my mother asked me, "How was Sunday School?" "Boring," I replied, "I'm not going again," I added quickly.

I was then informed that I had to go because it was good for me to go to church. My response was to point out that my mother didn't go so why should I.

I never returned to Sunday School!

If you are responsible for Sunday School or if you are wondering about how to reinvent it, then this blog post might help get you thinking.

The post ends with some great questions:

Do we want our children to learn how to be be compliant and "good"? Or do we want them to know to their toenails that they are beloved children of God, called to be ministers?


Do we want our children to know rote verses and have cultural literacy in terms of being able to identify the stories about Noah, Abraham, and Jesus? Or do we want them to understand the spiritual journeys of our spiritual foremothers and forefathers while figuring out their own?


Do we want our children to focus on getting themselves into heaven (which seems rather self-serving, doesn't it)? Or do we want them to learn that following Jesus is the best way to live on earth?

There's also a great book out of Willow Creek called The Fabulous Reinvention of Sunday School that helped us reshape children's ministry in a previous church.

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Revised date for world's end

I heard on the radio this morning that Harold Camping has decided that his maths was wrong and in fact the world will end in October.

How is it that someone can miss the most obvious statement of Jesus that no one knows, and get others to believe them?

It's a salutary lesson to everyone who would seek to become an expert, a teacher first and a disciple second.

Preaching from Isaiah

So, I took on the challenge of preaching through Isaiah as the result of a conversation with a small study group we have at church. It's a big book, but that doesn't mean we should shy away from it just because of its length. Neither should the complexity and span of history put us off either.

I decided to try to take a fairly broad approach and pick up about a dozen themes and ideas from across the whole book. One of the things I keep saying to both the study group and the church congregation is to look for echoes. Echoes of both the New Testament in the Old and of the Old in the New. For example, when Isaiah speaks prophetically about the gathering of the nations in worship and discipleship in chapter 2, where does that echo in the New? Possibly Paul's declaration that every knee shall bow and every tongue confess or when Jesus speak of making disciples of all nations.

As I work through I'm also reading an interesting book about Preaching Christ from the Old Testament by Sidney Greidanus. It has quite an interesting survey about how the early church did it, and it lays out a method with examples of a Christocentric model. I'm also using Motyer, Goldingay, Webb and Oswalt's commentaries and a very useful book by David Jackman called Teaching Isaiah. It's a guide to developing sermons and series.

What have I learnt so far? Well a few things come to mind. Firstly I guess it becomes very clear very quickly that the nation, indeed the nations, have a case to answer before God, but while God's judgement is inevitable so too is the hope that comes from God's eternal purpose of redemption. In fact you can quite easily see why some of the church fathers looked to Paul's faith, hope and love triplet as a basic hermeneutical method.

Secondly, there's the challenge to choose your story. Chapter 7-9 express it clearly as Isaiah paints the picture of the present reality, the near future and the distant future to come. You can choose to live by the story of gloom and distress or you can choose to live by the story of hope and redemption.

There is so much more that has direct relevance to our present-day situation that Isaiah cries out to be preached. I just hope we do him justice!

Praying in the pool

So I went for my first swim in ages yesterday. Didn't swim far, the pool got busy and there was a water aerobics class starting that I hadn't noticed in the timetable. I did about 24 lengths, and when I stopped for a breather and to take my goggles off for a moment, I got talking to a fellow swimmer about life and stuff.

It wouldn't be appropriate for me to share what was said, but it's where the conversation went that caught me by surprise. A simple remark opened the door to the opportunity to pray, and so there we stood, by the edge of the pool, with swimmers going up and down and me praying a blessing on someone I'd never met before.

Weird isn't it? I often wonder how many God-moments I miss in the daily run of my life. We're all so very busy going somewhere, doing something, that we probably don't notice a lot of what is happening right in front of our eyes. Worse still, perhaps we are like the religious characters in the story Jesus told about the man who got mugged by thieves and ignored by religious people. Stepping over his body or crossing the road, they moved quickly to avoid contamination that might interrupt their ability to be devoutly religious.

As I continue to read Isaiah, and remind myself of some of the other prophets too, I can't help but notice that when it comes to religious service, God seems to have a somewhat different perspective to us. Rather than focussing on the songs we sing or the sacrifices we make, or the prayers we speak, he talks about the justice we seek on behalf of others, he speaks about righteousness rather than self-righteousness. To use post-modern missional language, he seems to talk about engaging with our culture to transform it rather than huddling together in isolation in order to condemn it.

Do you think that being incarnational might just be reflected not only in the way we live out our discipleship spiritually, but also in the way we live it our practically?

I wonder, when I go out later today, if God will present me with another opportunity to be his co-worker?

More of Reggie McNeal on Missional Church

Came across this video of Reggie McNeal talking about missional church.

What caught my attention in this video was the discussion about "Cross Domain" partnerships. The idea of working with the community rather than for the community. When we work for the community we are less likely to engage the community, but when we work with the community, engagement is set to rise.

So I guess the question is: Where might God be calling us to work with our community as we partner with him in his redemptive mission?



There are some other resources available too, particularly a paper about engagement. This can be downloaded from here. The paper is called: Fast Forwarding Your Church’s Engagement in the Community

Telling stories

I had a thought as I walked up to church this morning. All this talk about stories got me thinking. We have Alpha and we have Christianity Explored and we have a whole plethora of access courses for people who might be interested in faith, but is there room for something different? Maybe it already exists, I don't know, but here's an idea.

A course based around the simple practice of retelling the stories, the story if you like, of God. Stories about his love and grace, about his involvement in human history and his intervention on our behalf.

We could start in Genesis with creation. Not as a way of arguing against evolution, but as a way of telling the story of who God is, reflecting on why we are here. We could look at Genesis 3 and talk about how we got into the mess we appear to find ourselves in, the loneliness and emptiness that sometimes invades our lives.

Of course we would tell the stories of Jesus and the early church too as lives got changed.

The thing is, much of our "investigating Christianity" material can require a high degree of Biblical literacy, but how many people know the stories? And telling the stories is not about educating people in Christian narratives, but opening minds to the possibility that God actually is at work in the world around us.

Just a thought.

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Standing firm

If you do not stand firm in your faith, you will not stand at all.

This little phrase slips into the narrative of Isaiah 7 almost unnoticed. With so much attention given to the sign of Immanuel, Isaiah's words to Ahaz about faithfulness can easily get missed. But if you stop and read carefully, these 15 words hit you square between the eyes.

Ahaz was not a faithful king. Uzziah and Jotham before him, even with their faults, were basically faithful kings, and Hezekiah, who would follow Ahaz, was another faithful king. But Ahaz was not like his father and grandfather, nor was he like his son.

Yet God still called him to faith, to live out of a position of trust. He spoke to him as if were a person of faith. That doesn't mean that he was, just that God treated him as if could be. In a sense, I guess you could say that Ahaz was full of faith potential, he just refused to act upon it. He'd rather look to kings and countries than to God for security.

Driven by a fear of everything except the power of God, and believing anything except the word of God, Ahaz had no faith in which to stand firm. The conclusion is there before us. He would not stand at all. His political alliances would let him down and his false piety would reveal his brokenness.

But as for me, well today is another opportunity to stand firm in my faith. It's a day-to-day opportunity. Yesterday's successes or failures belong to history and tomorrow's can wait their turn. I can only stand one day at a time!

Missional Community

There is a great video over at Missional Church Network that gives a great insight into what it means to be part of a missional community.

Definitely worth a watch.


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Church for Men?

Been reading David Murrow's book Why Men Hate Going to Church, very interesting. Having recently been to a meeting about church and men, it's given me quite a lot to think about. We are looking at how we  do ministry to and for men at church, and the questions raised by both the recent breakfast meeting and Murrow's book need addressing.

The pivotal issue is simply this: is church to feminine? To which the answer is almost certainly yes. Odd then that if the culture of the church is predominately feminine, why are most of the senior leaders still men? Hmm.

Murrow suggests that over time the church has simply fallen into line with the culture of the people who fill the pews, on average 60-70% female. So we come into buildings that are decorated with flowers, painted in pastel colours and designed around a nurturing, comforting, caring ethos. Now none of those things are bad, no one is saying that. The point is that the environment and the content of our services leans away from a masculine agenda and towards a feminine agenda.

How we reset the balance, according to Murrow, is to choose to set the thermostat of the church to more male-oriented settings like challenge rather than comfort. But doing this is maybe not so easy to work out. We can preach challenging sermons but are they presenting the right kind of challenge? I don't know. But it certainly bears some reflection and some thought about how we prepare and present our material in order to challenge everyone in appropriate ways.

I've always maintained that following Jesus was the most courageous decision I have ever made in my life. It has been a hard life, not the easy life that many non-believers think it to be. If I hadn't have chosen to commit myself to becoming a whole-hearted follow of Jesus Christ I could have sailed through life selfishly seeking my own goals and meeting my own needs. I could have been driven by whatever desires I had. Instead I chose to submit myself to someone else's authority. I also chose to follow God's call into ministry, another courageous choice that has been anything but easy.

So why does the gospel I preach come across as uninteresting or irrelevant to men? Maybe I've failed to emphasise the risk and challenge of following Jesus in favour of the language of relationship and sentimentalised commitment. Maybe I've not lived out a discipleship that is strong in heart.

Whatever the reasons, the need to think seriously about we engage men for the kingdom of God remains.

More to come I'm sure!