More from Croucher

As promised, here's another article from Rowland Croucher on the issues of stress and burnout amongst ministers. This one begins with a story about a man who had the ability to preach, but always lost his church job through conflict. In the end he was virtually down and out, his wife just managing to make ends meet.

Rowland goes on to look at what helps a pastor/minister last the distance.

Today it's both easier and harder to be a pastor. Easier, because we have more resources to help us - like the World Wide Web for sermon-material (ever used the search-engine Google as a concordance?), more support-groups to encourage and pray for us, better access to the world's practical theology experts, and a higher standard of living, on average, than pastors have ever enjoyed.

But it's also harder. Many of us can identify with the apostle Paul who said, 'Who is equal to such a task?', about his own call to pastoral ministry. These days the expectations of our people are higher - and more likely to be expressed vigorously. Up-front leaders and speakers compete with dynamic personalities on television. There are more 'religious' people not attending churches (in the West) than ever before in history. Our people are likely to be better-educated - and differently-educated than we are. 'One size fits all' doesn't work any more: people are more mobile, and brand-loyalty doesn't work for Generation X'ers (those born since 1965) - or even Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964).

He offers a number of suggestions over several articles (I've only listed the first few here, as the others run comfortably on from the one before.)

1. Jesus as the model for ministry
2. Spiritual formation -keeping on bel
3. Images of Ministry - what is yours?
4. Saint or Pharisee?
5. Keeping the Spiritual Disciplines - this point keeps turning up; is God saying something?!
6. What about the 'Call'?
the rest of the article appears in a second page:
7. Understanding yourself - how much does your family history affect your work?
8. Co-dependency - blaming others for your own faults
9. Mentors and Networks - absolutely essential!

Daniel Oudshoorn on mission in the here and now

Just came across a very good essay that first appeared in the New Zealand magazine, Stimulus, back in February 2006. It's entitled: Speaking Christianly as a missional activity in the midst of Babel. (It has a subtitle: Christian living as the exegesis of the Gospel proclamation after the end of history.)

The piece is by Daniel Oudshoorn, about whom I can't find a lot, except that he's been a student at Regent in Vancouver.

The essay is full of great quotes, but I'll stick to just one: Western Church talk about mission is often dominated by strategising. The church, driven by a pragmatism that is itself definitive of western culture, searches for the strategy that will cause mass conversion.

You can read the complete essay here.
Stimulus doesn't have all its material online; only a selection. However, many of their printed back editions are still available.

Colin Greene

“…I firmly believe God is raising up a new generation of prophets and visionaries who are what I call ‘brokers of a new reality’. In other words they really want to know what is going on in our world on all kinds of levels, politically, economically, spiritually and culturally. They want to know what are the contours of the cultural space we presently inhabit and they want to be able to celebrate what is good about that process of rapid globalization, as well as critique what is dangerous and reckless about it. As an Anglican I want the Anglican church in the West to stop re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and accept that the Christendom ship is now sinking very quickly and will soon be gone below the waves of rapid fundamental change and innovation. The Anglican Church requires a new missional imagination and to do that it must re-engage with the biblical narrative in such a way that it can discover new ways of being church among the cultural refugee’s and spiritual seekers of our generation…”

Colin Greene, author of Metavista: Bible, Church and Mission in an Age of Imagination (Faith in an Emerging Culture Series)

Alan Hirsch calls this book: Well written, theologically stimulating, meticulously researched, and will no doubt be an authoritative text in its genre. But the best thing about Metavista is that it is simply great missiology in the Newbigin tradition.