-
Identify the hostile soil and begin a building project.
I am sitting on a long haul flight from Melbourne to Ho Chi Minh City, where my son Daniel and I will wait 8 hours before boarding our flight to London. I feel quite relieved to be finally on my way to London, where I will help Fusion with it’s pilgrimage for the Olympic Games, launch my new book (check out www.kingdomcells.org where you can download a sample of the first few chapters), participate in an International forum discussing the future of Fusion, and catch up with my sister and brother-in-law and their children. It is great having Daniel with me. This is his first international flight so he is…
-
There will always be competing stories, and if your vision of the future is not clear then those competing stories will win.
In the last couple of reflections I have been processing the importance of engaging with the reality of the community in which you find yourself, which is so important, but if you want to do ministry your job is to change that reality. Put simply reality changes when how we think about the reality changes. Ultimately the wall of Jerusalem was rebuilt in 50 days by people who had been living alongside the problem and feeling powerless about it all that time. The main thing that Nehemiah provided was a different view of reality. After really knowing and understanding both the situation and the people he stands before them and…
-
The only way to effectively make a difference in a community is to get past your preconceptions
Yesterday I focussed on the need to actually name the community you are wanting to work in, today I want to focus on what it means to move from idealism to reality. After Nehemiah asks how Jerusalem is going, he allows himself to confront the reality of the situation in a deep and personal way: They said to me, “Those who survived the exile and are back in the province are in great trouble and disgrace. The wall of Jerusalem is broken down, and its gates have been burned with fire. ” [4] When I heard these things, I sat down and wept. For some days I mourned and fasted…
-
The land of waffle: where you feel like you are doing something useful but you are just not sure for whom or why it happens to be useful.
I am continuing to reflect on what it means to accept the burden of responsibility for a specific community. Over the last couple of reflections I have unpacked two of the core understandings that I see as foundational for anyone who wants to take on a whole of community ministry: firstly that everything you do comes from Christ, and secondly its not what you do but who you are that is important. The next thing that is essential for someone who wants to take on ministry to a community is engagement with that community. I am bouncing off my reading of Nehemiah because he was the only recorded example of…
-
I am continually surprised at how quickly I lose sight of Jesus and start making my own plans.
Over the next week or so I will be doing a series of posts about what it means to work towards changing a community. As I am preparing to head off to the U.K. to work with people who want to do just that, I want to have a crack at naming what I have learned over the last 20 years of ministry in a way that might help someone who is wanting to make a start. Much of what I have learned has come through the mistakes I have made, and I am certainly not holding myself up as a model, but I have discovered someone else who might…
-
Its about where you look
Hope or rubble? Have you noticed that whether you have hope or not usually has very little to do with what is actually happening. I enjoyed teaching Nehemiah this week. Nehemiah helped a rag-tag bunch of misfits become one of the most remarkable building teams in the world.. constructing a massive wall around a whole city in 52 days! Along the way there were plenty of setbacks, which could have caused them to lose hope. There is one moment in the book that really speaks to me both personally and as a leader..
You May Also Like
I am glimpsing both the kind of family and kind of church I want to be part of
If we are not continually seeking and learning and changing, we are not actually followers of Jesus, and we are certainly not seeking first the Kingdom of God.
If we truly want peace, we need to stop dividing the world into “us” and “them”
-
Playing Politics
Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber. ~Plato As you are probably picking up I am enjoying engaging with the book of Ecclesiastes. More and more I am gaining insights for almost every area of life. This year I have discovered that though my favourite television show is “the West Wing”, I am actually pretty hopeless at the game of politics. In Ecclesiastes chapter 8 Solomon gives three principles for effectively managing the political game of life:
