Update - blogs, emerging, and conference

I have taken a break from blogging (both writing and commenting on other blogs). I don’t have very much to say that isn’t already being said by others. My favourite daily blog is Andrew Jones. Andrew’s writings mainly concern the emerging church and his life as a missional Christian creating community in a post-modern world.

Not long ago I finished reading Emerging Churches by Blogger and Gibbs. I was inspired by much of what I read. The authors provide an unbiased look at current church planting done by missional Christians in a post-modern world. There were many light-bulb moments as I realized more what the kingdom of God, as preached by Christ, could look like here on earth. I began to feel more at peace with things I had been thinking about lately concerning church, and more at peace about my recent move from the charismatic seeker model of church.

In this, I have been challenged much more in many life areas. I am learning to about a holistic approach to worship (encompassing every action, every word, every thought, every relationship). God wants our lives 24/7. We can’t hide from God although we can sometimes hide from ourselves. Our lives should genuinely reflect a Christian journey and not simply a church script.

I am going to a book launch breakfast this week for Michael Duncan. In 1985 he and his wife, Ruby, with their two children relocated to the Philippines and moved into the very heart of a third world squatter community. For many years they lived and worked among the poor. Michael soon became the Team Leader of the work in Manila. Their concern was to bring about holistic transformational development and this necessitated being fully engaged in relief work, community development, social justice, evangelism and church planting. In 1994 the Duncans returned to New Zealand and since then Michael has continued to be involved in urban work both in Australia (Melbourne) and New Zealand (Auckland). He has been a Senior Pastor of churches in both of those cities.

Since 1976 Michael has also been a speaker in many countries of the world. His own personal testimony, his involvement amongst the very poor of the world and his gifts in communication has taken him to many different groups and places as a communicator. By way of example, last year whilst in Fiji he was invited to speak to the elite group of soldiers imprisoned in Suva who were caught up in the recent coup in that country. And then just recently he had the privilege of speaking to over 100 Hindu students, many of them lepers, whilst in India. And then, very recently, he had the opportunity to speak at a special memorial service In Australia for some of the victims over the Bali tragedy in Indonesia. Michael is often asked to speak to youth conferences, churches and mission gatherings.

I also plan to go to the Forge intensive being held in Perth this July. Forge intensives are times of inspirational story telling, radical creative dreaming and vigorous conversation as together we seek to re-imagine how the gospel can penetrate and transform our communities! If you want to find out more about these seminars, please contact Andrew Hamilton at mailto:mhamo@brightontown.com.au re: Forge Intensives.

Emergent conversation 1

This is a topic that I find very interesting lately. I have been engrossed in this emergent conversation and am learning alot. I would like to share some of what I am learning. I will post alot about this in coming weeks, months etc, but I will start with this: God moves by His divine will and is working in this world as I type this. We should find where God is working and get involved. God by the Holy Spirit will lead us.

There are Christian ministers who have a deep passion to minister Christ to the lives of all men and women, yet they don't want to come out of their modern organisatioal structure. The reality is that we now live in a post-modern world and to be effecitve ministers in this post-modern world, we must be willing to let go of our "sacred cows" and engross ourselves in culture. God is working in culture. There is no better example of that then the incarnation. God in Christ. The spiritual meeting the physical. God meets man. Christ was born into a Jewish culture and did the will of God in that culture to establish the kindom of heaven.

So we also, if we are to be faithfull to that calling, must imerse ourselves in our culture to bring the kingdom of heaven to this culture.
Please note the difference - we are not to be of the world, but we are to be in the world. To be a light.


It is not strange that people don't want to attend our modern church services. In many ways it is so foreign to our western culture. It is also not surprising to note that most average Aussies have a favourable view of Jesus. Jesus is not the problem. It is the church that they have an unfavourable view of.

The church as we know it was formed in response to the modern era which was characterised by the sacred / secular divide. The church was put in charge of spiritual matters while the rest of the world tried to create a realm without God.

The post-modern world is seeing the sacred come back into being. Before modernity, one couldn't differentiate between a religous practise and a secular practise. for every practise was deemed to be religous. The post-modern world is now seeing people in all sub-cultures attempting to find truth through all sorts of experimentation. Drugs, sex, music, black magic. Meanwhile the Church is in a corner asking its members to bring people into their community so that they can be cleaned.

I believe that Jesus wants to minister to people in every culture. The goth sub-culture, the rave sub-culture, the clubbing sub-culture, every sub-culture. Jesus wants to bring redemption and healing to all people. The fact is that all people live in culture. That requires disciples of Jesus to imerse themselves in a particular culture and identify with Jesus and transform secular space. We are to be Christ in our cultures.

This is the Church. "For where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them." (Matthew 18:20). I believe that community is the key. I will close with this, the one line that I have read which I believe can best summarise the emerging church conversation - "Building christian community in post-modern cultures".

I will post more about this topic. It has captured my mind and challenged me about alot of what I thought I knew about christian ministry. We are deeply loved by God and we have been given a mission - "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age." (Matthew 28:18-20)

Meet them where they're at...

I saw this on tallskinnykiwi. cool eh.

Emerging Movement

What is emerging? Lately I have been engrossed in thought and conversation about a new type of Christian living. Many of my ideas have so gripped my heart but many Christians simply set me aside as fanciful. It was then I stumbled across the emerging discussion and found that my ideas are shared by many tens of thousands more people across the globe. This is known as the emergent conversation.

I want to give you some extracts from emergent thinkers that I have encountered so that you will gain a better understanding of this. First I will begin with a definition from wikipedia.

The emerging church or emergent church is a diverse movement within Christianity that arose in the late 20th century as a reaction to the influence of modernism in Western Christianity. The movement is usually called a "conversation" by its proponents to emphasize its diffuse nature with contributions from many people and no explicitly defined leadership or direction. The emerging church seeks to deconstruct and reconstruct Christianity as its mainly Western members live in a postmodern culture. While practices and even core doctrine vary, most emergents can be recognized by the following values:

• Missional living - Christians go out into the world to serve God rather than isolate themselves within communities of like-minded individuals.
• Narrative theology - Teaching focuses on narrative presentations of faith and the Bible rather than systematic theology or biblical reductionism.
• Christ-likeness - While not neglecting the study of scripture or the love of the church, Christians focus their lives on the worship and emulation of the person of Jesus Christ.
• Authenticity - People in the postmodern culture seek real and authentic experiences in preference over scripted or superficial experiences. Emerging churches strive to be relevant to today's culture and daily life, whether it be through worship or service opportunities. The core Christian message is unchanged but emerging churches attempt, as the church has throughout the centuries, to find ways to reach God's people where they are to hear God's message of unconditional love.

Doug Pagitt gives 11 characteristics of the emerging church movement and a post-modern spirituality:

1. A Kingdom of God focus - join the Kingdom of God wherever it finds it.
2. Pursue faithfulness to God through new practices, structures and understandings.
3. Tend to have a hopeful and positive view of God's engagement in the world - we should find the activity of God in the world and join it.
4. Committed to loving God and loving neighbor and loving enemy in real ways in this world.
5. Deeply connected to the story of God and the Bible.
6. Living with the guidance of the Holy Spirit - not culture or understandings
7. Theologically active - thinking deeply about these practices
8. Openness to the "other" - outsider, foreigner, doesn't get freaked out
9. Want the good news of God to change the world and be the good news for all creation.
10. We understand community to be an essential part of the Christian life.
11. We are interested in the future more than fighting the battles of the past - we are people who are trying to live the story of Jesus in our world in ways consistent to where we have come from.

from “meltingearth.com”

you might not be emerging if :
-you think or act as if numbers are important
-you are sure you know what the term "pastor" means
-structure / authority are assumed (important / critical)
-your experience of worship is, in practice, quite narrow
-your future has a dependency on a building or buildings
-preaching / a message, sans discussion, is standard fare
-finances play a (perhaps) "undue" role in decision making
-systems / programs are primarily utilized to address issues
-scripture is normally dissected or predigested before ingested
-*doing* kingdom work is valued more than *being* the kingdom
-you've yet to critique the economic metaphor used to describe salvation
-you read, write or employ systematic methodologies of how to do church
-meetings/services are timed to sub-minute intervals, for efficiencies sake
-being cool / vibey / edgy (and not uncool) is somehow key to the kingdom
-dialogue, particularly negative feedback, is avoided - rather than welcomed
-mythological truth has not regained is rightful place alongside factual truth
-time at a divinity school is considered more useful than time at a monastery
-administrative announcements are allowed to disturb the flow of the service
-the terms "music" and "worship" can be substituted without loss of meaning
-your website architecture mirrors corporate america (mission, vision, values)
-you can point to a senior pastor / figure / person / personality in your community
-you believe society or people-in-general consider spirituality inherently irrelivant
-service elements are added without thought to their role in the holistic experience
-emerging church jargon appears on your website - e.g. 'emerging' or 'postmodern'
-you don't give a second thought to employing marketing techniques for your church
-unity is considered important, rather than a (negative) signal of (artificial) conformity
-your resume / credentials / accomplishments / title, appear prominently or are "relevant"
-you fail to see the irony in propagating "emerging-church" products via christian industry
-you talk, lecture, write books about the emerging church without being one in a community
-growing hearts (i.e. for loving God / loving others) is given less attention than growing heads
-what the central speaker has to share is generally the point - rather than the ensuing dialogue

you have yet to deconstruct church
and experience an organic emergence
of something unique to your community

From www.emergentafrica.com/node/60

We're talking about practice: how do we plan public worship experiences in ways that form individuals and form communities? How do we approach the Bible in a world that sees the twin dangers of narrow fundamentalism and shallow relativism? How do we understand preaching and teaching in a digital world that is formed far more by hypertext than linear text? How do we lead boldly in a flattened world? How do we lead gently in a world made cynical by larger-than-life broadcast personalities? We're deeply engaged in the rediscovery of monastic spiritual practices. We didn't invent these - we're not creative - we're just desperate and so we're learning from anyone we can about spiritual practices - and we're seeking to practice them with transforming results. We're exploring what it means to be missional in a local church context; we're trying to imagine what missionality looks like serving in a local church over a long period of time.

And beneath this - beneath the practice - we share this sense that our theology needs desperate revisioning. It's not that we expect to hold a bunch of new beliefs - although that is happening - but it's more that we sense we're coming to believe our beliefs in a new way. We're coming to believe our beliefs in a way which is different from the options that we're presented. And that new way is very hard to define because we're stumbling into it - and maybe making it up as we go along - but we hope that this new way of believing our beliefs is less arrogant and strident and defensive and aggressive, and we hope that it's more honest and deep and properly confident.

I do not believe that the Emergent discussion will form a “new denomination”. I do not believe that lines will be drawn separating this movement from already existing Christian movements. If anything, I could say that it’s effect would mostly resemble the reformation – but without the tearing down and rebuilding. The emergent discussion will challenge all people who think they have a grip on what “church” or “Christianity” is all about. I believe that this movement will have the effect of causing Christians to rethink their theological positions, to rethink what they think they know about the church or Christianity, transform Christians and churches into a missional movement. Present day western Christianity in my view is an entity. Book of Acts Christianity is a movement.

To find out more about this, there is an abundance of resources. One emerging voice that I know subscribes to over 2000 blogs on this discussion. Here are 2 that I frequent: www.jesuscreed.org and www.tallskinnykiwi.typepad.com.

Please feel free to comment if you have any thoughts.

Why an Iranian Nuke Is So Significant

By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, writing in Time Magazine says:

Like many physicists who worked on the Manhattan Project, Richard Feynman could not get the Bomb out of his mind after the war. "I would see people building a bridge," he wrote. "And I thought, they're crazy, they just don't understand, they don't understand. Why are they making new things? It's so useless."

Feynman was convinced man had finally invented something that he could not control and that would ultimately destroy him. For six decades we have suppressed that thought and built enough history to believe Feynman's pessimism was unwarranted. After all, soon afterward, the most aggressive world power, Stalin's Soviet Union, acquired the Bomb, yet never used it.

Seven more countries have acquired it since and never used it either. Even North Korea, which huffs and puffs and threatens every once in a while, dares not use it. Even Kim Jong Il is not suicidal.

But that's the point. We're now at the dawn of an era in which an extreme and fanatical religious ideology, undeterred by the usual calculations of prudence and self-preservation, is wielding state power and will soon be wielding nuclear power.

We have difficulty understanding the mentality of Iran's newest rulers. Then again, we don't understand the mentality of the men who flew into the World Trade Center or the mobs in Damascus and Tehran who chant "Death to America"--and Denmark(!)--and embrace the glory and romance of martyrdom.

This atavistic love of blood and death and, indeed, self-immolation in the name of God may not be new--medieval Europe had an abundance of millennial Christian sects--but until now it has never had the means to carry out its apocalyptic ends.

That is why Iran's arriving at the threshold of nuclear weaponry is such a signal historical moment. It is not just that its President says crazy things about the Holocaust. It is that he is a fervent believer in the imminent reappearance of the 12th Imam, Shi'ism's version of the Messiah.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been reported as saying in official meetings that the end of history is only two or three years away. He reportedly told an associate that on the podium of the General Assembly last September, he felt a halo around him and for "those 27 or 28 minutes, the leaders of the world did not blink ... as if a hand was holding them there and it opened their eyes to receive" his message. He believes that the Islamic revolution's raison d'être is to prepare the way for the messianic redemption, which in his eschatology is preceded by worldwide upheaval and chaos. How better to light the fuse for eternal bliss than with a nuclear flame?

Depending on your own beliefs, Ahmadinejad is either mystical or deranged.

In either case, he is exceedingly dangerous. And Iran is just the first.

With infinitely accelerated exchanges of information helping develop whole new generations of scientists, extremist countries led by similarly extreme men will be in a position to acquire nuclear weaponry. If nothing is done, we face not proliferation but hyperproliferation. Not just one but many radical states will get weapons of mass extinction, and then so will the fanatical and suicidal terrorists who are their brothers and clients.

That will present the world with two futures. The first is Feynman's vision of human destruction on a scale never seen. The second, perhaps after one or two cities are lost with millions killed in a single day, is a radical abolition of liberal democracy as the species tries to maintain itself by reverting to strict authoritarianism--a self-imposed expulsion from the Eden of post-Enlightenment freedom.

Can there be a third future? That will depend on whether we succeed in holding proliferation at bay. Iran is the test case. It is the most dangerous political entity on the planet, and yet the world response has been catastrophically slow and reluctant. Years of knowingly useless negotiations, followed by hesitant international resolutions, have brought us to only the most tentative of steps--referral to a Security Council that lacks unity and resolve. Iran knows this and therefore defiantly and openly resumes its headlong march to nuclear status. If we fail to prevent an Iranian regime run by apocalyptic fanatics from going nuclear, we will have reached a point of no return. It is not just that Iran might be the source of a great conflagration but that we will have demonstrated to the world that for those similarly inclined there is no serious impediment.

Our planet is 4,500,000,000 years old, and we've had nukes for exactly 61.

No one knows the precise prospects for human extinction, but Feynman was a mathematical genius who knew how to calculate odds. If he were to watch us today about to let loose the agents of extinction, he'd call a halt to all bridge building.

Time, April 3, p. 68

The Jesus Creed

"...the Lord our God, the Lord is one.
Love the Lord your God with all your heart,
with all your soul,with all your mind, and with all your strength."
The second is this: "Love your neighbour as yourself."
There is no commandment greater than these.

Gloria in Excelsis

Glory to God in the highest, and peace to his people on earth. Lord God, heavenly King, almighty God and Father, we worship you, we give you thanks, we praise you for your glory. Lord Jesus Christ, only Son of the Father, Lord God, Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world: have mercy on us; you are seated at the right hand of the Father: receive our prayer. For you alone are the Holy One, you alone are the Lord, you alone are the Most High, Jesus Christ, with the Holy Spirit, in the glory of God the Father. Amen.

The Nicene Creed

We believe in one God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, True God of True God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father by whom all things were made; who for us men, and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, and was made man, and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate. He suffered and was buried, and the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures, and ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of the Father. And he shall come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead, whose kingdom shall have no end.

And we believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life, who proceedeth from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified, who spoke by the prophets. And we believe one holy catholic and apostolic Church. We acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins. And we look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.

On the United States new found interest in Indonesia...

I began writing my thoughts and opinions tonight about Americas new found interest in Indonesia. I am very sceptical that the great collonialist cowboy now wants to extend a hand of help to Indonesia. I am sceptical for 3 reasons:

1. America knows that there is Oil & Gas in this country
2. America knows that they need military support in this region with the current China situation
3. America knows that they need the support of Indonesian Muslims to win the "war on terror".
   

I feel that America only has America's interests in mind here. Ofcourse many great things will happen for Indonesia once America comes along side. Condoleeza Rice promised that America would invest heavily in the Indonesian education system. That alone is the number one reason to partner with the US. Indonesia needs to increase its standard of education. The number one fault of this country is the number one cause of suffering for it's citizens - Many Indonesians are not educated past primary school because they can not afford it.

This lack of education is the reason behind corruption here. This lack of education is a key contributing factor to terrorism here.

I stopped writing my thoughts and opinions because it weighed heavily on the negative side. While I still hold these thoughts and opinions, I so strongly want to see the standard of living for Indonesians increase, that I will refrain from snarling at the hand that can make that happen... for now.

A comment from Rev

I took this comment of the rev from Signposts...

Jesus washed his disciples feet. Do you know what that means in a time of open sandals? Of walking great distance over dirt roads? In a time without urinals? This was a job that even a slave was allowed to resist if he was a Roman citizen because it was the lowest of lows, and unworthy of any citizen of Rome. And said, “I do this to show you that I as your Lord serve you, so you should serve each other” Does this charectorize the leadership in the Pentecostal church in Australia, or specifically xxxxxxx?

How does driving around in luxury cars, flying first class, owning multiple expensive homes, and basically my way or the highway leadership mentality reflect Jesus? And if it does not reflect Jesus, why are they leaders? Worldly leaders do these things, but the church is supposed to be different, the first should be last, the greatest should be the servant of all.

the rev