Another photo of St. Andrew's

City of churches
Originally uploaded by Handles

And the future of the Church is where?

A few blogs ago I mentioned a conversation with a person from a newly constructed church building and the kind of ‘attractional’ and ‘consumerist’ mentality this person had with respect to the future of the congregation that is there, and is hoped to come there.

Again I came into contact with the same person who now spoke to me of the ministry they were hoping to develop for ‘young people’ and the kind of enticements, things and persons, that are envisaged being used to bring about the attendance of that particular constituency. Now I’m not against attracting young people! I try all kinds of things to make worship & the life of the congregation where I serve address the yearnings, spiritual and otherwise, of young people. (We use Hillsong material and have a data projector to show slides, movies, etc.!) However when this persons spoke to me the language was peppered with “iPod”, band, singing group, movies, internet, coffee and so on. I found myself bombarded once again by that ubiquitous cultural mix of ideas, sounds, words, images that is a streaming torrent of all the advertising for that which is subsumed under the rubric of “emerging church”. The growing culture of narcissism that we are growing for our young in the church. It made me go back to George Orwell and his novel 1984. At one point near the end of novel the protagonist, Winston, is being tortured and Big Brother is reminding Winston that he’s old, part of the past and holding back the future that the young are open to with its myriad of the ‘new’. As hope flees from him Winston also sees fleeing his belief that the future lay in the young. Traditionally they have been seen as the symbol of hope. But Winston notes that they have already been indoctrinated and have sold out to a phenomenon that has been called Cultural Attention Deficit Disorder: the need to be constantly entertained, visually, mentally, aurally and orally. There is no future with the young who live in a muddied environment where distinctions between fact, fiction and advertising are not known.

So, if it is argued by others that we need to stop and realize that our needs are simple, materially and spiritually, then we might uncover, as Winston sought to do, that love and companionship is where we need to be.

Rather than this mad rush to ‘live for the now’, maybe the ‘now’ is what we really need, where, as I’ve said in my message on http://glenelg.unitingchurch.org.au that giving and receiving expressions of pure love, old and young, make us who we are as children of a loving God.

Roland Allen writing in 1927

Forwarded to me.

Writing in 1927 he said….

The spontaneous expansion of the Church reduced to its element is a very simple thing. It asks for no elaborate organisation, no large finances, no great numbers of paid missionaries. In its beginning it may be the work of one man, and that a man neither learned in the things of this world, nor rich in the wealth of this world.

The organisation of a little church on the apostolic model is also extremely simple, and the most illiterate converts can use it, and the poorest are sufficiently wealthy to maintain it. Only as it grows and spreads through large provinces and countries do any complex questions arise, and they arise only as a church composed of many little churches is able to produce leaders prepared to handle them by experience learned in the smaller things. There is no need at the beginning to talk of preparing leaders to face great national issues. By the time the issues have become great and complex the leaders of the little churches of today will have learned their lesson, as they cannot possibly be taught it beforehand.

No one, then, who feels within himself the call of Christ to embark on such a path as this need say, I am too ignorant, I am too inexperienced, I have too little influence, or I have not sufficient resources. The first apostles of Christ were in the eyes of the world ‘unlearned and ignorant’ men: it was not until the Church had endured a persecution and had grown largely in numbers that Christ called a learned man to be His apostle. The missionaries who spread the Gospel and established the Church throughout the lands round the Mediterranean are not known to us as men of great learning or ability. Most of them are not known by name at all. Only when the Church had been established and had spread widely did Christ call the great doctors whose names are familiar to us by their writings or by their great powers of organisation and government.
What is necessary is faith. What is needed is the kind of faith which uniting a man to Christ, sets him on fire. Such a man can believe that others finding Christ will be set on fire also. Such a man can see there is no need of money to fill a continent with the knowledge of Christ. Such a man can see that all that is required to consolidate and establish that expansion is the simple application of the simple organisation of the Church. It is to men who know that faith, who see that vision, that I appeal. Let them judge what I have written.

Roland Allen, The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church, 150.

Mission of church in an emerging society

In his book “Mandate to Difference” Walter Brueggmann uses Isaiah 56 as a basis for thinking about the mission of the church in emerging society. I’d like to summarize the 5 points he makes about the text.

1. The EXILE as the true character and venue of our humanness is an alternative to the dominant imagination that we live in a centred, coherent, world in which we can establish security on our own terms. The claim of success and security, so powerful among us causes us not to notice the cast out and often not to acknowledge our own displacement or anxiety about coming displacement.
2. OPENNESS TO FOREIGNERS, that is, to welcome others who are not like us is a radical alternative to the ideology of conformity tht takes those not like ourselves to be dangerous and unacceptable deviants.
3. The MEMORY OF THE EXODUS that leads to neighbourly generosity is the primary work of a covenantal society. The memory in practice issues in a subordination of the economy to the social fabric with focal attention to the marginalised who are without social access, social power or social advocacy. The covenant is an assertion of interdependence and an institution of mutuality tht flies in the face of acquisitiveness tht regards everyone else as a competitor for the same commodity or as a threat to myself-securing.
4. The VISIBLE PRACTICE OF SABBATH REST that disengages from the pursuit of commodity is an insistent assertion about the nature of being human. The paue for receptivity of holy gifts that are inscrutably given is a break in the rigor of production and consumption.
5. The PRACTICE OF PRAYER that binds us in love to God and to neighbour beyond our small claim is the resolve to live life on terms other than our own. This is against conventional tribalism that teaches us to yield is to lose.

Keeping the Sabbath

Happy is the mortal who does this,
the one who holds it fast,
who keeps the sabbath, not profaning it,
and refrains from doing any evil. (Isaiah 56:2)

The reason that Sabbath is a radical discipline is that it is a regular, disciplined, highly visible withdrawal from the acquisitive society of production and consumption that is shaped by commodity. Work stoppage and rest are public statements that one's existence and eh existence of one's society are not defined by the pursuit of commodity but precisely by the intentional refusal of commodity.
(Walter Brueggmann Mandate to Difference p59)

Evangelistic attractional model - a query.

Was sent this from Alan Hirsch's blog by my USA friend.

The Christendom template tends to bolt down missional impulse by substituting it with an attractional one. So while the local church does genuinely do forms of evangelism and outreach, because it measures effectiveness through numerical growth, better programming, and increase of plant and resources, it requires the attractional impulse to support it. The exchange is subtle but profound and the net effect is to unwittingly block the outward bound movement that is built-in to the gospel. Instead of being sown to the wind, the seeds are put into ecclesial storehouses thus effectively extinguishing the purpose they were made for. And because of this, it quite simply can never hope to impact the broader culture as Jesus movements are able to. This is an attempt to try portray the evangelistic attractional mode….

A is for adaptive change

A is for adaptive change.
A survey of 200 university students noted that "When I graduate I will probably have a job that does not exist today" in a world in which "I did not create the problems but they are my problems." This is adaptive change, the awareness that the skills and habits and training of today are of little help in the world of tomorrow. Missional conversation wants to wrestle with this context of adaptive change.