More Quotes

From Susan Hope 'Mission Shaped Spirituality'

"If we are to 'go' in mission, where is the energy to come from? What powers the mission? What kicki-starts it? What massive implulse can propel us from being a setteled community into being a community on the move? And what will keep us going when we find ourselves in for the long haul?"

"The spirituality of the Anglican Church is that of a settled community: it's liturgies, its way of organising itself, its buildlings, its committees... have been formed and shaped through a long time of settlement.... what will the journey of mission do to the spirituality of the Church?"

"Discovering that we are deeply loved is a lifetimes work."

"14 eldery ladies in a small church discovered that many of the children attending the school next door began the day without breakfast. They started cooking and serving breakfasts in the church hall. After a while concentration levels among children in the school improved, and so did relations between church and school. The head teacher became seriously interested and she and her husband eventually became Christians because of it."

"Fear leads to accumulation (of money)... it is impossible with integrity to proclaim Christ's salvagtion if he has evidently not saved us from greed, or his lordship if we are not good stewards of our possessions, or of his love if we close our hearts agains the needy."

(from Vincent Donovan) "Church planting... can be misleading (as a description of the missionary's task) since it implies a kind of fixed and predetermined outcome to the preaching of the gospel. The missionary's job is to preach, not the Church, but Christ. If s/he preaches Christ, the church may well result, but it might not be the church s/he had in mind."

"Christians have a right, in the name of Christ, to intrude into what has been called elsewhere 'the worlds settled arrangements'." I like this: we're so used to thinking about 'rights' in terms dictated by secular politics, what 'rights' do we have as followers of Jesus and citizens of the Kingdom? Discuss.....!

"What the Church of England could do with possibly more than anything else at present is an adventure. Settlement may have brought many blessings, but it has left us bored. And bored churches become boring churches. Western secular culture is also bored - when you've got everything, there's not a lot more to do, except to get more."

Hope makes the point that adventure grows us up faster than anything else. You can't have a learning experience if you don't have any experiences. Jesus had disciples: he taught through an apprenticeship & reflection model. It's not enough for churches to teach the same message as Jesus, we need to teach it in the same way as Jesus. How many so-called Bible-believing churches are one-eyed on this? Do we not think that Jesus was smart enough to know the best teaching methods? Yet 99% of our teaching is delivered as verbal communication. Can we develop a way of being church which looks more like Jesus way of being with the disciples?

Nehemiah: A Lesson in Leading Change

I've been challenged to look for biblical models of some of the stuff I'm trying to do with churches, in terms of working out a vision and strategy for change and mission. Nehemiah, which has always been a stimulating book, almost takes us through the change process step by step:

1. Get uncomfortable: Nehemiah has a steady job in the royal court, but hears a report of the dreadful state of Jerusalem and its people, which cuts him to the heart. Change doesn't happen unless we're not happy with the status quo

2. Get praying: N takes his grief to God, rather than just bathing in his own misery, and in prayer is taken through repentance to a point of action.

3. Get the facts: N surveys what needs to be done to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. He can only develop a workable vision if the vision has its feet on the earth. A lot of the literature on evangelism, new forms of church etc. has the same message: don't just copy what is succesful for other people, get the facts of your own situation and respond to those. A lot of Christian outreach is done in hope that it will appeal to people, rather than actually getting the facts of where people are at, and where they are itching.

4. Get a vision: the facts can be depressing. In fact, if they are going to stir us to action they probably will be depressing (see 1), Nehemiah gets together with the Jerusalem leaders and says 'lets build the wall'. His vision has credibility because a) it's based on reality b) N has identified new resources which can help the vision become reality c) there is committed leadership behind it.

5. Get started and keep going: there's no point having a vision if it stays on the drawing board. Nehemiah is not just a visionary, he is a great organiser too. In most cases this would be different individuals: one who has the vision, another who breaks it down into manageable steps and identifies who's going to do what. There is a clear action plan, which adapts to circumstances (opposition from without, and grumbling from within) and a clear vision which N keeps on restating. Sharing a vision once is no good, it needs to keep on being affirmed, otherwise energy and focus will drift. There are other issues for N to deal with: scandalmongering by his opponents, internal wrangling over fair distribution of food, but to his credit he keeps the people focused on their task, whilst dealing with these issues.

6. Get partying: once the wall is finished, there is a celebration. But it's not just a 'thank goodness that's all over' celebration. In it, the people are reminded of the Law, and called to renew their obedience to God. Every vision, if it's from God, is part of a bigger vision called the Kingdom of God, and so the story doesn't end when the vision is realised. How many churches have gone into 'drift' mode after completing some major building project? The final section of Nehemiah is concerned with how the people of Jerusalem are going to serve God, and whether they will be faithful and obedient. Does it take a different kind of leadership to keep people faithful during 'normal' time, compared to the leadership required to lift people to achieve a vision?

Two of the repeated refrains in current books on mission are vision and leadership. We need leadership that not only helps our churches discern a vision, but that will help the church to see it through. The road to Hell is paved with mission statements that never got beyond being framed and put on the wall.

Lent Blogging

Ingredients in this years personal Lenten stew are:
1. Keep a list of what I'm praying for, and make notes of what happens (inspired by George Muller, great man of faith and opener of Bristol orphanages 100 years ago, my wife's currently reading his autobiography). Had a practice today and the two things I prayed for both happened, so that's encouraging!

2. Alcohol only on feast days (i.e. Sundays - with Ash Weds to Easter being 46 days long, I go for breaking the fast every Sunday, rather than keeping it for 40 days at a stretch up to Palm Sunday. Call me weak willed..)

3. Have a morning a week to pray and be with God.

4. Blog just once a week: probably Saturdays, also cutting down my surfing of other blogs etc. to once a week. It's easy to get into the habit of spending time every day looking for an argument to join, or a thread to make a comment on, or just browsing for information. I'd like to get out of the habit for a bit.

5. Try to get back into fasting, which in my head I see as part of normal Christian discipleship, but the rest of my body isn't quite so keen. I don't know what my feet think because I've not seen them for a while.

6. Get in touch with friends who I've not spoken to for a while. Easy to write, harder to do, as I'm bobbins at keeping up friendships, then complain that I've nobody to go for a pint with.

7 is the Biblical number of perfection, 6 the number of humanity, so I'll stick with 6. Legend has it that the rug makers of north Africa put a deliberate mistake into every piece of work, because only God is perfect.

Begin the fast with joy
Prepare for spiritual battle
Cleanse the soul
Purify the body
Abstain, as from food
from every destructive habit,
indulging only in the Spirit's virtues.
Persevere in these wihth all passion
so shall we be fit, rejoicing in spirit
to witness the passion and death of Christ our god,
and his passing over from death to life.
(Ray Simpson, The Celtic Prayer Book Vol. 1)

comedy

You wait weeks for a good punchline then all of a sudden three come along at once....

The BBC website reports a new Christian run comedy club in Birmingham, promising clean humour. Almost makes me want to live in Birmingham. But not quite.

My deep and profound book of the moment is Peter Kay's autobiography. It's pretty funny, and reminds me a lot of my own schooldays and experience of discos as a teenager.

There is one point at which the book goes all serious, and it's where he talks about his Catholic upbringing, and the irrelevance of most of the religion he experienced at church and at school. I've got so used to hearing the 'had enough religion as a kid to put me off for life' stories from people twice my age that it's quite a shock to hear it from someone in their 30's. It's pretty damning as well, there's clearly a vague faith there but the church seems to have done more to quench it than to encourage it. Fair play to Peter Kay that he doesn't just crack some snide jokes at the church and walk away, but tries to engage with what was going on.

Third story: some vicars in, I think it was Leicester, have been having sessions with a stand up comic to learn about preaching better sermons. About time too. The only people who will get an audience to listen to them speak for more than 5 minutes at a time are the comedians. Increasingly, they're the only effective political commentators: Rory Bremner and Ian Hislop have been a more effective opposition to New Labour than most opposition politicians. As Jesus once said 'did you hear the one about the man with a plank in his eye'.

To see the classic John Smiths ad with Peter Kay and the football, click here

Pinocchio and the Archbishops

After buying Pinicchio from the local charity shop ('Break' on Abbey Manor, good collection of vids and books, the CD section could do with a bit of a boost, if you're clearing out....), watched it with my 4 year old a couple of days ago. I'd never seen it before, and had thought it was all about a wooden boy with a long nose. Not true: the nose growing bit only lasts a couple of minutes, and it's actually full of things like kids smoking cigars and then turning into donkeys, which are then locked into crates and put on a boat to work in the mines. Call me squeamish but I was, at several points, wondering whether letting my daughter watch the film was a wise move. Thankfully she didn't seem to pick up on the scary bits, just as she didn't pick up on the double entendres in Shrek last week.

Strange how you can form a view of how something is going to be, and then reality is very different. Maybe some of that is happening in Tanzania this weekend at the Archbishops meeting. A lot of fairly hardline things have been said and done whilst the various parties were on opposite sides of the globe, but now that they are face to face, reading the Bible and praying together, this is reality time. Whatever impression people had of each other, whatever words they said, now they have to speak face to face. It's often much easier to be uncompromising when you don't have to talk to the people you're not compromising with. That's how Ian Paisley has managed it for so long, 'cos he refuses to talk to his opponents.

There's a bit of wisdom here: only face to face communication is the real thing, and every other form of communication is a lesser form. God's early communication with humanity is walking with us in the garden, which falls apart once we start to hide and shout messages from behind trees, and only with the incarnation of Jesus is face to face communication with God opened up again. All other, lesser communication between Eden and Bethlehem - through law, messengers, acts in history etc., is fulfilled in the face of Christ.

We email, phone, write and blog in a glass darkly, but then face to face. One reason why, for Lent, I'll be blogging just once a week. Less time looking at this screen, more time seeing people's faces. Reality check.

Anglican Archbishops Tag Wrestling

Or Primates Meeting, as it's being called in the media. Here's the pictoral version:

there are another 9 cartoons here which make everything crystal clear.

There's a decent summary of what's going on at the BBC website, for more details there are plenty of folk giving a blow by blow account, including Ruth Gledhill and Thinking Anglicans and Anglican Mainstream . That's if you have too much time on your hands. Otherwise just pray. I can't imagine what God thinks of all this.

I was reminded today of Matthew Fox. Not the Lost actor, but a former Dominican who created a blend of New Age and Christian thinking and was the favoured theologian of the fated Nine O Clock Service in Sheffield. I spent 2 years studying his work in the 90s and concluded he was effectively a pagan thinker who used Christian terminology to make his message more appealing (there's a summary of the thesis here) . The RC church threw him out for heresy and disobedience to his vows, and shortly after guess who ordained him? The Episcopal Church of the USA. So if the Anglican Communion splits, it will be sad, but there is a limit to how far a church can stray from the gospel and the revelation of God in Jesus and still be the church of Jesus Christ.

A Culture of Child Abuse

The UNICEF report on childhood in Britain, putting us bottom of 21 nations in terms of childrens well being (a composite of poverty, health, safety, education, family, risk behaviour and happiness), is grim reading. It's reported in various places, including the Independent, and BBC

Everyone will be piling in with answers. The Independent, true to its libertarian principles, cites Holland (top of the league), and focuses on the amount of freedom Dutch children are given. Experts in childcare point to the way the government has encouraged parents to contract out childcare to other paid adults so that we can all do more work, and the way this destroys family bonds. Ironically, I'm hoping to chat to the local school soon about the 'extended schools' agenda, which is basically the government trying to use schools for wraparound childcare to enable parents to see less of their children, and to do so more easily. That's a slightly warped view I know, but possibly a fair summary.

There are loads of other factors. Our culture is massively toxic to children. Everything has sold out to the 'market' - my kids watch 'Milkshake' on Channel 5, as it has their favourite programmes, and we mute the sound during the adverts - of which there are about 10 every 10 minutes. If the kids just watch 5 hours of morning TV a week that's 300 adverts. Can I say 'I love you just as you are' to my children as often as the TV says 'you need more stuff'? And can parents get out of the cycle of giving their children more stuff instead of love and quality time? ?Our houses don't help - one of the findings of the report is that families don't eat together very often. 24/7 work and an epidemic divorce rate must play a big part in this, but we also have houses designed around building firms profits rather than the needs of families, where there is no decent sized space for a family meal, or where there is a decent sized space its' designed to fit a wide screen TV. Someone mentioned the other day that Italy doesn't have many big out of town supermarkets, that you shop by going from 1 specialist store in town to another. If the Italians can manage their planning regime to preserve the character of their communities, then why can't we?

The whole education agenda seems to have backfired - by trying to OFSTED and test everything we've stressed our kids out with exams and coursework and a constant pressure to perform. What values will they pass on to their children? Blairs 'education education education' mantra may be the gospel according to new Labour, but it doesn't seem to have the power to transform lives that the original Gospel has. One thing which keeps me out of depression today is what happened on Monday night, where we heard about the work Urban Warriors are doing with Yeovil young people, seeing kids becoming Christians, lives changed, all sorts of local state and secular agencies asking this Christian youth ministry for help on how to engage with young people. As Bill Hybels put it, the local church is the hope of the world, because the only thing which can make us fully whole is Jesus, and the message of Jesus has been given to the church. (I just wish we'd act more like the hope of the world - the same day as the UNICEF report, the only headline about the church is of an imminent split in worldwide Anglicanism! Aaaaaaargh! Will you people just sort yourselves out!!!!!!!)

Final bit, before I start ranting. Worth reading alongside the UNICEF findings is some research here on the Civitas website, which has been around for a while, on the effects on children of absent fathers. All the indicators on the UNICEF list are affected by having an absent father, and it's sobering to see two of the countries with the highest divorce rate - the USA and the UK - in the bottom 2 places on the league table, and by some distance. Perhaps in the church we've not spoken up for marriage and conventional families because we don't want lone parents to feel stigmatised. I agree with the objective, but the tactics are backfiring badly.

Finally, (really finally), if anyone knows some good marriage preparation/parenting course material, please send in a comment. One of the best practical responses we can make as a local church is to provide decent marriage prep and parenting support.

Automated Tesco

The local Tesco corner shop has just installed 2 self-service tills, where you scan and bag your own shopping whilst a slightly-too-loud-so-that-everyone-in-the-store-can-hear computer voice tells you helpful things like 'unrecognised item in the bagging area', 'insert money now', 'not in there you idiot' 'please stop kicking me' etc. Meanwhile the remaining human staff are crammed up at the end of the store. The good thing is that most people are still going to the human tills.

At our Alpha course last night we were talking about London culture, and what a grave sin it was to talk to strangers on the Tube, or in fact anywhere. The auto checkouts at Tesco are trying to put us in touch with our inner Londoner - minimise human interaction, do things faster, stay in control. Meanwhile Tesco lay off staff and we all have a couple less conversations a day, becoming slightly less human in the process.