VISIONING AND WAITING

 2019 was a long time ago!

It seems like only yesterday that we were meeting for our Vision day in late 2019.

So many dreams we believed God was putting on our heart. Some of you may remember this little booklet which summarised our priorities.

We were looking at putting on a new full time associate with a focus on discipleship and families. We were planning an inter-church evangelism conference. 

We were beginning conversations with the BUV and their architect about developing the front of the church property both for local mission (e.g low cost housing, community garden) and generating income to support further mission. We were planning to upgrade our internship programme; We were about to launch a number of missional communities. We were considering another Vanuatu missions trip.

We were looking at reframing our Sunday evenings for an outreach focus running Alpha and the Jesus the Game-changer series. We were working with an outreach consultant about relaunching the Outreach HUB, and putting on a community mission worker. We had a team together to encourage social enterprises and were working on an inter-church conference for young Christian entrepreneurs. We were exploring when and how to plant some sort of a centre maybe out in the Woodstock area past Doreen.

Then it all changed!

And then quite suddenly our circumstances changed and Sunday morning 15th of March 2021 was our last regular service, as along with everyone else we went into the first of many lockdowns.

Here we are almost two years later; over a 100 episodes of Diamo Online and 80 online sermons later, and we are still not out of the woods! Yes, things seem to be opening up a little more, but ‘back-to-normal’ is still a fair ways off!

And 2022 onwards?

Like most others, we are still coming to terms with (when) and what this new ‘post-covid world’ will look like. Many people now want to work from home; Online education is far more of a thing; enjoying neighbourhood and living locally is becoming important. 

On the other hand, the data seems to show that many who were ‘going through the motions’ of doing church are finally giving up and may not return. Others still hold to their beliefs, but are not convinced that coming to a typical weekly Sunday service, sitting in pews singing and listening to a sermon cuts it — they yearn for something more relaxed, relational and communal.

There’s uncertainty and anxiety about the future — will the economy bounce back? Will we ever travel overseas again? Will all the Covid ‘tree-changers’ head right back to the big cities? Will migration pick up again one day, or will the budding new estates at the outer edges of Melbourne decline? 

Certainly anxiety and mental fatigue are at an all time high. People’s creative edge has been dulled. The way many feel has been described as “languishing.” It’s that lethargic space where one is not technically depressed, but neither is one doing well.

What that means is that we (and many others) are in a season of refuelling and reflection. We are waiting on the Lord and watching to see how our church community and our mission field is changing, rather than just rolling out the old menu and hoping it still works.

As a matter of fact, as we watch the news of new variants, and new covid ‘waves’ we are all still uncertain week-by-week as to whether these bleak times and restrictions will ramp up or ease up.

Waiting and watching and witnessing!

Isaiah 40:31 says: “They who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.”

Psalm 27:14 says: “… Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!”

We are in a season of waiting, watching and ensuring that each of us maintains their personal witness!

Our Church Council had a ‘visioning retreat’ back in mid-2021 to begin to prayerfully reflect on our church vision of  two years ago.  Our purpose and our heartbeat for loving God and others stays unchanged. That’s our compass, but it will take prayer, time and discernment to gauge what the Lord is saying about the many priorities and projects we had pencilled in way back then. 

Our mission field is changing. We ourselves have been changed through this time. We need to wait and watch patiently and prayerfully together through this next season to hear the Holy Spirit clearly through the fog of these times.

We have had a church community ‘dreaming’ forum pencilled in the calendar for quite a while. I think we’ve had to quietly postpone it and move it forward about five times because of various restrictions! God willing, early in the new year, when were can ALL meet together, we will be able to share together.

Guidance -- Plan: A or Plan: Z?

One of the firm convictions that many Christians have is that out lives are purposeful. God knows about us before we were born. The very number of our days and the very hairs on our head are known. We are not here by accident. God has made us unique, and has plans for us. 

The question is what does that look like?

I remember getting my first iPhone in it’s beautiful white shiny box, wrapped in cellophane. Sitting down and slowly pulling the box open. And there it was! Pristine and perfect in all its ways. Not a scratch or blemish. Just breathtaking and full of promise.

Is God’s “plan” for our life like that?

I can  remember coming back to faith as a Uni student many years ago and getting really excited by a verse that was  going round at the time:

“… For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future….” Jeremiah 29:11   (NIV)

I dreaming about how this perfect plan would unfurl winding down the year! The perfect family, the perfect job, butterflies, rainbows, perfect health, maybe fame and fortune. Maybe my own Wikipedia entry as one of the great heroes of the age.

But within a month I began to wonder. I had a really bad patch and did some foolish things that certainly would NOT have been part of Plan: A. Did that mean I was now on Plan: B? I’d better be careful.

The times they are a-changing! Part: 3

Many years ago missiologist Lesslie Newbigin presciently  wrote:

“The most important issue for the Western Church has been that it has totally failed to recognize that the most urgent contemporary mission field is to be found in their own traditional heartlands, and that the most aggressive paganism with which they have to engage is the ideology that now controls the developed world….” 

In our October- November 2018 sermon series at Diamond Valley Baptist Church, we are going to explore seven questions to help us reflect on how to function as a community of faith into the future.

I’ve created a mnemonic to help us recall the questions:

Picture a cross; with a train travelling on the crossbeam. On it’s funnel there is strapped a Go-pro. In the lens of the go-pro is a heart, and growing out of the heart grows a large rambling strawberry bush. In amongst the strawberries is a large tomato sauce bottle, and leaning against the sauce bottle are a number of ladders. Got it? Good!

Continued ... 

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. 

A Vision of God!

“Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I. Send me!” He said, “Go and tell this people ....” (Isaiah 6:8-9)

Someone once dryly commented that when some people hear the voice of God calling him or her to serve, they often say, in paraphrase of Isaiah, “Here am I! Send my friends!”

Maybe such an answer reveals that they never have truly felt loved and accepted. They have never sensed the extravagant wonder of God’s grace and had the privilege in response, of being used of God to bless others - the marvel of a call to serve. But that is what we are called to do. 

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

29 Predictions of the Year 2000 from December 1900

Sometime we imagine that we are the first generation to hurtle through times of rapid change. But I wonder how our great grandparents pictured the new industrial, confident, 20th century panning out. As steel, electricity, radio-waves and motor engines began to appear, and the European powers hold on colonies that spanned the globe began to waver - what might life look like in the unbelievably distant 2000AD?

The Ladies Home Journal from December 1900 contained a fascinating article by John Elfreth Watkins, Jr. “What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years”. Mr. Watkins wrote: “These prophecies will seem strange, almost impossible. Yet, they have come from the most learned and conservative minds in America. To the wisest and most careful men [sic] in our greatest institutions of science and learning I have gone, asking each in his turn to forecast for me what, in his opinion, will have been wrought in his own field of investigation before the dawn of 2001 - a century from now. These opinions I have carefully transcribed.”

Prediction #1: There will probably be from 350,000,000 to 500,000,000 people in America and its possessions by the lapse of another century. Nicaragua will ask for admission to our Union after the completion of the great canal. Mexico will be next. Europe, seeking more territory to the south of us, will cause many of the South and Central American republics to be voted into the Union by their own people.”

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.

"And the Year is ...2020!"

This was an article I wrote for a panel discussion back in 2007. We were imagining the trends and the changes that might be emerging around us. Ridiculous, at one level, because the future always surprises us when it does arrive! But it was a helpful exercise in learning to observe and interpret more carefully what is happening around you. I wonder what would you add or subtract to this list? I think if I were re-writing it now, almost eight years on, I'd add in something about:

- The 'inter-culturalisation' of the Aussie church.

- An increase in many challenging and varied shapes and expressions of Kingdom community.

- A healthier fusion of proclamation and action.

- The rise of a more contemplative mainstream spirituality.

- An increasing ability to engage diversity without abandoning one's own framework.

- The return to a form of  local parish community and neighbourhood.

***   ***   ***

"And the Year is ...2020!"

OK! I admit it; I love Dr Who! I just love the idea that I can hop into the Tardis and instantly jump into the future ten thousand years or even a leisurely ten million years or so. ‘Trouble is that that’s easy compared with gazing a measly TEN years forward!

Last year, I was invited to be part of a panel discussion given the topic: “What will Church be like in 2020.” That’s a tough one! I’ll be getting close to retirement! Hopefully Collingwood will still be getting the ‘wobbles in September! The Olympics will be on! There will be a U.S. Presidential election. But what will be happening in our so-called ‘post-Christian’ western world? I wonder what we dream God will be doing? Here’s some of my wonderings: 

1. Twenty-Four Seven Discipleship 

The church of 2020 will have realized that powerful testimony comes from personal transformation! They will realize that our focus should not be about programs, but principles. As we live as disciples ‘obeying all I have commanded you’ so we incarnate the Gospel into our world. The church of 2020 will not focus on getting the vision and strategy right; and making the people fit into it. Rather they will understand that obedient consistent ‘holy’ living will mark a ‘culture’ that fascinates people to faith.

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? 

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: