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Convert, or else

In August 2011 I created an updated crucifix showing Jesus put to death by today’s most powerful empire. Possibly in that same spirit but with way more awesomeness Kris Kuski has created some amazing sculptures of church joining state.

Churchtank by Kris Kuski

If you fancy some related reading, I recommend what John Michael Greer and Greg Boyd have to say about civil religion.


21 April 2013
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On returning to America, finding nothing has changed except a bunch more people are needlessly dead, and mostly leaving again out of indifference

So I did that fast from America thing. Pretty much. I looked in on the election now and again, and I had a nosey at what Matthew Paul Turner and Rachel Held Evans had to say a couple times, just to be sure. American Christianity and politics have not found any sanity since June. Mostly I found out I didn’t miss anything too much. Of course, that could be because of all the blood-pressure-raising ‘entertainment’ that British Christianity and politics have been providing of late.

Here is who is going back into my feed reader for 2013: John Michael Greer, Love is What You Do and Larry Shallenberger. That’s it for now.


27 December 2012
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Merry Christmas stuff

Farmer, preacher, theologian and anti-racism activist Clarence Jordan:

Jesus has been so zealously worshipped, his deity so vehemently affirmed, his halo so brightly illumined, and his cross so beautifully polished that in the minds of many he no longer exists as a man. By thus glorifying him we more effectively rid ourselves of him than did those who tried to do so by crudely crucifying him.

Thanks to Daniel Sturgeon for the quote, which goes along rather nicely with some sermonising I did at my church on Sunday.


21 December 2012
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In olden times before phones were smart we called this a ‘blogroll’

A thing we old people like to do to amuse ourselves is to subscribe to ‘blogs’ via ‘feed readers’. Many of you youngsters won’t understand these things because you haven’t found the secret click combination to get outside of Facebook or else you aren’t sure what to do with writing that is longer than 140 characters. But some of you kids might want to experience the old-fashioned Internet. If that’s you, there is a small chance you may enjoy some of the things on the non-exhaustive list of what I like to read and look at.

Comics, illustration, design

  1. Doodlemum – these are way better than doodles
  2. Dresden Codak – cyborg sci-fi in a weird world
  3. False Positive – webcomic tales of the surreal, fantastic and macabre
  4. Happle Tea – a funny and insightful webcomic about mythology and other things
  5. Hark a Vagrant – Kate Beaton is excellently superly excellent
  6. Doodlemum
  7. Illustration Art – insightful commentary on the world of illustration
  8. Jill Lorraine Turpin has a great take on family life
  9. Marlo Meekins is much funnier and stranger than most people
  10. Nimona – when the sidekick has actual powers and doesn’t follow the supervillain rules
  11. Punching the Clock – surviving the daily fail of big box retail
  12. RUTH AND ANNABEL RUIN EVERYTHING – it’s in all caps for a reason
  13. Ryan Andrews – beautiful engrossing short story comics
  14. Sin Titulo – It’s going to take a while to read, and it will suck you in. Clear your afternoon schedule
  15. The Abominable Charles Christopher – he’s actually not abominable at all
  16. the johnson banks thought for the week is the blog of my favourite UK design studio
  17. Thrillbent’s Insufferable – What happens when you’re a crimefighter and your sidekick grows up to be an arrogant, ungrateful douchebag? What on Earth could draw the two of you back together again?
  18. Willow Wood Starfall – gorgeous comic in a nouveau style
  19. XKCD – a webcomic of romance,
    sarcasm, math, and language.

Lots of words in a row

  1. Doors of Perception – John Thackara’s blog about design, energy and the planet’s future
  2. Heresy Corner – questioning received wisdom on culture, politics and religion
  3. Kester Brewin – Peter Rollins’ mate writes about pirates, theology, education and stuff
  4. Michael Rosen – author and former children’s laureate blogs mostly about education, especially how Michael Gove is ruining everything
  5. Peter Rollins – pyrotheology
  6. What If? – the author of xkcd answers hypothetical questions with physics and funny

Good blogs I’m not reading right now because I’m taking a break from American Christianity and politics

  1. Greg Boyd – with all the shouty Calvinists about it’s nice to be reminded the bible has other salvation metaphors and visions of eternity
  2. Matthew Paul Turner – obvs
  3. John Michael Greer – Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society. Don’t let the ‘druid’ throw you. This guy is a genius
  4. Larry Shallenberger – author, pastor, writer of this blog that I really like even though he sometimes writes about sports
  5. Love is what you do – she’s actually living the gospel in real life
  6. Rachel Held Evans – obvs
  7. The Beautiful Due – I’m not a fan of poetry. I love this guy’s poetry
  8. Two Friars and a Fool – theology and culture with an emergy kind of vibe

What do you like to read and look at?


21 August 2012
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In which I wander around a couple things within an -ism

Last night I accidentally looked at a bunch of websites for ‘church creatives’ and websites of ‘creative churches’. I came to two conclusions:

  1. A lot of churches are very serious about professionalism in their operations and presentation.
  2. Many many many many many many many many many many many churches are merely corporations selling religious-based entertainment and merchandise.

This morning I read a blog post by Michael Rosen about how, in his opinion, Michael Gove et al are working hard and fast to deliver the education system to the marketplace, thus pitting schools against one another in a struggle for rankings and (often) profit.

Remember how blind faith in capitalism led us into the rotten economic situation we’re in today? Remember how blind faith in capitalism nearly caused the the actual meltdown of the world’s economy in 2008?

And yet this anti-community, materialistic -ism is the one to which we are entrusting our children’s education and our spiritual well-being. Are we insane greedy fools?

Yes.

But a more helpful way of looking at it might be to say that we are so busy swimming we don’t notice the water is full of poison. This way of thinking could easily lead to contemplation of Ephesians 6:12: For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

The problem is not so much the megachurch pastor with the perfectly whitened smile and the promise of wonderful everything if you buy into his brand of Jesus®. It’s not so much Michael Gove and the Tories. It’s that we’ve accepted the powerful -ism of the day as a given. It doesn’t have to be. But Paul promises a struggle for those who try to live another way.


15 August 2012
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UNCOMPROMISING!

At ____ church/ministry/blog we are all about:

Okay. That’s nice. It sounds really good. The problem is that in this context uncompromising is code for: If you disagree with my stance on issues that I have decided are important, you are wrong and you don’t get to join my club and my club is the only club in the universe that matters.

When it’s said straight out, it’s easy to dismiss that kind of thinking as unfortunate silliness. But when the big important word UNCOMPROMISING is used with other big important words like Biblical and Truth it becomes much harder to dismiss. Doing so leaves you with… compromising.

No one wants to be caught in a compromising position.

The words we use matter. I think UNCOMPROMISING is one of the least helpful words in Christianity at the moment. It has become a tool of theological bullying. Until that gets sorted out – maybe you know how to sort it? – remember, you are not putting your soul at risk by disagreeing with someone who tells you they are UNCOMPROMISING. And if you want to describe your commitment to Jesus, maybe a different word would serve you better for now.


12 July 2012
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Only me!

I have written before that I’m not a fan of today’s church music. Apparently a lot of other people aren’t too. Today Christianity Magazine posted an article asking Has Worship Music Lost Its Soul? (Short answer: yes.)

In the article, some church music industry mavericks point out how boring church music has gotten, some pundits explain why there’s a problem, the established superstar defends the status quo – so far it’s what I expected, especially since most of the stuff in the article happened elsewhere on the Internet months ago – and then (this is where I get depressed) a solution is offered. The solution is have a play around with some other styles of music, i.e. Why stick to bad parodies of Coldplay when you could also be ripping off Lady Gaga, Ed Sheeran, some whale song and Snoop’s rap break in California Gurls? If the kids like the dubstep, do some dubstepping for Jesus. C’mon everyone! This will be fun! (I’m paraphrasing a little bit.)

THIS ISN’T A SOLUTION! THIS IS THE MUSICAL EQUIVALENT OF APPLYING A DIFFERENT INSTAGRAM FILTER TO THE SAME LAME PHOTO OF YOUR COFFEE MUG AND HOPING THAT THIS TIME IT WILL WIN FIRST PRIZE IN THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC PHOTO COMPETITION. NO! IT WON’T WIN!

Ranting is easy. Let me try to say something positive now.

I’m a church music observer, not a practitioner, which means I’m that guy. Nevertheless, with apologies, here are my suggestions to help church music people find the soul again.

  1. Don’t change anything publicly yet. You don’t know what needs changed.
  2. Except for essential church band duties, ban church music from your ears for at least six months. A year would be better. You need a musical detox.
  3. Get to know the giants on whose shoulders you are standing. Find out who the musical heroes of your musical heroes are. Listen to their music. A lot. Find out who their musical heroes are. Listen to their music. A lot. Go back further than that. Follow the detours. Explore your history. Listen to the greats of every genre, even the stuff you don’t like or don’t get. Listen to understand. (This is not expensive anymore thanks to YouTube and Spotify.)
  4. Sing and play your instrument every day. Learn songs (not church songs) and make up new stuff. Do it alone and with others.
  5. Read great writing, especially poetry.
  6. Watch great performances of all types.
  7. Read your bible. Untranslate.
  8. Find a way to immerse yourself in your local community’s life. Find a place to serve nonchurch people in a practical way. This probably means volunteering somewhere. You need to spend time outside the Christian bubble.
  9. After a year, see what starts happening. It will probably be interesting. After two years, it will probably be amazing.

You are already full of soul. This list is only my suggestion for how to let it out. You may know of a better way, but there aren’t any shortcuts.


11 July 2012
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On leaving America

11 years ago Christine and I with our 2.5 year-old son left the United States to live in North Wales. We set out to make a fresh start, and we did. But I sort of failed at something. I never really left America. I blame the Internet.

While Christine and I were starting fresh and getting healed up from a full term stillbirth and some whacked out ideas about God and the response of a church that didn’t know what to do with an unhealed dead baby, I sort of stayed in America. I kept up with American politics and Christianity via the Internet. Being the Internet, it was kind of a cartoon version of American politics and Christianity.

It was fine for a while. Some bits were very good: I found Greg Boyd, Rob Bell, John Michael Greer, Shane Clairborne and Larry Shallenberger. Other bits were bad. My evolving views made my wonderful sister and brother-in-law angry and lost me a really good friend.

Lately, America has just been making me mad. I’m cheesed off that American Christians are still debating whether or not women can do the same jobs as men or be considered their equals. I’m cross that they are still trying to decide whether or not LGBT people get to be counted as fully human. I cannot endure one more pastor with perfectly reformed theology expounding ad nauseum why a different conclusion than his is Dangerous. I’m sick of the fake miracles and the politics of fear. (‘AMERICA IS DOOMED!’ Of course America is doomed, not because it has a black liberal president but because America is an empire and all empires are doomed.) I don’t have the stomach for this presidential election. I don’t need to hear the latest pronouncement by the church’s prophets of Baal about what kind of prayer and fasting we need to do for the next 40 days to make sure God doesn’t lightning bolt the country. I have no interest in what the evangelical pope has to say about anything. I’m sick of the megachurchcorp CEOs and their obsession with their big numbers. I’ve had it with the whole thing. I have no grace to offer.

I realised a couple days ago that the problem isn’t America – okay, actually the problem is America and its stupid paranoid greedy consumer religion. But that’s not my problem. My problem is that I’m making it my problem. I live in Wales, UK. My job is to serve and love people in Wales. Raising my blood pressure over what the Americans are doing is stupid and dumb. I’ve been stupid and dumb.

I’m going to stop.

American Christians are on their own journey. My meddling in it displays a serious lack of faith in the Spirit’s work in those Christians and an unwillingness to fully concentrate on the work I’m doing here. It’s time for me to leave America – for real – and keep my face pointed in the same direction as the plough.

This is what I’m doing. Until the end of 2012 anything to do with American spirituality or politics is out of my life, the good and the bad. (The exceptions are family and friends, of course. And I’m keeping Josh Garrels in my playlist.) Basically I’m cutting out a bunch of podcasts, books that I may have read, blogs, Twitter accounts and all their links and link and links. Here’s a list for people who like lists:

This will give me space to clear my brain. Once I get to 2013, I’m not sure. My goal is not to pretend that America doesn’t exist or has nothing spiritually good to offer. Rather, I want to return (metaphorically) full of grace and love and no longer fighting against a bunch of rules and ideas that haven’t actually applied to my life for years. It may take me more than six months to get there.

This is obviously a big overblown statement full of broad brushstroke characterisations. It says more about me than it does about the United States. That is the point. I want to expose my own dysfunction so that it is clear (to me probably more than anyone else) why I am doing this. It also makes me kind of accountable. If I announce something on the Internet, I am a lot more likely to do it. Also, I tend to make big overblown statements about things that don’t need big overblown statements.

If you are an American reading this blog, you are welcome to keep reading and to comment. I’m not going into hiding.

Finally, thank you, Greg Boyd, Rob Bell, John Michael Greer and Shane Claiborne and so many others. You have helped me to become a better person. I’ll be back listening to you again, maybe as soon as next year.

I start as soon as I finish my last book on spirituality by an American author for now. (The book is Falling Upward by Richard Rohr. It is the perfect book for where I’m at right now.)


4 June 2012
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Here it is in broad but terribly accurate brushstrokes

From John Michael Greer’s latest essay:

It’s among the major failures of contemporary Western culture that the keepers of its religious traditions have so signally failed to deal with the core issues of our time. There’s a history behind that failure, of course. In what used to be the religious mainstream, well-meaning but clueless attempts to become relevant in the 1960s and 1970s led clergy to replace authentic spirituality with a new definition of religious institutions as some sort of awkward hybrid of amateur social service agencies and moral lobbying firms, deriving their values from the contemporary nonreligious left rather than from any coherent sense of their own traditional spiritual commitments. Since the vast majority of Americans then and now are on the moderate-to-conservative end of the political spectrum, and have next to no patience with the liberal ideologies that drove this shift, the formerly mainstream denominations ended up with a fraction of their old membership and influence as parishioners abandoned them in droves for more conservative churches and synagogues.

Those latter, meanwhile, had just completed the same transformation in the other direction, surrendering their own traditional commitments in order to embrace the political ideologies of the contemporary right. This is why so many of today’s supposedly conservative clergy are out there right now urging their congregations to vote for a Republican party whose platform could not be further from the explicit teachings of Jesus if somebody had set out to do that on purpose. Very few American religious groups have avoided falling into one or the other of these pitfalls.

That has had any number of unhelpful consequences, but the one relevant here is that either choice makes it effectively impossible for those who speak for religious institutions to say anything at all about the reality of our nation’s and civilization’s decline. The denominations of theold mainstream are committed to what, without too much satire, could be described as the belief that everyone in the world deserves a middle class American lifestyle; those of the new conservative religiosity are just as rigidly committed to the claim that middle class Americans deserve, and ought to be able to keep, that lifestyle. Neither can begin to address the hard fact that this lifestyle and nearly everything associated with it are going away forever.

If you are not reading Mr Greer, why? And don’t say it’s because he is the head of an American order of Druids. In the words of somebody that Rob Bell quoted, all truth is ours. (I’m not bothering with the actual source because I’m having an out-of-college-for-the-summer break from sources.)


31 May 2012
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You know who talks about having sex a lot? Teenagers with purity obsessions.

Abstinence is Death


27 April 2012
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You are not to be called Leader, unless, you know, you want to be

Should Christians obey Jesus’ instruction in Matthew 23:8-12?

But you are not to be called ‘Rabbi’, for you have one Teacher and you are all brothers. And call no one your ‘father’ on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven. Nor are you to be called ‘teacher’ [or, leader], for you have one teacher [or, leader], the Christ. The greatest among you will be your servant. And whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted. (NET)

It is nearly universally ignored by the current versions of Christianity. In the western evangelical world the most admired pastors are the ones who are indistinguishable from visionary leaders in the business world. It seems a very impractical instruction to obey. After all, without a vision, people are unrestrained and they perish (Proverbs 29:18).

Paul, if he knew of this instruction, did not obey it or at least had a unique interpretation of it:

The pastoral epistles have an overall feeling of approval of hierarchical systems in the church. Two explicit examples:

The writer of Hebrews did not seem to go for the no-calling-people-leaders idea:

Did Jesus mean something other than the obvious reading? Is the ‘do not be called…’ triplet a rhetorical device that Jesus is using to emphasise the upside-down nature of the Kingdom of God and not meant to be taken literally? Do these passages that seem in disagreement harmonise somehow? Is it just too impractical an instruction to obey? Is the church getting things badly wrong? What do you think?


14 February 2012
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We notice our own team’s crap and everybody else’s good stuff.

I don’t do much explaining here. The main reason I wrote this post is that I was tired of this paper with the diagram cluttering my life, and I wanted to put it in the recycle bin.

The sets are not drawn to scale. The subset GOOD ART is vastly larger than the set ALL CHRISTIAN ART. The subset GOOD CHRISTIAN ART is probably not much smaller proportionally than the subset GOOD ART, but in absolute terms it is orders of magnitude smaller. (No, I don’t know how many orders of magnitude.) We notice how much bad Christian there is because we compare ALL CHRISTIAN ART to GOOD ART. This is the wrong comparison. We compound our mistake by comparing absolutely instead of proportionally. It’s like being annoyed because a ginormous beach ball the size of a house isn’t as big as the moon. I am, of course, still annoyed.


29 November 2011
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I drew this for Laura Anne who is hosting a great blog series on community

A good thing to do is go to her blog and read it.


7 September 2011
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Let the chicken math speak forth

1) If you are thinking about taking this seriously, please don’t. 2) I promise I am not making fun of the bible’s symbolic use of numbers. That is a completely different thing than this.

Matthew Paul Turner is busy interpreting natural disasters today. We don’t have any natural disasters here in North Wales, so I thought I would have a go at interpreting dinner. The reason? This turned up on my daughter’s plate at supper time. It really honestly did. I did not try to arrange them that way (although I did adjust the kerning for the photo).

Let’s start with the numbers.

71. Seven and one. Seven is the number of perfection, so 71 is perfection plus one — superperfection. But when you subtract perfection from perfection plus one as does the chicken math manifestation, you get 64. 64 is the square of eight. Eight is the number of new beginnings. So you can see that 71 minus seven equals 64 which means new beginnings times new beginnings — an abundance — yea, verily, an outpouring of new beginnings.

Where will we see these new beginnings? To answer that question, we must look at the placement of the numbers. The numbers are on a tortilla. A tortilla is flatbread, bread without yeast. This is clearly a reference to the Passover. The beginning of the outpouring of new beginnings will be brought forth at the time of Passover.

But how will the Lord bring it forth? It is clear. I, the father, prepared the food and gave it to my daughter. These new beginnings will be an anointing poured out upon God’s daughters. And it shall be an anointing of spice and flavour. For as certainly as I served zingy Mexican food in a nation known for its bland cuisine, so shall God bring new life and excitement to his church which has become dull and uncreative.

It shall begin at Passover in the coming year.

But do not be complacent saying, ‘It has been ordained; I will do nothing but wait.’ For just as you would not think of eating your dinner before praying together as a family, do not think that God will pour out his spicy anointing upon the daughters if you do not pray as a spiritual family.

Seek God’s face day and night. Purify yourself before the Passover. Be ready. The season of 64 is upon us.


27 August 2011
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You should probably watch this video in which Peter Rollins explains how the thing you think is the resistance is often just a vent that maintains the status quo


Material Faith from Peter Rollins on Vimeo.


23 August 2011
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Dear Christianity, ... Look forward to hearing back, Creativity

… At best, our relationship has been bumpy since the late 1950s. And we’ve gone our separate ways a few times. You spent years revitalizing fundamentalism. And I spent time in London discovering the Beatles. …

Go read the whole letter from Creativity to Christianity by Matthew Paul Turner.


16 June 2011
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Don't go to church

My friend Sarah heard an idea at a conference. Her enthusiasm for it turned out to be infectious. This is the idea: regularly have a Don’t Go To Church Sunday. The pastor tells people to stay away so they can spend time obeying the second great command, love your neighbour as yourself. Most everyone has stuff that they would like to do for others, but they never quite get around to it. What if your church explicitly gave you permission and time to go do it?


6 May 2011
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I'm special, so special / Gotta have some of your attention / Give it to me

I’ve been thinking about what it is that makes Christianity unique, because everybody wants to be special. I came up with a lot of things that aren’t unique to Christianity: community, a strong moral code, monotheism, heaven, hell, our own music, a linear understanding of history, instant healings, ecstatic experiences, prophecy, a historic human founder, a resurrection story, a proselytising impulse, a paradigm for understanding all of life, nonviolence, scripture (Plus fundamentalism, being Right, tribalism and killing for your god.) Etc. All this stuff is quite common in and out of Christianity.

Note: Could this be why denominations, religions, organisations and tribes are so intent on focussing on their differences? If you start noticing how much isn’t unique, you may become aware that you fear a loss of your identity. And your audience. And your income.

But there is something that I think is unique, or at least exceptionally rare: living and dying for the sake of, not just your friends, but also (especially!) your enemies. This is what Jesus did. This is what he invites us to do.

Lots of people will kill for what they believe.

Many people will die for what they hold dear.

Very few people are willing to die for someone who stands for the opposite of what they love.

Please tell me if I’m wrong. Tell me that there are a lot of things unique about Christianity. Tell me that there are other religions/philosophies/tribes for which suffering (with abandonment, with no guarantee of success) to save the life of an enemy is a core value.

?


25 March 2011
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In which Larry Shallenberger hits one nail very firmly on its head

In recent years the church has gotten better at helping its members identify it’s strengths. We help them find their gifts and passions, but we do this with a self-serving motivation: We want to know how people can fill volunteer slots in our churches. The unspoken value is the highest dream God ever places in the heart of a person it to be a church volunteer. The other unspoken value is that the church is the non-profit [organisation] that meets on Sundays.

What if the church decided that it’s job was to help its people find their gifts, talents, and ambitions. But what if we didn’t try to edit those ambitions? One person would start serving homeless people and a second would start working on her novel. One might serve the children’s ministry while another would volunteer to tutor in an after school program. What if we trusted God to give people the right ambitions? I think Don [Miller] is hitting on something important when he told the audience, “there is no category for you.”

A to the big fat men!

Read the whole post.


1 October 2010
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A modern Pentecost

I wanted help my class of 10-13 year-olds to feel like they were a bit more inside the story of the beginning of the church, so I rewrote Acts 2, setting it in the present in the town where our church meets on Sundays.

When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together at Ysgol John Bright. Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole room where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages as the Spirit enabled them.

Now there were staying in Llandudno holiday-makers from every nation under heaven. When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard their own language being spoken. Utterly amazed, they asked: ‘Aren’t all these who are speaking from North Wales? You can tell by their accents. Then how is it that each of us hears them in our native language? Scousers, Mancunians and French…

Keep reading
18 July 2010
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Look at me being a stereotypical children's pastor!

In my new ‘office’.


16 March 2010
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Function or dysfunction?

Has the fellowship served to make the individual free, strong, and mature, or has it made him weak and dependent? Has it taken him by the hand for a while in order that he may learn again to walk by himself, or has it made him uneasy and unsure? This is one of the most searching and critical questions that can be put to any Christian fellowship.
—Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together


24 January 2010
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What's a good size?

‘We believe that our particular group has grown as large as it ought to. We have stopped short of being an organisation; we are an organism instead, a living and spontaneous association of individuals who know one another intimately, care for each other deeply, and feel the kind of respect on for another that makes rules and bylaws unnecessary. A group is the right size, I would guess, when each member can pray every day for every other member, individually and by name, interceding for his personal needs as well as for the success of a particular mission. But what is to prevent 20, 50, 100 such groups from springing up wherever the call is heard – each obedient to its own particular genius, each working in its different way for the coming of the one Kingdom?’

—Brother Andrew, the man who pretty much invented smuggling bibles into communist countries in the mid 20th century, in his autobiography, God’s Smuggler, ch.21 p.251 1970 edition, emphasis mine


22 January 2010
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A notable new blog

My beloved wife and former writer here is gracing the internets once again with her poetic and insightful writing on children’s ministry over at the the official i61 Kids blog.


21 August 2009
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Dear My American Friends,

I posted this on Facebook last night, and it seemed to touch a nerve in a good way, so here it goes out into the world.

I’ve been thinking about something for a month or two now. I think it’s thunk enough to be written down and shared with you.

In the 10 years since my son Teifion died and the nearly nine years since I moved to the UK I have changed quite a lot. I imagine you have too. The other week I was cataloging the big changes. A lot a conservative American Christians, if they had access to that catalogue, would waste no time in declaring me a first class passenger on the Satan Train…

Keep reading
14 August 2009
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The rules of my fight club

I watched Fight Club last night. I know this film has been out for a while, but as I was watching I was struck with a powerful, prophetic sense that it captured the zeitgeist of this generation of men. Now is the time for a paradigm-shifting change in the way we talk to the lost men of this generation. Now is the time to change the world. Now is the time for BREAKTHROUGH! That’s why I am starting a Men’s Missional Fight Club For Jesus. Here are the rules:

The first rule of my fight club is tell all your friends we’re starting a fight club.

The second rule of my fight club is here are some fight club leaflets you could put up in your office or village shop or whatever.

The third rule of my fight club is no hard punches. We don’t want anybody to get hurt.

The fourth rule of my fight club is you have to read and sign the health and safety statement and waiver of liability.

The fifth rule of my fight club is you have to sign up for the tea-making and mug-washing rotas which are taped up on the back wall.

The sixth rule of my fight club is the fights will last no longer than three minutes. You’ll be surprised at how tiring fighting actually is.

The seventh rule of my fight club is this isn’t about winning and losing. It’s just a bit of fun.

The eighth and final rule of my fight club is that there is no pressure to fight. You are welcome to just watch.

∗

And we wonder why our big ideas go nowhere.


2 May 2009
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Look at my pretty paradigm!

John Michael Greer is at his best this week, writing about paradigm change. He writes about the difficulty of change, the way that our paradigms prevent us from eve being able to ask certain questions, much less answer them, and in describing the thinking of some dude called Thomas Kuhn he shares this bit of brilliance:

It’s standard practice for the new paradigm to include the value judgment that the questions the new paradigm answers are the ones that matter, and the ones the old paradigm does better don’t count. Nor is this judgment pure propaganda; since the questions the new paradigm answers are generally the ones that researchers have been wrestling with for decades or centuries, they look more important than details that have been comfortably settled since time out of mind. They may also be more important, in every meaningful sense, if they allow practical problems to be solved that the old paradigm left insoluble.

Yet the result of that value judgment, Kuhn argued, is the false impression that science progresses, replacing relatively false beliefs with relatively more true ones, and thus gradually advances on the truth. He argued that different paradigms are not attempts to answer the same questions, differing in their level of accuracy, but attempts to answer entirely different questions – or, to put it another way, they are models that highlight different features of a complex reality, and cannot be reduced to one another. Thus, for example, Ptolemaic astronomy isn’t wrong, just useful for different purposes than Copernican astronomy. (From the standpoint of relativity theory, please note, this is quite correct: since there are no fixed points in the cosmos, only frames of reference, it’s as meaningful to take an earth-centered frame of reference and calculate the movements of the planets from there as it is to take a sun-centered frame of reference and do the same thing.)

So basically, the paradigm you just threw away because it is old and useless still explains certain parts of life, the universe and everything better than your shiny new one does.

Go read the whole article, and while you are there dig into Mr Greer’s archives and subscribe to his feed. I know he writes about peak oil and ecology, but if you want to understand why the white western evangelical church is failing, why most of the church is stuck talking about the possibility of rearranging the deck chairs on our Titanic, and WHY the things that Alan Hirsch, Floyd McClung, Frank Viola and even Brant Hansen are saying are so important, then I can think of no better teacher than John Michael Greer.


24 April 2009
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We did a good thing

I say we. It was mostly Steve and Gill’s idea. I help hold them to it now and again. The idea was, when we start a church, let’s not use a bunch of terminology that only we understand. Let’s speak everyday English.

In my wandering on the web I visit quite a few church websites. Pretty much none of them get it. The big attractional churches don’t get it. The new missional churches don’t get it. (I’m using jargon here because I’m writing for Christians.) The churches in between don’t get it either.

Don’t believe me? Imagine you’ve never been to church before. Pick a church. Visit the website. Do you, the imaginary non-church you, have a clue what they are talking about?

It’s a simple idea. Missionaries to other cultures get it. Talk the same language as the people you want to reach.

Take a good, hard look at your church’s lexicon. If you are saying things in a way that only people who are already in the club can easily understand, find a new way to say it.

Probably what you will really do is go to my church’s website and look for how we are failing to be understandable. (Please do. Then comment here. We appreciate any help we can get.) After you get us sorted out, maybe have a look at you.


18 April 2009
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In which I quote Seth Godin at length and ask all preachers to consider what they do on a Sunday morning

From this post: The purpose of a presentation is to change minds. That’s the only reason I can think of to spend the time and resources. If your goal isn’t to change minds, perhaps you should consider a different approach.

  1. The best presentation is no presentation at all. If you can get by with a memo, send a memo. I can read it faster than you can present it and we’ll both enjoy it more.
  2. The second best presentation is one on one. No slides, no microphone. You look me in the eye and change my mind.
  3. Third best? Live and fully interactive.
  4. Powerpoint or Keynote, but with no bullets, just emotional pictures and stories.
  5. And last best… well, if you really think you can change my mind by using tons of bullets and a droning presentation, I’m skeptical.

So, according to Seth, we preachers are putting the best hours of our week into something that is usually between the fourth and last best way of changing people’s minds.

Oh dear.

I think the thing to do is blow him off, because any alternative is a bit unthinkable.


15 April 2009
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One o' them there modern translations

But we have this treasure in saved, healed, delivered and supernaturally changed vessels, to show that God has given to us, right now, His surpassing power over every situation. We are no longer afflicted, perplexed, in conflict or defeated. No, we are alive with the power of Jesus, and the resurrection power of Jesus has changed us now…TODAY! In every way!. God wants you to see just what a Jesus-controlled person is all about, so the power of Jesus is on display in the life I am living, and those who don’t have this life, are miserable and dying. (2 Corinthians 4:7-11, MSV)

This is Michael Spencer Version of one of those bible passages that we don’t celebrate much because to do so would require us to be honest about ourselves, and who’s actually honest about themselves in church? Here’s the real version:

But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may also be revealed in our mortal body. (2 Corinthians 4:7-11, TNIV)

The whole article is a bit long and in baldly exposing some of the lies we regularly live swings a bit too far to the dark side of life, but it is a Very Important Article for anyone who cares about realness.


11 April 2009
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Oops

11 chapters into Luke in my New Testament reading project and I can’t find anything that resembles church as we do it today in the western world.

That’s not hyperbole.

Okay, maybe it is a tiny bit of hyperbole, but not much.

Yes, I know that statement is unbalanced. What are 11 chapters of one book compared to the whole New Testament? And why should it church look like what Jesus did? The church wasn’t even established yet. And if we don’t do church like we do it now, what are we going to do? How will anyone be taught? Jesus taught. Jesus preached. Anyway, the world has changed…

Yep. I know. It’s hard to imagine anything different. I’ve been in church all my life – I help pastor a church! – and my head hurts when I try to imagine something different. All I know is that when I look at the practice (industry?) of western church, I see very little that looks like what Jesus did.

I can say the same thing about my life. I’m so steeped in the culture of Christianity that all my relationships are tainted with it. When I look at my husbanding and parenting I see a heck of a lot of the religion of the Pharisees and not nearly enough of the life-giving attractiveness of Jesus.

I think I am understanding the significance of the title of Rob Bell’s book Jesus Wants to Save Christians

I think Jesus is trying to save me. I think the more I read, the more the Holy Spirit will have to work with and the more hope there will be for me to imagine without my head hurting. And that gets me closer to the goal actually following Jesus, whether it looks like church or not.

I’ll finish with a quote from this remarkable post by Brant Hansen:

And I want to convey how remarkable Jesus is. How smart he is. How he understands our nature. How infuriating he can be to those in power. I want to subvert a culture that turns the church into an incredibly expensive and remarkably harmless spectator sport. I want people to understand how revolutionary the love of Jesus is.


4 March 2009
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We want to lower the bar of how church is done and raise the bar of what it means to be a disciple

— Neil Cole, quoted in The Forgotten Ways by Alan Hirsch


11 February 2009
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Beware of bold pronouncements

Over the last few months I have enjoyed some serious world-rockage thanks to Surprised by Hope by Tom Wright, Starting a House Church by Larry Kreider and Floyd McClung, and The Forgotten Ways by Alan Hirsch, plus a bunch of podcasts from Greg Boyd and Rob Bell. Now it’s the bible’s turn.

Over the next three to five weeks I plan to read the New Testament. I will be looking specifically at what it looks like to be a follower of Jesus, both individually and as a community of Christians on a mission. The purpose of this is not to know more stuff, rather, I want to make whatever changes are necessary to orient my life around God’s mission on Earth (John 3:16) and my place in that mission through the new birth (John 3:3).

This is more of a read-and-reflect than a study, so I will be using my handy dandy TNIV Books of The Bible. I plan to write about what I read here. And I’m off…


10 February 2009
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...church is what you do from Sunday to Sunday out in your neighborhood, with your small group, with your tribe of people.

—From an interview with Greg Boyd on the Burside Writers Collective.


10 February 2009
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Alan Hirsch explains what church does to people

The following excerpt is from Mr Hirsch’s book The Forgotten Ways:

Jane is an average churchgoer. She loves God and wants to grow in him. But her problem is how to bring all aspects of her life together so that is makes sense of her faith. How does she experience church?

She spends most of her time in the ‘godless’ secular space called ‘the world’. On Sunday she goes to church. Church fellowship offers her a neutral kind of space filled with like-minded believers. She feels safe and reassured when she is around them, because the tension she normally feels when ‘in the world’ is temporarily alleviated. After a bit of ‘fellowship’, she goes into the chapel area in response to the call of worship. [i.e. She goes into the main room because the meeting is starting.] The music kicks in, the worship starts and she is drawn up into a form of ecstasy as she begins to engage her heart in the worship of God. And all of a sudden it is as if God ‘bungee jumps’ into the deal. The worship rocks and Jane begins to feel that the sermon really ‘fed her’. So in taking communion she recommits herself to Jesus as personal saviour. The church then sings a few more rousing songs, and the pastor pronounces the benediction, and whoooop! It is as if the bungee cord draws God up again, returning him into heaven. And Jane finds herself back in the middle circle having a coffee or soda with her Christian friends.

But then she has to go out into the world. Labouring as she is under a dualistic worldview and experience, this space in Jane’s perception is a somewhat caustic context for Christians, because God is not perceived as being ‘in the world’. And so it is a somewhat harrowing experience, and she barely makes it to mid-week cell group (home group/connect group), where she undergoes a similar experience to that of Sunday (but not on the same scale). Yes, she has her quiet times when sometimes God ‘turns up’, but other than that she feels that she is rather alone in a spiritually precarious place.

If you will forgive the slightly satirical oversimplification, I’m sure that many of us can recognise ourselves in this story. The tragedy is that everything in this medium of church sets Jane up to experience her life as fundamentally dualistic and therefore divided between the sacred and the secular. No one has necessarily intended it to be this way; it’s just as if a virus somehow got into the system, a nasty sucker that has lodged itself in the fundamental programming that underlies the Christendom software. So no matter how seeker friendly one might wish to make the service, it still communicates this sacred-secular dualism that has plagued the church. The net result of this is that God is experienced as a church-god and not the God of all of life, including church.


9 February 2009
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Jeff gets a curriculum

For the past few weeks I have been using an absolutely amazing curriculum. I’m not usually a fan of curricula, but this one has transformed the way I think about and do my class for students in years 6-8 (ages 10-13).

This thing is just plain inspiring. It is built around the story of a hero and his adventures. Kids love heroes, and this one is so well-written that he grabbed my imagination from the moment I started reading. More important, he is grabbing the kids’ imagination. They are connecting with this character. They are connecting with his adventures. Watching them for the past few weeks, I am convinced that this connection with the story in the curriculum is starting to lead them to a real connection with God.

I’m using the curriculum with a pretty small group, about 15. The discussion points are great. The ideas for hands-on learning are brilliant. And it is all amazingly scalable. This curriculum would work for large groups too. And for young children. And for teens. I think even adults could get something useful out of it. I know one-size-fits-all solutions usually aren’t, but I honestly believe this is different. The content is rich, both in breadth and depth.

The only real drawback that I have come across so far it that because the curriculum is not brand new, it is only text. There is no audio or video – or even Powerpoint slides. I think that could put some people off. For me it hasn’t been a problem. I have been so inspired by the content that I have found it easy to find my own media. This is the age of Web 2.0 after all. Almost everything in the world is available in about six clicks.

There are several modules. Not all are stories, not all are heroes, but if they are anywhere near as good ad the module I’m using at the moment, this is the curriculum I’m sticking with for the foreseeable future.

You can buy new favourite curriculum in book form here. And it is available for instant download here


20 November 2008
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Eight reasons not to use lists

Keith Johnson is the Ah Ha Architect for Group Publishing. I don’t know what that means, but I think he’s great, especially when he lets rip with a rant on the blog he writes with Larry Shallenberger. His most recent is majestic with ALL CAPS and bold type and exclamation marks!!!. The article is great but his comment (No. 5) is my favourite:

Try this instead: “Have One Point”!!! That’s It! And state, “this was my observation, and you might have another one, that is why I left point #2 BLANK…

Go have a read. It will get you all hyped up for your pastor’s Sunday sermon.


28 September 2008
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A man can dream

I just had a crazy idea.

What if the worldwide charismatic church took all its zeal for God and hunger for a great outpouring of the Holy Spirit and directed it into connecting with the people around them?

What if they gave up listening to prophecies about a coming revival and praying for said revival to come and talking to each other about how great it will be when revival comes and Changes Everything and put their energy into building the kingdom of God right now?

What if all the money spent on conferences and special meetings was invested in neighbourhoods at home and abroad to connect people with Jesus?

What if it didn’t matter so much which charismatic celebrity was ditching his wife and family for his secretary/favourite prostitute/bottle of whiskey/tax haven in the Caribbean and which other charismatic celebrities acted too soon or too late to sort it out because no one cared – they were all too busy making disciples of Jesus to care?

The cynical bit of me thinks any of this happening is slightly less likely than John MacArthur speaking in tongues live on GodTV.

Another part of me is surprisingly hopeful.

I’ve never been more grateful for these people and these people. Let’s follow their example, shall we.


1 September 2008
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The Mustang 1

Honey Gold 1965 Ford Mustang 2+2

This is me in my first car, a 1965 Ford Mustang 2+2. I had it from about age 17 to 19 (1991-1993). It was the coolest and fastest car in my circle of friends. It had a 302 cubic inch engine (sadly not the original 289), three speed manual transmission (who needs gears when you have that much power?), and an original – but non-working AM radio (which was fine because it had dual exhausts with no mufflers). My dad and I restored it together.

This car, how I got it and why I got rid of it will be the subject of my next few posts in which I will write about the Word of Faith movement, free will and miracles.


18 August 2008
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You see strange things in the desert

(See Christine’s growing Arizona 2008 set here)

We’re back from two weeks in Sunizona and Tucson, Arizona visiting family and getting my third sister married off. (One more to go.) During the holiday I had some great talks with my dad. One of our subjects of conversation was Todd Bentley and what is happening in Lakeland.

My natural tendency is to hate it – before you form your image of what kind of guy I must be, please note: I was the poster child for weird manifestations during the ‘renewal’ in the 90s – but I have worked hard to not form too much of an opinion about Mr B.

My dad is more open to this stuff.

He told me a little bit about the beginning of the charismatic movement. He wasn’t in it. Rather he was taught about how wicked, weird and dangerous it was. He didn’t join in until the early 80s when the movement had lost most of its edginess and was starting to go pretty mainstream.

Today, when a lot of people are talking about being post-charismatic, it is impossible to deny that the movement has significantly affected most of Christendom. The way we worship, the widespread openness to the work of the Holy Spirit – these are part of the church because of the charismatic movement, which was preceded and prepared for by the pentecostal movement.

My dad pointed out that the blip in the 90s we called the renewal and now this thing could be the child of charisma, and, like a lot of babies, it is ugly to everyone but its parents.

Yesterday, I read a post by Julie Clawson about another ugly baby, the emerging thing:

But what amuses me the most is that the current changes occurring in the church (and the ones in the past for that matter) were viewed as a malevolent force more reminiscent of Yeat’s “rough beast” than the movings of the Holy Spirit. Change is feared and its harbingers vilified (if I hear one more person refer to Brian McLaren as the antichrist…). The calls of the reformers are not properly understood and often seen as a rejection of all that has come before. While it may be difficult to convince some that questioning and critique is not rejection (or arrogance), I think Yeat’s imagery could prove useful in this case. The widening gyres represent a continuous unfolding of history that expands and contracts, but never breaks away fully from its spherical path. What one experiences is a shift not a genesis. Accepting that perspective may help some more easily dwell within the unfolding of history.

With Yeats’ I agree that “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” But I believe that to be a good thing – the impetus that pushes us to renewal and revival.

Wouldn’t life be more fun if we could be open to the probability that God is somehow in all the ugly new babies, even if we don’t join in until they go mainstream? We could stop throwing around words like dangerous and heretical. Maybe we could even relax enough to give our brains space to remember our job is to fulfill a great commission, not to be Right about what the uglies on the edge are doing.


7 August 2008
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Epiphany is a strong word for something so obvious

After two years of helping to run a church my brain has finally started working. I just remembered what I’m good at:

I used these four abilities to build a design studio from nothing to way-way-way-too-busy in four years. Then I joined the i61 church plant and forgot. For two years, I have been making a lot of pretty things, physically and spiritually, for i61. I have been using those four skills to some degree in the church, but hardly at all to connect the church with the community.

When I went to work full time for i61 18 months ago, I had the idea of approaching ministry as a design job. I wanted to bring the thinking and creative skills that I had developed in five years as a designer to a new arena. But my ideas about how to do it were not well formed. It was all too nebulous, and it didn’t work. I soon slipped back into the place that was the norm for me during Ministry Career 1 in America: in front of the computer, comfortably afraid of doing the Things That A Person In Ministry Should Be Doing. I knew that i61 couldn’t operate very well without me, but What Was I There For, Really?

Was I actually contributing to the advancement of the kingdom of God? I’ve had very real doubts about that. It wasn’t a lack of ideas – I always have a million of those. It was a lack of connection. I wasn’t connecting what I am good at with the work of building God’s kingdom. I was trying to fit myself into my idea of what A Person In Ministry ought to be doing without even being fully aware that I had such an idea.

When I started my design studio. I had the advantage of not knowing how to be a graphic designer or how to run a business. I needed to feed my family and pay bills, so I just got on with it. When I went to work for i61 I had a decade of ministry experience and a lot of new ideas telling me what I should do. Somehow those things didn’t connect with what I can do best, what makes me thrive.

Last night in the bath, the place where most good thoughts are thought, I remembered the things that make me thrive. And for the first time I connected them with the works of God. Bam. I felt like I retrieved piece of myself from the shelf, the feisty bit that likes people and makes things happen.

The catalyst for this connection was a meeting with a high school assistant head teacher. I was talking to her about an event we do called Hi, School! Just having a meeting with someone outside of the church world was a buzz. During the meeting she invited me to do some school assemblies. I came alive inside. Here was a chance to start something. Starting things makes me happy.

Then I felt guilty. Shouldn’t I be focussing on what I’m already doing? This doesn’t fit perfectly with some of my New Ideas Of How To Do Ministry. If I like it, it is probably because it is an old, and therefore ineffective, way of doing things.

Fortunately, I came to my senses and realised that I get thrilled standing up in front of a crowd of teenagers and talking about the kingdom of God because Jesus in me gets thrilled to talk to a crowd of teenagers about the kingdom of God. It is one of the things I’m built to do.

That excitement has been bouncing around in me for a week, and last night it bounced off all the right things at once and gave me this really obvious realisation: The things that I love to do and do well are the things that will make me most effective in getting the good news of the kingdom of God to my community.

Damn the theories. I’m finally ready for action.


19 June 2008
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Too good

Seth Godin wrote a couple days ago about the importance of letting the evidence of human involvement be visible sometimes.

I think the promotion of the kids thing we are doing Wednesday is a good example. I made some fun and pretty invitations and laser printed them on card.

Front:

Back:

As I was distributing them about the neighbourhood, they started seeming too good. They weren’t quite right. I would have felt a lot more comfortable giving out pieces of paper with the details hand-written on them. That would have been inviting. Somehow what I was doing felt more like selling.

It’s okay. The reason we are doing this now is to start learning how.


26 May 2008
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Can we go back to theory, please?

Our church has done a very good job of making a place that is easy for non-church people to come to – for starters, we meet in a pub – and people do come. About half of the people of i61 didn’t go to church before they came to i61 or else they had not gone for a very long time.

Easy to come to is good, but for a while Christine and I have been feeling that it is very important for us to go, to share the life of God with people where they already are. Since we are the children’s pastors, we decided to do something with kids. Since there is no time like the present, we decided to do something this half-term week. The obvious place to start is Someone Else’s Neighbourhood. Unfortunately, the Someone Elses had to work all week, so we are doing it in our neighbourhood at our house.

It’s surprisingly scary.

I printed up a little invitation, and yesterday I went out in the rain and passed a bunch of them around. People I don’t know got them through their letterboxes. People I do know or have spoken to a bit got me knocking on their door inviting them. The response was tepid at best. People seemed to think of it as a thinly disguised wheeze to get their kids into church.

The response at last house I went to completely took the wind out of my sails. Our village shopkeeper lives there. He always seemed like a nice guy. We chatted once about the woes having BT as an internet provider. His teenage daughter babysat our kids a few times. But yesterday he said, ‘No, not interested,’ before I could finish one sentence. When I stuttered something about it being just some games and crafts for the kids, he cut me off again.

Like I was selling double glazing!

Or I was a bleeding Jehovah’s Witness!

At that moment I acquired actual empathy with a friend from church who went out for a Christmas meal with a bunch of mums from her children’s school. She didn’t drink because when she’s indulging in extra calories she prefers to get them from food. The real reason doesn’t matter though. She’s a Christian. She didn’t drink, so obviously she’s judging their lifestyle. Now they don’t want to be her friends anymore.

Jerks.

Actually, they are just being people who are living in the culture we live in. That’s not an excuse for other people’s bad behaviour; it is a reminder that we kingdom of God people still have a lot of barriers to move out of the way when we go where the people are.

I’m pretty sure some of Callum’s neighbourhood friends are coming. I’ll let you know how it goes. I think it will be good.


26 May 2008
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Jesus is NOT my boyfriend and I will not sing to Him as if He is.

—Bill Kinnon

This is my favourite worship quote in a long time!


25 May 2008
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How I succeed at barbecues

Yesterday, the Gill family was at the first i61 barbecue of 2008. i61 barbecues are famous for immense quantities of fun and food. Friends who accept the invitation to come usually find that before too long they are part of us and inviting their friends to barbecues.

People often ask me two questions at i61 barbecues. The first is: Did you make these chocolate chip cookies yourself? I reply, Yes, with an appropriate amount of honesty. The second question is: Can I have the recipe? Today, for the first time ever, the answer is, with a complete lack of modesty, Yes, you can have what is probably the best chocolate chip recipe in the world.

The ingredients are listed in a mix of American and British measurements, so you might need to use this.

Get a big bowl, and put this stuff in it:

Mix them all up. Don’t taste it yet; it’s too slimy and gloopy.

Now add this stuff:

Mix again. Tasting is good to do now.

Chop up 300 g of really good chocolate, 2/3 milk chocolate and 1/3 70% cocoa plain chocolate. If you are living in North America and you are tempted to use chocolate chips or anything that has Hershey’s written on the label, resist. Put the chocolate in the bowl and mix one last time.

Grab some dough, make a ball and put it on an ungreased baking sheet. Repeat about 35 times. Bake all those little balls for about 9 minutes at 190°C.

Eat all that you can within a couple hours. Store the leftovers in an airtight container.

Your results may vary.

You’re welcome.


5 May 2008
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Blogging will turn you into a self-righteous [insert naughty noun of your choice here]

It’s easy. Just make sure your feed reader is stocked with a steady supply of bloggers you agree with. Make sure you cut out most of the non-Jesus blogs so that all your culture comes filtered and packaged like a carton of Tesco Value apple juice. When you are not online, try to be in your church office. It’s comfortable there. Read enough rants conversations about Mark Driscoll/John Piper/Bill Gothard/Some Other Reformed and/or Fundamentalist White Male to be at least strongly tempted to write something about him yourself – nevermind that he’s on a different continent and spends a big chunk of his life trying to connect people with Jesus. Once you’ve got all that in place, sit back and enjoy the slide into becoming exactly the same kind of [naughty noun] that only a few years ago made you think seriously about whether or not you actually could carry on being a Christian for much longer. Don’t think twice about any of this until your 15 year-old throws out a statement like, ‘You don’t like anything that’s different.’ Immediately deny it and try to ignore its truth by reminding yourself that you aren’t narrow like all those other people. You’re just right. You’re a pastor at the hottest church in [your region], for crying out loud. Carry on with some success until you start to prepare to talk to your teenagers about an area or two where they aren’t acting like Jesus. After you have been crushed by the weight of your hypocrisy, you might find repentance is the best tool for re-inflating your lungs.


2 May 2008
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In praise of small churches

There’s a lot of talk about the size of churches.

Some people go for massive – the more people in a mega-church, the more people that know Jesus, right?

Others think tiny house churches are best – how can you have community and reality in a giant battery farm of a church?

It seems like the cool way to be these days is multi-site with the pastor live in every location via satellite or speedy car trip across town.

There is probably nothing/a lot wrong with these ways of doing church. There’s always room for something different though

At our church we may have stumbled upon a Something Different. It’s new to me, at least.

The pub where we meet has room for about 125 people. On Sunday morning it’s full. We’ve done all the expanding we can without tearing the place down and starting over, so the only way to fit in more people was to add another meeting.

Hanging out together is a big part of what we do, so we weren’t interested in cramming another meeting into Sunday morning. Making time for family life is also a big part of what we do, so we didn’t want to add a Sunday night meeting. We decided to go with Saturday evening.

Two weeks in, it’s going very well.

One of the things we realised very quickly was that before too long i61 Saturday will develop its own personality. The meeting has different childrens’ workers and a different band. We’ve even talked about different speakers in the future.

In a year or so, there may be two i61 congregations of about 125 people meeting at the pub. Then what?

I think a strong case could be made for starting another main meeting on another day. 125 or thereabouts is a good number.

Put enough Small Enoughs together and you can end up with something very big – a lot of people knowing Jesus.

I don’t think 125 is a magic number, but I think 100-200 is a good size for a human-sized (rather than institutional-sized) congregation.

I am really excited about where we are headed.

UPDATE Christine just said, ‘What about when we build our bigger building?’ (We have plans drawn up for one that will hold about 250-300 people, 500 with rows, but we don’t do rows – too formal.) I remember Doug Pagitt or one of those emerging guys saying that 300 was about the right size for their community. Get back to me in five years; I’ll probably write that 1,000 is the ideal size for a church like i61. [insert smiley]


1 April 2008
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Dressing for church

(entering shop) You’ve got to help me!

Madame, that is what I am here to do. I am Walter J Wolf, king of Christian Couture. In what way may I be of assistance?

My friend invited me to church and I said yes and I’ve never been to church before and I don’t know what to wear or what to say and I’m going to make a total fool of myself.

A common fear, but one that need not overwhelm you, not once you have set foot in this shop. First of all, let’s think about your clothing –

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24 March 2008
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Essential reading for youth ministers

Design project deadlines and Easter deadlines are keeping me from writing the ten blog posts in my head and adding a new section to the site. Nevermind. In the meantime, all people who are involved with church and teenagers must read this blog: Once a Youth Pastor

Personal experience in youth ministry shows me that the #1 indicator of a teen’s spiritual longevity and commitment is the degree to which parents are involved in their kid’s spiritual development. The #2 indicator is the degree in which a teen connects with an older spiritual mentor outside the youth group.

Got it? #1 is parents. #2 is mentors. That’s the starting point for the reasoning that follows.

Now, what do most churches with “effective” youth ministries do? They hire a youth pastor.

I’ve come to believe that this is one of the biggest barriers to #1 and #2 happening! That’s right. In most places, the presence of a youth pastor is the biggest barrier to overcome.

Also related are these two articles that Christine and I wrote about a year ago: Community and Youth ministry is broken, but should we fix it?


17 March 2008
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What's Your Condition?

What I smile like.

My favourite wife has despression. She’s also a happy person. She’s also a brilliant speaker. She told the story of her journey into happiness at our church on Sunday. It is a story worth hearing. I promise I’m not saying that just because I am married to her. Have a listen (23 minutes)

Also, you might enjoy checking out Christine’s related project on Flickr, Room 37


25 February 2008
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Grids

In which I neatly jump from graphic designers’ grid systems to the internet’s most famous archdruid to the historian Arnold Toynbee to a church in North Carolina to the bible to you.

grid

Image borrowed from Mark Boulton’s grid systems design tutorial

Graphic designers use grids…

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14 February 2008
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Even more shame on you

There are many, many churches and Christians in the world who have no interest in piling shame on anyone. But we still don’t see the masses rushing to talk to them about their lust and their gluttony and their failures and their griefs. Our minds tell us that those are secret and private. Our culture is in agreement: Hide it away! And we get no arguments from our own pride and shame.

The kingdom of God – and all the healing and life that come with it – doesn’t work well with a lot of secrets. 1 John has a lot to say about living in the light and bringing things into the open – stuff that goes against natural human inclination.

So when we are trying to move people away from shame and ‘into the light’, we need to be aware that we are not just overcoming church culture, but also the broader culture and human tendencies. And that leads us back to thinking about the questions I asked in part one of this little series.


10 February 2008
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More shame on you

The thing about shame is that it is easy to apply and often gives good immediate results. But it has no power to effect long-term change, and it stands completely in opposition to the ways of God.

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10 February 2008
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Shame on you! And while I'm at it, let me give you some condemnation and rejection as well

In my experience, there are a number of life issues and sins-that-so-easily-beset-us that the evangelical church really stinks at addressing. We’re good at inspirational messages about How To Succeed and How To Get Over It (and those are often useful and necessary). We are very good at shock and shame and savagery when people Don’t Succeed and Don’t Get Over It. But we are not so good at teaching people How To Fail, nor are we very good at coming alongside the failures among us and walking with them into success. We are really bad at understanding Getting Over It and what an ordeal that actually is.

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10 February 2008
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You are such an asset to the body

—on a greeting card to Christine from a church* member who is obviously much more pure of thought than we are.

*From our former church in Tucson, Arizona, USA, not i61.


30 January 2008
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Eight subversions of Christianity

Greg Boyd, my favourite pastor that I don’t know, wrote in his blog earlier this week about a book he read called The Subversion of Christianity by Jacques Ellul.

In his review Greg writes that the church has been subverted by success, money, morality, religion, pragmatism, violence, politics, power.

Every one of these things is realised in the kingdom of God, just not in the way or the timing that we humans necessarily want it to be. That’s what makes us so susceptible to temptation. We are so easily like Abraham with Ishmael, Saul with the pre-battle sacrifice. But we can be like Jesus when satan offered him easy shortcuts to everything God was giving him.

Have a read of Greg’s post, then come back here for a quick look at the good things that are subverted by each of these eight things and what implications they have for a life of following Jesus in our time.

Success God’s dream for the world has always been for the whole world – from Adam (fill the earth) to Abraham (all the nations of the world will be blessed in you) to Jesus (my house shall be a house of prayer for all nations; go into all the world…) to the apostles (God desires all people to be saved). The temptation is to try and make it happen by dumbing down the good news: Say a prayer, buy a T-shirt, you’re in the club. Salvation is transformation and that rarely happens while being swept along in the emotion of a giant crowd. The good news is for the whole world, one real connection with God at a time.

Money The bible talks so much about money. It is full of promises about our needs being met, about us having an abundance. But ‘all these things’ are added as a side-effect of seeking God’s kingdom, and we freely receive so that we may freely give. The temptation is to make the side-effect the goal.

Morality Living a moral life is not the aim. Living a life abandoned to God is the aim. The Kingdom of God is a return to eating from the tree of life. Goodness is a by-product of God’s kind of life. The temptation to base life on ethics and morality looks so good. It is so safe and easy. But it has no power to enable us to live a life that is truly good. The rules are a wall that separate us from really knowing the source of goodness. That brings us neatly to…

Religion Paul writes about people holding on to a form of godliness but denying its power. That’s a good definition of religion. There is this urge in people to be like God. That makes sense; we are made in his image. Religion gives us a set of boxes to tick in order to be like God. It gives us a feeling of accomplishment. Except that it doesn’t in the long run. Religion grows and looks for more and more behaviours to control. Look at God’s original terms of covenant with Israel – three chapters in Exodus. Look at what it turned into by the time Israel got to their land – Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. Religion’s promise of making us like God or pleasing to God is a false one. Jesus said once that the one necessary thing was sitting and being with him. Fact is, it is a lot easier to try and define life with rules.

Pragmatism God has been at work to fix the world ever since sin came into it. We humans have a natural desire to join him in it. The problem is that we stink at fixing the world. The thing that fixes the world is the spread of the kingdom of God. That doesn’t make sense to our natural minds though. What makes sense is: I see a problem; I’ll try to fix it. And then it gets more broken, giving us more to fix and so on, leaving us completely distracted from the real answer. Living and spreading the Kingdom of God causes the world to be fixed without all our clever efforts

Violence See my upcoming post Hooray for violence.

Politics It’s religion, it’s fixing the world, it’s being willing to be bought (even though we’ve already been bought by God for an infinite price), it’s playing by the rules of this world’s system (which guarantees we lose*), it is ultimately a quest for…

Power Jesus says, you shall receive power. Paul writes about God’s power working mightily within us. People want power. It’s one of those built-in things that goes with our God-given mandate to take care of the earth. Once again, the temptation is to try to seize power. But the power that God promises is the power to be his witnesses, the power to lay down our lives for others. It’s funny how unpopular that kind of power is. Nevermind that it is the same power that Jesus had, the only power powerful enough to reach the world, to remove the fear of lack, to make us good like God, to connect us with God, to fix the world, and to defeat evil.

We Christians, if we are willing to let God change our minds about almost everything, could actually be the kind of humans God designed us to be.

—

*for an example of how to win by not playing by the rules, look at David fighting Goliath.


17 January 2008
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Halloween: the Christian's second most important holiday

Easter is, of course, the winner. Without the death and resurrection of Jesus there would be no Christianity. That is important to celebrate.

I am relegating Christmas to the number three spot because it is owned by commerce. Yes, Christmas is a wonderful family holiday. Yes, we Christians celebrate the incarnation of God (even though Jesus never said we should). Yes, I love Christmas. But frankly, we Christians just don’t own it anymore. The shops do.

We don’t own Halloween either, but we could.

I grew up hearing about the evils of Halloween – satan worship, demons, razor blades in apples – not from my parents, but from the Christian culture I lived in. I grew up going to Halloween alternative events, having lots of fun in my bible character costume, knowing that I was safe from all the devil-worshiping psychos that were certain to get me if I dared to risk knocking at the doors of the heathens in my neighbourhood.

Then one year I tried it, and I didn’t die.

As soon as my son was old enough (3) I introduced him to the joys of trick-or-treating. That was when I started realising that Halloween is the second most important holiday for Christians.

Jesus said there are two commands that matter: love God and love your neighbour. The Easter holiday is all about the first command. Halloween is all about the second.

What other day of the year can you put on funny clothes and be welcomed at your neighbour’s house? In my neighbourhood Halloween is the only day of the year that that people actually get out of their houses and chat with the neighbours that they don’t know. It is a night of celebrating community.

In the neighbourhood behind our church they throw a party at the shop and lots of people come out and have a great time. That’s where we went trick-or-treating last year.

On Halloween people let down their guard and come out of their houses. And unlike Christmas, it is not fraught with expectations and busy-ness. So here is my plan of how Christians are going to take over Halloween:

Full disclosure: I will be on holiday over Halloween this year, so for me this is more of a memo for 2008.

1. Ignore the demons and the occultists. (Almost) no one else in your neighbourhood cares in the least about that stuff. They are interested in costumes and sweets. Paul tells us to overcome evil with good, not with huddled prayer meetings in the church basement. If you want a prayer meeting, do it on the 30th. If you want to do some real spiritual warfare, put on some silly clothes and go hang out with your neighbours.

2. Cancel your anti- and alternative events. In the words of Disney’s little mermaid, ‘I want to be where the people are.’ Hint: they live around you in those house-shaped things. Stay home, put some pumpkins in the window, hand out a bunch of sweets (not tracts!) and have a nice chat with all the witches and axe-murderers that come by. Even better, go outside and meet the little ghouls’ parents lurking at the bottom of the drive.

3. Be positive and proactive. Find out in advance where the nervous old people live. Let them know that there will be adults out and about and that you will keep an eye on their house. Have some extra glowsticks to give to kids who need to be more visible. Find good places to hide so you can jump out and scare the trick-or-treaters. If you are feeling really ambitious, have an open house/garden with games and hot chocolate and snacks.

4. Check your motivation. You are doing this because God commands us to love people, not because you are trying to score crowns in heaven by getting converts. People can smell a rat a mile away.

5. Make Halloween the starting place. Probably sometime over the course of the evening you will meet somebody and there will be a bit of a connection. Go with it. Invite them to join you for bonfire night. Have their kid over to play with yours. Give the relationship opportunity to grow. And remember it is about loving people, not converting them. That is the Holy Spirit’s job.

Doesn’t that sound like a lot more fun (and useful) than anything else you could be doing Halloween night?


19 October 2007
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Youth Ministry is broken, but should we fix it?

Youth ministry as it is practiced today (in North America and the UK, at least) is a failed experiment. I’m not the first person to say this. Mike Yaconelli, who was a major youth ministry guru in the USA, said it back in 2003. A lot of other people have been saying it too…

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13 February 2007
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Shout it from the rooftops

Photo: Bailbrook Mission Church, Bailbrook, Bath, © Alasdair Ogilvie

This will get them flocking in on a Sunday.


8 February 2007
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