Womb of Wonders

Church gatherings are a frustration to millions of people all over the world. Yes, there's millions more people who get their socks blessed off week in week out but the frustrated bunch are a sizeable contingent within the overall crowd. I think I stray in and out of both these camps fairly frequently. Most of this can probably be slotted under the broad statement often used in struggling relationships, "It's not you, it's me". But some of it isn't me.
On my journey of the last few years I've found that one of the hardest things about departing from an established form of church to try to create something new is to keep alive the inner hope that what you've glimpsed with the eyes of faith really is possible. It's really easy for the exciting newness, which will always be followed by a starker reality, to slide into an overall atmosphere of resignation. The little voice that whispers, "Actually, that thing you used to be part of, that's as good as it gets."
But I remain convinced of this: there is a point to communities of Christians gathering together regularly. What is that point? No less than this: Jesus intends his church to be a 'womb of wonders'. What I mean by that is - whenever his people gather in his name, with generous hearts, heeding the wisdom of the apostle Paul from 1 Cor 14:26, then all the potential of the resurrection morning is there too. Everyone present has the potential within them to contribute to the creation of the miracle environment. That should be our expectation. And expectation is far more than just waiting for something to happen, for some divine gift to land in our lap; God has designed us to be more than mere recipients of miracles, he has given us the potential to be initiators of new creation in the here and now.
And that’s how I'm trying to think of church, specifically in its gathered form. I'm beginning, all over again, to expect that my offering, however tentative and humble, however broken I may be, can trigger a chain-reaction. My hunch is that God is also cultivating that attitude in many others too, stirring a shared expectation that as we make our faltering efforts to show grace to one another Christ himself will rush to join in, enthusiastically pouring out his blessing amongst us.

Shades of Grey

The other night, after a church meeting, I found myself on the receiving end of some 'observations' about my leadership. Feedback is something that I really value and so I was all ears. However, it seemed that on this occasion I was being subjected to a somewhat binary assessment of my leadership style. My own experience of controlling leadership has made me extremely keen to resist this approach myself, and yet that was exactly what was being suggested.
After struggling for a while to grasp how this interpretation might have been arrived at it dawned on me that I was in a no win argument. You may have been in one of these conversations yourself, when you find yourself being drawn into a debate which is based on the false assumption that there are only 2 polar opposite positions to adopt, the issue is either black or it's white. But anyone who exists in the world of real human beings knows that things are rarely black and white, rather we are constantly dealing with shades of grey (with the occasional spalsh of colour if we're having a good day).
This particular conversation centred on the power dynamics of leadership, with the suggestion that if the situation is not one of utopian democracy then by default autocracy prevails. Of course the reality of leadership is, in the language of Blanchard, 'situational'. If the building is burning down the office don't sit down to discuss the best way of evacuating - somebody dictates orders. But if a bunch of highly gifted jazz musicians are jamming together it may be difficult for someone in the audience to work out who the leader is. This is perhaps best expressed in the continuum offered by Tannenbaum and Schmidt (left). In the context of church there are very few scenarios that would excuse a leader operating at the autocratic end of the scale but that doesn't mean that the body therefore is as liberty to function entirely in the zone of self-definition. I really do hope that at every opportunity I afford the maximum possible freedom to those God has privileged me to serve with leadership.

Idealism

I promise that my next blog post will contain some original thought before I do that there's another book quotation I really want to put up here:
'Most leaders are to some extent idealists. They have a desire for things to be different, to be better. Thus, the leader lives all the time with a discrepancy between the world that she wants (and others want) to inhabit and the world she (and others) actually do inhabit. Psychologists call this condition 'cognitive dissonance' - there is a discord between the reality and the ideal. Now, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that this discord produces a certain mental and emotional strain in people. This can be constructive, generating passion, drive and energy; but it can also be destructive, producing frustration, disappointment and confusion. Accordingly, one of the mind's strategies to deal with it is denial and repression. Most people deal with cognitive dissonance fairly effectively simply by choosing to look away from the ideal. They come to tolerate the reality by avoiding the evidence, by filtering the data they receive. They fabricate a world in which the discrepancy is less.
The leader, however, is motivated by a desire to hold on to the ideal - indeed it is the ideal that drives her. Accordingly she commits herself to a journey that will inevitably lead her into a dissonance between the reality and the ideal, a tension that she refuses, until she gives up leading, to deny or suppress. Unfortunately, most other people don't want to know about this tension: they are in the business of denial and they don't want to be reminded of how bad the reality is or how much better the ideal is. They prefer blissful ignorance - and the leader, in all the evangelical fervour of her vision, is a fly in the ointment. And so the leader finds herself pursuing the lonely path that all prophets and visionaries down the ages have followed - of being isolated, being a voice crying in the wilderness, travelling alone, ahead of the crowd, on the margins, in a distant land - feeling a sense of belonging but also a sense of alienation.'
From Leading Out of Who You are: Discovering the Secret of Undefended Leadership
by Simon Walker

The 'Bait and Switch'

Working in an evangelistic ministry like I do one issue that's frequently considered is that of 'follow up', or my preferred way of describing it 'follow through' (subtle but important difference). However neither of these concepts are likely to have much chance of success if the original evangelistic 'pitch' in any way involves a bait and switch.
What's a bait and switch? Well, imagine you get a mailing through your door telling you that you've won a free holiday in Ibiza. All expenses paid, first class flight and 5 star accommodation included - all you have to do is sign and return the enclosed letter of acceptance and then turn up at a hotel somewhere near where you live to meet a representative of the company who'll explain the rest to you. Yep, its a scam. We see it being played out on Watchdog every week. A naive young couple are gutted when they realise they've actually signed up for life to a timeshare apartment on a building site down a dirt track 10 miles from the sea. But the parallels between this kind of corporate con trick and contemporary evangelistic preaching are scary. One of the main reasons that 95% of the people who respond to an evangelistic message don't go on with God is because they quickly realise they've been stung. Someone promised them peace with God and freedom from guilt and they woke up the next day to find they're lumbered with a lifetime of hanging out with wierdoes on a Sunday morning singing strange songs and listening to long winded lectures.
So what can be done about it? Well whilst it's important for church leaders to ensure that their congregations are welcoming, caring environments the onus is really on us the evangelists. The day of selling individually packaged grace deals without any reference to the conditions of the contract is over. The message must change. Christianity equals community. Belief necessitates behaviour. We evangelists need to grapple with this and find fresh inspiration so that we might reveal the true nature of life in the risen Christ, joining an epic journey with a rag-tag bunch of pilgrims who are determined to see God's great dream for the world fulfilled.

Eden is 10!

This is basically a blatant plug for the forthcoming conference I'm organising as a way of marking the occasion of 10 years of Eden. For those of you who don't know already Eden is a pioneering initiative involving the establishing of incarnational mission teams in Manchester's most challenging neighbourhoods. With a priority on youthwork but a holistic vision that extends to the whole community Eden has made a profound impact. The conference will consider the highs and lows of the journey so far as well as sharing wider lessons from the last decade of urban ministry in the UK with a watchful eye on the future.
Dates: Fri 6th and Sat 7th July
Venue: King's House, Manchester
Special guests: Floyd McClung, Dr. Martin Robinson, Pete Greig, plus many more
Costs: £50 or £35 unwaged
For more info click HERE >>>

Style vs Substance

Book Review: Organic Church: Growing Faith Where Life Happens
I'll be honest - a few pages into this book I wasn't enjoying it. Having got used to the often understated approach of emerging church type books I found Neil Cole's gung-ho writing style quite annoying. However, as the book's proposition sounded interesting I perservered and I'm extremely glad I did. There's some superb material in this book, for instance the Simple Church model it proposes, an obvious incarnational DNA, the voice of real experience, and lots of very quoteable one-liners. Here's a few of my faves:
"We need to lower the bar on how church is done and raise the bar on what it means to be a disciple."
"A growing number of people are leaving the institutional church for a new reason. They are not leaving because they have lost their faith. They are leaving to preserve their faith."
"There is a vast dfference between delegated authority and distributed authority... Authority is distributed to each person to accomplish all God has for the person, without needeing layers of intermediaries to pass that authority down. One's cover is found in his or her position in Christ, not in human positions above in the chain of command"
In summary then, this book is manna from heaven for anyone braving the desert sands that lie beyond church-as-we-know-it in hope of eventually entering a more fruitful future.

When Jim met Jon

This dates back a couple of years but I'd never seen it before, it's Jim Wallis on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. I reckon it's one of the best examples I've seen of a Christian communitcating to culture (with the exception of Bono's various public rants and prayers!). Check it out and let me know what you think.

The Violence of Love

To continue the theme of my last blog entry I'm going to give space to the voice of a prophet who was promoted into the presence of Jesus by an assasin's bullet on March 24th 1980 - Oscar Romero.

It is very easy to be servants of the word without disturbing the world: a very spiritualized word, a word without any commitment to history, a word that can sound in any part of the world because it belongs to no part of the world. A word like that creates no problems, starts no conflicts.
What starts conflicts and persecutions, what marks the genuine church, is the word that, burning like the word of the prophets, proclaims and accuses: proclaims to the people God's wonders to be believed and venerated, and accuses of sin those who oppose God's reign, so that they may tear that sin out of their hearts, out of their societies, out of their laws -- out of the structures that oppress, that imprison, that violate the rights of God and of humanity.
This is the hard service of the word. But God's Spirit goes with the prophet, with the preacher, for he is Christ, who keeps on proclaiming his reign to the people of all times. (December 10, 1977)
The Violence of Love, a collection of Romero's outspoken words, is available from Amazon.

Our 3 journeys

About 2 years ago I came across a concept called 'LifeShapes' in a book called The Passionate Church, by Mike Breen. The book was written in a way that would naturally appeal to anyone with a picture-oriented mind like me. One of the images that's stayed with me was a reflection drawn from the lifestyle of Jesus in Luke 6:12 -19. Imagine an equilateral triangle drawn on a page, the top points Up, the left points In and the right points Out. Up refers to our relationship with God, In refers to our relationship with each other and Out refers to our relationship with the wider world around us.

Well, a few days ago I just found a very similar concept being used by an emerging church group in Australia (right), which appears to have been developed entirely on its own with no reference to Mike's book. I find this really encouraging because it shows me that God is working around the world revealing his ways to people who put their trust in him. The way a certain revelation is understood and communicated may differ, after all any illustration, whether visual or verbal, is just an imperfect attempt to grasp a truth. In this case we have two perspectives on a single simple reality - we need God, we need friends, and we need to reach the world.

The Loneliness of Leadership

Yesterday I finally got round to visiting 'Another Place', the art installation by sculptor Antony Gormley just north of Liverpool docks. Crosby Beach is a rather grim place to be on a drizzly January morning but I was well prepared with many protective layers and I really tried to enter into the atmosphere of the place. For me, these cast iron men staring at the horizon reminded me of the loneliness of leadership.

Don't get me wrong, 'Another Place' is not a depressing place, not at all. In fact, the figures seem to evoke a spirit of resolve and even hope, but their isolation and vulnerability is inescapable. Yes, there are 100 of these iron men on the same beach but each one is so far removed from his neighbour that it is impossible to view the sculptures together as a whole, as a community.

The life God has called me to connects me with lots of church leaders, of all traditions and denominations, I'm on first name terms with at least a hundred and work quite closely with several dozen. It's quite apparent to me that the default setting for church leaders is 'fly solo'. Of course there are exceptions but on the whole spending time developing friendships with other leaders appears a fairly low priority. This state of affairs is actually quite strange considered in the context of the struggles which are par for the course in leadership. The tragic truth is that over the years I've known several who've decided to give up on church altogether. It was these leaders that I felt my heart going out to on Crosby Beach.

I often think about my own future as a leader and wonder if I'll eventually be swamped by the tide or slowly sink into the sand. It's a possibility that I think every leader should be realistic about, nobody can say "It'll never happen to me." And so I've made this my goal, to make myself know-able to other leaders and to try to build friendships that will last. In particular I've decided not to allow doctrinal differences to dictate my relationships. Above all, I must not fly solo.