I plan for this to be the last post about church growth as it relates to structures. I started the series because I have a deep seated belief that the local church is ultimately a force for good in this world and that the pastor at the helm needs to have a fuller understanding of his position within the church.

Just as God has ordained some to be teachers, apostles, prophets and healers, there is a variety within each of these groups that needs to be recognized. The giftings of one pastor may be to a small congregation where as another imbued by with gifting to lead a large church.

I still believe that the local church is the ultimate force for good but the curtain need to be pulled open and the church needs to see the little man called Christendom who has been calling our shots for far too long.

Christendom is a concept borne out of a close connection of church and state, not necessarily a theocracy but a symbiotic relationship where one feeds the other to their own ends. And Christendom thinking is destroying the church.

We live for the most part in a post-modern, post-Christian, post-denominational world. A world that has lost automatic respect for the church and it's teaching because of how we have represented Christ and His teachings. Witness what clerical abuse of children, institutional thinking, denominationalism, political manipulation by refusing communion to those who expouse Heterodoxy in their thinking. These things and Christians who exhibit little to no Christ-likeness has stolen away the good will of the church universal and must be examined and where appropriate repented of and where appropriate rejected or redeemed.

Christendom has ended but we are still behaving as if it's alive and well.

The net effect over the entire Christendom epoch was that Christianity moved from being a revolutionary, social and spiritual movement to being a static religious institution with its attendant structures, priesthood, and sacraments. Taken as a sociological reality, Christendom has been in decline for 250 years so much so, that contemporary Western culture has been called by many historians (secular and Christian) the "post-Christendom" culture.
    -Michael Frost, Exiles, p.4

    
I'll go out on a very short limb and say this, the decline of the (at least Western) church is because of a failure to see it's place in the world clearly.

So how do we begin to turn this around? It's not what you might think.

Step 1: Christian unity!
Step 2: See step 1.

Our Savior Jesus once said "A house divided against itself can not stand" and later went on to say "My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me." (John 17:20-23)

If we resolve to be Christians, one body, one faith, one baptism, one together and open to the transformation of our lives by the Holy Spirit of God I believe that church form and structure will flow naturally into our current contexts. In some places it will look the same as before and in other places radically different but we have a God big enough to handle it.

This is the call of an Emerging Pastor and their leadership of Gods church.

Barriers to growth start at the top, with the Pastor and his attitude to what the church is and what it should be. I tend not to advocate one style of church over another, I don't particularly care if your church is emergent, emerging, traditional, contemporary, is in a factory, a clown college or an old monastery. What I do care about is that it is a community of people expressing Kingdom qualities to it's greater community. A group of people reaching out to the marginalized for and with the love of Christ.

When we look at the question of the pastor as a barrier to growth, we need to look at the size of the church and how he runs it.

Consider these 4 categories:

• The Family Church(< 50 active members)
• The Pastoral Church (50 to 150 active members)
• The Program Church (150 to 350 active members)
• The Corporate Church (> 350 active members)

These create 4 natural barriers in the life of a church that must be confronted and dealt with proactively when your church is going through a phase of growth or contraction. The size impacts the effectiveness of the pastor as well as the manner of their leadership.

A pastor who leads a church of a particular size as if they were another size is most likely setting themselves up for failure. For example, suppose you are a leading a thriving Pastoral sized congregation and find yourself called to a new congregation already in a Program-size. That leader will need to make a significant shift in thinking if they desire to be effective in their new congregation. They move from the primary leader in the church to either the team leader or a team member or a larger leadership group.

It may be that the new church has called you to grow a specialized area such as small groups or outreach. You are now no longer responsible for the entire congregation, but a sub-set of them. Your will for the direction of the church becomes part of a greater whole which can lead to frustration if you do not accept this.

Conversely, if you have been brought in as the team leader you need to accept that you are setting overall direction for the church and the execution of individual components of this is not within your control. There are just two many parts for you to micro manage.

Over the next 4 posts I am going to unpack what these church sizes mean for the pastor. What their responsibility is to the congregation, leadership styles that work for it's size as well as the pitfalls of working with a church of that size.

I've recently been challenged to think about whether our faith should be a public or private affair. To generalize both positions:

Some people advocate that our faith should be a public as possible. That we should shout it from the rooftops and insert it into all parts of life, whether it's wanted or not. These people advocate a faith that not only informs the conscience but writes public policy.

Advocates of private faith believe we should keep our faith out of public life, off the T.V., out of politics and some even go to the extreme that it would be wrong to evangelize or even speak to another person about our faith in case we accidentally convert them.

I learned early on in my life that when confronted with two extremes we are more than likely missing the point. It seems a tool of the Devil to push us towards the extreme ends of the spectrum on any issue and not allow us to be reflective or nuance in our positions and reply. I take that position here.

Sure, the bible talks about private faith, Jesus encouraged us to pray locked up in the pantry, but he also commissioned us to go into all the world and live lives of public example. So what are we to do? How should we live our faith?

Let me advocate this, we should not have either a public or a private faith, rather we should have a personal faith.

A personal faith is one that shy's away from boycotts of specific groups and instead builds relationships with people who they hold differing opinions on.

The motivation of that statement is, as a pastor, emerging or otherwise, you will be asked to stand up and denounce many groups of people, many activities and even products and services. One week a congregant might ask you to speak out against homosexuality and gay marriage, the next week it's drug users, and the week after it's prostitutes.

It's ironically easy to mount the high horse when talking about these issues, be it an inclusive or an exclusive response. There are those extremes again. When asked to address a difficult topic, a default response is to saddle up and denounce a group or through the church doors open and say all are welcome.

A personal faith does something different, it seeks to intentionally build relationships with those we are being called to single out, and an emerging pastor will lead those who follow them to do the same.

By way of example, I used to have a very slanted view of prostitutes and prostitution. I was very against prostitution but I also held the prostitute in very low esteem, something not someone, and certainly not a person worthy of my time.

Since then I have made an effort to meet those in the trade; firstly to see them as people and then to understand why they are where they are and what help I may offer to them. Doing so has not made me regard prostitution favorably, if anything it has made me even more angry about it, because of what it does to the practitioners.

A personal faith, one that built a relationship with this marginalized group helps me to love them without loving what they do.

So instead of setting up groups of people as our enemy, let us do as Abraham Lincoln suggests and destroy our enemy by making them our friends.

A great deal of my time recently has been given over to the contemplation of church as an activity. In the last month on three seperate occasions, people (all couples but I don't think that's causal) have told me that they have given up going to church because to varying degrees they do not see a point in it.

These are all people who love God wholeheartedly but have been disenfranchised in congregations that see their value as their abilities and not as fellow children of God.

It gives me reason to pause when I hear something like this and it should cause you to pause as well.

Why does a congregation exist? That seems to be the root of all of this. I know that many people are not fans of the institutional church and are looking to the emerging and missional movements to find something new and exciting, I count myself among them, but surely the institutional church as we know it is not evil.

If it were evil (as defined by actively opposing peoples relationship with God) then I would be the first with the flamethrower and pitch fork calling for them to be closed down. I do not believe the institutional church to be inherently evil but they have in many cases become misguided.

This sounds a little contradictory but I'm both a supporter and detractor of the institutional church. Actually, I just don't like the institutional part. Let me unpack that a little with some more definitions.

We call pretty much any church with 4 walls and people institutional. I believe that is unfair. An institutional church in my mind is one that has become institutionalized. One that exists purely to perpetuate it's existence.

IBM, one of the worlds biggest computer companies and largest employers had this problem not that long ago. They were BIG BLUE, everyone came to them to have their problems fixed. After a while they just seemed to stagnate. Their products were no longer innovative, they did not take the industry lead and as a consequence they were overtaken by smaller rivals. IBM it seems existed just to be IBM, they were no longer a business to help people.

Sound familiar? Institutionalized churches are like IBM, they were once vibrant communities of faith and healing but somewhere along the line they looked inwards and started to plan for maintenance and not growth.

IBM seems to be back on a growth trajectory but it took many years, a lot of pain and introspection and real LEADERSHIP to turn things around.

The same is needed for the church.

One of my favorite pieces of Scripture is "Without a vision, the people perish". It is our responsibility as leaders of God's church to be focused on his mission and share with our congregation how we are going to accomplish that in our context. That is vision. All else is secondary to the Fathers mission. The building, lobbying government, the music everything is secondary to the mission. They are often important, but I will say it one more time. They are secondary to the mission.

Here are some hard questions for you church leader:

 * What is your churches number one focus?
 * Do you have a vision statement?
 * Does it fulfill the great commission?
 * Are you able to measure if it's working?
 * Are you making an idol out of anything secondary?

 

I'm a little reluctant to talk about this, not so much for the content but because to do it correctly I need to name someone and in effect give them free advertising.

Recently I've been having a bit of a discussion (read: disagreement) with the owner of xmin.org, this is a website that advocates something I agree with, but goes about it in the wrong way.

xmin is short for Christian Minimalism and bills itself as "The Final Denomination", a very large claim but I'm calling it for what it is, Universalism and that's heresy!

From their website:

    What is Christian Minimalism?
        Christian Minimalism is the thinnest possible Christian denomination.

So what do I agree with?

Like it or not we are moving into a post-denominational world, one where our affiliation with a particular brand of church no longer holds a sway over where we go on a Sunday. My parent's in-law are a good example of this. They were both brought to faith in the Church of Christ and have spent nearly 20 years at the church I now attend. When they took their sea-change and move many hours away, they sought out the local Church of Christ and found that it was a stale and dying place. Instead they ended up at the local Salvation Army church, something completely different to Church of Christ.

This presents a great difficulty for the Emerging Pastor. You now have people entering your church from another Christian tradition who is rebellious against (for instance) your insistence of adult baptism as a means for membership, and will not take it well when you say their baptism as a baby or 50 years of attendance in an Anglican church will not qualify them for full membership within your church.

So I like the idea of getting to the core of the matter, to rooting out the fundamentals (that's not a dirty word) of our faith and coming together in a true spirit of unity. To strip away everything to the barest of bones so that ones political, theological and social opinions are secondary is excellent. From that basis we can add everything else in liberty and grace.

What I don't agree with is opening up our understanding of our faith to be so broad that anyone, even those who would deny Christ crucified could be included in the "tribe".

So where do we start? Where do we draw our line our understanding.

The early church fathers ran into this very problem, they were fighting heresy on every front, from the Gnostics who separated out the flesh and spirit naming the former evil and the latter good, to the universalists of their day. To get through this rough spot, the Emperor Constantine did something useful (instead of nearly killing the faith by popularizing it, but thats another story), he locked all the parties in a room and made them argue it out. The output of their discussions is what we call the Nicene creed.

I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds; God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God; begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made.

Who, for us men and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the virgin Mary, and was made man; and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate; He suffered and was buried; and the third day He rose again, according to the Scriptures; and ascended into heaven, and sits on the right hand of the Father; and He shall come again, with glory, to judge the quick and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end.

And I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of Life; who proceeds from the Father and the Son; who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified; who spoke by the prophets.

And I believe one holy catholic and apostolic Church. I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins; and I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.

I'm going to leave this post here, it's already getting pretty long, but I'm going to follow it up soon with what I think is a better idea than xmin, and that is true Christian minimalism, core faith!

When I found the following test it was billed as the world's easiest having a pass mark of just 4 out of 10. What I have since discovered is that 4 was setting my sights a little too high :)

There are some things in life that we just take for granted. For some of us it's our faith in God, faith in being able to keep our job, that are parents will always be there for us and one especially for those emerging pastors, that God works the way we think he does.

Nothing is more confronting than challenging our expectations especially about the fundamentals of life, those questions we thought we had put to bed years ago. What I continue to learn is that I have to unlearn and discover freshly what it means to be in a relationship with the God of the universe. I have to continually unlearn and discover again what my doctrine is, that's not simply throwing away everything I've learned but rather allowing new knowledge, new understanding and discoveries to be synthesized into my greater understanding of things.

So I encourage you to take this test (don't cheat, the answers are just below) and after you grade yourself take a few moments and pray to our Heavenly Father to reveal to you an area of your life or thinking (or both) where you have become stubborn or refuse to accept change and allow the Holy Spirit to challenge your expectations and grow you even more like Christ.

Let us live in the wisdom of John Maynard Keynes "When the facts change, I change my mind".


Here are the questions, be sure to write down your answers:

1. How long did the Hundred Years War last?
2. Which country makes Panama hats?
3. From which animal do we get catgut?
4. In which month do Russians celebrate the October Revolution?
5. What is a camel's hair brush made of?
6. The Canary Islands in the Pacific are named after what animal?
7. What was King George VI's first name?
8. What color is a purple finch?
9. Where are Chinese gooseberries from?
10. What is the color of the black box in a commercial airplane?

 

Now that was easy wasn't it? Check your answers below AND GOOD LUCK!

 

1. 116 years
2. Ecuador
3. Sheep and Horses
4. November
5. Squirrel fur
6. Dogs
7. Albert
8. Crimson
9. New Zealand
10. Orange, of course.

I had the pleasure of catching the train with a friend this morning. This friend and I debate and solve all the worlds problems every time we get together, it's a great iron sharpens iron time.

Out conversation momentarily touched on exclusivity and how it affects us. Consider this...

One day I bought the Serenity DVD box set, my wife and I watched it, enjoyed it and loved it. We lent the box set to this same friend and his wife, they watched it, enjoyed it, loved it and became fanatical about it :)
Not long after they ordered their own copy which didn't come in a cardboard box, rather it had a fancy smancy tin box.
Well I felt ripped off and envious of my friend because I didn't have the fancy tin box. So annoyed was I that I planned to go out and buy it.

Stop, hammer time!

What's going on here? I soon came to my senses and realized that my friend didn't really have anything more than I had, and even if he did, what does it matter?

There seems to be something wired into us that quests for the biggest, newest and shiniest objects. The tin box, the larger house, the best looking wife (I win there suckers! :)

I believe that this is part of our sinful nature that we can redeem. Instead of lusting after the better house or car or XBox, how about we redirect our desire into seeing God's will be done for the poor in our community. Let us boast about how there is no one in need in our community and spur the next town over to do the same.

I've been reading a lot about monastic orders recently and I think that they had something going for them, let's spurn the desire to accumulate treasures on earth and instead build up our heavenly storehouse!

It's about credibility, would you follow a pastor who built up his house instead of the church? The call to be an emerging pastor is in this detail, being counter to the consumer driven culture of this world.

Personally, I'm still trying to get the balance right but that's a step in the right direction.

I've been reading today a lot about Pope Gregory (590 - 604) and his influence on the English church as well as some of his correspondence as recorded by Bede.

I'm fascinated by him as a missionary leader, sending out missionaries to the Saxon's to bring them Christianity. It was in fact the second time Christianity was brought to the Saxons, the first time was by sword but this time by the accounts I'm reading were with love (missionary zeal).

Bede records many pastoral letters between Gregory and the Bishop of London which are worth reading and apply to today's emerging pastor but I want to paraphrase something from his Homilies on Ezekiel. It shows that he thought the contemplative life of monks would be best validated if it bore fruit in action.

"Of the two wives of Jacob, whom spiritual writers regarded as tech biblical types of the contemplative and active lives, Rachel was beautiful, but Liah was the fur tile one. Gregory himself thought he had married Rachel when he became a monk; but being pope was like waking up in the night to find oneself in the arms of Liah. It was a shock, but while there were those who still lacked the Christina faith, it was a necessary shock" ¹

As emerging pastors we need to be filled with that zeal for fertile living, lives that produce fruit.

 

^1. McManners, J. The oxford illustraed history of Christianity, p940

I've been polishing up my CV lately in anticipation of applying for a new ministry position somewhere. When I say polishing up I actually mean creating from scratch because I've never really had to apply for one.

So far my paid pastoral employment is as a visiting speaker to churches and a part time wage I draw from my church to support my college tuition. I've held a lot of roles but never have I applied outside of this church for a job.

I'm not jumping ship yet but I sought out some advice about what to put on a CV for ministry and there were some things I didn't think about.

There's experience of course. I detailed different ministries I had been involved with and my role within them. I included a very brief rundown of my secular work experience (my I. T. CV runs to about 6 pages at the moment) as well as something about my passion.

The advice I received from the head of leadership development for my denomination (the guy who also co-ordinates a lot of jobs) was to include two sections. Firstly "What I contribute to the team" and secondly "What I want to learn from your team".

Both of these gave me pause for reflection, this isn't just a job, ministry is a calling (something I actually said in my "Passion" section) so what is it exactly that I believe God is calling me to do? To learn and to teach?

In secular employment you can take a job that isn't a 100% fit because you know you can just move on (very Gen X/Y of me) but being called to a place to minister should take a great deal more of reflection, prayer and introspection, shouldn't it?

So emerging pastor, let's ask the questions, what do I bring to the team and what do I want to learn before we put in that application form. Perhaps God may want to inform us a little bit here.

I can't go into specifics because of confidentiality but a recent situation that comes partially under my authority has me contemplating the line between the public and private life of the pastor and whether such a division actually exists.

It has always been my belief that leaders in the church are to be held much more accountable for their actions because of their position. It's certainly a Scriptural concept and one that makes me shudder a little. How that will work in heaven I'm not sure but it's something that God keeps placing in my head, especially as I grapple with sin in my own life.

The pastor will never be perfect, will have their failings. The Apostle Paul had a thorn in his side that continually bugged him and God deliberately didn't remove it. I may exegete that this is because it kept Paul humble but that is speculation.

In my own life I deal with sin, with patterns from the past that keep raising up to try and grab me back into their bondage once more and as much and has hard as I've prayed and as much and as hard as I've fasted and as fervent and as honest and as real I have been with myself God has refused so far to take it away from me.

What are we to surmise from this, how do we reconcile God leaving us vulnerable to temptation while holding us to a higher standard? Is he just mean or is there a higher reason for it?

Someone once said that "Character is who you are in the dark". The real you is the version of yourself who no one meets, no one sees, no one witnesses. If this is the real me, the one in the dark place, then my vulnerability to certain sin is my check and balance and the method of God to help me grow and overcome.

That is the private life of the pastor, the place where we struggle.

The post is really a short treatment of the issue, I can see that it needs more fleshing out over the next few weeks. What are your thoughts about it?

These thoughts have been circling my head for a little while, it's about our ambition.

I consider myself a very ambitious person, I look for opportunities to develop, grow, excel and climb higher in my corporate position. I've had to do a lot of thinking about how ambition reconciles with ministry because the drivers are not the same.

Sure if I was (still) a Catholic I could seek opportunities to become a bishop (although being able to only move diagonally doesn't really appeal to me) or a cardinal. But as a run of the mill protestant there are not many opportunities to climb the ladder.

There is a school of thought that suggests that we subliminate (push down, bury) our thoughts and feelings such as ambition in the context of ministry but I don't really like that idea much. I feel that God has made me this way for a reason and it can be used for his kingdom if only I could figure out how.

Sublimination also seems to be a counterproductive exercise because that suppressed ambition may express itself in a more unhelpful way down the road.

I've thought that I could apply my ambition to a goal such as winning as many souls as possible but on the face it that always seems so contrived an answer. We should all showing the gospel to people but if I base my ambition on it I will be falsely disappointed if someone does not come into God's family. It's a dangerous thing to base your ambition on something out of your control, after all it is the Holy Spirit that convicts.

The working draft of my thinking lately places ambition as motivation towards effectiveness in the broader sense.

Being effective in ministry to paraphrase Paul (2 Timothy 2ff) is to be a soldier of Christ, to be an athlete striving and to be a farmer working hard each day.

If my ambition is to be redeemed it has to be towards these goals, to be an effective soldier of Christ by listening to my commanding officer at all times, not being distracted by fleeting fads and thoughts. To be an effective athlete I need to be in training each day and to be an effective farmer I need to get up each day and do what needs to be done, not putting off the planting, sowing or reaping until another day.

Sunday and Tuesday night I brushed off ye olde electric guitar and was involved in a very intimate worship experience with my church.

It happened quite by accident, all the night service crew (except for one) who were rostered on had to bail at the last minute so the drummer (the only original), another worship leader and I just sat on some stools and bashed it out. The drummer was playing a large bongo and the other worship leader and I were playing guitar and singing.

That Sunday night I really felt the presence of God in the worship time, at the end of a couple of songs I engaged in some "free worship" and it was a blessed time with the Word, communion and ministry afterwards.

The three of us were asked to lead worship on Tuesday night during our monthly prayer gathering and we readily agreed, everything was about the same but I just didn't feel it.

So it begs the question, what was different, God or me? And what can I learn from this?

My studies recently have caused me to seriously reflect on the differences between the modern and post-modern mind, here is the beginning of my thoughts.

Modern society (modernist thinking) placed it's faith in science and rational / empirical thinking with the belief that the pursuit of science and technological advancement would bring us a better world in which to live.

Modernity is the Apollo space program, taking us all to the stars and leaving microwave ovens, unicorns, sunshine and rainbows in it's trail.

Post-modernism is the Apollo 13. People floating adrift in space, our technology not providing us any answers and leaving us marooned and fighting to survive.

I want to share with you this Scripture from 2 Timothy 2:1-7. This Scripture is the text I'm required to base my message on for my subject on advanced preaching subject techniques.

You then, my son, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus. And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable men who will also be qualified to teach others. Endure hardship with us like a good soldier of Christ Jesus. No one serving as a soldier gets involved in civilian affairs he wants to please his commanding officer. Similarly, if anyone competes as an athlete, he does not receive the victor's crown unless he competes according to the rules. The hardworking farmer should be the first to receive a share of the crops. Reflect on what I am saying, for the Lord will give you insight into all this.

When I read this I see Paul profiling the life of an emerging pastor. So lets dissect it!

This semester at college I'm studying an advanced preaching subject, it's all about preaching to the post-modern world and understanding what that means as far as traditional preaching styles and their assumptions go.

One thing I have heard in church meetings has been complaints that the people aren't coming in because we're not preaching 'em like we used to. To that they mean either some real fire and brimstone or some Billy Graham style evangelical message. I've started to see the same thinking begin to creep into my church because one of the services is faltering.

It seems to me that when a church finds itself in a state of decline it does what every other organization does, tries to recapture the past. It remembers the good old days when people were stacked to the rafters and the tithes were bountiful. They look back and say, well we used to sing hymns and preach the Word of God (usually a complaint about the style of preaching not the content) and the people flocked in.

Thinking like this is both right and wrong! It's right thinking because it recognizes that people have changed, they have moved address and we need to change along with them. It's wrong thinking to then say, well we'll just move back into the past and people will follow.

An emerging pastor has the responsibility to track down their post-modern sheep and understand their thinking to reach them in a way that both honours God and listens to people.

Interested in that kind of job?

No, food poisoning isn't a clever theological metaphore, it's a horrid statement of fact.

I seem to be on the mend now but this weekend was pretty much a wipe-out for me. I was supposed to be leading the church in worship this weekend but I realised at 3am Sunday morning this wasn't going to happen. I wont go into any details, you all know what food poisoning does to the body, I'm just thankful to God for my wife who has nursed me through this time (even now as I blog ill lying on the couch) and for those in my church family who picked up the slack for my absence.

Someone once said "Don't make yourself irreplaceable or you will never be promoted", I believe something similar applies to the life of the minister. Not being promoted but rather having people being able to step into your shoes when life takes an unexpected turn.