Mission in Action

Just finished the first section of Tim’s new book on living the cross and resurrection – The Ordinary Hero.  It’s been an encouraging read so far and the style is accessible.  What I have particularly liked about it is how it has unpacked the early chapters of the book of Romans in applying the cross and its work to our lives.

It is a timely book in that it is probably swimming against the flow of books that are coming out at the moment that call us to discipleship by pointing us to the life of Jesus.  Now that is not a bad thing in and of itself but as Tim notes:

Perhaps rather surprisingly, when the New Testament writers tell us how we should live, they don’t often point back to the life of Jesus. Instead again and again they take us to the cross and resurrection.  Whether they are talking about marriage or conflict or community or money or opposition or leadership or temptation or work or suffering, they look to the cross and resurrection.  So if you want to know how to live as a Christian, you need to understand how the cross and resurrection shape our lives.  That pattern of the cross and resurrection needs to become our reflex, our habit, our instinct. We need to live the cross and resurrection.

There is something refreshing about that approach, because it is possible to have a Jesus to imitate without either of these two things, and it is clear from Scripture that they are indispensible.  Before we can imitate Jesus we must be included in him courtesy of these two seismic events (or are they one event with two parts?).

Will keep you posted.

written by Steve

The paper I am writing, The Little Church That Could, is proving inspiring – to me at least.   One of the things that I am interested in is the manner in which the mundane is treated with disdain in our culture.  By the mundane I mean everyday life – the way we just get on with it.  The advertising world tells us that mundane is a hell from which their product can lift us, before setting us down ever so gently in the land of hyper-reality where it is all toothsome smiles and pertness.

When a  large majority of college students surveyed in the US believe that they are above average then something has gone awry.  Average these days is below average!

In an effort to garner enough interest in this noise-filled world churches often resort to demonstrating how non-mundane/average they are. Check out  the glowing people on the webpages of so many churches.  Mundane and average don’t get site hits.  Not that I don’t think it is amazing and exciting to be a follower of Jesus (along with difficult, contrary etc) however, why don’t we just refuse to play the hyper-reality game and instead infuse the mundane with the gospel?   For me that is the guts of what missional church is all about.

Tim Chester has a good post over on his blog about this issue as it relates to what a gospel community looks like.  Check it out here.

written by Steve

The Local: Ellenbrook officially became part of our wider The Local network this morning.  I enjoyed waffles and coffee before doing Bible Teaching and a Q and A session with them.  It was a real encouragement.  Their hearts are for their community, they have prayed about it, talked it through and are ready to go.  They are looking forward to seeing God working in the “averageness” of life in the street.  The Ellenbrook crew all live close to each other and have spent quite some time already doing life together.  Now they are committing to doing church life together with gospel intentionality.  They’d appreciate your prayers.

written by Steve

The Local: Ellenbrook  officially comes on board as a TCH church plant this Sunday.  Having spent some time with their main leader, Dave, and having met part of their core group, I get to do some introductions and Bible teaching (along with breakfast) with them this Sunday morning.  It’s an exciting time.  Dave, the young leader, has taken his group through some Big Picture stuff about the Bible and they have read through Total Church together.

The group had initially been a small church plant in what is a new and growing suburb about fifteen minutes drive from us.  It’s one of those housing developments that has literally sprung up in the last eight or so years and now has around 17, 000 residents, with long term plans for 80, 000.  It also has the highest percentage of 0-8 year olds of any suburban area in Perth.  So, young families, new mortgages, fresh starts, they’re all the reasons for being in Ellenbrook.  Coincidentally I’ve done some work in the area for my old job and the Shire Community Coordinator there is a fine Christian lady who has a real heart for the welfare of the suburb.  I’ve told her about the group, so she says she will look out for them.

As a traditional model of church the group was foundering somewhat because it was competing with a number of other churches that filled the gap in Ellenbrook that were more “happening” than they.  People would rock up to their meeting in the hall and would see few people and not a big kids’ ministry, and that was it.  However they did start to see some non-Christians coming into their lives, in fact Dave and his wife Heidi have the gift of hospitality in their street, and their neighbours are starting to see their place as a drop-in zone. The fact that the houses are a lot closer to together than in other more established Perth suburbs gives it more of an urban feel to it also.  A household model of missional church seemed to fit their strengths more and more. Having met with Dave for the last few months to talk about the shift to a household model I suggested that perhaps there were enough churches in the suburb to cater for the Christians and that Ellenbrook could probably do with an “open set” style of church in which non-Christians might be able to see Christian community lived out.  On the back of that, Dave is committed to helping people understand the Bible, and there are actually a few people he has met who have expressed a desire to know what the Bible is about.

Of course the key is that the people in the group have been fired up by God’s big plan of salvation, and their own need to be missionaries in Perth’s newest slice of secular society.  They are under no illusions about the task ahead, or perhaps they are, but are willing to have those illusions shattered along the way!

So from this Sunday we are two partnered congregations who will begin the process of networking with each other from time to time.  We didn’t plant out because we grew by conversions (which is my strong hope down the line), however it is a real opportunity to do mission together in our part of the suburban sprawl that is Perth.

I’ll have some pix on Sunday.

written by Steve

So label me a crusty old conservative (and no doubt some of you will), but I have to say I’m disappointed with the new Baptist Ministries Australia logo. Now don’t get me wrong, change was needed.  In fact I signed up on Facebook for a group calling for change. The old logo had a touch of “That 70s Show” about it, and reminded me of Mrs Hislop’s rock cakes at the after church lunch back in the days when Mum and Dad thought silver flock wallpaper made a strong fashion statement (which it did – Ed).

But for the new logo and the new statement accompanying it to not even mention the cross is a gut wrencher.  I know it’s got stuff about gospel and Trinity, and I like the social justice aspect of it, but surely all of that comes out of the cross?  No doubt I’ll get the “it goes without saying” line, but if there’s one thing that doesn’t go without saying it’s the cross.  You ask theologians as diverse as Moltmann, Carson or NT Wright what the guts of our message is and they’d tell you about the crucified Messiah of Israel who turns out to be King of the World.  The cross not only gives power to our faith, but is the only thing that makes sense of the justice, love, mercy and humility that the new statement mentions.

Just as importantly, the cross steers us clear of the legalism that we are always in danger of succumbing too.  If there is one thing that fundamentalism and liberalism have in common (and there is more than one) it is a self-affirming works based righteousness that is alien to the cross: Both compile a list of sinners and saints and find themselves firmly placed in the latter camp.  The cross does away with this delusion, instead imbuing us with a profound sense of the grace of God in the Lord Jesus Christ that offers us a righteousness that is not our own.   Only a community fully aware of the cross can  by the power of the Spirit, live the self-sacrificial, other-person-centred lives most extravagantly displayed by Jesus and his death in our place.

The old logo had this to say about its design:

The circle represents the all-encompassing love of God and the world for which Christ died; the empty cross pointing to our resurrected Saviour and the significance of his death and resurrection for our life;and the open Bible to indicate that we are people of the Word.

At least the new statement reaffirms our commitment to Scripture, so let’s use the Scriptures as the grounds for appealing to the continuing centrality of the cross.

MIA Rating: Three noughts and no crosses gets one and a half donuts. Some sweet and timely sentiments, but hollow in the middle.

written by Steve

I’m frantically trying to finish a book chapter to present at  Beyond 400: An Exploration of Baptist Futures. It’s a conference at the Vose Seminary here in Perth in a few weeks time, celebrating 400 years of the Baptist movement. Nigel Wright from Spurgeon’s College is the guest speaker, and there will, no doubt, be a diverse range of views about the best way forward for Baptists at the start of the 21st century.

My chapter – The Little Church That Could – is, not surprisingly, an appeal to consider deliberately small church as an integral part of what any Baptist future might look like here in Australia. However it is taking a more nuanced approach than simply saying do church small.  Rather than isolated individual congregations, the approach is more a series of networks that comprise local households.  The leaders of each congregation in the network work and plan together, but the bulk of church life; mission, communion, Bible teaching, church discipline, baptism, is carried out at the local level, deliberately aiming at living life under the radar, each congregation embedding itself in its community and looking for ways to do low key Christian life and witness together.  There is a strength in having a wider network, indeed it can lead to larger gatherings for specific purposes, and it allows a corporate strength for some training/missional activities.

The term “under the radar” is deliberate, and I suspect, not where some people might see the future for Baptist churches.  In the move to grow healthy churches, church growth is seen as desirable.  There is a concerted push to put churches on the radar, bulking up their influence and attractional capabilities.  Whilst I have no particular beef with this aim, I believe it is does not take seriously enough just how off the radar church is in Australia, no matter what we do.  I once attended a leadership meeting hosted by one of the biggest churches here in Perth and the visiting speaker made the following statement: “I’ve had heart troubles. I wonder what it would say in your newspapers tomorrow if I dropped dead on stage.” I wrote down “Headline in The West Australian, Page 12: Person You’ve Never Heard of Dies in Place You’ve Never Been To”.  If they even bothered to write it up.  Like it or not that is the reality. Even for a church of the size and influence of the one we were sitting in at the time Christians are not on the radar of 95 per cent of the population.  The worrisome aspect of that fact is not that we aren’t on the radar, but that leaders such as the one who made that statement don’t seem to be aware that we are not.  Doing big church has an internal plausibility structure to it that blinds its adherents to the fact that no one outside is walking past saying “If I never go to church, that’s the one I’m never going to.”

My concern as such isn’t for the future of these big churches – they will chug along just fine. Rather it is for the myriad smaller churches that are told by church growth spokesmen that if a little church is an orange and a big church is an apple, the trick is to behave like an apple whilst you are still an orange.  The idea here being that if you start to do all the “look big”  stuff then actual big will follow and you will have made the leap to big church nirvana and all the influence, pulling power and “on the radar” benefits that brings.

The orange/apple line doesn’t work on at least two fronts. The first is burn-out.  The end result of orange to apple is less likely to be an apple sized church and more likely to be stewed apples.  The primary problem for the average Christian family is busyness.  Middle Australia is time-poor, over-scheduled and running on emotional fumes.  Orange to apple church requires huge reserves of the one thing we don’t seem to be able to make for ourselves  - time.

But secondly, and this works at a deeper substructural level, the attempt to put church “on the radar”  ignores the fact that for most of their lives the vast majority of Australians live their lives under the radar. The advertising industry does its best to present hyper-reality as the norm, lulling us to believe that other people (who buy their products) are living  intense, pleasurable, highly intentional technicoloured lives, and you too could be living that way, if you sign up now.  Run-of-the-mill life doesn’t get much of a look in in Ad-land.

It doesn’t take much to see how this has influenced church.  Check out the pictures on the web pages of some of the apple sized churches if you want proof: intensity and liminality are often the order of the day.  But they are not the order of the day for the average suburbanite; average is.  If the community of God’s people is in any way going to engage with the vast majority of Australians, then the bulk of the work will have to be done under the radar.  As Steve Timmis is wont to say “Little bits of gospel light will have to seep into the nooks and crannies of the city (or suburb) and dispel the darkness that the light on the hill sweeps over.” If that is to happen then the future of the baptist movement must include myriad intentionally little churches flying under the radar and quite happy to remain as oranges.

There you have it. Now to flesh it all out into about five and a half thousand words.

written by Steve

Went for a walk this afternoon to mull over the middle part of my sermon on John 10.  The waterfall in the National Park was going gangbusters. It’s just a pity that after 150 mm of rain in the past few weeks my preaching this weekend didn’t coincide with John 4 or John 7.

In five months time this will be a trickle, in eight months it will be tiny rancid pools filled with algae.  Makes you wonder how Elijah felt watching his only water supply, the brook Cherith, dry up before his eyes as he hid from King Ahab.

written by Steve

My friends of former work colleagues at my farewell from Swan Alliance

18 months at my place of employment, Swan Alliance, ended two weeks ago and it was sad to leave.  Having signed up to the job not long after we got back from England – I was offered the job the day after Declan was born – it has been a big part of me recently.  It was certainly God’s provision at the time, and I have picked up a whole bunch of skills from the role, skills that I will be able to use in my church planting role.

The friendships I made were great and will be lasting.  The team was very tight and worked hard at helping each other.  There were genuine tears (mine were anyway!) when I left, and it does feel like I have finished something that was quite significant in my life.

I am looking forward to the six months preaching at Parkerville Baptist Church (did my first sermon on Sunday night), although it is a readjustment to having discretionary time again in which to do my work.  I will do some pre-sermon work off and on during the week then get the sermon done in about eight hours or so on a Thursday. At least that’s how i hope it happens.

written by Steve

We went through the fourth Crowded House value in depth at our Wednesday gathering tonight, focusing on the commitment to not let conflict go unresolved.  Oh how easy that is to do in church. But how important it is to resolve it in godly and biblical ways.

I found a stunning book on conflict and Christians called “A Culture of Peace: God’s vision for the Church” by three Mennonites, a couple from the US and an Indonesian pastor.   It is a challenging and enlightening book, and the chapter “Peace Inside the Church” is the best thing I have read on the issue.  The exposition of the conflict passage in Matthew 18 is brilliant as this segment illustrates:

Christians have the tendency in church to use niceness as a means of conflict avoidance, and assume in doing so that avoidance will keep the peace.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The book goes on to say:

…where conflict is not acknowledged, where people fear conflict or think it is wrong, the whole situation will get very unhealthy.  The results will be thoroughly unpleasant: anger, depression, explosions, broken relationships, people damaged and alienated from the church.  How often this has been the case!  Christian churches have tried to avoid conflict; they have done everything they can to “keep the peace” as long as possible.  But the result has been explosions of anger and hostility, leading to broken relationships and the splitting of churches and conferences.

The proper resolution of conflict is going to be crucial for The Local, and I am committed to this being part of the culture creation of our group.  I must say I was really encouraged by the ensuing conversation.  Now to see how it will work out in practice somewhere down the line….

written by Steve

I took Declan for a walk in the John Forrest National Park this morning – his first trip into the park, despite the fact we live 2 minutes drive from the entrance.  Hot, dry weather doesn’t make an Australian national park much fun for a toddler, but now in winter with the rains making the streams flow, and Declan in exploration mode, it was time.

Well of course I made the mistake of stopping at the first big puddle and throwing a stone into it, and before you know it Declan would not budge.  Every stone, piece of gravel (and occasional handful of dirt) had to be thrown into that patch of water.  Mountain bikers zipped past;  families out for a bracing walk in a winter breeze; just-teen kids trying to impress each other – all swagger and laugh.  And all the time Declan was tossing stones into a puddle.  It was the same with the next puddle – when we managed to move on twenty metres or so. And the next. And the next.  We only got a few hundred metres along the trail before the weather turned and it was back to the car, Declan covered in dirt, water, and the contented look of a job well done.

I’d had other ideas.  I’d wanted to walk with him to see the breath-taking view down the valley where  boulders litter the sides of the hills like huge brown eggs nestled in now-green straw.   And the old Victorian railway tunnel – bored through the solid rock and lined with 400,000 bricks . The tunnel is 500 metres long and pitch black as you walk through it, save for the sharp point of light at the other end that diffuses the closer you get to it. A metaphor for our lives perhaps?

But for Declan it was pebbles and puddles – his concentrated “uh-oh” at every splash echoing the first casual one I threw out along with the stone.   And as we went through the motions (for me, not him) I was reminded again of  that beautiful image GK Chesterton has of God causing the sun to rise every morning for millenia.  Why does it do so? Because God is so much younger than we – and with a childlike wonder he utters a delighted “Do it again!”

This thought has been on my mind all week as our group explores what it means to be a Spirit-filled community.  What does it mean to walk in step with the Spirit in the way Galatians talks about?  Are we looking for the spectacular? Grand vistas and impressive creations?  There’s nothing wrong with wanting the “wow” factor, and certainly nothing wrong with asking for it.  However what about a God who takes pleasure in tossing stones into puddles?  What about the mundane “do it again” stuff?  Praying for a friend who is troubled and who has a strong impression of God’s peace at the end of it.  The ladies from The Local going out for dinner with two friends who do not know Jesus.  The ensuing conversation those two women have with Jill on the drive home about the sense of community and kindness they feel from the group.  Personally, I relish hearing these stories: They assure me.  God’s Spirit is one day going to fill the earth as the waters cover the sea, but even now he is filling the nooks and crannies, the dips and hollows, the dried out creek beds, all in anticipation of that glorious day.

written by Steve