Prayer and Preaching

Here's a useful article about the importance of prayer in the process of sermon preparation.

It's true that prayer often features as a perfunctory step in the process, even as an act of desperation as Sunday morning approaches. But we all know that payer ought to be a central feature not a peripheral part of the process. As the author of the post says:

We need to regain a theological vision in which prayer becomes the posture of the preacher, for before our people can hear from God through us, we must hear from God ourselves. And hearing from God through his Word is the fundamental work of prayer.

But not only is prayer about hearing from God, it is also about something more fundamental too:

The point of prayer is realignment, as our hearts assume a posture of dependence and humility before God. Prayer places our needs in the perspective of God's sufficiency, our problems in the perspective of his sovereignty, and our desires in the perspective of his will. Prayer is not a monologue. Rather, prayer invites God to have the last word with us, and for his Word to shape and define us.

This is true whether you are praying as you prepare to preach or whether you are praying as you prepare to live out your daily life for the glory and honour of God.

I'm a father-in-law!

I think it might just be sinking in that my daughter is now a married woman. Even on Saturday, as I swapped between leading music and solemnising the marriage, it all seemed a little unreal. As Ally and I sat in the wedding car–a white classic VW Beetle convertible–we both said how surreal it all felt. But there we were, Ally in her wedding dress and me in my dress-suit.

At church we had a great time. Thanks to everyone who took part the worship was good and the congregation relaxed and informal. Even the photographs were fun!

So, now I'm a father-in-law and I've handed over responsibility for my daughter to someone else, not that I will ever really give up being responsible, but now they have a life to build, a life that we will be a part of but not shaping. It will be their choice. I wonder how you work out the line between concerned intervention and interference?

The problem with church is...

We had an interesting discussion at the ministers' gathering yesterday. Sparked by me I have to say before anyone looks for someone else to blame! The question I wanted to raise comes out of a continuing desire to see the church blossom and flourish as a missional community in partnership with God. It does not arise from any personal agenda beyond a conviction that we are not all that we could be. That there is an adventure of faith that we are yet to experience and enjoy.

I just needed to say that before anyone gets upset or worried about the question I raised and the analysis I offered.

My question was this: Is full-time ministry as we deploy it in today's churches the very reason the church is not flourishing? In other words, are we as minister the problem?

The reason for the question is probably rooted in a concern that the primarily management model of ministry into which we have fallen has removed the pioneering, church planting pattern of the early church. We have as they say, moved from mission to maintenance, and we need to move back again.

But there is more. This shift has produced a professionalisation of ministry to the point where I think it is in danger of being detrimental to the spiritual growth and ministry involvement of the majority of the church. We defer to the minister as the one trained to do what biblically we are all called to do. We look to our ordained leaders as omni-competent, able to fulfil all the required roles of the leadership of the church. This is not good. I don't believe any one person can fulfil the role of apostle, prophet, pastor, teacher and evangelist, and neither does anyone else as far as I can tell. But we act like it's true. We say the days of the one-man band are over, but we carry on doing things in the same way. Perhaps, if we didn't have so-called full-time minister, we might see more leadership talent released and more ministry happen as we all share from a similar position busyness. Who knows.

A second danger is the reenforcement of the sacred-secular divide. Ministry is what the pros do in the scared places at sacred times. Everything else falls outside of this and is therefore secular. Any meaningful engagement in ministry for the non-ordained specialist is limited to occasional involvement on a Sunday or in a mid-week group. How unhelpful is that?

I recently attended a meeting at LICC where Mark Greene did a great job launching a new initiative aimed at supporting Christians in their workplaces and challenging the churches along the way about how they empower them to be effective whole-life disciples.

All of this makes me wonder if we don't need a radical reimagining of leadership and ministry in order to make the shift to a more fully engaged and involved community of faith. If the five-fold pattern of Ephesians is a workable model of leadership then most churches cannot afford to pay for that, so it would mean a flatter, less professionalised understanding of ministry and leadership.

Still much to reflect upon.

Thinking about stuff while waiting to catch the train

Has discipleship replaced having a hobby for many Christians? That's crazy talk I hear you say, it's ludicrous. But hear me out as I think out loud about it for a moment. And anyway, even if it is crazy, this is my blog and I can be as crazy as I want to be in my own world can't I?

Back to the question. I keep thinking about the number of spaces we all occupy. There's the family space, the work space and the leisure space. Some argue that there isn't room for a fourth space, so Church or faith activity has to compete for attention with the other three spaces. Work is a non-negotiable space for most people, so in fact the competition is with leisure and family. When we fill our diaries with lots of well-intentioned activities focused on being part of a faith community, it will be either our leisure time or our family lives that will have to give up part of their space to make room for being a follower of Christ.

So maybe the discipleship question we should be asking is how do we integrate faith into our lives in order that it doesn't have to compete for time and resources and space. In other words, how do we we become everyday followers of Jesus, following him and serving him through the ordinariness of everyday life?

I don't have an easy answer to that question.

What I do know is that there are times when we are clearly too busy being Christians to be effective in God's mission. Our wholehearted commitment to meetings and planning and events distances us from the very people with whom we could be spending our time and who we could be influencing for the kingdom.

I don't invite people who are far from God to come to any church related events because I simply don't know any people in that category well enough to know how and when to invite them (and what to invite them to as well!). I'm addressing that by becoming intentional about getting to know some people who are far from God, people who are missing from the kingdom.

It's not easy. It's time consuming, and in my case energy sapping because it involves throwing myself around a tennis court for the most part! But I'm doing it, not to create evangelistic opportunities but to get to know real people who matter to God just as much as I do. Maybe one day I'll get the opportunity to extend an invitation and maybe one day someone will say yes. What is certainly true is that without this intentional move on my part, I probably would never get the opportunity in the first place.

No Longer Alone

It was while I was studying theology at what was then LBC (now LST) that I became aware of my grandfather's involvement in mission. He responded to an urgent call for mission workers to go to Africa at the turn of the 20th century. Disillusioned, as far as I can tell, he retuned home a few years later and it would appear had little to do with the church after that. I never knew him, so I never had the chance to ask him why.

I've often wondered where he stood theologically, and whether we would share anything in common. I've wondered if he prayed while in Africa for the church in the UK to be renewed and to recommit itself to God's great mission. I've wondered who or what inspired him to cut short his studies and set off on his missionary journey.

All of this has often left me feeling somewhat alone in the family. I don't dwell on it, but there are times when I would love to be able to reflect on theological issues with my close family in a way that just isn't available to me. No one has gone this way before, or so I thought. And then I found out something new.

My Grandmother was my Grandfather's second wife. His first wife was called Mary, and they had a son and a daughter as I recall. Owen and Dorothy. Mary, it turns out was the sister (I hope I'm remembering this correctly) to Uncle Ernest. Uncle Ernest turns out to the J Ernest Rattenbury a Wesleyan theologian. It gets more interesting too. Ernest and Mary's grandfather was John Rattenbury, another Methodist leader from the late 19th century.

A quick email to a methodist friend of mine produced the following response:

Hi Richard, 

Always good to hear from you dear friend. Well how amazing. As your e-mail came in I was reading an article about the Methodist Conference of 1861 which was held in Brunswick Chapel Newcastle, the place where I subsequently grew up. The President of Conference that year was, yes you have guessed, Rev John Rattenbury, described as a hypnotic revivalist preacher! His son was H Owen Rattenbury the father of Revs J Ernest Rattenbury and Harold Burgoyne Rattenbury.

So I no longer feel quite so alone as I once did. Maybe John was a maverick too, a preacher passionate about God's mission, determined to follow Christ and preach Christ.

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.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

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.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

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.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

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.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

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?