Lack of imagination....

These are radically different kinds of questions than the ones currently being asked by denominations and congregational leaders. In Missional: Joining God in the Neighbourhood I argue that we’re controlled and shaped by what I call church questions. No matter what the style or brand - be it traditional, contemporary, emergent, missional etc. - the basic underlying questions are focused on how to improve, change, reorder, redesign, remake the church in one form or another. Discussions are about what types and models of church are needed, they focus on how to, one more time, restructure what already exists, put a commission together to imagine new forms, or change existing books of order and discipline to make the church more open. All these activities, which have some value, are shaped by a single, common imagination. Church is the centre of the conversation, the subject, object and end of all these discussions. It’s this imagination that’s blinding and binding Christian imagination from the ways the Spirit is actually unravelling our existing church world and pushing us across boundaries into unknown spaces where we no longer have the maps or control.

Alan Roxburgh in his article: Rediscovering the Neighbourhood

Update on the 30 days

Back on the 2nd May we mentioned that Alan Roxburgh's Missional Network was running a 30 days of joinging God in your neighbourhood series.

I've just checked back and there are now 20 days listed (obviously a little behind, even given that they're a day and half behind us in time zones), with some fascinating and useful material.

There are several items by Simon Carey Holt, along with a variety of ideas of ways to engage with your neighbourhood, such as going out with the local police at night and hearing what they know about the area, or offering tutoring to immigrants close by, or becoming a regular in a particular coffee bar or other meeting place, and getting to know who else is there frequently.

Some of the ideas may not appeal, some may take up more time than you have available. Nevertheless this is a worthwhile series which is bound to have at least one thing in it that's of value to those looking for ways to become more neighbourhood-focused.

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.

Alan Roxburgh talks

Alan Roxburgh will be in New Zealand soon, but for those who may not be able to get to his talks, here's a way to catch up with what this missional speaker has to say. The Montreal Diocesan Theological College has put half a dozen or so of Alan's talks (from Sept this year) online. They can be downloaded as mp3s or listened to online.

Either way these are worth checking out. Paul Fromont says, Al is one of the Western churches foremost missiologist/theologians. He brings real intellectual grunt, breadth, experience, a network of diverse conversations, and great communication skills to the table. All are in evidence in the audio recordings of the talks.

The Missional Channel

Nope, this isn't an addition to Sky; sorry to raise your hopes.

Instead it's a site on Vimeo, where there are about ten videos from mission-focused speakers, including some whom we've often named in this blog for various reasons: David Fitch, Alan Hirsch, Ed Stetzer, Graham Cray (the Fresh Expressions man), Andrew Jones, Alan Roxburgh.

The videos vary considerably in length, the longest being around half an hour and the shortest just under two minutes (the length shows up down the bottom left of the screen before you start running the video). The titles aren't terribly helpful ('Missional Conversation', 'an interview with..', 'cultivate gathering' and so on) so it's a matter of opening up one of the videos and seeing what it has to say.

Recommended for those short patches when you just need to stop and listen for a while....

Simon Carey Holt on video

Alan Roxburgh is a name that turns up on this blog fairly frequently, but it was only today that I discovered the videos on Roxburgh Missional Network site.

The focus of these is 'moving back into the neighbourhood' and the two dozen or more videos look at different aspects of this. The softly-spoken Australian (so soft I had to turn the computer's sound up), Simon Carey Holt features in five of them, and gives as good an idea of what the focus is as anyone. He tells a story in the first of his videos about being in a Los Angeles neighbourhood when three young boys were mistakenly shot (the local gang mistook them for members of an opposing gang). In spite of there being a church of 9,000 people nearby, with 100 pastors, Holt was surprised to find that not one of those people seemed to know anything about the shooting, nor did any (as far as he knew) turn up to the spontaneous memorial that took place in the alleyway beside the Holts' kitchen window.

The problem was most of that enormous congregation drove to their church, and drove home again to a different suburb.

Holt is the author of a book, The God Next Door, which also focuses on the themes discussed in the videos.

Perhaps your church isn't very neighbourhood-connected. However, you are, and there's nothing to stop you being involved with the people who live on either side of you, or behind you, or across the street. We tend to think of our neighbours as being there by chance; perhaps the reality is, God has put them there purposely.

Changing face of Priesthood

On the Prodigal Kiwi site a few days ago there was a post in which Jemma Allen reflects on her first ten years as a priest, and looks at what's changed. The post starts with a list of points:

1. The changing face of priesthood (while she reflects on her journey, and it’s changes; the bigger picture is that the role of the priest has changed).
2. What distinguishes a priest when you take away the clerical clothing?
3. The importance of “time for you”; of time for the other.
4. The priority of listening, and of being with others (especially outside of a congregational contexts – Jemma is a University Chaplain).
5. What happens to priesthood when you take away what is regarded as a central function of priesthood – officiating at the Eucharistic table…? The role of priest as “gatherer” is often used to describe this function – they gather a congregation around the central act of worship. What happens to ones identity as "priest" when your context and activity is beyond the edges of a more traditional parish context? What function and role does priestly identity and gifting serve outside of the congregational context?
6. The importance of subverting cultural measures of effectiveness: “busyness” and “productivity”. The importance of offering an alternative way of being in the world.
7. The recognition (albeit, implicitly) that the cultural landscape has changed markedly. As Alan Roxburgh is fond of saying, we live in an “unthinkable world” and there is a need to see “with different eyes”. For me, this includes how we see the contemporary role of the priest, a role that is at once ancient and future, although in contemporary contexts too often the emphasis is on the “ancient” rather than on the “future” and the missional formation of priests.

The post continues with some further reflections on the priesthood - and the way in which, being a University Chaplain, her views of the priesthood have had to change. (Since these words were taken directly from Anna's own blog, I've given the link for that. You might just like to explore it a little fur)

Introducing the Missional Church

Introducing the Missional Church: What It Is, Why It Matters, How to Become One (Allelon Missional Series), by Alan Roxburgh and Scott Boren.

This book won’t be out till November 2009. In the meantime, here’s some information about it:

Many pastors and church leaders have heard the term "missional" but have only a vague idea of what it means, let alone why it might be important to them. But what does it actually mean? What does a missional church look like and how does it function? Two leading voices in the missional movement here provide an accessible introduction, showing readers how the movement developed, why it's important, and how churches can become more missional.

Introducing the Missional Church demonstrates that ours is a post-Christian culture, making it necessary for church leaders to think like missionaries right here at home. Focusing on a process that allows a church to discern its unique way of being missional, it guides readers on a journey that will lead them to implement a new set of missional practices in their churches. The authors demonstrate that living missionally is about discerning and joining God's work in the world in order to be a witness to God's kingdom on earth.

To be published by Baker Books.

Incidentally, we're on the lookout for a word to replace: Post-Christian, or even Post-Modern. What do you think the word for the coming period could be?

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.

The need for evaluation

In an article on the Roxburgh Missional Network this week, entitled New Directions for a Leadership Style, John McLaverty writes about the need for ongoing evaluation of our lives and ministry. After he quit his job as a full-time pastor nine years ago, McLaverty was encouraged to take a 360 evaluation.

“ A 360 what?”, I believe was my quick and rather anxious response. Patiently and wisely [the Vocational Psychologist] responded, “A 360 is an effective instrument through which you can filter and evaluate changes you may want to make in your style of leadership. It is a multi-rater, full circle (hence the 360) feedback survey. We are going to ask 20-25 of your friends, colleagues, peers and work associates to fill-in a confidential survey on how they perceive you both in strengths and challenges. In the end we will provide you with a confidential report and recommendations for your professional development. We will also suggest you form a support group that will help guide you through the recommendations.”

McLaverty recently asked in a different post, Why are you in ministry? It's a question he believes ministers should be asking themselves on a regular basis. (Us lay-people, of course, never have to ask such questions....!) The Pastor/Leader 360 is available via the Roxburgh site - it costs something, but you can download a sample report to get some idea of what it's about.

Unthinkable Life

Life, Inc. How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back, by Douglas Rushkoff.
Missional guru, Alan Roxburgh, has written a good review of this book on his blog. Here are a couple of paragraphs from it:

“I read it in one sitting. A lot of the material is familiar and, yes, he overstates and exaggerates in places where it isn’t needed. Frankly, it's pretty easy to critique this book at many levels, in part because it tries to tackle a tough piece of social history in a book wanting to communicate with people who don’t have the inside ‘expertise’ of social historians, economists or urban studies. It's a book that over-stretches by oversimplifying economic developments that are more complex than he wishes to own. All of this being the case, Rushkoff has still written a book that deserves our attention. It would seem to be the vocation of church leadership to read with a critical eye and not simply take everything at face value. There is much in this book that will assist us in framing why it is so hard right now to shape local churches and denominational systems in anything that goes much beyond the latest ‘seeker’ techniques or church growth gift-wrapped in glossy missional paper.

“Part of living in an unthinkable world is discovering how to see the ways certain parts of life we simply ‘take for granted’ come out of very specific social histories, now forgotten, that are blinding us not just to the ways we are being shaped but from imagining a different world. In reading Rushkoff we are getting very close to the lived anxieties of the people who come, hungering and thirsting to our churches whom we too often send away empty because we are focused on meeting needs and being seeker friendly. We see how corporatism has framed a way of living in suburban life shaped by the automobile that isolated people from neighbours and makes us frightened of the very strangers the Gospel calls us to embrace.”

The book was published by Random House, June 2, 2009

PS, by 'an unthinkable world' I understand Roxburgh to mean a world we haven't yet envisaged, rather than one that can't be envisaged.