Over and Over again …

In my holiday reading, I was reminded of an old quote – attributed to Alert Einstein – in which he says

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

As I return to the business of “re-imagining church”, I’m reminded of how uncomfortably close this comes to the activities of churches up and down the country.

Only days before I left for holiday, I was in conversation with someone who couldn’t accept that the form of church and worship that he grew up with in the 1950′s has little or no appeal to the 20,000 or so people of our town who don’t do church. The conversation was like sitting in the passenger seat whilst the driver ignores the steam coming from the radiator and the increasing regularlity of clonking noises from the engine. The levels of church attendence are declining and aging in our town, and yet there’s a reluctance to stop the car, get out and walk. 

So here’s the question – Is there a touch of insanity (by Einstein’s standards) in our activities – doing the same old same old, and not taking any notice of the fact that the formula doesn’t work any more?

On the brighter side, on returning to work I was delighted to hear of the “Re-Generation” conference in which our CofE bishops are tangibly trying to engage in the lives and worldviews of our rising generations in order to do what Anglicans (and other Christians and their churches) are supposed to be doing – “proclaiming afresh in each generation” the gospel of Christ.

What will protect us from the insanity of doing the same-old-same-old? Some years ago, when I played a part as a tutor on The Leadership Institute programme for developing clergy as leaders (here) I became increasingly aware for church leaders to be “reflective practitioners”, taking time out from the cycle of plan-do-plan-do, to connect with a fresh take on “the things we do”, drawing insight from the way others approach similar issues to those we face locally. We created clusters of people – initially barely known to one another, and often from very different experiences of church, faith and life. We then (metaphorically) lit the touch paper and watched the creative sparks take light. The results were great to see, often returning tired, middle aged, risk-averse (and often cynical and burnt out) clergy into their once inspired and confident selves.

So the second question is – how can we persuade busy lay leaders in our churches to engage in this kind of reflective, creative energy-giving clusters, to save us from the insanity of doing the same-old-same-old, and inspire us all to proclaim afresh the good news which is God’s gift to the world?

What would work for you?

Purpose Driven Life – Purpose 2

You were created – to be part of God’s family.

(my apologies to those who were looking for this last week – I omitted to post it before going on holiday..)

We all have different experiences of  being part of a family, some good parts, some memories we’d rather forget.

When we hear we are part of God’s family, we easily imagine some of those good/bad/ indifferent memories and transplant them – for good or ill – into our fears and hopes of being part of this new family.

There are two people I know who illustrate this. The first had horrible experiences of his father so rejected the notion of God as his father “My dad was awful, why would I want another one? Get me out of here”. The second friend responded exactly the opposite way “I had such a disfunctional family, I was so glad to find a new family in the life of my church, it gave me hope”.

These opposite responses from similar experiences would  suggest that it’s not our experiences that shape us. It’s more that the choices we make in reflecting on our experiences that truly shapes us. 

Which leads to a chicken and egg dilemna – Strictly speaking, we should look to the Bible first to get our understanding of what Jesus meant when he talked about being part of his family. But our experiences of our human families ring loud in our ears when we hear the word “family” – so being part of God’s family first calls for a re-learning of the language of family!

Peter, in the Bible, says that God’s family is like “living stones” of God’s spiritual temple. this means (amongst other things) that we are, collectively, God’s visible presence in the world – illustrated in the quality of the lives and relationships of his people. Peter also says we have the privilege and responsibility of being  gathered together as God’s “chosen People” and ” royal priesthood” and his “holy nation”. This puts a duty of care upon us, as we seek our God-given-purpose, to live up these responsibilities.

Also, Jesus was quite hard-nosed on the subject of family – he said that loyalty to his family – the church – takes priority over our allegiance to our human families (at least that’s how I read Matthew 8:18-22, 12:46-50 or 19:27-30).  

So being adopted into God’s family raises a number of questions for us

1) How do you balance

the image and standards of family in the Bible as the benchmark of what God’s family should be like

with your own experiences and observations of our human families as our starting point for thinking of family.

2) Considering more specifically our call to become part of God’s family, a question – what kind of difference does it make to you to be part of God’s family – to be known by his name, and to be the public representative for God in your friendship group, workplace and human family?

Your comments and questions?

Purpose Driven Life – Purpose 1

 

The parable of the Prodigal Son, or more correctly, the Father with two lost sons, gives an absorbing and gripping image of the extent of the God’s love for the people he calls his own, even when they reject his presence. As we consider the first aspect of of our God-given purpose, the parable reminds us that we are loved by God and, whether in his presence or absent from him, we are his beloved children, destined to give him pleasure.

Even when we are distant from God, he longs for us to return to his loving presence and to lavish us with blessing beyond our dreams, to feast with us. All he requires of us is our presence: our delight in him is his delight in itself.

We express our desire to delight God and delight in him when we worship him. Such worship is found in our gatherings with God’s people – to offer God our thanks and praise, to seek his presence, to discern his will and to allow, in prayer, our hearts to beat with his. It doesn’t stop there, though, as such worship - making God smile – is also bound up in our daily choices to honour him in our daily activity and relationships.

What have you done today, or this week, that has fulfilled your God given purpose to make God smile?

Purpose Driven Life – What is your purpose?

In his letter to the church of Colossae, Paul tells of his own “Purpose Driven Life”. His encounter with the living God and his discernment of his own calling and gifting gives him the ability to say “no” to the distractions from his main purpose because of the “bigger yes” that compels him in his ministry.

Paul’s sense of purpose also gave him an inner security and confidence when the voices that surrounded him were calling him to be more popular by changing his style, or changing his teaching to make it more palletable. But in the words of another recent writer, he did all that he did “for an audience of one”.

Paul’s sense of purpose was also determined by his sense of his destiny. He wrote of running the race and winning the prize. He had his sights firmly set on the Bible and the Holy Spirit giving an assurance of the hope of eternal life – the new heaven and new earth in which God rules and is seen to rule wholly and forever. Paul’s heaven-shaped perspective reminds me of another recent writer who said something like this

In the not to distant past, Christians were often accused of being so heavenly minded that they are no earthly use. This may be true of people who separate themselves out from the world as if they were already in heaven. Today’s danger is, however, the reverse, that many Christians are so earthly minded that they are of no heavenly use.

It is through worship, reading the scriptures, prayer and gathering together the community of God’s people that our vision of heaven begins to shape our dissatisfaction with the world as it is, and starts to align our minds and actions on making God’s “will be done on earth as it is in heaven”.

Such was Paul’s purpose – a bold, ambitious, life-absorbing passion and work. As for you and I, we may have small or large dreams and passions, but central to our existence is a purpose that is rooted in God’s purpose for us and the world he longs to bring back to himself.

What is your Purpose in life

The MoreThanSunday / Encounter community are reading Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren this term. Join us in an online discussion through the weeks. I’ll be posting some outline thoughts and questions to focus our shared reading. Join in the conversation. Starting with the big question – What is your purpose in life?

We started looking at the Apostle Paul to discover something of his God-given purpose. Taking our cue from Colossians chapters 1 and 2, we see that his sense of purpose began with a personal encounter with the Risen Christ. He was commissioned by Jesus, gifted by the Holy Spirit and sent to serve others in the world. His sense of call gave him courage when things got tough and in the words of a more recent writer, was able to say “No” to distractions because of “the bigger Yes” inside him.

I like the quote attributed to John Wimber, a great servant of Jesus and his church, with an effective worldwide ministry –  who said of himself “I’m just a fat man on my way to heaven”. That was his focus.

My own sense of purpose came in my 20′s with an experience that led me to discern whether God might be calling me to preach. It took a few years to work out whether there was anything more than too much cheese too late at night prompting the idea, but led to my own sense of not what to do to fulfil God’s purpose for me - to preach the Word of God and to lead God’s people (or a portion of them at least) in God’s Mission.

That was about 25 years ago, and since then I’ve been privileged to see God working in amazing ways as I’ve tried to do something my Vicar Factory Principal said “I sense God saying “get out of the way so I can do my work” “. I hope and pray that I can listen to that voice most of all as I continue to work out what God’s big purpose in my life looks like in the small detail of what to do tomorrow.

Renewing our Vow and Covenant

Our church is a sometimes strange existence, an odd blend of fairly ancient and almost modern.

By way of bringing this into focus, being new to town and always up for a bit of an experiment, we did a “renewing our baptism vows” as part of the celebration of Jesus’ baptism in the lectionary set readings at one of our trad-but-not-trad services this week.

So, on the fly question… We’ve got some renewing baptism vows bits of liturgy, so we go through that. Then, midstream think - if I go and stand by the font (which I would have filled with water were it not for the fact that someone had filled it with flowers), is anyone likely to be willing to stand out from the reputedly pew-bound congregation and declare that they want to specifically and publicly stand up for their vows, or is that too wacky for the great and the good of Marlow?

To my surprise, we not only had half a dozen folk eager to join me (albeit without the water), we had folks commenting afterwards that the newbie had done something “different but good” “moving” “meaningful”.

In previous church existence, I wouldn’t have thought twice about calling people out to declare their faith in front of others in the church. By reputation, the churches I now serve are more trad and reserved, but I’m discovering that either that reputation is unfair, or God is doing a new thing in renewing the traditional church as well as moving amongst the group that’s called the “emerging church”.

It’s been a good reminder that a big part of my work here is to create a dialogue-in-mission between inhertied models of church and emerging models of church.

That dialogue begins with valuing the “where we’re at” as well as the “where we dream of being” amongst the trad and contemporary congregations, both of which, according to Rev Cranmer, ought to be prayerfully seeking “constant re-formation”.

And, simply put, where we’re at is that we are all – in Baptism –  called, loved and sent by God, our Heavenly Father.

We begin, then, in ministry and mission, as those who God has called and anointed with his Holy Spirit. We are loved with a love stronger than death, as seen in Jesus, we are sent by the God-with-a-mission. The bit that was a step too far, this week. was to ask those who stood up for their faith to tell us all what prompted them to do so, and what new thing they sense God may be doing in their lives. So next week, who knows …..

In the meantime, we left the congregation to take home the Methodist Covenant prayer, another way of marking the new year and seeking God’s renewal of our covenant with him.

For those who, like me, are challenged by the prayer and dare to pray it anyway, it’s here to feed our faith.

I am no longer my own but yours.
Put me to what you will,
rank me with whom you will;
put me to doing,
put me to suffering;
let me be employed for you,
or laid aside for you,
exalted for you,
or brought low for you;
let me be full,
let me be empty,
let me have all things,
let me have nothing:
I freely and wholeheartedly yield all things
to your pleasure and disposal.
And now, glorious and blessed God,
Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
you are mine and I am yours. Amen

Prayer, Passion and Purpose

The first week of the year is always a time (in church-life terms) that I love most. For as long as I can remember, it’s been a week of prayer in the church communities I’ve belonged to and served. It’s a chance to look back on what God has done to say “Thanks”; a time to take stock and say “Sorry”, a time to hope and pray “Please”. Most of all these weeks have been times to listen to God’s heartbeat, listen to his Word and attend to the pictures and songs he shares with his people as he meets with those who long to see Christ glorified.

Each year these weeks of prayer have been different and so memorable for different reasons. This time last year, I was leading the people of Yateley through prayer during the thickest coat of snow, and new things evolved in our practice of prayer. At that stage my new post in Marlow was not even on the horizon – a lot has changed in the turn of a year.

This year, we are in the not so small but ancient village church of Bisham. Our call to prayer is brought into focus in reading a reprint of a letter, posted in the church, from the vicar of Bisham to his people whilst he was laid low in sickness and his errant parishoners were evidently neglecting the duty and joy of gathering for public worship in his absence. So he sets out, in strong, passsionate, and urgent tones the need to turn to Christ in faith and repentence to recieve the blessing of being called a child and servant of God, taking a full part in the life of the Christian family.

We were struck, too, by the short-term shortsighted view of much of our activity. Here we were in a building over 700 years old asking – what does this generation long to live as a legacy that people 700 years from now will look upon as significant and beautiful offering to glorify Jesus Christ? We may have a grasp of the urgency of today’s task, but long to gain a greater sense of how our efforts and activities fit into God’s longer term purposes. We laughed at the notion of dreaming what the church might be up to in 30 years time (with a view from our collection of bath chairs), but considering the legacy we may leave to those who will worship in our district in 2800AD is nothing short of mindblowing !!

On top of this, I’m reminded of our diocesan framework for ministry and mission, and in particular this year’s focus on Making Disciples. Our first step towards this is gathering our Encounter community groups (and others) together around the material called “Purpose Driven Life”. It’s my hope and prayer that many of our folks will be renewed in their faith and life-focus by using this as a spiritual MoT. I’ve got a hunch that in doing so, we will discover the gifts and passions to unlock new areas of ministry and mission in and beyond the thing we call ”More Than Sunday”. 

As we gather at the start of the year these ponderings are set as a backdrop for our hopes for the coming year:

Prayer – a longing for a deeper life of prayer, connecting God’s people together in our shared life and shared desire to discover more fully the beat of the Father’s heart

Passion – such a heartfelt urgent longing for God to be encountered in our worship and in our shared life that our lives are transformed

Priorities – setting our sights on the one thing that we can do well together that fits God’s purposes at this time and in this place with these people that God has drawn together.

That’s my pitch, what do you reckon?