I am not a church growth guru but I know people who are. Some of them are impressive people who look to build the Kingdom others are not.

Growing you church is not about you, it's about the Kingdom of God. If your heart is to increase numbers to justify your new building plan, raise your status as a pastor or use those numbers as a measuring stick then I'll ask you to stop reading and pray for God to reveal to you His Kingdom purposes for your ministry and His goals for your church.

There is a correct size for your church and it is not the same as the church across the road, the city or the country. The size of your church is defined by it's context, pastor, community and it's willingness to serve.

• Context and community: A country town of 200 people will probably not grow a church of 2000 (or even 200).
• Pastor: The growth of the church will be limited by the willingness of those in control to part with that control as growth occurs and to cast a vision of the incarnational Kingdom in your community.
• Willingness to serve: The desire of the church to be the Church will determine it's reach and influence.

If God is looking to build you into the pastor of a mega church, may He bless you. If his desire is for you to consume that country community into a community of believers then may He bless you there. If your to lead an incarnational community of house churches and small groups then may He bless you there as well.

Whatever the shape, church growth is about honoring where you are and the limits imposed on you.

Some people say, "It's all about the numbers", and they are right. So too are those who say "It's about people, not numbers". We reconcile this by concentrating on growing people into a community of believers not numbers on a growth chart. If you can agree on that, then we are well on our way to discovering the barriers to church growth that are internal and external to our ministry.

Since changing to the new church earlier in the year I have been sitting on the sidelines as far as some of my giftings are concerned. One in particular is preaching.

In some ways the absence has been healthy for my, not that the load at the old church was overwhelming, rather it has given me pause to appreciate just how powerful preaching as a ministry can be.

When preaching week in week out my experience is either becoming very enthusiastic about the next week, or becoming dried out by the task. The difference doesn't seem to be based in my attitude to the task, or how connected to God I was feeling but rather in how much preparation has gone into it.

Often I've been chatting with a group of pastors and a common thread of conversation is how much they dislike the task of preaching and how it seems to be a long and horrible labor to birth their messages. With some (false) modestly, I would casually drop into the conversation that I usually wrote my sermons on Saturday morning and I didn't have too much of an issue with it.

Really that was a half truth. Many times I have left writing my message until the last moment, but during the week or so leading up to it I have already chosen a theme, I have been collecting illustrations and newspaper articles and ideas have been swirling around in my head.

It's this sort of preparation that makes or breaks a message.

For my mind, there is little excuse for a pastor or speaker to get up in front of a group of people and not know what they are about to say, to not be prepared or to believe that the Spirit of God will fill their mouth with words because they are the anointed one for the day.

The challenge for me has been to balance preparation with hearing from God, but that is just another part of the preparation isn't it?

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.

I recently finished a short book called "Jesus Wants to Save Christians: A Manifesto for the Church in Exile" by Rob Bell.

I have to say, it left me both hungry and satisfied. For over a year I have had the thought that the church today is something akin to the nation of Israel in exile. In a macro way it has swapped natural for unnatural and become not just of the world but worldly in everything it does.

Now that's a big call and I guess what I'm saying is that the church (not specifically Christians) has become something that it was not supposed to be. It has swapped it's dynamicism of the past for something tried and true and in most churches I have been associated with, the majority of the energy goes into maintenance. maintenance of the buildings, the mortgage, the programs, the rosters. All of the things that should be peripheral have become central which pushes the important things from our grasp.

Such thoughts will not be new to you if you have been reading this blog over the past year, but reading the book helped bring some of my thoughts into focus and I'll be writing about these over the coming months.

Today I am going to start at the outcome. What does a church in exile look like? The correct answer is whatever shape God ordains for where and when you are. Whatever shape, structure and resources make sense in your context but not simply shape, structure and resources maintained from the past.

Although it was quite a rough ride to be expelled from their homeland and into captivity (more than once), exile for the Jewish nation help to sharpen their focus as well as build their reliance on God. I wonder what would happen to most churches I know of if they were physically exiled from where they stood, not just exiled from the mainline of society? How would that sharpen their focus, would it?

When I heard the call of God to move from the church I was serving and to go to another church I considered a nearby congregation whose pastor had also just moved on. This was (and still remains) a troubled church. Most of their 50 strong congregation is over 70, there is one young family, but what they do have is their building, and they work hard to keep it.

I had a very informal chat with this church and put it to them that if I was to be called to serve there, the first thing I would do would be to shut down every single program they have and keep them shut down for at least 3 years. Its a radical idea, but my feeling at the time for them was that they needed to rediscover who they were at a church now and not perpetuation who they were as a church 30 years ago. (Who knows, they might even sell the building and give the money to the poor).

What would your church look like if you stopped every single program? What would rise up and fill their space? Some of the old which was valuable may well reappear but I would bet next weeks collection it would emerge totally different, and something that honours God where you are, with what you have and blesses the community around you.

Following up from my last post, On the market I want to reflect for a moment on what I believe God's motivations are for moving me on from one church to the next (wherever that is).

We were reading through James chapter one in my bible study last night and a passage that really hooked into people was:

 4Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. 5If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him.

Mature and complete, not lacking anything, that really resonates with me. In my mind it links to a Scriptural principal that I live my life by. It is the lesson from the parable of the talents: "Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master's happiness!"

Our maturity and completeness is borne out of our faithfulness to God in the small things that he has given us. When we show faithful with that He gives us more. This is no "Prayer of Jabez" increase my borders nonsense but a call to Christ likeness.

I believe that over the past 10 years of my Christian life God has been calling me to ministry. This wasn't something I was able or prepared to do in the beginning. It started with a call and in faith I answered and that began a journey.

In just answering the call of God he began to add more to me. I found myself leading a bible study, leading the congregation in worship and other things that I will label small, not to belittle them but to put them in context.

Being faithful with those things came more responsibility, soon God opened the door to bible college so I could further learn and grow. Along with it came the role of Student Pastor at my church. The role stretched me, made me think differently and brought me to a higher place in my relationship with God.

From there God has placed more responsibility on me with a pastoral position and the position of Elder in his church.

At each turn God has taught me something, entrusted me with something and allowed my care of that something to stretch, grow and test me. After every instance of faithfully dealing with that something, he has given me more.

Leaving my current church is a real stretching time for my faith. I have been ministering in the same place for the past 8 years, the church that I was brought to faith in and with people I have known for up to a decade. But in many ways these circumstances make it difficult for me to reach a new level with my relationship with God.

It's not that I am complacent, or totally unchallenged, but God wants to finish a work in me, to make me more mature and complete and I can not do that where I am.

I want to challenge you, it doesn't matter if you are a pastor or not. Where are you in your relationship with God? Is your faith complete? What is the last thing he entrusted to you? Where you faithful or has your faith stagnated?

My observation is that when we fail at the task at hand most people just plain give up. They say "I've failed God" and cease to look for the opportunities he is bringing their way.

Is that you? You can continue to grow even after failure if you repent. When you admit your failure to God, I can almost guarantee that he will find another way for you to grow and mature in him.

I'm not sure why I haven't written about this before now. It's public knowledge but I have been uncharacteristically quiet about it. About three weeks ago I submitted to the prompting of God to move on from my current church and ministry and venture into new and unknown territories.

What that involved for me what to resign from all my current commitments, even the ones that I enjoy the most.

In secular work I'm always hesitant to move on from one job unless I have secured another. In reality that makes me less likely to pursue a new opportunity unless my dissatisfaction with my current job has reached a threshold that I can no loner tolerate. I fear that this would be the same in ministry. I'm not at all dissatisfied with what I'm doing so I am less likely to look for or take an opportunity that God brings my way because I am comfortable and a little complacent.

So all of that is behind me now, I have resigned and in faith I am expecting God to bring about a new opportunity to minister to his people with the gifts that he has given me.

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?

 

Over the past three days I've been attending the Higher conference, which is the annual Churches of Christ NSW Youth Ministry event for training and refreshing youth group leaders and youth pastors.

I have in fact no desire, compulsion (or ability) to be a youth pastor. My 2 years as a youth worker has shown me that it is not my gifting that I should never again entertain the idea :)

So why was I there you ask? No? I'll tell you anyway. I went to learn.

I consider learning as one of the most valuable activities you can apply yourself to. In this case I wanted to learn more about Youth Ministry in general and how best to support any such ministry that may one day be under my responsibility as the leader of a church.

In the past I've had some disagreements with people about the best way a certain ministry should or shouldn't be run. It's a sad thing to say, but sometimes the leadership of a church doesn't have a clue about what a particular ministry needs by way of support and can impose unfair boundaries or unreachable goals because they simple don't get it.

I don't want to be one of those people who simple speak from ignorance or from my own self-importance or my own gut feel on how I think something should run, and I also don't want the wool pulled over my eyes when someone says that to be successful, ministry X needs Y.

When I was first appointed an Elder in my church one of the first things I did was to contact several of ministry leaders and ask "So what do you do and why?" It wasn't for critique of their practices (although an outside set of eyes is often good for that sort of thing), but an exercise that helped me to gain a holistic view of the church I was asked to help lead.

There was a lot of great learning to be had at the conference and a lot that can be applied outside youth ministry. I particularly liked this idea.

 One youth pastor with a rather large youth group in the opening minutes of the night gets everybody to ask three questions of the person beside them. The first two don't matter, they are icebreakers the third question is "Is this your first time here tonight?" He then asks if anyone has a new person next to them and sends someone over with a drink bottle full of lollies, a letter home to the parents about what the youth group is about and a voucher (valid for two weeks) to have a free can of drink or chocolate the next time they come.

It's a great welcome idea, but in a youth group of 500 kids it also makes it easy to spot the new ones (their the ones holding the bottle) and get beside them and tell them about Jesus.

You could easily modify something similar in your church services, and I think it's an exciting idea :)

I've just published another article / deep thought which takes a look at missional communities in history and tries to draw out of their experience something that we can take forward for today's missional/emerging church.

Comparion of Missional movements in history attempts to deconstruct the Piest movement of early Protestantism as well as the monastic movement from it's 3rd century roots and compares their distinctive characteristics, features, strengths and weaknesses in their historical contexts. By looking at how each was caused, shaped and affected we can learn more about missional living and leadership today.

I hope you learn something from reading it because I did writing it. There is truly nothing new under the sun as far as "doing church" goes and we have a lot to learn about community and involvement in the lives of others from these movements in the past.

Happy new year!

While my wife and I rang in the New Year in the style we have become accustomed to over the years, surrounded by friends. This new year has given me a great deal to pause and reflect on.

For some time now someone very close to me has been suffering from several persistent and painful illnesses that is causing them much distress. While the doctors have offered little to no explanations to what ails them they have been asking me the question "Why wont God heal me".

My own story of coming to faith begins with receiving healing from God. Others I know have received healing for physical, psychological and spiritual issues. The niece of an elder in my church had one leg shorter that the other and it grew an inch after she received prayer. I'm not talking over time, but visibly growing.

Such talk unfortunately puts me in a camp that some people label "religious nut job" but I can only speak of my experiences and I can not attribute them to the natural.

So why wont God heal this person close to me? It's a horrible question to be asked. When we are the one in pain we generally attribute it to malice, God is being vindictive of punishing a person. If we have never suffered pain we tend to be a little more philosophical, God's ways are above our ways (or God works in mysterious ways).

The answer that I give a person is different to an answer someone else gives because our theology is challenged and shaped by our experiences. The more we get to know God, the more we experience in life and the more we actively reflect on our experiences the better placed we are to contribute to the conversation.

My answer is often wholly unsatisfactory to the person who is suffering because it requires trust.

For my mind, the question isn't, why wont God heal me or even is it God's will for miraculous healing. The question we should be asking is have I surrendered by heart and will to God? Can I truly say "Your will be done"?

I do not believe for a minute that God wants us to be suffering and that it is his will for us to suffer but I can say that those times he allowed me to stay in the pain of my circumstance, I grew.

This does not mean that we should cease praying for healing of the sick and otherwise afflicted but we should also be mindful that God often uses our circumstances to draw us closer to him. I don't believe that makes him capricious, I think that he knows best.

I will continue to pray for healing for the person close to me but I will also continue to pray that their relationship with God grow tighter and stronger through this experience.

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!

I've had cause in recent months to ponder inactivity. Not inactivity due to laziness, nor inactivity due to invalidity but rather the paralyzing inactivity that comes from seeking perfection in what we do.

I have a *cough* friend *cough* who is a perfectionist that falls into bouts of procrastination because of the compounding nature of time and tasks. For example, say we have a job to do but we want to do it properly so we wait until we have enough time to give it's due attention. A week or so later the task is still there but it will now take 3 days instead of 1 to complete because we didn't start on it earlier. Now we need to find 3 days in our busy schedule and on it goes. (Housework is a prime example of this.)

Sometimes our quest for perfection gets in the way of getting the job done and this compounds the original task and can potentially send us into a reactive depression which colors our view of all the other little things that need doing. I am certainly not an advocate of "close enough is good enough" but I believe that we need to take a step back and examine our motives in how we perform our ministry.

Just before I started my training for ministry (around 10 years ago) I had a conversation with someone who helped to confirm my calling. This great godly man who later mentored me had fallen into what I like to call the Cult of Perfectionism. He contended that what God truly seeks are "men of excellence" (excuse the gender bias) who will take God's Word out into the world.

This sounds great on paper, I resonated deeply with this phrase "men of excellence" and made it somewhat of a personal goal to do everything I can to the level of excellence. Perhaps it was pride that resonated with the statement but what I didn't realize at the time is the enormous pressure that it puts me under to succeed.

When we hold church leaders up to the unerring standard of "excellence" we are doing them a great disservice. Granted that leaders live in the fish bowl and Scripture says that leaders will be held to a higher standard but if we don't give leaders room to fail in the small things how are they to learn in the big things?

My first taste of ministry was in youth work, a wonderful place to start. It teaches you patience, endurance and above all gives you a place to fail gracefully. I learnt more about ministry by failing here than succeeding elsewhere. What I mean by failure in this context is that I didn't always get things right, didn't always say the right things, lead by example at all times but those teens would always respect you in your repentance and admitting you were wrong.

I put it to us all that our churches need to change our culture from one of excellence to grace, especially in the case of the new leader. Let us support them through their faltering steps into ministry and reap the harvest of a ministry in balance, not one under pressure and paralyzed by perfectionism.

Recently Pastor Mark Driscoll (a hero of mine) was out in Australia as part of his speaking tour. Unfortunately I didn't get to hear him speak but a friend pointed out this interesting discourse on what he sees as issues facing the church in Australia, particularly the Anglican denomination.

Although some points are skewed toward the Anglicans there is some gold in there for all of us like point 13:

There is a lack of missiologists A missiologist evaluates the culture and uses discernment to find the idols, "so missionaries can be employed and churches can be missional". "Theologians defend the truth of the gospel and missiologists then take it to the streets." When you stack the team with theologians and not missiologists" lots of people still don’t know Jesus.

Check out the whole list.

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?

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!

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.

One of the most frustrating issues in ministry is waiting at the well for people to drink and drink deeply. As the old saying goes, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink.

Ministry is about leading horses, I mean people, to the water and waiting patiently as they discover that they need to drink the water to be sustained.

When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, "Will you give me a drink?" The Samaritan woman said to him, "You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?" (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, "If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water." "Sir," the woman said, "you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water?"  Jesus answered, "Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life." (John 4:7-14 slightly abridged)

In ministry there seems to be a great deal of waiting at the well with people. We speak to people about the water, try and sell them on it's benefits, tell them how the water has sustained us in all times but ultimately we are required to wait patiently as they make the decision to drink for themselves.

It's just painfull to see people...

Those that sow in tears will reap with songs of joy. (Ps 126:5) I've always enjoyed that Psalm, it brings an amount of comfort to me when ministering to those in pain because it points me towards the hope that they have in future and that the pain not matter how much it hurts will be redeemed. Twice this weekend I fell into some accidental ministry where this verse resonates deeply within me. The first happened in my lounge room...

Since I'm a small group pastor and this is a ministry blog, I think I should probably do a bit more talking about small groups :) One of the most impacting moments in my early Christian life was when in the middle of a small group study the leader turned to Ben* and said, "are you ready to make that commitment?" and Ben said "Yes". The study was very evangelical and focused on what it means to be a Christian. Ben had been in the group for some months and in his 40+ years, only when to church for weddings and funerals. So what happened?...

I've been trying to make the "Sunday Life" entries as regular as possible, reflecting on ministry experiences from the weekend. My Sunday's are usually quite busy, if I'm not worship leading, I'm praying and talking with people. If I'm not talking or praying with people I'm preparing for something else. I sat down this morning thinking, I've got nothing to say. Sure I went to both services, was blessed by the messages and was challenged to draw closer to God, I had the opportunity to minister to people one on one, pray for healing in their lives and encourage them on. But sometimes it doesn't seem like enough.

I want to spend a little time talking about a practical problem with all those involved in ministry (although it can be applied to anyone). This is the power of triangulation.

 

It’s important for a pastor to be aware of triangulation because of the impact it can have on their relationship with the congregation, it’s also pretty important that the pastors wife gets to understand it as well because people will certainly try to put her in one.

 

Basically, triangulation is when someone tries to influence the relationship of two other parties be it two people or a person and an object.

 

Triangles are formed when any two parts of the system become uncomfortable with the third.

 

Try this on for size. A wife has an alcoholic husband and after years of worry she decides to do something about it, she tips all his alcohol out! When she does this, she is trying to affect the relationship between the husband and alcohol as seen in this nifty diagram.

 

 

 

Like stop signs and reindeers, red means bad!!!

 

You could change the labels to read something like Pastor, Pastors wife and congregant. Does this sound familiar, a congregant doesn’t like something the pastor has done so they tell the wife in order to make a change.

 

In both of these situations all that’s going to happen is somebody will get hurt.

 

So what do we do with all of this? Learn that you can only change the part of the relationship that you are apart of.

 

In our pretty picture, the wife is not in the relationship between the husband and alcohol but she is in a relationship with the husband. If she wants to affect the alcoholism she needs to strengthen the relationship with her husband. Or she can strengthen her relationship with the alcohol by joining a spouse support group and understanding more about alcoholism.

 

There is a difference between triangulation and mediation. If Y comes to you saying that X owes him money, don’t go to X but offer to go with Y to X. This is empowering Y to confront X. Don’t go to X on Y’s behalf!

 

Remember, if you try to change the other two parts of the triangle you will not only be ineffective, but will end up with the stress of the conflict.

On the train this morning I was finishing off one of my ethics assignments, this one is about the validity of cohabitation as a pathway to marriage.

It's a very difficult question to answer because of the crossover between sacred and secular views of marriage. The Catholic church insist that marriage has to be performed by a member of the clergy in from to at least two witnesses (the council of Trent) while Martin Luther said that marriage is a secular issue and the church should just stay out of it.

The underlying question for me is how much say can the church have in a secular society. We can not be legislators of all morality (mostly because we abdicated the moral high ground long ago) but at the same time we can be a positive influence on our society guiding them towards a Godly way of living.

After all the foundation of our societies laws are based in Judeo-Christian thought and no one argues that "don't kill" and "don't steal", while going somewhat against our nature are beneficial to society.

That's not the path I went down in my assignment though, I think once people cohabitate they have entered into marriage with each other. Australian law at least recognizes that after a certain amount of time living together you are in a de facto marriage. What we can add to society and people who are considering cohabitating is give them access to pre-marital counseling! And encourage them to make a public commitment of their relationship to their friends and family so they can feel invited to support their relationship together.

When Sally and I were married we could have eloped, had the minimum witnesses and excluded our friends, but by inviting everyone to our wedding ceremony we were saying, join with us on this journey and I think that is something that the cohabitating couples I know are missing out on, the society of friends and family invited to help strengthen a relationship.

This weekend past my wife and I (along with a whole lot of others from my church) attended my denominations state conference. This is the second year I've been and the second year I have walked away refreshed and energized with new ideas for ministry.

The conference typically grabs a ring in from the U.S. to deliver a series of messages and this year it was Dr Peter Steinke, a fairly unimpressive man to look at but one who has a real heart to see churches moving past conflict and into new life.

I want to share a few of the thoughts and ideas he shared with us because they really can impact your ministry.

Peter set the scene for the church and it's ministry as being something like the state of the Jewish nation in exile to Babylon. As the influence of the church declines (I guess I mean politically and socially) we are increasingly finding ourselves as strangers in a strange land. We are living in a land of believers not belongers and the challenge for us today is to communicate our story, the Christian meta-narrative, to this world that holds us in exile.

Barak Obama recently caught flack for saying that some people in the U.S. were bitter and as a result, cling to guns and religion. As ineloquent as his words are, he is fundamentally right. When people do not embrace change they turn to the tried and true. If the church fails to embrace the enormous change of the world around us we will sink into fundamentalism so fast your head will spin.

That's enough for one post, I'll keep going tomorrow.

I guess what we can take out of this is this is not the world of our parents, it has fundamentally changed and if we do not change along with it we will become fundamentalist in our thinking. And that's no way to remove ourselves from exile.

Some exciting news!!!

My grandmother, who has been coming to our church for a little over a year now has, after doing a Christianity Explained course, given her life to Jesus!!!

I am going to be baptising her next month! If then, she is born-again, that means I will be older than her :P

Although I haven't blogged about it in detail I've been putting a lot of time into contemplating the life cycle of small groups in out church.

One blog I have read suggests three phases of group life being
 1) Starting / Open to all
 2) Covenented / Closed to new people
 3) Concluded

While each church has different needs and goals with their small group life and it wont fit with everyone, but I particularly like this view of small group life because it plans for the conclusion of the group. And in my mind, the conclusion of a group brings oportunities for growth.

Most of the existing groups at my church have been running for many many years. They are full (I call a group full at 12 people) and stagnant. There is no room for anyone else, no thought of splitting and no thought about concluding. They are happy in their rutt. That sounds harsh, after all they are faithfully studying the Word of God and growing from the experience but they are missing something because of their familiarity with each other. They have lost the boldness to grow.

Most strategies for small group growth in a church is to help groups get to a certain size and then split them in twain. I'm not a fan of that strategy at all! To my mind it is an unnecessarily violent act and only serves to damage both halves.

To combat the contradiction in these two areas I've been experimenting with a sort of middle of the road strategy that I call "Small Group Plants". I'm sure it's not unique or original although I have not heard anyone else articlate it, not in any books or confrences.

The idea behind small group plants is for the leader (who has been mentoring group leadership with others in the group) to support and commission two to three people in their group (I think three is the most ideal number) to go out and find at least one other person that is not in a small group and start one on their own.

The old group leader is allowed to come to the new group for a limited time period but after that they are on their own (although supported by the small group pastor, me :)

In this way, both groups move back to the starting / open to all phase and begin again recruiting members. The old group because their is now three spots freed up and the new group, well, because it's new.

Thoughts?

I've been studying one subject for nearly a whole year now. It's called the ministers personal growth and it's about understanding the psychological issues facing pastors as well as their congregations. The culmination of the subject is a thesis length report on your own personal growth as a pastor, the challenges your facing and developing strategies to combat issues like burn out, fatigue and moral failure.

It has been perhaps the best subject I have every studied and I'd commend it to anyone in ministry.

I've been reading and re-reading as well as tweeking the last parts of my thesis to make it as full possible and as I re-read it I'm reminded of the lessons I have learned and have taken on board which have made a huge difference in my life and ministry.

While I'm not going to publish it online, over the next few weeks I'm going to share some of the insights I've learned along the way starting with Triangulation. Bet you can't wait :)

To my great surprise I recieved a phone call from my friendly local Fedex Kinkos yesterday asking me to pick up my box of studies. I wasn't expecting them until Friday so it was a pleasent surprise get them early. I took a photo of the box but I used the wrong phone and I can't get the images  off it so your just going to have to imagine the depressing browness of the box and it lovely bible study center.

I'm thinking about turning it into a pinata and smashing the box open with a big stick on Sunday morning during church but I dont know how well that will go :)

Besides getting the studies underway, the biggest issue I still face is getting all of the group leaders together for our intital meeting. I've had three false starts so far because of Mothers Day and other ministry and college obligations. I'm going to try one last time on the Sunday the studies start and hope for the best.

On Friday I recieved a proof copy of the new bible study from the printers, I must say it looks great! The only thing I would change is adding a table of contents. I know, I know, how could you and every other person miss a TOC?!?! well I did so I have to live with it.

Sunday morning I got up to spruke the study and also tell people the cost. As a church we could probably absorb the production costs without much hassle but I believe that people take a greater ownership of something when they shell out for it. So I've pinned the price at $5 a study which is the printed book plus a small exercise book to keep study notes as well as sermon notes. I didn't really see the point of paying for lots of blank pages in the study book to write down answers when the exercise book is cheaper and a lot more flexible!

After the service I was praying with a young couple about some big things they are going through, what a privellege that is to pray for someone, and after I was done someone was there with $10 to buy two studies! That was so encouraging, it's one of the first signs I've seen of people not directly involved with the production of the study wanting to be a part of it.

On a slightly different note, I've had to move the training day back a week (to the day before we start) because some people are being totally unreasonable about the timing. Apparently Mothers Day isn't a good time to get a big group of people together, who knew? :)

As a young and naive small group leader I used to believe that you could do things in your group like, pick the next study, by canvasing the opinions of the whole group, garnering a consensus and then together going down to the local Christian book store and picking one out that meets all the agreed upon conversation.

This in fact did work for a while, when the group was very small, 3-4 people finding such consensus was easy because the group was traveling very closely together in their discovery process with God. When the group grew bigger, say 6-8 people, it became much harder to reach an agreement on who would bring supper next week let alone what we should be studying.

I put these kinds of issues into the subject of Shared Leadership vs Leading by Consensus. When we lead by consensus one could make an argument that we are showing no leadership at all, I don't agree with that. It does however put an unnecessary strain on the group when people start to engage their opinions only to be upset when the group doesn't move the way they suggested.

Shared leadership on the other hand is in line with the model of mentoring new leaders from within the group to become group leaders themselves. Let's take the example of choosing a study again. In a shared leadership scenario, the group leader would pull aside the person (or people) they are mentoring and ask them what they believe the group should study next and either go with it or put it to the group. Doing this gets people to think not just about themselves but of the Spiritual needs of others in the group and that is the best training I can give them.

There is one other benefit from shared leadership, it keeps the leader accountable. It gives people permission to speak into the leaders life about where they think the group is and helps prevent leader ego trips.

Today is pretty exciting for me, I'm off to go visit the printers and get the ball rolling with the new church-wide bible study. It's due to kickoff on the 19th of May so I'm cutting it a little fine as far as production is concerned but it all seems to be going to plan.

I'm also going to send out a PDF copy to the small group leaders today so they can have some time to absorb the infromation. As a church we have performed 40 days of Purpose and 40 days of Community. The biggest problem with both of those studies was there was no formal equipping for the leaders, we just had to feel our way around.

I'm a firm believer that the group leader should lead. Be it by reading on ahead and nutting out the answers themselves or just being further down the road of Christian experience than those in their group. If the leader is stumbling for answers then the rest of the group will stumble along with them.

Along with sending out the advanced copy, I'm also setting aside two training days for group leaders where we will go through the study as a small group ourselves and learn and grow. Because the study is 8 weeks long, I'm planning to have one day just before the commencement and one day three weeks in both covering the following 4 weeks.

Theological training today prepares you for many things. It prepares you as a critical thinker. It prepares you meet peoples Spiritual and emotional needs. It prepares you for understanding the whole person and their welfare. What a good theological education doesn't prepare you for is the fear in peoples eyes when you want to involve them in a ministry.

We joke around our church saying if you visit two weeks in a row you will be on a roster, I'm not trying to get people onto a roster, I'm trying to get them into a small group.

At our vision casting confrence (VCC) we (by that I mean the church leadership) commited to developing three areas in 2008, number two with a bullet is small groups as a means for personal spiritual growth and development. It's the reason I'm employed by the church, to create this small group culture. Also at the VCC we promised to undertake a church-wide study to kickstart our small group program.

So I've been spruking this for some weeks, I have sign up sheets, new leaders ready to take up the reigns, training planned but so far it's a little like pulling teeth to get people to sign up. This Sunday again I made an announcement during the service about what this is all about (them and God) and said I'd be at the back of the church after the service to help people find a group that's good for them.

As people filed out of church a few wouldn't meet my gaze, some rushed past and others made excuses. But the worst were the ones that had fear in their eyes that I might talk to them and display some interest in their spiritual well-being.

I've decided that the best way to overcome this is to use rule number 1. My rule number 1 for all ministry situations is to have people personally invite others. We can put up a hundred sign-up sheets and not get a single commitment to come but a leader extending a sincere personal invitation is in my estimation 90% effective in growing a ministry be it a small group, welfare or worship.

I've been trying to get a new small group up and running for a couple of months now but I've just been running into barrier after barrier. I've got people lined up, a study area and some exciting ideas to experiment on them with but the venue had been elusive.

The small group I run at the moment used to meet out of our house but recently we have been meeting at another couples place because they have a lovely new little boy and he needs to get some sleep! It's been quite good not having the group at our house every week, not because we don't want people around, we love having people around, but because after 4 years it's good to share the load a little.

So with that and another reason in mind I didn't want to start this new group out of our place. The other reason is I want it to be closer to part of the community we are focusing on at the moment and since a lot of them don't have transport our place would be a little too far.

I chose to meet in the cottage at our church. We have a main church building, a large hall, a manse as well as an old fibro building we call the cottage which houses the office and some space for Sunday school etc.

The cottage is on the same street that we are reaching out to with our soup kitchen so it seemed like a good idea go there and be close to the action. That way anyone curious about the Christian faith and wanted to know more can come along easily.

I've taken a brave step with this group, although I'm the one who started it up and recruited people to come (it is my job after all), I decided that I do not want to be it's leader. Last week I called up someone I have been mentoring in my home group to come and take over the reigns of this group.

If a church is going to develop a healthy small group community then it needs to be able to grow, and if it want's to grow it needs new leaders. I firmly belive that these leaders should come from apprenticing group members in existing groups so I thought I really should model that myself instead of just taking control.

So now I have a leader, a venue (and the keys!!!), and people to start with and I'm really looking forward to where God is going to lead us!

I guess it happens in all churches, some sort of emergency comes up with a key person and that creates a cascading effect in a ministry.

Two Sundays ago I was asked to swap my rostered week for worship leading, I was supposed to be in the 27th but the leader for the 20th couldn't make it so they wanted swap. This worship leader however didn't just want to swap with me, they wanted to swap their entire team. So with a good deal of effort the entire worship team I was rostered on with swapped to this week. So how did it go? It was brilliant!

Not to overstate it, but I usually take a bit of time getting the song selection right for a service. There are many considerations, service length, special events etc but this one had to be actioned with economy of time. So on Tuesday morning I was on the train with a friend who had the "Presenter" software we use for our powerpoints and we just riffed right through a song list.

I know some places like Hillsong put a great deal of production into their services, taking quite deliberate actiosn to make sure the music and message are connected, I believe the term is "building a platform of praise for the speaker". I agree with the approach in general that the two (well all elements of the service) should complement each other but there comes a fine line sometimes between architecting a service and emotional manipulation (not that I'm accusing anyone of that!)

Why do I mention that? Because God really had his hand on the song selection. This weeks and the next two weeks services are based around missions and the song list really captured this theme brilliantly without even trying. The start and finishing song are two very missiony outward focused works and the rest of the songs allowed me to dig deep into what it means to be a Christian when I was meditating on communion.

If your interested, the song list was:

• Tell the world
• Always and Forever
• Salvation belongs to our God
• Nothing but the blood (old hymn)
• Create in me (another old hymn)
• Send me

This weekend marks a momentous occasion. Ready for it?

We have added a new addition to our family, his name is Denny Crane! (yes, with the exclaimation mark!)

Named after one of my favorite T.V. characters (played by... the brilliant... Will...iam... Shatner), little Denny, the Shetland sheepdog is bumming around our appartment scratching at everything in a desperate search for food. Not that he needs anymore food, he's a little porker.

As a rule I have chosen not to use this blog as a forum for non-ministry related things so here comes a really tenuous segue.

Denny is a sheepdog, and pastors are called to be shephards. Told you it was tenuous :)

As a pastor, you are called to be a shepard, literally someone who guides a bunch of often clueless people around life and into safe pastures for the next life. It is truly one of the greatest responsibilities a person can have. If by chance you are an athiest reading this or someone who just generally disagrees, you can not disagree with the fact that when someone who has a degree of authority in your life abuses the trust you have given them, it can have quite serious repercussions.

To take the biblical sheparding analogy to it's logical conclusion, if the shepard fails to watch over his sheep then the wolves get in and hurt and kill. They seek to get in and devour.

Now I'm not saying that the pastor needs to be coddling people, holding their hand through every trivial decision or signing off on whether they should get that car loan or not, but they have a responsibility to guide, guard and protect the spiritual well being of those God has blessed them with.

Denny Crane!

In one months time we start up our church wide bible study. I've nevery had to organize something on this scale before and it really is a learning curve. I'm trying to get 150 people (half of which are in groups) into groups which means creating new groups, get the study completed and to the printers and create a whole bunch of new leaders to lead the new groups.

Besides having a study to do, I think that getting the right leaders is the most important step here. A good leader can turn lemons into lemonade where a bad leader will just end up cutting people and squeezing the lemon juice into the wounds.

So how do you choose a leader?

This isn't a question of is a leader born or made, but really about picking the right sort of person for the role. My first stop was to ask the existing group leaders who they thought would make a good leader. I'll blog on this a little more later but I have something I call the group health check. It's a bunch of areas that I feel important for a group to be working in such as developing community, getting stuck into Scripture and reaching out together into the greater community. One of the other items on the list is "Are you identifying a leader to take over from you?" If we are aiming to grow our groups then at some point the group will need to divide and start over but that can't happen unless there is someone to take the other half.

So my first port of call is to those people that are being mentored and trained in existing groups including my own.

While all the leaders haven't come in this way, it's a principal that should really be held too as much as possible.

Recently some people have been talking to me about keeping their group on track. Every small group seems to walk on a thin line between becoming a social group or a study group. It's not a new problem and in fact it's one that pops up in my group from time to time.

Nothing is wrong with either of these if that's what your looking for in a group, but the purpose of Explore: groups is to find the balance between Community, Scripture and Outreach.

A pure study group (Explore: Scripture) will sit down bible in one hand, commentary in the other and purposefully dig down into Scripture to find out exactly what it means and how it applies to their lives.

A pure social group (Explore: Community) will sit down with coffee in one hand, biscuit in the other and purposefully dig down into the lives of everyone there and discover how they are travelling.

Like I said, nothing particularly wrong with either of these but that's not the purpose of Explore: groups at our church. Explore: groups exist to create community, that's getting to know each other and how God is working in ourlives as well as balancing that with getting a God's eye view of life and how we are meant to live it.

If you find your group polarizing towards one extream or the other and you don't know what to do about it might I suggest these two approaches.

Firstly, talk to your group about what they think the point of it all is. You may discover that they too and unsatisfied with the direction of the group or maybe they want to drag it all away across to one side. In that case you might have to raise up a new leader and move on somewhere else.

Secondly, to try and achieve balance and really find the time to explore the real issues of life and faith why dont you use the mullet strategy. That's business at the front, party round the back :)

The mullet strategy requires some dicipline and commitment from your group to show up on time and get down to business. For my group, business is the study and the party is community. When we start off with community we often run out of time and end with community. It's not bad but we all miss out on learning together.

When we adopt the mullet strategy in our group something kinda weird happens, the community time doesn't take as long. That's not because we are rushing against the clock but because a lot about our lives and week have already been shared in the context of the study.

So not only do we get the time to share about our lives, but we have talked about how God works through it as well and that's pretty great! I always leave more refreshed and feeling more connected not just to God but to my fellow groupicans as well.

So why don't you try for a bad hair day too?

The topic of being a servant leader seems to be strictly a Christian concept these days. Sure, there are some management books that still advocate it in the workplace but I cant remember the last good one I read.   

This is an article I wrote last year to teach small group leaders about the concept. Basically it's a short essay on how Moses was an effective leader who learnt how to be a servant of his people by first becoming a servant of God. Afterwards there are a series of reflection questions to help draw out the concepts into your own life.

I hope you get a lot out of The leadership qualities of Moses.

So, what does a Small Groups Pastor do? When I decided to take up the role at my local church I sat down with a blank sheet of paper and asked myself exactly that, what am I supposed to do?

I was given a job description that goes along the lines of "grow the network for small groups" and that's about all. It wasn't laid out as a matter of numerical supremacy, the directive is to in the first instance get as many people in our church as possible into a small group for their own spiritual development, then see where it goes from there.

My sheet of paper blank, my brief in front of me, I prayed and asked God to lead me on with a vision for the small group ministry in this church that would be valuable and effective in developing the spiritual lives of those inside and outside the church. No mean feat!

At college we are encouraged to discover our philosophy of ministry (we all have one even if we don't articulate it). I believe my philosophy of ministry centers around the concepts of orthodoxy and orthopraxy. You have probably heard of the former and not the latter.

Orthodoxy is all about having right beliefs where orthopraxy is all about putting those beliefs into practice.

To effectively lead this ministry and grow and develop it I need to have both the right concept of it's goals and model the right steps to see it happen.

As I sat down with my pen and paper I jotted down everything that God was telling me about the priorities of the ministry. I reflected on those for a while and saw that they grouped themselves into three categories:

• Community
• Scripture
• Outreach

I'm going to expand on those each in separate posts but I want to focus now on rebranding a ministry.

I have the brief and my focus areas but how do I do it? How do I get a church excited in small groups again?

Taking a leaf from all those marketing people I used to work with, I've gone with rebranding the ministry. The vision of the church is to move people from complacency to being compelled in their faith so my part in that is to get people to explore their faith in a new way.

So "Explore: groups" are born. Each small group is now focused on:

• Explore: Community
• Explore: Scripture
• Explore: Outreach

This is not just marketing but a re-imaging of how a small group ministry can run in the context of our church.

But where do you go from here? You start investing this in the leaders and modeling it to them.

Yesterday I had a day of personal formation at college. Personal formation (PF) is a subject that runs for three years, handily broken up into PF1, 2 and 3. I'm currently studying PF2 and yesterday I got to meet with my formation group and share a little about where God is taking us in our life.

The subject seemed to be a gimme at first, you just sit around and share how your going, pray for each other and see each other in another 2 months time but it's really a quite intense and very personally confronting process.

In the start of year you attend a retreat, your put into a group and you share everything about your life. After you do that you find yourself instantly bonded to one another in the group. The process promotes you to be vulnerable about yourself and share in each others vulnerability. Then during the year you meet up and update the rest of the group. It's a process guided by a facilitator who is looking to develop our ministry philosophy and challenge us in other areas as well.

That's the background.

So yesterday one of my group members shared with us that they were facing a life threatening ailment (I wont go into it for confidentiality reasons) and at the end they said, "But God is good".

Our facilitator picked up on that statement, it was almost a throw-away, something said as a full stop to the conversation. He challenged the person and all of us to ask "why is God good", why is he good when a person faces being struck down in their prime and faces the prospect of leaving behind a young family.

I guess this falls partly into the "why do bad things happen to good people?" category but the answer to that is easy, none of us are really good! And even if we were, Christianity isn't some sort of insurance policy against illness, God shows some of his fairness with illness. He allows the rain to fall on the righteous and the unrighteous. If God said when you turn to me you will live perfect and healthy lives he would be creating an injustice that is not in keeping with his character. He would be saying to us, I love this person more than that one and that just isn't the case. He would be making life so much easier and avoid the character forming events of life.

So why is God good? One reason is that he shows us fairness, he doesn't play favorites, he just want's to draw people away from their lives lived in rebellion and bring them into his family.

Some people might object to this and say "but Christians claim that God heals them, doesn't that mean he's playing favorites?" On the surface that seems so but if you did a little deeper and examine the healing ministry of Jesus we can clearly see that  he shared physical healing with both those who believed and those who did not.

I believe that God is good, not just because the bible tells me so, but because God is ultimately fair, he is just, he does not punish us unless we are truely deserving of it and that isn't with cancer, it isn't with AIDS, it comes at the end of our lives when we stand in his presence and our eternal destiny is decided.

Well, we can cheat a little. The bible says that anyone who calls upon the name of the LORD in this life, that is, anyone who makes Jesus the King in their life will share with him new life in the next. And even that's not cheating, that's an offer for everyone.

I've been wanting to publish some of my assignments for a long time. Not that they are the greatest theological articles ever written (they are not bad either, distinction average), but because there are a lot of students out there examining the same issues but not sharing their conclusions.

So I've just put online an article called Becoming a Christian Leader, which I guess what this site is all about. It's my major assignment from a subject called "Becoming a Missional Leader". It examines the character of a leader from a Christian perspective and why it is critical to focus on character development.

How you enjoy it or get something out of it.

Sometimes life and ministry just throws you a curveball and this Sunday I caught it (although it nearly broke my hand).

I'm one of the Worship Leaders at our church and this week it was my turn to lead the morning service. I really enjoy worship leading, I feel particularly close to God when I'm doing it. It's a wonderful responsibility and I would do it quite a bit more if I had the time.

In our church we break out the responsibility of leading a service into two roles, worship leading and service leading recognising that not all worship leaders are gifted in leading the other parts of the service and vice - versa. I am one of the few who do both, that's not a blowing my own trumpet thing, I really enjoy doing both but it wasn't always that way. I used to be fine leading communion and the offering, short prayers and announcements but I really never felt comfortable performing the general prayer portion of the service. I used to defer to an Elder but when I was brought on as an Elder in training over a year ago I knew it was time to lift my game, press in with God and trust him to grow me. He had after all trusted me with a little, and now he had given me more.

That is actually off topic for this post, I really wanted to share about how God can bless something when we trust him.

When I put my Order of Service out to the members of the worship team for this week I knew that one of my three singers would not be able to come (I also sing with the team). Wonderfully someone heard about this and sent me an email saying if I need an extra singer then she was available. Thanks Janelle!

Everything seemed on track, God was giving me Scripture to share during the service, I was praying about the service and those who would be there. I arrived Sunday morning about 10 minutes before practice and prayed with our intersessors to be used by God.

After the prayer I had a call from one of my singers, she couldn't make it. She was quite apologetic and I told her it was ok, and it was, life happens sometimes. I had a quick word with the husband of the other singer, he told me that she wouldn't be their either, that was a little annoying, she had opportunity to give me notice. Just after that my fill in singer arrived and told me the drummer wouldn't be there.

The keyboard player arrived shortly after and it was just the three of us during practice. I rang around to some other drummers and no one was available (read: awake), but God had other things in mind. One of the intersessors volenteered to play the other keyboard, adding some depth. He then rang his son and he agreed to play drums for us.

The drummer arrived just before the service, we prayed and then worshiped with our church family.

It was one of the best worship times I have experienced and quite a few others have made the comment as well.

Sometimes we really have to just let go of our plans, our rosters and let God have total control. I think plans and rosters are a good thing generally and don't limit God, but sometimes He just has other ideas and it's wonderful to be able to go with them and experience the blessing.

If your interested, my song list was:

• King of Majesty

• All things are possible

• Salvation belongs to our God

• Amazes Me (On my knees I bow down)

• Complete

• Agnus Dei

• How great is our God

I found this poster on another blog (along with a few other really great posters) and it really helps to describe where I am at at the moment.

For me, ministry is all about the good news, the good news that there is hope for this life as well as the next. But saying that doesn't just bring about hope into the lives of others, and trying to apply a formula to every person just doesn't cut it (anymore? did it ever).

Relevance is critical to those we minister to. We need to think beyond simply attempting to bring the news of hope as a set peice and instead being the news of hope in peoples lives. I believe it was St. Fransis of Assisi who said: "Preach the gospel to all people and if necessary use words".

How can I bring the good news to a person who feels backed into the corner, who cant or wont turn their heads to see what God has for their lives? I can go to them, understand them, and minister to them.

My chuch is seeing the fruit of this approach, it really works. With concern for our neighbours we go to whats best described as an enclave of hopelessness. A cul-de-sac of housing commision flat filled with those who have lost hope, have no one to talk with and feel backed into a corner. And guess what, by going, listening and experiencing a little part of their lives with them there is flesh starting to grow on their dry bones.

You don't know this yet, but when I took on the Pastor to Small Groups role I inherited a project that involves the whole church.

The vision of our church for 2008 is to lead people from a place of complacency to being compelled in their relationship with God. To open their bibles when they are outside church, to pray more and to put legs on their faith and be involved in the lives of others.

The project I inherited is part of helping people move to compulsion in their relationship with God. It's a church-wide small group study based around the Beatitudes in Matthew 5.

My wife was on the project team with an Elder and a former pastor who put the study together. Although it's blown out from 6 to 13 weeks in length, I'm proud of the work she has done along with the rest of the team to put the study together. It's a challenging piece of work that when studied will really challenge people to examine where they are in their walk with God and live out their faith in the way Jesus intended.

The reason I am mentioning it now is because I've reached a milestone with it. I was handed the completed draft of the study just over three weeks ago and it has taken me this long to read it, format it, and introduce an overall structure and narrative to the text. It has survived the transition from PC to Mac, a computer blowing up and being shuffled around between computer and USB drive that many times that I thought it would get corrupted.

So yeah me!

I am thinking about releasing it as a Creative Commons licenced resourse after we complete the study as a church. Hopefully others can use it to further their relationship with God as well.

... more shall be given.

In some breaking news, tonight I was voted on by the church to take up the role of an Elder in our church.

For the past year I've been serving with the Eldership as an "Elder in training". It's basically a traineeship where you do everything an Elder is supposed to do and learn about how to operate in this important area of ministry.

The Eldership at our church is particularly important at the moment because we don't have a Senior Pastor leading the church. It takes on quite a lot of the pastoral responsibilities for the church.

So tonight they voted and tonight I was voted in. It's quite exciting really! To me it says that a bunch of people trust in me to say, I can allow him to listen to what God has to say for this church and lead us in that direction. Quite humbling actually.

I alluded in the title to a piece of Scripture known fairly commonly as the parable of the Talents (Talents being an ancient unit of currency). In the parable Jesus talks about being responsible with whatever God has given us and when we show ourselves to be trustworthy, more will be given to us.

While it's a story about how we live this life and our reward in the next, I also take it as a principle for our lives in the here and now. That when God gives us a certain measure of responibility we will not have any more until we can be proven to be trustworthy with it. Becoming a part of the Eldership in full is for me a confirmation of my spiritual growth and that God is involved and has concern for my life.

Today marks a change in my status in ministry. Up to this point I've been working at my local church placement in a purely volenteer capacity. It's a requirement of my ACOM degree to perform 40 hours of ministry per subject. But today I signed my first work contract into a paid pastoral position!

I'm working part time for 4 hours a week, I know it doesn't sound like much but that is in addition to all the other ministry tasks I undertake.

So now I am officially the Pastor to Small Groups at Penrith Church of Christ.

It's a bit of a change in focus from what I have been doing which was focusing on developing the Young Adult population but when you being paid you go to where the need is :)

I have a real passion for small groups. I’m not just saying that because of the role, I believe small groups have the power to transform churches from places where people gather infrequently to places of real community. I believe that those who lead small groups have a special spiritual role, they have taken up the challenge to Shepard a group of God’s people and have taken responsibility for helping to grow their relationships with God and each other.

The reason I have a passion for small groups is because a small group changed my life! When I first started attending the church at Penrith, nearly 10 years ago, a pastor there created a small group and invited me along. In that place I made friends, learnt from Gods word, and for the first time in a very long time felt safe. Without that small group holding me up and showing me Jesus, I can’t honestly say that I would have come to know Christ.