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?