time for another shot of leunig!

God help us to live slowly:
To move simply:
To look softly:
To allow emptiness:
To let the heart create for us.
Amen.

Back again!

I love the Beatles song “Penny Lane”, a portrait of a village virtually teeming with “nowhere men”. Written by Paul McCartney, recorded during the Sgt. Pepper sessions, and released in February 1967 as one side of a double A-sided single, along with Lennon's "Strawberry Fields Forever". Beatles producer George Martin has said he believes the pairing of these songs resulted in probably the greatest single ever released by the group. Penny Lane is a study in ‘mundanity’. The simple sights and sounds of an ordinary suburban neighborhood; of completely commonplace and inconsequential people and events, all set to that rich melody, with the horns, the flute. The chorus: "Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes/There beneath the blue suburban skies..." highlights the importance of memory - the importance of experience - the way the smallest visual and aural details build up to form and inform this amazing thing we call Life. All around us are ordinary phenomena – people, homes, school, shops, shopping centres, neighbourhoods, parks, phone calls, emails, street scenes, routine family life, artistic and cinematic depictions of how we live our lives, everyday work and commercial situations, sociable occasions, non-professional sports activities, transportation contexts, venues of legal and political action, viewing televised entertainment, consuming information from various media, and so on and so on. These are the places of the ‘uttermost parts of the world’ and the immediate world where real people live and die. This is where the incarnation happens. Not in the disconnected glamour of Rome or Hollywood but in the mud and marketplace of Bethlehem or Cana. This is where we go with the Word and the Spirit. This is the place of the Mustard Seed Kingdom; the place where the small and foolish confound the powers of the world. What we find as we reflect on the events and places and people ‘under blue suburban skies’; will astound us if only we attend to them with the seriousness they do not typically receive. These unnoticed, unmarked aspects of our communities are often the most important indicators as to what God is up to.

This blog has MOVED....!!

So long and thanks for the fish...

This Site is now closed.

Q: How many forum members does it take to change a lightbulb?

	A : One to change the light bulb and to post that the light bulb has been changed. Fourteen to share similar experiences of changing light bulbs and how the light bulb could have been changed differently. Seven to caution about the dangers of changing light bulbs. Seven more to point out spelling/grammar errors in posts about changing light bulbs. Three to correct spelling/grammar errors. Six to argue over whether it's "lightbulb" or "light bulb". Another six to condemn those six as stupid. Fifteen to claim experience in the lighting industry and give the correct spelling. Nineteen to post that this group is not about light bulbs and to please take this discussion to a lightbulb (or light bulb) forum. Eleven to defend the posting to the group saying that we all use light bulbs and therefore the posts are relevant to this group. Thirty six to debate which method of changing light bulbs is superior, where to buy the best light bulbs, what brand of light bulbs work best for this technique and what brands are faulty. Seven to post URLs where one can see examples of different light bulbs. Four to post that the URLs were posted incorrectly and then post the corrected URL. Three to post about links they found from the URLs that are relevant to this group which makes light bulbs relevant to this group. Thirteen to link all posts to date, quote them in their entirety including all headers and signatures, and add "Me too". Five to post to the group that they will no longer post because they cannot handle the light bulb controversy. Four to say "didn't we go through this already a short time ago?" Thirteen to say "do a Google search on light bulbs before posting questions about light bulbs." Three to tell a funny story about their cat and a light bulb. AND One group lurker to respond to the original post 6 months from now with something unrelated and start it all over again . . .

Happy Australia Day!

H A P P Y C H R I S T M A S !!

When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses, for art establishes the basic human truths which must serve
as the touchstone of our judgment.
- - - John F. Kennedy- Address, Amherst College, October 26, 1963

We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;

World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world forever, it seems.
- - - -Arthur O'Shaughnessy

What is Growth?

Saw this in Chris Erdman's Blog ...

What do you think?

Why reach out? To pull in, or..."

Saw this part of a church's ad for a new associate pastor for family and young adult ministries:

"The 2,000 member congregation has served God and Community since 1956. It has recently completed major construction including a multifunctional facility and Day School. Arriving two years ago, the Senior Pastor, experienced in large churches, excels in high program growth. Through the developement of new programs, the church is reaching out to the community and is eager to attract young families."

At first pass there seems little problematic here. The description is a common way churches think about their ministry. But I wonder if there isn't something problematice about the last sentence. It is the attraction motive to outreach that troubles me. What does it mean when our congregations believe they exist to offer religious goods and services that compete in the market for people's money, time, and lives? In what way is this an appeal to Christendom--a life for the church at the center of culture as its religious chaplain? What is the church's motive in outreach? I wonder if it's not inherently opposite to this? There is no question that a growing church will attract new people--but how and why? Is "high program growth" what it means to be the church of Jesus Christ? Something grates at me here.

Hip Hip Huzzah!

The gorgeous miss revhead's birthday this weeek - all cheer please!!

Changes for us!

I'm going to be taking some long service leave next year - and then moving into something different!

Here's the text of what I shared at our 7pm church service Sunday:

Hi guys
I want to share with you about how God has been leading us over the last few months....

A couple of weeks ago there was an article in the Age about religion and under 30s.
Bottom line, less than half of the under 30s believe in any sort of God...
They are getting less spiritual not more spiritual
Of those who call themselves Christian – and that’s a really small percentage - only one in five of those who are Christians relate to the modern day church.

What is sinking home for me is that that the majority of Australian youth and twenties are unreached by the Good News of Jesus. And those of you who do believe - don’t really connect with the local churches of your parents. Increasingly the under 30s are looking elsewhere for faith experiences and community. It is no longer in the conventional churches services; traditional youth programmes, Sunday school programmes; outreach events or even contemporary worship that attract and inspire your generation.

How do I know this? Because the data shows that for the last fifty years we have been losing lost ground in Australia! It is your generation’s GRANDPARENTS that were the last genuine ‘churched’ generation. ONLY ONE IN FIVE, OF THE CHRISTIANS AGED 16-30s RELATES TO THE CHURCH! MORE THAN HALF OF THAT AGE GROUP DON’T BELIEVE IN ANY SORT OF GOD.

That makes me to dream and drool about what new opportunities God is opening up. The sorts of church that are currently serving us well at present, wouldn’t work so well in the years ahead when the teens of today become the twenty and thirty somethings of tomorrow. Also as the kids of multicultural Australia mature, their cultural upbringing will place most of them outside the traditional evangelistic strategies of the church.

I believe we will need to experiment in planting new sorts of church – and also find better ways of discipling your generation so you can become missionaries in what really is non-Christian Australia.

We have felt strongly about this so called ‘emerging’ generation – not just the youth but those into their 30s too. As increasing numbers of them drop out of existing church programmes and experiment with new forms of community – and this is happening across the western world as a whole - we have had a growing concern for them. How will the discipleship happen? The modelling of family-life? How does mission happen for the unchurched under 30s? It will take not just youngies, but older parent-age Christian families to nurture this movement.

I have a growing conviction that we need to be released for this. We would like to work alongside these emerging younger leaders, and to be part of modelling new forms of community. One of the challenges is that it has often tended to be the more inexperienced, sometimes frustrated younger Christians who have gone off to do this sort of thing, rather than those of us with a little more experience and perspective. I really feel that we need to those of us in church ministry with more experience and training to get into this.

My dream is eventually to model the sort of mission community that Generation Y can relate to. I see such a community birthing other similar groups. I see the potential in linking such a group to the training offered by bible colleges or similar agencies.

I’d love to help create an all-age, local community that feels like a close knit family. One that could take in interns and train them for urban mission. Whilst there are plenty of people in the 16-30 age bracket who are thinking these thoughts, there are fewer ancient folk like us with the passion, and the ministry experience to track with them on this journey.

Now I had already been planning to take long service leave next year - about half a year - to finish my study, I’m doing a doctorate – on this very theme. But as we have considered, prayed, talked with colleagues and our leadership here at Eltham, I believe that the Lord is calling us do this sooner rather than later.

What this means is that I will finish up serving at church around the middle of February next year and take roughly half a year of Long Service Leave during which I want finish off my study and research what is happening around Melbourne in this area of emerging church.

Then, the second half of the year I want to begin planning towards such a new type of church plant. I would be discussing with the Baptist Union people and our local Bible Colleges about the best ways to do this.

At this stage I don’t have any details to share about the nuts and bolts of what this would mean for us. Until middle February, nothing really changes at all. The various HUBS and teams will be ploughing on with their planning for 2007. They will have some exciting new stuff to build in – wait and see.

It will be exciting to watch how our Lord continues to direct you guys here. I think Eltham is one of the best examples of really caring church in Melbourne. You have had the courage over the years to plant new churches, send out missionaries to unlikely fields; you have often stepped out in faith to try new things or to experiment with unexpected God given initiatives. My prayer is that this call on our lives would be yet another one of these initiatives. Can you pray for us as we interpret what this means in practical terms?

Article from The Baptist Witness

I wrote an article for the Baptist Witness about what makes for effective churches.

Some folks wanted a copy. here 'tis:

>Witness>Transition or Revolution!.pdf