Vital Church Planting Conferene 2011 Video

Every year I find the Vital Church Planting Conference to be a wonderful opportunity to be inspired by the new things happening in the church. This year's was no exception, and this video produced by Andy and Sue Kalbfleisch will give you a little taste. Incidentally, a few of these shots were taken by me! Lol.



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Church as Fight Club?!

How's this for a Fresh Expression of church--a church based on martial arts! From an article sent to me by Heather McCance:

The young man was a member of a fight team at Xtreme Ministries, a small church near Nashville that doubles as a mixed martial arts academy. Mr. Renken, who founded the church and academy, doubles as the team’s coach. The school’s motto is “Where Feet, Fist and Faith Collide.” (source)

Actually, this kind of thing has been around for a long time. I've certainly heard of Christian Karate Academies. And if you want to go back even further, you'd find the very foundations of the martial arts to be the spiritual arts. The oldest forms of codified fighting styles in Asian were developed in monasteries to both promote the health of monks and help them defend themselves from opportunistic criminals who might assume monks or nuns would be easy targets.

The goal, these pastors say, is to inject some machismo into their ministries — and into the image of Jesus — in the hope of making Christianity more appealing. “Compassion and love — we agree with all that stuff, too,” said Brandon Beals, 37, the lead pastor at Canyon Creek Church outside of Seattle. “But what led me to find Christ was that Jesus was a fighter.”

The outreach is part of a larger and more longstanding effort on the part of some ministers who fear that their churches have become too feminized, promoting kindness and compassion at the expense of strength and responsibility. (source)

One thinks of the boxing clubs in the inner city that helped many young men learn how to control their strength and discipline their lives. Cultures have been training young men to harness their aggression for millions of years with very productive results. This is pretty much the same thing, just "Christianized."

Some of the bigger (and more important questions) that come up from this have to do with the shifting cultural norms of masculine identity. Just as women's roles have been changing, men's have, as well. I think that even the more regressive-sounding conservative Christians that quote Paul's "Household Codes" to say that men should be the head of the family are still positing a very different vision of manhood than what our forefathers knew. Whether we think the Gospel calls us something very much in line with the feminist movement (Cf., "In Christ there is no longer male nor female"), or into something that looks more like enlightened patriarchy, it's still a change from what we grew up with.

The book and later movie Fight Club from a few years ago touched a nerve when it explored the issue of manliness and in our age. The movie is premised on the dissatisfaction many men feel with masculine identity in our culture. First they find relief by fighting each other in a relatively controlled, yet bloody, way. Later, this evolves into an anti-corporate campaign. This notion that masculine identity must be reclaimed from consumer-culture is, in my opinion, right on. I really wish our ideas about manhood came from somewhere other beer commercials.

Yet there is lots of room for critique of efforts to build up a kind of new way of being a man that are so linked with violence.

“What you attract people to Christ with is also what you need to get people to stay,” said Eugene Cho, 39, a pastor at Quest Church, an evangelical congregation in Seattle. “I don’t live for the Jesus who eats red meat, drinks beer and beats on other men.” (source)

Indeed, the ultimate aim of Christian discipleship goes quite a bit beyond being a good fighter or even a good man. In Christ we are called to live a life worthy of the kingdom of God.

In some ways, I suspect that the emergence of this movement to create fight-church is a reaction to the mainstream's efforts to make church amenable to women and children. There are a lot of young men who would find what we do at Messiah, for example, to be quite boring and irrelevant. I have to admire church planters willing go after those guys, but I honestly don't think my particular church is called to that ministry!

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Emily's New Blog

As usual--lack of posts means I'm very busy. Henry has a way of making me want to stay home with him (and Betsy) rather than be chained to my desk editing sermon footage and making a CD out of the Advent Concert. Sigh. Perspective, you know?

Anyway, here is a note about St. Lydia's, an "Dinner Church" that my friend and fellow YDS Alumna has started in NYC. The project has it's own website, but now Emily has started a blog, as well. I can be a real "foodie" sometimes--so a fresh expression of church (to use the Canadian and U.K. dialect of missional language) has appeal. I would be all over that sucker. I'm tempted to start something like that here, but of course I don't have near enough time. I would be thrilled if I had enough time/energy to even start a tradition of home eucharists here at Messiah!

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FEWG

FEWG--The Fresh Expressions Working Group--is a Diocesan Committee that primarily is responsible for overseeing church planting in the Diocese of Toronto. That means both serving as gate-keepers to the money set aside to assist in setting up church plants (through the grant process and ultimately controlled by Diocesan Council), but even more importantly we companion on-going projects, think strategically about where God may be calling the Diocese next, and recruit and discern potential missional leaders.

I'm a very junior member of this committee and have only been to three meetings so far, but I have to say that I am extremely impressed with how they do business/ministry. I'm not sure I have been a part of a committee than has been more open to the work of the Holy Spirit. It is not uncommon for people to speak about how they think God has been active in the work they are talking about. And we speak quite a lot about how God's providence is working itself out in the Diocese of Toronto. It's a very "spiritual" sort of discussion that we have around that table. It's also quite down-to-earth nuts-and-bolts, too, but there is no contradiction there. I wish there was a way to share some stories from that committee because I think people throughout the Diocese would be encouraged both by the good news of what we are discovering in this process as well as by the amazingly holy way that the committee and the planters have gone about the work of building up the Kingdom. Very, very cool.

I also appreciate how fun these meetings are. Lots of laughing and joking around. They feed us lunch (sandwiches and pop), and we do a devotional time before the meeting starts in earnest. The Archbishop, Colin "Double-Cross" Johnson, joins us. (His nickname "double-cross" comes from the way he follows the tradition of putting two crosses in front of his name since he became Archbishop.) The meetings last about two hours.

A sign of a good meeting is that everyone leaves feeling even more excited about their work than when they entered. Something about getting a group of enthusiastic people together ought to create something between them that it is powerful and exhilarating, you know?

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Tabled

Check out this series of art installations intended to explore the sacrament of Communion. I love it when Emerging Church does these sort of explorations of aspects of Christianity that perhaps need a little bit of deconstruction! Mad props to Joe Manafo.

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Vital Church Planting Conference 2010!

Somehow I got talked into being on the Vital Church Planting Conference planning team for 2010. Actually, it didn't take much arm-twisting at all to get me on board. I had my first meeting with the group today. Lots of stuff to work on, but it's good work!

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A Rainy Friday

Got up Thursday morning to kind of blustery day here in Toronto. I started my day off with a trip to the Doctor. He doesn't want to give me anything for my cough until it's been around for a week or two.

I knew I had an appointment in the afternoon, but nothing else to do at the office, so I decided to spend the morning working from home. Techie that I am, I can do most of my office tasks using just my old laptop at home. We do our liturgical planning, for example, using a Google Docs spread sheet. Each Sunday (or major feast) gets a row. The columns contain notes about what the readings are, hymn selections, who is preaching, what we are doing with the kids that Sunday, and other details. All the COTM staff can log in with a username and password from any computer on the Internet and make notes and changes. No more passing around xeroxed planning documents or e-mail attachments back and forth. It makes coordinating multiple staff assignments on Sunday mornings MUCH easier. I also use Google Calendar to track my personal appointments and task lists, which I can also access from anywhere.

So I got a fire going in the fireplace and went to work answering e-mails and reading. The cats kept me company. Betsy worked upstairs. After lunch I went into the office to do some meetings and take care of other tasks. One of these meetings was with a student from Wycliffe Seminary that wants to be a Theological Intern with us this year. I'm very pleased to have him on board. I don't want to announce his name and so forth until I introduce him to the congregation a week for Sunday.

After meeting with him I spent some time with Eric talking music and plans. He continues to impress me with his knowledge and ideas about church music. When I was at Holy Cross I picked a book called The Emergent Psalter by Isaac Everett. The book's blurb will give you a sense what that's about:

Many alternative and emerging church communities have begun exploring ancient music and liturgical traditions despite a lack of high-quality, published liturgical music which does not require (or even desire) an organ and a four-part choir. The Emergent Psalter serves to provide that resource. Featuring music written for two emerging communities (Transmission in New York and Church of the Apostles in Seattle), this book is an excellent resource for anyone producing an alternative worship service or thinking of starting one. (source)

Not surprisingly, Isaac is friends with Emily Scott--who does the Paperless Singing stuff in NYC. Emily and I overlapped at Yale a few years ago. Anyway, Isaac does some really interesting things with these Psalms. On the one hand he is deeply invested in the tradition--Gregorian Chant and also the Hebrew approach to the Psalms. But then he let's the Word manifest in an new way in its new context. You can get a sense of what I mean by listening to his podcast. Every week he takes the Psalm appointed in the Lectionary and shows how to do it in his style.

So Eric and I had a nice talk about music and some of our ideas about how to develop liturgy at Messiah. Lots of good stuff in the works!

Today it was rainy and cold. I slept in hoping it would help the cough go away (it didn't) and read some of my childbirth/parenting books. Then I went on a pastoral visit. Now I'm home with Betsy with a nice fire and cats-on-laps. Life is good.

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Judith Warner's Faith-of-No-Faith

As she often does, Judith Warner touches on the spirit-of-the-moment in her latest NYTimes blog. She's discussing her beliefs and how although she doesn't feel that she fits into any traditional faith category, she feels that her children are really missing something by not growing up with a language of faith:

I am Jewish. But for nine years, from age 5 to 13, I attended an Episcopal school, went to chapel, sang in the choir. To this day, in good moods, my mind fills with hymns, and on a certain kind of spring day, a day that’s full of promise and hope, I see sunshine streaming in through stained glass windows, graceful specks suspended in the light over highly polished wood pews.

I would never call myself a Christian. But if you begin the Lord’s Prayer, I will join in, with feeling.

...

I know there are a lot of people who view people like my friend and me as “confused.” And yet, I can tell you that she and I – and my somewhat striking number of other friends whose faiths are other than what they “ought” to be by virtue of their upbringing – don’t feel confused at all. Some of us just can’t find a home for ourselves in the categories of identity that make sense for other people. Some of us are defined by little bits and pieces of experience and belief that together form a mosaic that for us, at least, is coherent and whole. (source)

I hear this sort of thing often, especially from well-educated folks who pride themselves on being open-minded and familiar with other cultures. There are a lot of people who feel this way among Betsy's peers at the University. Notable, to me, is the nostalgia for the culture sustained by institutional religion as well as the regret for its decline. But there is also a sense of displacement, as though they are part of a spiritual diaspora. It's the sort of thing we would expect from a culture that is becoming rapidly post-Christendom. Still, I have tremendous hope and faith that the Holy Spirit knows what She is doing...

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Videos to Reflect With

I met Joe Manafo at the Vital Church Planting Conference a few months ago here in the Diocese of Toronto. Joe is film maker and is deeply committed to the project of using New Media to express the Gospel. He and some others have an experiment called ThinkerLabs that creates a space for open-source collaboration for Christian New Media.

I find this model of open source collaboration intriguing, and the Alt.Worship-style liturgies and videos are well thought out. Here are two examples of the sort of thing they are creating at ThinkerLabs...





I'm interested to see where this initiative goes!

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"One Size Fits All?"

Those of you interested in emerging church, missional church, or fresh expressions will be interested in this documentary recently released about Canadian Church life.


You can purchase a copy through the Wycliffe Bookstore (I believe) or from the movie's website.

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Vestry 2009

It's past midnight on Sunday night / Monday morning, and I'm in a weird overtired place. Last night I slept fitfully, but slept, for about six hours. I woke up at 6 A.M. and was at church by 7. Normally I don't get up that early on Sunday mornings anymore (though I did for the first few years of my ministry). But today was a special day--Annual Vestry!

Annual Vestry is a meeting of the church membership that receives various reports and votes on various motions. They also elect officers (and receive the appointment of others). We review financial statements and approve a budget and do all that kind of stuff.

Normally as part of Vestry the Rector (me) gives a report on the state of the parish. Like many other priests, however, I give my address to the parish during the Sunday morning service so as to speak to those who won't stick around for the actual Vestry meeting. During my "Charge to Vestry" I spoke about some of the current situation of the church and directions forward. I also outlined what I see as some particular strengths and challenges of the church.

One thing that I stressed in particular is the need for us to shift some focus away achieving excellence on Sunday morning and towards starting up Fresh Expressions of church. This is possible, in part, because of the tremendous amount of work we've put into tweaking Sunday mornings to get them humming along. Sunday mornings at Messiah are great, and that might be sufficient to attract a few families a year (as it did in 2008), but real growth is only going to come with new, missional ministry.

As some have pointed out, supporting mission is like supporting motherhood and apple pie--no one is going to speak against it. But actually the implications are far trickier. For one thing, most of us church professionals immediately want to start with worship. We want to design some new service or do some clever liturgy in an existing one. Learning more about more about church growth and evangelism, however, I become convinced that this strategy of attractional church is fundamentally flawed. No amount of advertising or promotion is likely to make a big difference for a place like COTM. We haven't seen much impact from any of the hundreds of dollars spent last year, and I doubt we'll see much in 2009, either. Even if we do, the numbers are bound to be small.

I'm not saying we abandon doing or promoting Sunday mornings. I'm a big believer in the Back to Church Sunday initiative, for example (in fact, I'm the Area Coordinator on behalf of Bishop Yu for that particular initiative)--but it's simply not enough. The roadside is littered with Pastoral-sized churches that tried and failed to lure people to join our way of doing things. More is needed.

Once in becomes clear that attractional-church isn't likely to succeed, the next place many churches go is programme. The idea here is that you can programme your church into growth. Churches create and run all kinds of fantastic programmes designed to either attract interest or develop new Christians. Some of these, like Alpha, can be quite successful. The problem is that the programmatic approach to church growth tends to be resource intensive. Once a church drops below a certain threshold of size, it fails to have the critical mass necessary to execute programme to the point so as to cause new growth. There is a reason "Programme-sized" Churches are called "Programme-Sized"--being a "Pastoral-Sized" place guess where the impetus for growth lies?

Indeed, my predecessor at COTM discovered precisely this. He has written and spoken about how when churches dissipate below a certain critical mass, growth becomes elusive. I would go a step further and say that's only the case if we are working within the the framework of inherited-church and it's emphasis on programme. No doubt there are many churches that are growing quite well with evangelism programmes--but we simply don't have the resources to sustain that at COTM. We don't have enough volunteers and we don't have enough staff.

So if the attractional model with it's emphasis on superior liturgy and advertising is insufficient and the programme approach is untenable because we lack critical mass, what's left? I would argue, strongly, that we need to develop new expressions of church that will appeal to an entirely new group of people. This is not a new idea, but it is finding a resurgence.

The success of something like The Meeting House is entirely due to the fact that they let mission drive ministry. They decided to pursue mission to people for whom Sunday Morning in a traditional church is no good and let that drive everything else. The result has been phenomenal growth. Now I have some critiques of the Meeting House. Note, for example, that only about 50% of the people that come on Sundays actually belong to the house-church groups where the real work of pastoral care and discipleship are supposed to happen. But the take away point is that if you align your ministry with a carefully-discerned mission you are likely to tap into a work the Holy Spirit is already doing.

The hard part is letting go of stuff to free up the resources to do mission-based ministry. I hesitate to even mention some the things I think we could axe in an effort to move forward in ministry. I think that before long I'm going to have to make some even bolder decisions for the good of my community that are likely to make a few people confused or even unhappy. But I really don't see how I can get COTM back into a thriving place where people's lives are changed without it. We are well beyond a time when simply doing Sunday morning well is enough!

I'm haunted by the fact that virtually every priest I talked to has told me that turning around COTM is going to take something like five to seven years. Yet we are in a better place to make that change than many parishes. My people are fearless! They really are. I love it. They really do understand that what we do is about following Jesus--how cool is that? So this transition is totally possible, but it requires a lot of change from both the congregation and from me. Like most priests, I was trained to maintain a church, not transform it!

Anyway, I'm still pulsing with energy from the Vestry Meeting (as you can tell). I'm both exhausted and fidgety. I'm thinking about all the things I should have said or explained more elegantly. I'm fretting over a few people that I meant to thank and didn't (so many to acknowledge). I'm anxious about the $40k deficit for the '09 budget. I'm thinking about some of the people in the parish that I really need to spend some time with. Having a been a good enough pastor to them? Probably not. And yet I'm desperately trying!

Did Jesus have these moments? Of course he did. Remember when he went back to his hometown and he couldn't even heal anyone? How depressing that must have been! There is a reason that he is often taking time by myself to go up mountain tops and pray either alone or with a few key disciples. Me, I'm planning to go to Holy Cross at the end of March. Pray for me until then!

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Vital Church Planting Conference

I've been at the Vital Church Planting Conference yesterday and today. My second year. Lots of great ideas and discussions and contacts. So much of the centre of gravity of church growth in the Diocese of Toronto is happening at this conference every year that I really don't understand why more people aren't there. This year the registration was around a 135. But I could think of lots of people who could really benefit from thinking about Mission and Evangelism who simple aren't here. 80% of success is just showing up, I think.

I'm too tired right now to tell any stories about the stuff I saw or the people I met. Suffice it to say that this conference is a great antidote to people feeling discouraged by the church's decline. There are lots of examples of the Holy Spirit doing crazy beautiful things all of the place. I'm pumped.

I know a lot of clergy that are really discouraged and burned out. one of the plenary speakers said that he thought the greatest obstacle to church revitalization was our own discouragement. So true. Yet it's not so hard to get out from under that dark cloud--simply go to some conferences like this one and hear some stories that remind you of what ministry is meant to be.

Life is good.

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Blessed Are You Who Distrub the Customer...

Here's a very catchy anti-consumerism song by the crazy/fun Rev'd Billy titled "Beatitudes of Buylessness."



Here's a direct link to the MP3 file...

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Another Presentation by Bishop Cray

Here are the two slideshows presented by Bishop Cray when he did a talk at St. Paul's, Bloor Street, on March 8th, 2008. The first one is about Fresh Expressions, the second is about some of the underlying theology for the shift towards Mission-based church happening in the U.K.

| View | Upload your own

| View | Upload your own

I hope those are useful to people. Thanks again to the Bishop for letting me share them!

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Bishop Graham's Power Point

The Bishop of Maidstone kindly gave me permission to publish his slide shows on my blogs. This one is the shorter version of his presentation, which he gave at the Wycliffe Institute of Evangelism Dinner.

| View | Upload your own

Pretty good, heh?

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A New Blog

Uber Geek that I am, I founded a second blog. This one will be less about me and more about of the goings on in the Diocese of Toronto with regards to Missional Church. Basically, I've been noticing a network of churches and individuals arise who are interested in transforming their parishes along these lines, and it seems like a good idea to give ourselves a bulletin board for sharing information, etc. I don't want to hog this blog (quite the opposite, in fact) so if you want to be made an Admin for that blog, just tell me and I'll set it up so you can post stuff.

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Alan Roxburgh Interviewing Graham Cray

I was at Wycliffe last night to hear Graham Cray (again). Here's an interview of Bishop Cray by Alan Roxburgh I "borrowed" from the Allelon website...

(source)

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J.C.'s Girls

Here's an interesting story: there is a ministry in Los Angeles called J.C.'s Girls. A former stripper turned evangelist has created a ministry reaching out to strippers and their clients. Heather Veitch is also trying to change the culture of local churches to accept sex-workers who are looking for the Gospel and brave enough to risk rejection by congregations.

My favorite quote:

And I came to [my pastor] and said, "Matt, um, I want to go into strip clubs and tell strippers about God." And he said, "Heather, go make it happen."

So part of this story is the empowerment of lay ministry to do unconventional evangelism into cultures that are alien to mainstream Christianity. At first I was a bit suspicious because this looked like a bait-and-switch kind of approach, but as I've listened to Heather's story a bit more I see that her approach is actually much more loving and open-hearted than that. She is the real deal.

No doubt her visibility will be raised even more by the documentary film about her, "The Pussycat Preacher," but she has already been on the talk show circuit.

Something else about her is worth noting: her husband suffered a traumatic brain injury that left him disabled. So she is raising her kids, taking care of her husband, earning the money, and do this ministry on top of all that! More power to her.

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More on Missional Church

I preached about Missional Church this morning (big surprise). The lections were perfect: Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones and the Raising of Lazarus. Basically, I said that if God can resurrect a pile of dry bones or some corpse that's been rotting for four days, then He can certainly give new life to the Church!

A couple of reflections about the meeting yesterday with Bishop Cray...

I gotta get me a copy of Mission-Shaped Church, the report from the Church of England about Mission and Evangelism. This document is a blockbuster in terms of opening up the CoE, and everyone keeps referencing it.

I need to check out the training resources developed through the Fresh Expressions project. What's there that's worth me spending a lot of time with?

Doing traditional church better (a model based on attraction) at best means competing for only about 6% of the population--but being a different kind of church has virtually infinite potential.

Key Principles:

• Inculturation
• Planting not cloning
• "Dying to live" (cf. John 12:24)
• Less detailed advanced planning; more discernment in context
• Seeing what God is doing and jumping in

"...do not try to call them back to where they were, and do not try to call them to where you are, beautiful as that place may seem to you. You must have the courage to go with them to a place that neither you nor they have been before." Vincent Donovan

Mission to Community to Worship, not Worship to Community to Mission

A sign of maturity in a Fresh Expression is that they know they need inherited church, and vice versa.

Every form of church is provisional and incomplete.

Fresh Expressions require a new ecclesiology, but they also need a new and robust eschatology to backup all that Kingdom-talk. We need a new language for the Christian hope that is more than just middle-class suburban bliss and do-good-isms or maintaining a repository of "culture."

If the decline of the church is our fault (for not adapting to changing need) than it can be addressed through a process of repentence (cf. Bob Jackson).

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Fresh Expressions

The Conference ended well. I got some new ideas and some stuff to process. Even more importantly, I established or re-established some relationships. Again, I'm too tired to blog a lot about the conference here, but I will point those of you interested in emerging church kinds of stuff to Fresh Expressions, which is a website out of the U.K. that has a lot resources...

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