Missional God

Last year Ross Hastings published the book, Missional God, Missional Church, Hope for re-evangelising the West.

Kevin Ward, from the Knox Centre for Ministry and Leadership, in Dunedin, has written a very good review of the book, one that makes you want to go out and buy it straightaway- especially if you've got any interest in mission. The review appears as a guest post on Jason Goroncy's blog. 

Ross Hastings may not be a name that's familiar to you: here's the biography that appears on the Regent College website:

Ross Hastings holds a PhD in organo-metallic chemistry from Queen’s University, Kingston and a PhD in theology from the University of St Andrews, Scotland, his native country. He has a vested interest in helping the Christian church understand contemporary science and in helping the scientific community benefit from theological and philosophical scholarship. Dr. Hastings teaches in the areas of pastoral theology, the theology and spirituality of mission, ethics, and the interface between science and Trinitarian theology. He has taught chemistry at high schools in England and South Africa, and also at Trinity Western University. He has served as a senior pastor in Kingston, Ontario; Montreal, Quebec; and Burnaby, British Columbia (BC). For eleven years, Dr. Hastings served in this capacity at Peace Portal Alliance Church in White Rock, BC. His theological dissertation is a comparative study of the Trinitarian theology of Jonathan Edwards and Karl Barth and is in the publication process. His first book, Missional God, Missional Church: Hope for Re-evangelizing the West, was released in 2012 with IVP Academic. Dr. Hastings serves as Associate Professor of Pastoral Theology at Regent College.

Art and Faith Conference

Murray Rae has just announced that the organisation, STAANZ will hold a conference and associated exhibition on Art and Faith in Dunedin from July 29-30 this year. The theme of the conference is 'Tikkun Olam: To Mend the World' and the keynote speaker will be Professor Bill Dyrness from Fuller Theological Seminary.

The aim of the conference is to encourage conversation between artists and theologians around the theme of art and faith.

More details on the conference website.

Pass this on to anyone who may be interested, especially artists.

Chuck Olsen visit

“Transforming Sessions and Parish Councils Into Communities of Spiritual Leaders” a seminar led by Dr. Charles (Chuck) Olsen

Thursday 24 March 2011, from 3:30 to 5 p.m at Knox Centre for Ministry and Leadership

All welcome. No charge.

A native Nebraskan, Dr. Olsen is a retired minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA). He has twenty-two years of pastoral and teaching experience. His special interests are church renewal and revitalization – both on a national and local church level. He was director of Project Base Church, a Lilly Endowment funded effort with the Institute of Church Renewal. Two books, The Base Church, and Cultivating Religious Growth Groups, were products of this venture into new and small group forms of Christian community.

As program director with the Heartland Presbyterian Center in Kansas City, Dr. Olsen directed the Lilly Endowment funded “Set Apart Lay Leader Project,” a four-year effort focusing on the integration of spirituality and administration in church boards and councils. His book, Transforming Church Boards Into Communities of Spiritual Leaders (Alban), tells that story. It was selected as one of the top ten religious books in 1997 by the Academy of Parish Clergy and is one of Alban’s all time best sellers.

Dr. Olsen founded Worshipful-Work: Center for Transforming Religious Leadership, an inclusive ecumenical ministry focusing on the integration of spirituality and administration. He teaches, writes, and facilitates the practice of spiritual discernment in religious bodies. And he is co-author, with Danny E. Morris, of Discerning God’s Will Together and, with Sister Ellen Morseth, of Selecting Church Leaders: A Practice in Spiritual Discernment, both from Alban and Upper Room. His latest book, The Wisdom of the Seasons: How The Church Year Helps Us Understand Our Congregational Stories, was released by Alban in October of 2009.

This will be Dr. Olsen’s second visit to Dunedin. He was last here in 2001.

Conferences and fundraising

I've been at the Practical/Pastoral Theology Conference here in Dunedin for most of the last couple of days; hence the lack of posts on this blog. Plus, last Friday I was out of the office for yet another reason for most of the day. It all cuts into my blogging time!

There'll be another Conference here in Dunedin in November of 2011; that may not please North Islanders...but hey! we have to have some events in this part of the world. And anyway, the weather has been absolutely glorious over the last few days, and lunchtimes, and tea breaks were spent basking in the sunshine while discussing erudite matters (and in my case, not so erudite).

All that by way of introduction to another conference that's taking place in the next couple of weeks, in four North Island towns/cities. (And also in response to the Working Well survey in which the majority of those replying said they wanted future conferences to be held in Auckland. Doesn't Auckland get enough stuff already?)

Brett Knowles in Napier suggested that the Ask Without Fear conference might be worth a look. It's about fundraising, and ways to do, and is being run by Marc A. Pitman, the author of a book with the same name as the conference. (You can read or skim the book online, if you're of a mind, at Google.)

Churches are always in need of more cash than they seem to have, and often, to their surprise, there are people out there just waiting to be asked to donate (not necessarily your church members, who probably already give readily) but people who you may not think of in connection with your church. I've seen this happen, to the tune of NZ$500,000, just in the last couple of years. It is possible.

Here's a link to the group that's running the conferences in NZ. Exult: practical resources for community groups.

Alan Roxburgh

I seem to have been remiss in not advertising Alan Roxburgh's visit to New Zealand.

He'll be in Dunedin from the 29th November to the 2nd December. For more details on this, check out the Leith Valley Presbyterian website or the Knox Centre for Ministry and Leadership news page.

Alan will also be in Auckland on the 26th and 27th November. He is presenting an Open Lecture: 'Where are we as church in contemporary Western Culture and what needs to happen?' on the 26th at 7 pm at Somervell Presbyterian Church, and is presenting a Missional Transitioning Consultation for Northern and Kaimai Presbyteries on the Saturday.

Incidentally, the spelling of his name above is correct; the spelling on the Knox website and on the advertising is not and may have been confused with John Roxborogh, formerly a lecturer at Knox College. John's name is spelt in the same way as the township of Roxburgh, in Otago, New Zealand.

Mission - and Health

In today's 'Star' - one of the local Dunedin freebie newspapers - there's a front page article about Dr John Arnold and his plans to open a Health Centre in the main street before Christmas.

So what, you say? Well, the difference with this health centre is that services will be free to any and all patients. John is concerned that there are a lot of people slipping under the radar in terms of health care, and he's hoping that by providing free care, more people will be able to have access to health advice and services.

And why am I particularly interested? Well, John and I have been getting together nearly every week for several years, since I first met him and took him through a discipleship course after he became a Christian. When the course was complete we decided that it would be good to keep getting together, and so we have.

The result is that I've been witness to John's long journey to get this free health clinic idea off the ground. And it's been quite some journey, particularly this year when John took a deep breath, began to work only part time at his usual practice, and spent many hours a week looking for premises and getting people involved and finding additional funding and everything else that was needed. The premises have been in hand for a couple of months, but of course there have been the usual delays from those in the world of bureaucracy.

We often hear of people going to third world countries to do medical mission. Here with the Servants Health Centre is an example of how you can do it in your own country.

Sheds, Streets and Charity

I wrote about the Men's Sheds movement in Australia a few posts back. I didn't know that the movement had reached New Zealand as well, so was pleasantly surprised to read in the paper this week that a second Shed was just up and running. They're actually calling them "Blokes' Sheds" here, so it may be an uptake of the idea rather than an offshoot of it.

The first Dunedin shed was established at Taieri Airport about a year ago (Taieri Airport now being a place where only little planes take off from), and the second shed is in the grounds of the Kings High School. It goes by the name of the South Dunedin Blokes' Shed, and officially opens on Saturday the 5th Sept, 2009. (Apparently Alexandra is also in the process of setting up a Blokes' Shed and Wellington is in on the act too.) You can see a video from Channel 9 about the Taieri Blokes' Shed here.

On another front, a group called Living Streets Dunedin is initiating the concept of making Dunedin streets more pleasant for pedestrians through "highlighting the good, the bad and the ugly in their walking environment." This sounds a little like the idea of getting to know your community, which Flagstaff Parish began a year or so ago.

And who says charity is dead? A young girl, Grace Hughes, was featured on television in July and in the Otago Daily Times in August. She has an inability to eat, and could be helped by treatment at a hospital in Austria. As the Star newspaper reports: Since then the family has been inundated with offers of help.

Being Local

There's a move afoot, plainly, regarding church being localised in the neighbourhood. The idea that people could form communities by travelling across town to some mega-church (or even a reasonably sized smaller church) is beginning to be seen as counterproductive to the idea of community within the Gospel. See our last post for more on what's happening.

Here in the National Mission Office, one of our jobs is to help people begin the journey of looking at their own community: what's already there, what's needed, who lives there, who doesn't, what's available for local people and much more. Though we might start the process, much of this work can only be done by those who actually live in the community, and an excellent piece of such work was done in this way by the Flagstaff Parish (in Dunedin) a couple of years ago. We use their template for helping other parishes to think about their community.

In North America there's a kind of movement beginning called Moving Back into the Neighbourhood, and Alan Roxburgh's site not only talks about this but offers a one-day workshop for people getting to grips with their community and what it contains.

My apologies

Every so often you need to do a bit of housekeeping, and this time it's involved the links down the side of the page. I discovered that a couple of Dunedin blogs, both run by the same person, haven't been added to for several months, so they've been deleted from the list.

And Glocal Christianity had changed its URL....I've repaired that on the list.

Sorry if you've been trying to access any blogs and haven't been able to, or have found them out of date.

Calvin in Dunedin

This year celebrates the 500th Anniversary of John Calvin's birth. Round the world there are people putting on conferences, lectures, celebrations of all sorts to mark the memory of this historic figure in Christian - and world - history.
To some Christians, Calvin's name doesn't evoke good vibes, and certainly there are aspects of Calvin's life and theology that we would no longer find acceptable. However, there is much that's great and good about the man, and it's this side of him we celebrate.
Knox Centre for Ministry and Learning, in conjunction with the Theology and Religious Studies Department of the University of Otago, is presenting a two-day conference offering international and local perspectives on Calvin, with particular reference to his historical and theological influences here in New Zealand, and particularly in Otago.
The keynote speakers will be Prof Randall Zachman and Prof Elsie McKee (pictured at right).
Other speakers are: Alison Clarke, Ivor Davidson, Peter Matheson, Angela McCarthy, Murray Rae and John Stenhouse.
The dates for the Conference are: 24-25 August, 2009. There will also be a son et lumiere presentation at First Church in Dunedin City.
Register - and find out more information here.

Clean-up

The Sunday after Easter, around 1500 people gathered in the Dunedin Town Hall for a Resurrection service. There were plenty of young people, but also a large number of oldies, and the enthusiasm was full on.
During that service, Bruce Elder, from Dunedin City Baptist, called for volunteers to help with a number of 'service projects' around the town. The aim was to get around 800 Christian people going out into the community to pick up on jobs that needed doing, but wouldn't get done otherwise. These varied from street cleaning, to painting playgrounds at schools to restoring the Wakari Hospital's duck ponds.
The project had been advertised at various churches around the city already, but another bunch of people signed up for it at the Resurrection service.
In the end the number who went and worked was about half the number called for, but most of the projects that had been set up got done - and the weather stayed fine for the afternoon...

Focal Point

I think I've come across the FOCal website some time ago, but hadn't given it much further attention. Anyway, by serendipity I came across it today again, and thought I'd let others know about it.
FOCal's equivalent of a mission statement is:
FOCaL is set up to give a forum for those who hold to a progressive Christian faith and 'left of centre' political convictions. While not wishing to deny conservative Christians or conservative politicians their right to express their point of view, we feel that our society and the church needs to hear the voices of the Christian left.
FOCal leans towards the liberal point of view, but seems more inclusive - if that's not a contradiction in terms (!)
Anyway, the page I first alighted on was the Links page. This is worth checking out, even if you don't otherwise give the site much time - mainly because this links page will keep you busy for some time as it is!
The links are listed under various headings:

• Christian Reflections on Politics and Society (Sojourners, Third Way, WCC, for example);
• Social Services, Government Aid Agencies;
• Environmental Groups (A Rocha, ECEN, for example);
• Resources for Faith and Spirituality (Spirited Exchanges, Soulscape, Spirituality and Practice, for example)
• Worship Resources
• The "Emerging Church" (which has both Brian McLaren and the Methodist Parish of Dunedin);
• Alternative News Sources (includes Aljazeera);
• Humour and Miscellaneous (dare I say these were quite refreshing after the list above - I'm needing a holiday, obviously! This section includes the wonderful Lego Bible (the Brick Testament), and the rather odd Dog Church Org: The Virtual Church of the Blind Chihuahua.

There's a great mix of stuff here - enough to keep anyone occupied through their holidays....