Category Archives: missional
New Wine Leadership Conference
I am at the above event but cannot currently bring you regular updates here as the wifi is down in the B & B where I am staying. I can do a short post like this from the WordPress app on my phone, but it isn’t suitable for extended typing. Twitter is a good place for keeping up on it. My tweets are here or follow the official conference hashtag #nwlc12
Free Gifts And Happiness
Coca-Cola did this as a publicity stunt, I’m sure. But isn’t it a parable of the Gospel? Isn’t it the kind of thing the church is meant to be doing all the time – lavish, free, unconditional giving to the world?
(Thanks to the weekly email from Share Creative for this.)
A Contradiction In Terms: An Inward-Looking Church
Remembering the old quote attributed to Emil Brunner that ‘the church exists by mission as fire exists by burning’, it is sobering to read ‘10 Warning Signs Of An Inwardly Obsessed Church‘ by Thom Rainer. Some of Dr Rainer’s ten signs sound not only familiar but widespread to me.
What do you think of his list? Would you add any? Would you challenge any?
Whatever you think, the tenor of the article underlines even more for me the importance of churches being mission-focussed. (By which, I don’t simply mean, ‘raising funds for others to do mission’.) Stuff about the priority of worship often deteriorates into narcissistic arguments about personal taste and aesthetics. I agree that ‘mission exists because worship doesn’t', but that is all the more reason to have mission-minded churches.
I’m reminded of the words of Ian Brown, former lead vocalist of the Stone Roses, who talked about his own spiritual quest in an interview in Q Magazine in November 2007:
My spiritual quest is for me to understand God. I’ve gotta educate myself, cos the church isn’t going to show me God. They put themselves next to God so that you’ve got to go through them to get to God. I don’t believe that.
It’s time we stopped getting in the way and being part of the solution for people like Brown.
Giving Up On Church
When one of my church members gives up a church job because they are called to be a witness in the world through their work, I am not worried about filling their job, I am delighted. Shane Claiborne explains more:
Ash Wednesday: Would You Like Tacos To Go With Your Ashes?
USA Today reports on an initiative called ‘Ashes To Go‘ in which Episcopalian priests are today offering the traditional Ash Wednesday imposition of ashes out on the streets for people in a rush, the same clientele who grab breakfast to go in their daily beat-the-clock dash to work. (According to the article, Roman Catholics officially disapprove, since it should take place within a proper church service of repentance.)
According to the Ashes To Go site,
“Ashes to Go” is about bringing spirit, belief, and belonging out from behind church doors, and into the places where we go every day. It’s a simple event with deep meaning, drawing on centuries of tradition and worship to provide a contemporary moment of grace.
I have found an ashing service powerful in the past, but I’d never thought of taking it to the streets. Specifically, I have noticed that it has not been the ‘traditional’ Methodists who have appreciated ashing, but the more charismatic Methodists. This may seem surprising that such a liturgical act might appeal to those who are regarded as being ambivalent to overt form and structure, but I think the connection is found in the sensory experience.
For me, to receive the imposition of ashes and then to share it with others is moving to the point of being emotionally troubling. That is not a criticism, as I hope you will see as I explain. I deal in the currency of death through ministry, offering comfort to the bereaved and celebrating lives well lived. That makes the connection graphic, especially last week when twice I buried the ashes of someone whose funeral I had taken a few weeks previously. As I watched the crematorium attendant release the lever on the urn and witnessed the ashes pouring down into an empty cube of soil, I wondered what the grieving families were thinking. Were these ashes really a beloved husband or father? What will I think when it is the cremated body of one of my parents?
Not only that, five years ago I had a cancer scare. It was a false alarm. A routine medical found blood in my urine, and I was referred urgently for urology tests. Nothing sinister was discovered. The doctors assumed I had either had an infection or was under stress. (I think it was the latter.) Ever since that episode, my inflamed imagination has wrongly interpreted every bump as a carcinogenic intruder. Silly, I know, but true. I live thinking almost daily of death, and whether I am ready to meet Christ. In moments of spiritual fever, I think more about my sins than God’s grace.
All of which brings me to an excellent editorial in today’s Guardian. It tracks changing attitudes to death in connection with Ash Wednesday. To quote a chunk of it:
These days, if we are asked how we want to die, we generally say that we want it to happen quickly, painlessly and preferably in our sleep. In other words, we don’t want dying to become something we experience as a part of life. This would have made little sense to generations past. For centuries, what was feared most was “dying unprepared”. Death was an opportunity to put things right. To say the things that had been left unsaid: “Sorry”, “I was wrong”, “I always loved you”. We used to die surrounded by our extended family. Now we die surrounded by technology, with a belief in medical science often replacing the traditional puzzle of human existence.
Ash Wednesday inculcates that idea of being prepared for death. The putting right of relationships, the readiness to meet our Maker, and so on. And if that’s the case, then maybe there is a missional application for the imposition of ashes. Perhaps those Episcopalian priests in the States today are doing something significant. When someone asks the ultimate questions about life, death and meaning, it’s not surprising when God comes into the thinking. Ministers will identify that at the other end of life’s spectrum when a couple have their first baby. Facing death in all its reality rather than the saccharine illusion so regularly trumpeted today could well mean a gospel encounter. I am sure earlier generations understood that better than we do, where death is on the NHS.
Yes, dust we are and to dust we shall return. But one day our mortal bodies will be reanimated by the Holy Spirit in resurrection.
HT for video and USA Today story: Bob Carlton on Facebook.)
Uncle William The Missionary
One autumn Sunday in 1983, a Chinese student turned up at my home church in London. He’d come over from Hong Kong to study civil engineering at a nearby institution. Rather than go to the Chinese Church in London, he chose to find a local group of native Christians with whom to worship for the three years of his studies here.
That was how we met William. Or ‘Uncle William’, as he became known to us.
He got that name on one of the many days he came back to our parents’ house for Sunday lunch. My sister and I told him how when we were children, we addressed our parents’ friends as ‘Uncle’ or ‘Auntie’. “Well,” said William, “I am your parents’ friend, too. You should call me Uncle William.” So we did, even though he was younger than me.
Over those three years we had great fun. We tried to convince him of the existence of the Wombles, an endangered species on Wimbledon Common, but he didn’t fall for it. When he travelled with us to attend Spring Harvest in Prestatyn, we told him he would need his passport for the Welsh border. It didn’t work.
But when we told him about the male and female haggis animals on the Scottish mountains, we got away with it. We span the old yarn that the males have shorter legs on one side of their bodies and the females have shorter legs on the other side. Thus they have to go opposite ways around the mountains in order to meet and mate. If they go past each other, it means another circuit.
William thought this was nonsense, and announced that he was going to visit a relative of ours who would confirm his suspicions. The moment he went out of the door, we rang her, knowing she had the gift of the straight face …
I have only seen William once since those days. It was ten years ago, when he paid a visit to London with his bride, Vicky. My sister hasn’t seen him at all since 1986, I think.
Today, we saw him again. He was in London for a short break and came down to see us. He hasn’t changed. He looks just as young, he still has the humour and it truly was one of those occasions where it felt like we were picking up only from last week, not years ago.
It struck me tonight that William’s example of worshipping with the locals rather than simply with his own fellow ex-pats was a model for all who seek to share in the mission of God. Get involved in the local culture. Don’t stay in the compound. Don’t huddle in the comfort zone. William didn’t.
William, the title of this piece of music is for you today:
What Is The Gospel?
Scot McKnight is worried:
He’s not the only one. I’m currently reading Michael Frost‘s book ‘The Road To Missional‘, in which he builds on the work of N T Wright and the late David Bosch to say that mission is alerting the world in announcement and demonstration to the fact that Jesus is King.
What they all seem to be getting at is that we have reduced the gospel to easy-believism. ‘Just accept Christ as Lord and Saviour.’ ‘Repent and believe.’ Well, yes, except the emphases on ‘Lord’ and ‘repent’ often fail to connect with Jesus’ frequent command in the Gospels to follow him. Indeed, these approaches are often embarrassed by the Gospels, drawing purely on a certain reading of Paul and only concentrating on the death of Christ, plus perhaps his birth to prove he was divine. The bits in between seem irrelevant to this approach.
How, then, should we summarise the Gospel? How would you summarise the Gospel? Indeed, can we summarise the Gospel briefly?
The Long, Slow Lingering Death Of Eastman Kodak
On a day when Eastman Kodak has filed for bankruptcy protection from its creditors, this seems like a poignant (if rather obvious) song:
Like Paul Simon, ‘I got a Nikon camera.’ But it doesn’t shoot Kodachrome. It’s digital.
I used to have a 35 mm Canon camera. Sometimes I shot Kodachrome, especially when I visited the Holy Land in 1989. I got through twenty-nine rolls of Kodachrome 25. The slow ISO was fine in the bright heat, and its pale to neutral colour bias was right for a dusty land. Back in the UK, I used to prefer the bold, green colours of Fuji Velvia, though.
But not any more. It’s SD cards and Adobe Photoshop Elements for me now.
Kodak was slow to adapt to the culture. It was there at the invention of digital photography, but they refused to bring out what would have been the first digital camera, for fear of damaging their income from roll film. Rather like the church not wanting to offend longstanding worshippers by finding new ways of reaching out to the unchurched, Kodak held back – and is now withering on the vine. The parallels are disturbing.
Today’s news reminds me of a story I read in the newsletter of the (ironically now defunct) organisation MARC in December 1990. On page 3 of that issue, Bryant Myers told this story:
There is a story of a company that manufactured drill bits for over forty years. It had been very successful, but the industry was maturing and profit margins were getting thin.
The son of the founder attended his first senior staff meeting after his father died.
“What business are we in?” he asked the older men, who had served alongside his father for many years.
“We make drill bits!” came the exasperated answer. “Our customers need drill bits.”
“No. Our customers need holes,” the young man quietly replied. Today the company is again successful. In addition to drill bits, it manufactures lasers that make very precise holes.
Kodak’s business was not film but images. We might not want to talk about the church’s business, because economic and consumerist metaphors can be dangerous for us. But we do need to ensure that we are concentrating on our core Gospel calling in a way that can speak to people today, and that almost certainly won’t be in the way it spoke to some of our senior remaining generations.
Tom Wright On Mission And Eschatology
From today’s latest Hope Together email, Bishop Tom Wright on mission and theology:
“We talk in our day about ‘mission-shaped Church’. But mission has to be shaped by what in the trade we call eschatology. In other words, what you believe about what God has promised to do eventually, must shape the way you do mission.”
Similar thoughts to follow in this weekend’s sermon.
