Renewal and Release - Part 1

Many years ago, a small group of believers challenged the reactionary autocracy that the mainline Church had become. The church had imposed a creedal legalism on the people that effectively separated the ordinary man and woman from the simple but life-changing message of New Testament faith in Christ.

This new radical movement wanted to by-pass the religious and clerical constructs of the day and call believers to a simple Spirit-directed, Bible based faith. They studied the Scriptures together; they relished their common unity around the bread and the wine, and they proclaimed Christ - not the rituals and intrigues of established religion. The ‘brothers’, as they were known, coined the old Augustinian phrase: “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; and in all things love.”

The fearless preaching of their leader disturbed the Church and the religious culture of his day so much that he was put to death by the religious establishment of his day! 

I speak of course, of Jan Hus and the Moravian movement of the 1400s. Though their legacy was to pave the way for the first large-scale protestant mission movement and for the Reformation a century later, the entrenched church culture of the day pushed their little movement to the very margins.

The Scripture story by which we live is about the conflict between two Kingdoms and their respective cultures – The Kingdom of this world with its powers and principalities versus the Kingdom of God, so radically proclaimed by Jesus.

The story of redemption is about personal  ‘culture change’ – it’s being birthed into God’s kingdom, a new heart and a new mind leading to new attitudes and new behaviours. Discipleship is about the lifelong, intentional reflecting on our attitudes and behaviours in the light of God’s calling. “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

The people of God are to be this peculiar ‘halfway’ people – journeying from Egypt to the Promised Land with God. Learning to put off the mental bondage of captivity and becoming the free covenant people of God – a Light to the nations!

And yet the Bible is marked by struggle, failure, grace and redemption. The people of God are always struggling to leave behind the gods of Egypt and Canaan. Every Judge and every King of Israel struggles with entrenched culture. Which god are we serving? Which belief system? The tribes and clans of Canaan are married into and slowly their culture becomes endemic and Yahweh is marginalised. All through the stories of the Judges and Kings there is a downward spiral ending in exile to Babylon – and then grace, and God grows a new shoot from the dead stump.

In the New Testament most of the letters are written to deal with cultural issues – almost none of the Pauline epistles are about ‘vision’ or ‘governance’ or ‘programmes’ – it’s all about Jewish Old testament culture or Gentile permissiveness or Gnostic super spirituality or the spirit of Rome – humanity’s greatest attempt at heaven on earth contrasted to the Kingdom of God’s culture - and it’s very painful for Paul and the other leaders! Two steps forward, one step back!

The history of God’s church is the same – The slide into Christendom with Constantine through to the valiant resistance of martyrs like Jan Hus, culminating in Martin Luther’s nailing his 95 theses to the Wittenberg cathedral door and unleashing a chaotic, powerful reaction to the decadent culture of the medieval church.
The evangelical movements or ‘Awakenings’ of the 18^th and 19^th century revolted against the immovably, nationalistic state churches of the era. You see it in the evolution of the various movements such as the Wesleyans, the Salvationists, the various Disciples, Adventists, Brethren, and others. These various ‘waves’ - overseas missions, Pentecostalism, assorted para-church movements, the church growth era, and the emerging church all emerged in response to ossified church culture and each birthed fresh, fluid expressions of faith.

Most new church h movements tumble out of such turbulence. How wonderful that the radical Moravian slogan of four hundred years before should also mark the spirit of new movement too!  “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; and in all things love.” The rich chaos of the Spirit of that time spawned many related but divergent movements. Movements always diverge and differentiate into more sharply defined entities. Out of the turbulence of the book of Judges, comes the sombre orderliness of Kings! Movements have always become ministries and then machines and then slowly un-noticed by their now conservative guardians, they freeze into stone monuments. But God in his grace sows seeds into the cracks of the weathering stone and new green shoots emerge.

And now the wheel has turned again and in 2000’s the fresh new movements of 200+ years ago are almost monuments themselves. Movements tend to be chaotic! Their members ‘live a conviction’ rather than ‘go to work’. They are highly relational, green-zone, fluid, self-organising, team focussed. The leaders proclaim the story rather than the policy! They are prophetic! They are imaginative culture-shapers – and their people interpret and build the new forms, experimentally, under-the-surface, in poverty, by faith, with passion. They expect resistance and difficulty, and learn to negotiate the possible. Sometimes they die prematurely. Too often it’s the dominant system and culture and that asphyxiate them! 

We see that our inherited paradigms are failing! Australia is not a Christian nation! Our numbers are declining; churches are aging and for most of the younger people in our society they seem way out of touch! This is no longer about servicing our going concerns but with urgency praying for renewal and creatively going out on a limb. If we fail, so be it!

We don’t want to be like the good proprietors of Cobb and Co anxiously peering out at the noisy T-model Fords puttering along asphalt roads and then turning to design a better horse! Cobb and Co exists no more! In a few years the motorcar will either be in terminal decline or will have re-invented itself for a new age. We pray for a cultural shift. How can we avoid either being immersed in consumer modernity or fortressed off from the world in a 1950s bubble.

What we aspire for our churches is cultural shift: A missionary paradigm; a bible-narrative from which to live; a contextual mission mindset; a centripetal culture, a discipleship culture, an incarnational mindset; an empowering leadership; a ‘sent’ membership and so on. 

This is not about change of programs but change of paradigm.

So – what might we respond? Our methodology will need to be different. Culture is changed in vigorous relationships, in sound pedagogy, in personal spirituality, in self-awareness, in being enabled to become response-able. It means we need to be modelling and delivering the opposite to the command and control corporation.  New movements rarely flourish long in tightly hierarchical organisations. Edgy ideas come from the edges. Can our respectable institutions, really become  dangerous insurgencies?

Click here for Part 2

Mission in a changing world.

As we start term:1 we’ve been thinking about the mission that
God called us to. In Acts 8, the early Christians found that they had sailed from there comfortable days of living in Jerusalem and worshipping in the temple into much more challenging but exciting waters. The old era had ended, a new faith-demanding era had begun ….

Diamo peeps, if you missed the Online Service 30th of Jan 2022, it would helpful some time to have a look! 😀 

The Road to Missional: Journey to the Center of the Church

The Road to Missional: Journey to the Center of the Church

Sourced from Outreach Magazine Website: HERE

By Michael Frost

 What Exactly Is Evangelism? 



The mission of God is far wider than the evangelistic enterprise. Indeed, evangelism is one of the aspects or functions of the missio Dei, but not the only one. We alert people to God’s reign through Christ in a variety of ways, one of which is the verbal announcement of that reign. We must see evangelism in this broader context. But having said that, we need to be careful not to assume that unexplained action is evangelistic. As it’s used in the New Testament, the term evangelism describes a verbal announcement. It is a declarative activity. Words are required. As David Bosch points out, “This message is indeed necessary. It is unique. It cannot be replaced by unexplained deeds.” But as Bosch also pointed out, there is no perfect set of words that captures the gospel, and it is ludicrous to think that we can train Christians to present the gospel as a five-minute sales pitch.

Part of the problem with evangelism is that many Christians feel they need to get the whole gospel out in one conversation. The reason for this is many Christians are only ever in a position to “evangelize” strangers because all their friends are Christians. When the only “evangelism” we do is with strangers on airplanes or at dinner parties or business conferences, we feel an understandable pressure to get all the bases covered, because this might be the only opportunity we (or they) get. Evangelizing friends and neighbors, gradually, relationally, over an extended time, means that the breadth and beauty of the gospel can be expressed slowly without the urgency of the one-off pitch. 



When we understand what it is to be truly missional—incarnated deeply within a local host community—we will find that evangelism is best done slowly, deliberately, in the context of a loving community. It takes time and multiple engagements. It requires the unbeliever to observe our lifestyle, see our demonstrations of the reign of God, test our values, enjoy our hospitality. And it must occur as a communal activity, not only as a solo venture. Unbelievers must see the nature and quality of the embodied gospel in community. And all the while, conversations, questions, discussions and even debates occur wherein we can verbally express our devotion to the reign of God through Christ. No more billboards. No more television commercials. No more unsolicited mail. If evangelism is like a meal, think of it as being prepared in a slow cooker and served over a long night around a large table. It can’t be microwaved. It can’t be takeout. 



In 1986, Italian chef and provedore Carlo Petrini founded the Slow Food movement which has since expanded globally to over 100,000 members in 132 countries. Slow Food exists to “counteract fast food and fast life, the disappearance of local food traditions and people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat, where it comes from, how it tastes and how our food choices affect the rest of the world. To do that, Slow Food brings together pleasure and responsibility, and makes them inseparable.”



Well, that’s what missional thinkers are attempting to do with evangelism—to slow it down, to counteract the abuses of fast evangelism, to place evangelism back into community, to rediscover both the pleasure and the responsibility of announcing the reign of God. It shouldn’t be a one-off, hit-or-miss presentation. As Bryan Stone from Boston University points out, it is as messy and organic and communal as life itself:

The practice of evangelism is a complex and multilayered process—a context of multiple activities that invite, herald, welcome and provoke and that has as its end the peaceable reign of God and the social holiness by which persons are oriented to that reign.



Part of the problem is that so many of our models for evangelism are itinerant evangelists and pastors. These people rarely tell stories about being deeply incarnated into a neighborhood or host community. Rather, their examples are all about "evangelizing” strangers on airplanes. They tell us about how they managed to fashion just the right line at the perfect time that broke their subject open and allowed them to present Christ to them. They make these presentations to people they will never see again and for whom they feel no sense of ongoing responsibility. It is the equivalent of fast-food evangelism, and it’s not the way it was meant to be. 



So, how is it meant to be? What exactly is evangelism? David Bosch defines it:

Evangelism is that dimension and activity of the church’s mission which, by word and deed and in light of particular conditions and a particular context, offers every person and community, everywhere, a valid opportunity to be directly challenged to a radical reorientation of their lives.


The times they are a-changing! Part: 2

Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon begin their book Resident Aliens (1989) with a story from their youth: “Sometime between 1960 and 1980, an old, inadequately conceived world ended, and a fresh, new world began. . . . When and how did we change? Although it may sound trivial, one of us is tempted to date the shift sometime on a Sunday evening in 1963. Then, in Greenville, South Carolina, in defiance of the state’s time-honored blue laws, the Fox Theater opened on Sunday. Seven of us — regular attenders of the Methodist Youth Fellowship at Buncombe Street Church — made a pact to enter the front door of the church, be seen, then quietly slip out the back door and join John Wayne at the Fox. That evening has come to represent a watershed in the history of Christendom, South Carolina style. On that night, Greenville, South Carolina — the last pocket of resistance to secularity in the Western world — served notice that it would no longer be a prop for the church. There would be no more free passes for the church, no more free rides. The Fox Theater went head to head with the church over who would provide the world view for the young. 

That night in 1963, the Fox Theater won the opening skirmish. You see, our parents never worried about whether we would grow up Christian. The church was the only show in town. . . . Church, home and state formed a national consortium that worked together to instill ‘Christian values.’ People grew up Christian simply by being lucky enough to be born in places like Greenville, South Carolina, or Pleasant Grove, Texas. . . . A few years ago, the two of us awoke and realized that, whether or not our parents were justified in believing this about the world and the Christian faith, nobody believed it today. At least, almost nobody. . . . All sorts of Christians are waking up and realizing that it is no longer ‘our world’ — if it ever was.”

It is obvious to anyone paying much attention that we are no longer a “Christian nation” — if we ever were. There are a many different world-views and culture 'shapers' amongst a wide variety of people groups, ethnicities and neighbourhoods. Most people no longer have a vague lingering loyalty to the faith of their grandparents' or their church. As Alan Roxburgh writes in The Sky is Falling (2005):  “We need a movement of God’s people into neighbourhoods, to live out and be the new future of Christ. It must be a movement that demonstrates how the people of God have a vision and the power to transform our world. …” 

The times they are a-changing! Part: 1

About six years ago, I returned from Orlando in Florida where I attended the Exponential Conference, the largest church planting conference in the world, with four thousand people attending from around the (mostly) Western world.

The Conference started with a member of the Exponential Band setting the stage with a powerful amended version of Bob Dylan’s anthem, ‘The Times They Are A-changing.’ … 

Come preachers and pastors
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.

 In truth, the western church finds itself at the crossroads. Either we are on the road to extinction – or we are on the verge of a new movement of God. Taken as whole, the decline of Christianity in western culture continues a-pace, and yet there is a new wind beginning to blow! More of the same is not likely to achieve significantly different Kingdom results; so something fresh is emerging. 

2018 Innovate Launch

Anthropologists! Anthropologists!

Can you engage another culture without entering into it in some way and changing it somehow by your presence and your own world-view? 

We can't remain objective outsiders when doing mission. We become part of the changed equation. Or do we? I think the the cartoon could work just as well with the caption: "Christians! Christians!" or "Missionaries! Missionaries!" 

(There's a certain irony about this old cartoon, when you consider how out of date the gadgets already are!)

Could this be the future of Church as we know it?

The Western church still puts a huge amount of effort into its central programmes, particularly the Sunday Worship Service. Yet the question needs to be asked why we do that. If our calling is to go and live out the good news, sharing our lives in our neighbourhoods building friendships, being community -  then why do we expect that in a post-Christian world, that bringing people to a big event in a building is the 'core' activity?

What does it mean to live as 'families' on mission? To be communities of disciples that connect deeply with the many who have a spiritual hunger but are deeply suspicious of 'religion.'

This is a cool video - the story of a worship leader who began asking deep questions ... 



Source:  http://www.thedesertbloomsproject.com

Fourth Place Consulting

Over the years I've had the privilege and opportunity of sharing with a wide variety of congregations and their leaders in their ministry work. That has involved all manner of interesting conversations and opportunities to participate in a number of activities such as:

  - designing and taking training for team members,
  - running leadership development programmes,
  - speaking at camps, services and retreats,
  - helping groups put feet on their missional dreams,
  - consulting around vision or governance issues,
  - mentoring leaders in their roles,
  - offering support in times of transition,
  - preparing reports and recommendations for Boards,

As these opportunities continue to arise from time to time, I've decided to get a little more organised via some everyday tools such as getting an ABN, setting up a web-page and getting a fancy name and logo! (I hope you'll take note, that Mr Gates company also has four squares for a logo!)

The webpage is HERE (or at the top in the tabs for this page) and will give an idea of the sorts of things I might be able to help congregations, agencies, pastors or leaders with.

THRIVING CHURCHES | PART 5 | INGREDIENTS

Q 4 | HAVE WE GOT THE INGREDIENTS FOR THE RECIPE?
 When my kids were little, one of the fun things to do was to gather in the kitchen on a Saturday afternoon and cook something together - usually a chocolate cake or chocolate brownies or chocolate chip cookies or chocolate .... something! You get the idea!

Trouble was as we read through the recipe, unpopular ingredients were downsized and  more yummy ones were increased. 

    "Two cups of plain flour"
        "Eww! I hate flour, let's just add one cup."
    "Teaspoon of cooking soda."
        "Yuck! That tastes totally gross! Leave it out!
    " Two tablespoons of cocoa."
        " No! Double that! We want it to be really chocolately."

...And so on.

Of course the result would end up a rock hard, bitter slab of inedibility!

We realised that to get the magnificent, shiny succulent results promised in the accompanying photos, we had to sort of, follow the recipe and include all the listed ingredients in roughly the proportions suggested.

To use a terrible metaphor, there is a metaphor here for us baking a 'church cake.' There are vital ingredients that need to be folded into the mix if we are to be effective.

THRIVING CHURCHES | PART 4 | VISION

Q 3  | HOW CLEAR IS OUR VISION?

Our future will not be about duplicating the thing we’ve done for the last few hundred years. Reggie McNeal makes the point that he gets very nervous if someone says to him: “I’m called to plant a church.”  

The reason is that because alongside our other social silos like politics, commerce, sport, home, justice, education and so on, Christians tend to add a new silo called ‘Church.’ This is where people go to ‘get’ personal religion;  ‘do’ worship and ‘find’ religious succour. What would it look like to re-envision our role as being salt and light across all the other silos rather than just becoming a new and separate silo? 

THRIVING CHURCHES | PART 3 | BIBLICAL FRAMEWORK

2 | WHAT'S OUR BIBLICAL FRAMEWORK FOR MISSION?

As well as a team of Christians with ‘missionary-DNA’ we need to ensure that the theology 'underneath' the new mission-project is coherent and understood by the key leaders. Our belief-system shape our values and therefore our practises and choices. That means the team-leader (or minister) needs to be a person who is well-grounded in the Scriptures and can teach with some depth and help others to engage and interpret the scriptures. It is vital that the team-leader is released to keep learning, stretching, reading, teaching, mentoring and speaking forth prophetically.

The Writing's on the Wall

WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO BE A MOVEMENT?

Introduction

One of the things that younger Christian groups like to assert about themselves in contrast to the older, maybe more institutional groups is that their group is a ‘movement.’ “We are a movement not a denomination!”

I believe that the need to self-identify in this way demonstrates that a group is actually no longer a movement with a future orientation but an institution looking back over its shoulder. Like most of the religious movements spawned out of the industrial revolution around 200 years ago, the ‘moving’ has been done and the descendants are now a mainstream denomination.

The past can be a terrible burden for a group who’s predecessors have distinguished themselves by prophetically and courageously leading out of a dysfunctional paradigm to a new and healthier paradigm. The descendants of pioneers will tend to preserve and then institutionalize their glorious past and so become unable to let go of it. They become paradigm-settlers who self-identify by their founders actions. Ironically, these children of ‘movement-makers’ tend to be somewhat resistant to change! Truly, movements become machines which become monuments.

This tendency needs to be acknowledged if we are to engage our current context and once again ‘move’ forward as we discover where God is leading us.

What makes a Movement?

The well known ‘Dancing guy video’ encapsulates the essence of a movement. A lone guy in a park stands and dances with rapt enthusiasm to toe-tapping music amidst the crowd of lethargic picnickers sprawled across the lawns. At first there is amused indifference to the loner. Then another brave soul joins in followed by another who drags a couple of mates with him. Soon there is a small merry band whooping like there is no tomorrow! More faces to to gaze longingly at them wondering if they dare jump up too. A few more dart sheepishly into the fray. Suddenly a tipping point is reached and masses of picnickers catch on that dancing rather than lazing is the accepted behaviour. Soon those remaining prone are hurrying to join in and avoid looking out of touch. The paradigm has shifted totally from resting to moving!

A social (or religious or scientific) movement happens when social behaviour shifts from a prevailing and dominant paradigm towards an emerging paradigm. 

Steve Addison says: “A movement is a group of people pursuing a common cause. Movements are characterized by discontent, vision, and action. For good or for evil, movements change the world.”

The birth of a new paradigm is always chaotic. There will resistance by entrenched interests. There is no guarantee whether any of the fledgling ideas jostling to emerge will grow into the new paradigm. 

Those early movement leaders are non-conformists or prophets who lead from the margins. It takes great courage to follow them. It takes significant energy and sacrifice to follow in their footsteps because the new paradigm is not yet fully formed - it may still fail.

Often there are competing or diverging factions or camps who will struggle fiercely amongst themselves for primacy. There will be others at the movements’s margins in a loose coalition, but with differing trajectories one to the other.

Says Seth Godin: “An organization uses structure and resources and power to make things happen. Organizations hire people, issue policies, buy things, erect buildings, earn market share and get things done. Your company is probably an organization.

A movement has an emotional heart. A movement might use an organization, but it can replace systems and people if they disappear. Movements are more likely to cause widespread change, and they require leaders, not managers. The internet, it turns out, is a movement, and every time someone tries to own it, they fail. ... The trouble kicks in when you think you have one and you actually have the other.”

The British abolitionist movement beginning in the late 1700s was probably one of the first modern examples of a movement. The most famous movement was probably the American Civil Rights Movement propelled by the courage of Martin Luther King. Other social movements include women’s rights, peace, civil rights, anti-nuclear and environmental movements. More recently there has been the feminist movement, pro-choice movement, right-to-life movement, gay rights movement, animal rights movement, anti-globalization movement.

There are a common characteristics to modern and historical movements. Here are a few questions to ask which may indicate whether you are part of a movement:

Missionaries without the Pith Helmets!

A number of years ago some good friends of ours sensed a call to go overseas as missionaries serving in Africa. As they prepared and then said their tearful farewells at the airport, I sort of imagined that they would be on some sort of permanent high intensity Billy Graham Crusade. Rallies in large halls, lights and powerful sound systems, dapper suits and ties, choirs and bands, powerful appeals, tearful responses followed by mass conversions followed in quick succession by a virtual army of builders constructing steepled chapels with rows of fixed pews, pulpits and carpeted stages across the land!

I was quite startled when I realized that much of their next five years would be spent living in an adobe hut in a far dry desert, learning a difficult dialect and making friends with and caring for a people who would never find their way into my imagined Crusade!

The Message paraphrase describes the coming of Jesus into the world like this: “... The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood.” (John 1:14).