I’m doing something slightly different tomorrow: I’m splicing up the sermon with two DVD clips from Fresh Expressions: the first, from their DVD 1, is of ‘Messy Church’, and the second, from DVD 2, is from the chapter on rural mission about ‘The Gathering’ in the Whitby Methodist Circuit. We’re then showing as much of DVD 1 as we can get through while people have coffee after the service. Then folk are invited to a ploughman’s lunch, where we hope they will discuss what they see at their tables, and record their thoughts (anonymously, if so desired) on small wipeable whiteboards.

John 1:1-18

Introduction
Sunday 22^nd July: can I be the first this year to wish you a very
Happy Christmas?

You probably think I’ve finally lost it – if indeed I ever
had ‘it’. Did you wonder why we heard a ‘Christmas’ Bible reading – the first
eighteen verses of John chapter one? What has that to do with a morning when I
shall give over two quarters of the sermon to DVD clips from Fresh Expressions about new ways
of mission and church with children and families? Wouldn’t it have made more
sense if we had read Jesus’ words about letting the children come to him?

Well, it might have done – but some words in that famous
Prologue to John’s Gospel are central to the different way of doing mission and
church that I have been emphasising ever since coming here. You can find it
distilled in verse 14:

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have
seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

The Word became flesh and lived among us. Here are two other
ways of translating it. More literally, it is, ‘The Word became flesh and
pitched his tent among us.’ Or Eugene
Peterson paraphrases it, ‘The Word became flesh and blood and moved into
the neighbourhood.’ Simply put, I believe those words do two things: they
change our focus, and they change our order of priorities. We’ll briefly
consider the change of focus first, and then see the first DVD clip; then we’ll
think about the changing of our order of priorities, and then see the second
DVD clip.

1. Change Of Focus
The change of focus is from ‘come’ to ‘go.’ We have assumed that mission is
about getting people to come to us. But Jesus didn’t do that: ‘the Word became
flesh and lived among us.’ He moved into the neighbourhood. Relying on a ‘come
to us’ approach to mission brings fewer and fewer people into the orbit of
God’s love. In a passage where he explains that eighty per cent of people find
faith in Christ through friendship with Christians, Jeff Lucas summarises the futility of the
‘come to us’ approach to mission this way:

It’s like a fisherman spreading his expensive net on the side
of the riverbank, and then inviting the fish to jump out of the water and get
caught.
(Gideon:
Power From Weakness, p61)

Yet we persist in getting out our ever-more-fancy fishing
nets every week. Yet not only did Jesus himself model a mission based on
‘going’, he told his disciples to model their involvement in mission on his:
‘As the Father sent me, so I send you’ (John 20:21). Mission involves being
part of the community, researching its culture and needs, and then finding appropriate
ways of sharing the Good News in word and deed.

So, although Christian mission will occasionally involve the
use of a church building (as it does in the two clips we’re going to see) it
mostly happens away from our gathering place. Mission is not about bringing
people into the increasingly unfamiliar culture of the church and expecting
them to fit our shape: it’s about being in the world, finding the points where
the Gospel makes contact and the points where it challenges. You’ll see a lot
of examples in the clips we’re going to run over coffee between the end of the
service and our lunch together, but for now let’s see our first clip.

2. Changing The Order
Of Our Priorities
Put these three words in order of priority: Jesus, church and mission. It’s a
fair bet that most of us would put them in that order: Jesus first, then
church, and finally mission. But it’s not the way it happens in John’s Gospel,
or in the New Testament generally.

Everything begins with Jesus. Christianity is centred on a
personal and shared knowledge and experience of Jesus Christ and his saving
love. If we don’t start with Jesus, we’re in trouble. Those who might put
‘church’ first tend to be devoted to the institution and its rituals, not to
its Founder. Without making the connection with Jesus personal, there is no
Christian faith. It all starts with him, as it does here: ‘the Word became
flesh.’

But ‘church’ doesn’t come second. ‘The Word became flesh and
lived among us.’ ‘Mission’ comes next. The result of Jesus coming was mission.
He brought God’s love into the world. Anyway, you can’t have church if mission,
hasn’t happened, where people find the God’s love for themselves.

‘Church’ comes third. It is the fruit and consequence of
mission. When we place church ahead of mission we just end up with church as a
therapeutic community where the important thing is for me to have my needs met
(see Mike
McNichols  and Brother Maynard).
In such places, mission becomes the preserve of the enthusiastic few, and not
central to the life of the church. When we focus on church, we don’t usually
manage to build community; often, we destroy it. When we focus on mission, we
gather together as a group and end up functioning as the community we were
always meant to be. (See Michael
Frost, Exiles,
for further on this.)

So the community of the church arises both as the fruit of mission – people are gathered
together under the reign of God – and the passion
of mission – a shared commitment to mission draws people together into deep
Christian community.

So we need to reorder our priorities. Our priorities cannot
be about the building. Nor can they be about so filling up people’s diaries
with meetings that they can spend little meaningful time in the community. Our
church priorities are simple: gathering for worship, a small group where we
challenge one another to grow in discipleship, and only as much other business
as is absolutely necessary.

In fact, that small group might most profitably be people
who come together to work on mission – sharing God’s love in word and deed with
those yet to find that love. Within that you find the fellowship to sustain you
in Bible study, discipleship and mutual pastoral care.

You’re probably bored with me talking about it, but my best
experience of this was when I was involved in my first appointment with
ecumenical youth worship and outreach. As a team we met in three different
configurations, each with slightly different memberships. We were a group that
met to pray and strategise for this ministry. We were a fortnightly home group,
where we studied the Bible and supported one another. And we hung out as a
bunch of friends on Friday nights, with pizzas, videos and some non-Methodist
liquids. The mission energised everything else.

But enough from me: time for our second DVD clip.

Technorati Tags: FreshExpressions, MessyChurch, TheGathering, EugenePeterson, missional, JeffLucas, MikeMcNichols, BrotherMaynard, MichaelFrost

I’m doing something slightly different tomorrow: I’m splicing up the sermon with two DVD clips from Fresh Expressions: the first, from their DVD 1, is of ‘Messy Church’, and the second, from DVD 2, is from the chapter on rural mission about ‘The Gathering’ in the Whitby Methodist Circuit. We’re then showing as much of DVD 1 as we can get through while people have coffee after the service. Then folk are invited to a ploughman’s lunch, where we hope they will discuss what they see at their tables, and record their thoughts (anonymously, if so desired) on small wipeable whiteboards.

John 1:1-18

Introduction
Sunday 22^nd July: can I be the first this year to wish you a very
Happy Christmas?

You probably think I’ve finally lost it – if indeed I ever
had ‘it’. Did you wonder why we heard a ‘Christmas’ Bible reading – the first
eighteen verses of John chapter one? What has that to do with a morning when I
shall give over two quarters of the sermon to DVD clips from Fresh Expressions about new ways
of mission and church with children and families? Wouldn’t it have made more
sense if we had read Jesus’ words about letting the children come to him?

Well, it might have done – but some words in that famous
Prologue to John’s Gospel are central to the different way of doing mission and
church that I have been emphasising ever since coming here. You can find it
distilled in verse 14:

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have
seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

The Word became flesh and lived among us. Here are two other
ways of translating it. More literally, it is, ‘The Word became flesh and
pitched his tent among us.’ Or Eugene
Peterson paraphrases it, ‘The Word became flesh and blood and moved into
the neighbourhood.’ Simply put, I believe those words do two things: they
change our focus, and they change our order of priorities. We’ll briefly
consider the change of focus first, and then see the first DVD clip; then we’ll
think about the changing of our order of priorities, and then see the second
DVD clip.

1. Change Of Focus
The change of focus is from ‘come’ to ‘go.’ We have assumed that mission is
about getting people to come to us. But Jesus didn’t do that: ‘the Word became
flesh and lived among us.’ He moved into the neighbourhood. Relying on a ‘come
to us’ approach to mission brings fewer and fewer people into the orbit of
God’s love. In a passage where he explains that eighty per cent of people find
faith in Christ through friendship with Christians, Jeff Lucas summarises the futility of the
‘come to us’ approach to mission this way:

It’s like a fisherman spreading his expensive net on the side
of the riverbank, and then inviting the fish to jump out of the water and get
caught.
(Gideon:
Power From Weakness, p61)

Yet we persist in getting out our ever-more-fancy fishing
nets every week. Yet not only did Jesus himself model a mission based on
‘going’, he told his disciples to model their involvement in mission on his:
‘As the Father sent me, so I send you’ (John 20:21). Mission involves being
part of the community, researching its culture and needs, and then finding appropriate
ways of sharing the Good News in word and deed.

So, although Christian mission will occasionally involve the
use of a church building (as it does in the two clips we’re going to see) it
mostly happens away from our gathering place. Mission is not about bringing
people into the increasingly unfamiliar culture of the church and expecting
them to fit our shape: it’s about being in the world, finding the points where
the Gospel makes contact and the points where it challenges. You’ll see a lot
of examples in the clips we’re going to run over coffee between the end of the
service and our lunch together, but for now let’s see our first clip.

2. Changing The Order
Of Our Priorities
Put these three words in order of priority: Jesus, church and mission. It’s a
fair bet that most of us would put them in that order: Jesus first, then
church, and finally mission. But it’s not the way it happens in John’s Gospel,
or in the New Testament generally.

Everything begins with Jesus. Christianity is centred on a
personal and shared knowledge and experience of Jesus Christ and his saving
love. If we don’t start with Jesus, we’re in trouble. Those who might put
‘church’ first tend to be devoted to the institution and its rituals, not to
its Founder. Without making the connection with Jesus personal, there is no
Christian faith. It all starts with him, as it does here: ‘the Word became
flesh.’

But ‘church’ doesn’t come second. ‘The Word became flesh and
lived among us.’ ‘Mission’ comes next. The result of Jesus coming was mission.
He brought God’s love into the world. Anyway, you can’t have church if mission,
hasn’t happened, where people find the God’s love for themselves.

‘Church’ comes third. It is the fruit and consequence of
mission. When we place church ahead of mission we just end up with church as a
therapeutic community where the important thing is for me to have my needs met
(see Mike
McNichols  and Brother Maynard).
In such places, mission becomes the preserve of the enthusiastic few, and not
central to the life of the church. When we focus on church, we don’t usually
manage to build community; often, we destroy it. When we focus on mission, we
gather together as a group and end up functioning as the community we were
always meant to be. (See Michael
Frost, Exiles,
for further on this.)

So the community of the church arises both as the fruit of mission – people are gathered
together under the reign of God – and the passion
of mission – a shared commitment to mission draws people together into deep
Christian community.

So we need to reorder our priorities. Our priorities cannot
be about the building. Nor can they be about so filling up people’s diaries
with meetings that they can spend little meaningful time in the community. Our
church priorities are simple: gathering for worship, a small group where we
challenge one another to grow in discipleship, and only as much other business
as is absolutely necessary.

In fact, that small group might most profitably be people
who come together to work on mission – sharing God’s love in word and deed with
those yet to find that love. Within that you find the fellowship to sustain you
in Bible study, discipleship and mutual pastoral care.

You’re probably bored with me talking about it, but my best
experience of this was when I was involved in my first appointment with
ecumenical youth worship and outreach. As a team we met in three different
configurations, each with slightly different memberships. We were a group that
met to pray and strategise for this ministry. We were a fortnightly home group,
where we studied the Bible and supported one another. And we hung out as a
bunch of friends on Friday nights, with pizzas, videos and some non-Methodist
liquids. The mission energised everything else.

But enough from me: time for our second DVD clip.

Technorati Tags: FreshExpressions, MessyChurch, TheGathering, EugenePeterson, missional, JeffLucas, MikeMcNichols, BrotherMaynard, MichaelFrost

I’m doing something slightly different tomorrow: I’m splicing up the sermon with two DVD clips from Fresh Expressions: the first, from their DVD 1, is of ‘Messy Church’, and the second, from DVD 2, is from the chapter on rural mission about ‘The Gathering’ in the Whitby Methodist Circuit. We’re then showing as much of DVD 1 as we can get through while people have coffee after the service. Then folk are invited to a ploughman’s lunch, where we hope they will discuss what they see at their tables, and record their thoughts (anonymously, if so desired) on small wipeable whiteboards.

John 1:1-18

Introduction
Sunday 22^nd July: can I be the first this year to wish you a very
Happy Christmas?

You probably think I’ve finally lost it – if indeed I ever
had ‘it’. Did you wonder why we heard a ‘Christmas’ Bible reading – the first
eighteen verses of John chapter one? What has that to do with a morning when I
shall give over two quarters of the sermon to DVD clips from Fresh Expressions about new ways
of mission and church with children and families? Wouldn’t it have made more
sense if we had read Jesus’ words about letting the children come to him?

Well, it might have done – but some words in that famous
Prologue to John’s Gospel are central to the different way of doing mission and
church that I have been emphasising ever since coming here. You can find it
distilled in verse 14:

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have
seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

The Word became flesh and lived among us. Here are two other
ways of translating it. More literally, it is, ‘The Word became flesh and
pitched his tent among us.’ Or Eugene
Peterson paraphrases it, ‘The Word became flesh and blood and moved into
the neighbourhood.’ Simply put, I believe those words do two things: they
change our focus, and they change our order of priorities. We’ll briefly
consider the change of focus first, and then see the first DVD clip; then we’ll
think about the changing of our order of priorities, and then see the second
DVD clip.

1. Change Of Focus
The change of focus is from ‘come’ to ‘go.’ We have assumed that mission is
about getting people to come to us. But Jesus didn’t do that: ‘the Word became
flesh and lived among us.’ He moved into the neighbourhood. Relying on a ‘come
to us’ approach to mission brings fewer and fewer people into the orbit of
God’s love. In a passage where he explains that eighty per cent of people find
faith in Christ through friendship with Christians, Jeff Lucas summarises the futility of the
‘come to us’ approach to mission this way:

It’s like a fisherman spreading his expensive net on the side
of the riverbank, and then inviting the fish to jump out of the water and get
caught.
(Gideon:
Power From Weakness, p61)

Yet we persist in getting out our ever-more-fancy fishing
nets every week. Yet not only did Jesus himself model a mission based on
‘going’, he told his disciples to model their involvement in mission on his:
‘As the Father sent me, so I send you’ (John 20:21). Mission involves being
part of the community, researching its culture and needs, and then finding appropriate
ways of sharing the Good News in word and deed.

So, although Christian mission will occasionally involve the
use of a church building (as it does in the two clips we’re going to see) it
mostly happens away from our gathering place. Mission is not about bringing
people into the increasingly unfamiliar culture of the church and expecting
them to fit our shape: it’s about being in the world, finding the points where
the Gospel makes contact and the points where it challenges. You’ll see a lot
of examples in the clips we’re going to run over coffee between the end of the
service and our lunch together, but for now let’s see our first clip.

2. Changing The Order
Of Our Priorities
Put these three words in order of priority: Jesus, church and mission. It’s a
fair bet that most of us would put them in that order: Jesus first, then
church, and finally mission. But it’s not the way it happens in John’s Gospel,
or in the New Testament generally.

Everything begins with Jesus. Christianity is centred on a
personal and shared knowledge and experience of Jesus Christ and his saving
love. If we don’t start with Jesus, we’re in trouble. Those who might put
‘church’ first tend to be devoted to the institution and its rituals, not to
its Founder. Without making the connection with Jesus personal, there is no
Christian faith. It all starts with him, as it does here: ‘the Word became
flesh.’

But ‘church’ doesn’t come second. ‘The Word became flesh and
lived among us.’ ‘Mission’ comes next. The result of Jesus coming was mission.
He brought God’s love into the world. Anyway, you can’t have church if mission,
hasn’t happened, where people find the God’s love for themselves.

‘Church’ comes third. It is the fruit and consequence of
mission. When we place church ahead of mission we just end up with church as a
therapeutic community where the important thing is for me to have my needs met
(see Mike
McNichols  and Brother Maynard).
In such places, mission becomes the preserve of the enthusiastic few, and not
central to the life of the church. When we focus on church, we don’t usually
manage to build community; often, we destroy it. When we focus on mission, we
gather together as a group and end up functioning as the community we were
always meant to be. (See Michael
Frost, Exiles,
for further on this.)

So the community of the church arises both as the fruit of mission – people are gathered
together under the reign of God – and the passion
of mission – a shared commitment to mission draws people together into deep
Christian community.

So we need to reorder our priorities. Our priorities cannot
be about the building. Nor can they be about so filling up people’s diaries
with meetings that they can spend little meaningful time in the community. Our
church priorities are simple: gathering for worship, a small group where we
challenge one another to grow in discipleship, and only as much other business
as is absolutely necessary.

In fact, that small group might most profitably be people
who come together to work on mission – sharing God’s love in word and deed with
those yet to find that love. Within that you find the fellowship to sustain you
in Bible study, discipleship and mutual pastoral care.

You’re probably bored with me talking about it, but my best
experience of this was when I was involved in my first appointment with
ecumenical youth worship and outreach. As a team we met in three different
configurations, each with slightly different memberships. We were a group that
met to pray and strategise for this ministry. We were a fortnightly home group,
where we studied the Bible and supported one another. And we hung out as a
bunch of friends on Friday nights, with pizzas, videos and some non-Methodist
liquids. The mission energised everything else.

But enough from me: time for our second DVD clip.

Technorati Tags: FreshExpressions, MessyChurch, TheGathering, EugenePeterson, missional, JeffLucas, MikeMcNichols, BrotherMaynard, MichaelFrost

From Jeff Lucas, Gideon: Power From Weakness (again):

The heartbreaking thing is this: most Christians are so busy attending prayer meetings and being generally involved in the life of the church that they have no time to live out their faith in the marketplace. They are piously preoccupied, serving God in the winepress. if it weren’t so tragic, it would be amusing. It’s like a fisherman spreading his expensive net on the side of the riverbank, and then inviting the fish to jump out of the water and get caught.

(The ‘winepress’ reference is to the Gideon story – it’s where we first find him hiding, according to the book of Judges.)

I love this for the final sentence – and I may use that in tomorrow’s sermon.

Technorati Tags: JeffLucas, quotes, Gideon, mission, church

Yesterday I attended at New Wine Networks meeting. I used to belong, but had let my membership lapse when it changed from free to subscription. I also haven’t been able to have much to do with more charismatic Christianity since coming to Chelmsford. Meantime, I have been developing my already-existing interest in missional church. The two are quite different – can they hold together? Can they hold together in me? Each appeals to a different side of my personality and convictions.

In some respects, I’m a misfit in charismatic circles. I am an introvert, and much charismatic worship is not for people like me. I’m not one to shout or dance. Years ago a friend asked me whether the Lord had ‘released me in dance’. No, he hadn’t. He still hasn’t. In the eyes of some, that probably means I’m in spiritual bondage. But in terms of my general musical taste, I rarely listen to danceable music. It doesn’t fit and introverted and reflective person like me. I also want preaching to go beyond sloganeering and cheerleading. Even when I did visit the famous Toronto Airport church at the height of the so-called ‘Toronto Blessing’ in the mid-1990s, the sermon I lapped up was an hour’s exposition of the Trinity. Others who had been exuberant in their praise a few minutes earlier fell asleep. Not me. There is also a stupidity in charismatic circles that defies belief. The rule seems to be, the more off the wall, the more likely it is to be from God. No wonder (as my reader will have noticed) I have recently been enjoying the popular books of Jeff Lucas, a charismatic himself, who has no patience with this nonsense, and regularly deflates it with humour.

And yet, and yet … I can’t get away from the biblical base for core charismatic spiritual practice. For all the nutty stuff, the foundations are still there for me. so when I ended up at this meeting of similarly-inclined church leaders yesterday, it all came flooding back as if I’d never stopped moving in such circles. As we prayed for each other, I as much as anyone else shared things in prayer that were relevant to them in ways that couldn’t be explained as coincidence. The same happened as they prayed for me.

Of course, my introversion has consequences in other respects, as an ordained minister. It goes against the popular image of the minister. I recall the college tutor who told us that we should visit five different people every afternoon (if they weren’t in, they didn’t count towards the five), spending twenty minutes on each call. Not long ago, a retired minister told me of a minister who organised a sports/social event for children, with an open day for parents. This minister glad-handed all one hundred parents, apparently – and this was told as an implied criticism of my model of ministry. Those models may work for extraverts, who enjoy meeting many people, but it doesn’t work for introverts, who would rather spend in-depth time with a few people (which is what I do on a pastoral visit).

Temperamentally, I probably belong more in missional circles. I love the emphasis on reflective and contemplative spirituality. The writings of Eugene Peterson and Dallas Willard (neither of them strictly part of the ‘emergent’ clan, but deeply loved within it) connect with me. They are sane and spiritual. They remind me not to make my prayers a to-do list for God. I appreciate the profoundly biblical analyses of Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch. Incarnational mission, as opposed to ‘attractional’ (get them to come to us) makes huge sense to me, biblically and culturally. I welcome the desire to incarnate the Gospel in postmodern culture. I have long believed that even in Scripture there are many ways in which the Gospel is presented, and often it is presented in different ways for different cultures.

Having said that, I have my reservations about where the emerging church goes awry. Doing yoga is a no-no for me, even though I want to reach out positively to spiritual searchers. Some of my critiques would sound altogether too conservative to some emergent ears.

So I’m not a complete fit in either camp. I want to take the best of both, as I believe some people are doing: the 24/7 prayer movement, and some of the examples on the Expressions DVDs. It is an awkward calling to straddle the two, and I do so clumsily, lurching more onto one leg and then the other.

Here I am, then, continually feeling uncomfortable – but also suspecting I am far from unique.

Technorati Tags: ministry, leadership, personality, NewWine, charismatic, missional, emergingchurch, TorontoBlessing, EugenePeterson, DallasWillard, MichaelFrost, AlanHirsch, 24-7Prayer, FreshExpressions

There’s a great quote in Jeff Lucas‘ book Gideon: Power From Weakness that puts Christian leadership and ‘ministry’ in perspective in the light of the way it is pumped up at conferences, especially to young Christians:

The future is not in the hands of the articulate people who stand on platforms, and I say this as one who spends most of my life on one platform or another. But as a Christian leader, I am not on the ‘front line’ in God’s holy war. I am a member of God’s ordinance core, privileged to help, serve and resource the real heroes who today will be faithful to God as hospital workers and home-makers, mechanics and managers, school teachers and secretaries, or – an even greater challenge – as those unemployed, wrongly deployed or just holding down what can only be described as boring, mundane jobs. (p61)

I think he’s got it right. Not simply as a corrective in the context he mentions, but as a corrective to regular congregational life, which loads huge expectations on the minister. We foolishly believe that a new minister will change everything. It’s not only an abdication of responsibility, it’s a measure of desperation in the face of church decline and powerful social forces, in whose wake we feel hopeless. It’s also an act of social captivity, in a society of personality cults and celebrity adulation.

Our hope, however, is not in the latest ‘anointed’ leader but in Christ. To put our hope in anyone but him is an act of faithlessness for a Christian. At my welcome service here in Chelmsford, I quoted Brian’s mother from Monty Python’s Life Of Brian: ‘He’s not the Messiah, he’s just a very naughty boy.’ I may be called to be Christlike and to set an example, but I’m not the Messiah. There are no vacancies for that position.

Technorati Tags: JeffLucas, Gideon, ministry, leadership