mission
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Jesus’ vision for the church: Hybels and Eldredge got it wrong… Bono got it right.
Because of our cultural history, most of us have an inadequate picture of the profound nature of what Jesus' vision for the church is. I certainly did for much of my life. The truth is that the once a week Sunday service, that most of us would call "church," is a far cry from Jesus' vision.
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We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started…. #TSEliot
T.S. Eliot penned the words of the title of this reflection as part of his poem, “The Little Gidding.” The words have been running around my head lately because it they capture the trajectory of our next twelve months. In 1992 my journey in ministry really started with a journey to the top of Mt. Wellington in Hobart. I was in the city on placement after finishing Fusion’s six month bible college intensive. A friend had challenged me to consider the possibility of “digging in” in Hobart and committing to Fusion’s work for the long haul. I didn’t want to. I was scared. I knew I didn’t have the answers. So…
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9 things you need to know about Jesus’ vision for the church. Hybels and Eldredge got it wrong. Bono got it right.
Mega church pastor Bill Hybels claims that: “The hope of the world is not government, academia, business, but the church because it is to the church that God has entrusted the message of salvation, which truly changes people’s lives and hearts.” Bill believes the most important thing about the church is our message. Bill is wrong. The message is important… but it is not the most important thing about the church, or the most important gift the church has for the world. Bill is not alone though… Most of us have an inadequate picture of the profound nature of what the church is meant to be. I certainly did. For 20…
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Ordination, while indeed symbolic, truly does matter, at least to me.
It has been an unusually long time since I wrote a Faith Reflection. This has largely been because I have been deeply engaged with what I have been doing over the last few weeks, but also because it has taken a bit of processing to come to terms with it. You see, in addition to running our first one week Foundations course at the church and leading the church to run three Open Crowd festivals simultaneously across the city, and engaging with an annual planning retreat, I got ordained. Since I started as a Pastor three years ago, I knew ordination was going to be something that needed to happen.…
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Re-orientation is a complicated process
Well it’s been almost a year since I wrote my last entry on this blog. A number of times I have thought I would’ve liked to write more but I found that I didn’t know how to communicate complex reality that I found myself living in. The last five years have been a time of profound dislocation for me. Five years ago I was the director of Fusion’s work in the state of Victoria in Australia. Five years later here I am in Alberta, Canada, getting close to completing a Masters in Theological Studies and serving as a Pastor in a denomination (the Christian and Missionary Alliance) that I was…
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Building Bridges
On Sunday I had the privelige of speaking at our home church in Edmonton. Our Pastor, O.J., asked me to speak about Acts 10 and 11, which was a lots of fun. If you would like to listen, you can get the mp3 file here. The theme of the sermon was building bridges.
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It’s not so much that the movement becomes an institution, its that it loses it’s verve that is the problem
Last week I wrote the reflection Institutions are anxious, Movements are prepared to take risks and it seemed to get a few people thinking. I received both very positive and very otherwise feedback about the reflection. I have been wrestling with what makes a movement and what makes an institution for a lot of the last decade. One of the things that becomes obvious in the conversation is that a lot hinges on how the words are used and in what context. I’m not sure its possible to have a movement without at least some organisation, but it certainly is possible to have an institution that is not a movement. In…
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I am grateful for my history, and I’m grateful for the history of those who have gone before me.
Today is my first day without any kind of agenda since arriving in Canada… It’s snowing outside, the Christmas shopping is done (at least for today) and we are enjoying just pottering around with Christmas movies on the television. There is something about this time of year that is just special. I wrote last year that these couple of weeks are kind of like an annual sabbath… a moment for the world to take a breath and reflect on the year that was and our hopes for the year that is to come. For me, this Christmas and New Year season comes at a point of significant transition. We are…
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A life of ease sounds attractive, but I want to get to the end of my life and know that I made a difference
I have shared in the past how much I like Moses from the Old Testament, mainly because he is constantly dogged by self doubt, which I identify with. I particularly enjoy his initial conversation with God, which was basically a series of excuses: Exodus 3:11 (NIV) But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” Exodus 3:13 (NIV) Moses said to God, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?” Exodus 4:1…
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We are called outside the camp
In my quiet time this morning I was struck again by the exhortation to go outside the camp in Hebrews chapter 13. I’m still reflecting on my time in the U.K. and the breadth of Christian history that I was able to engage with there. Two images highlight this for me: Columba Bay and Durham Cathedral. Bay is on the Southern Western coast of the tiny island of Iona. It is surrounded by rugged cliffs and covered in pebbles that have been rounded by centuries of being bashed against each other by the force of an often rough sea. Durham Cathedral, according to the visitors guide is one of the…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…