New Eden Project Manifesto: Preamble

We’re in a position as a church, and as a family, where a bunch of unsettled and up-in-the-air realities are about to come crashing down into some new sort of normal. This year we’ve been out of our house while replacing deadly asbestos with normal plasterboard (we’re hoping to be in our renewed home by Christmas). My boss (and friend) resigned from his position unexpectedly, which has thrown church life into chaos for us. The building we’re currently meeting in is up for sale and our lease expires in two months. And our church community has the opportunity to recalibrate as we find a new place to meet; each time we’ve moved from non-stable venue to non-stable venue our numbers have been decimated and the sense of being rootless has not been great for us. So I’ve been thinking about the next chapter of church life for me, as a pastor, for us, as a family, and for those in our church as a community. I signed up for ministry with the Presbyterian Church because my theology and understanding of polity line up with Presbyterianism, but also because our denomination is one that puts the Gospel at the centre of what we do and is in a situation where new ideas or fresh expressions of church might bring renewal to a bunch of communities and buildings around Queensland; we’ve been a nomadic church plant for almost six years, which, while ‘new’ and sometimes ‘fresh’ hasn’t really been easy, or what got me on the Presbyterian bus to begin with. I’ve got great respect for those church planters who spend years meeting in schools or other public spaces for hire; but I’m not convinced that’s the most effective use of resources or the best model for the church in Australia long term (imagine, for a moment, that state schools decided overnight to no longer lease buildings to churches).

I’ve written quite a bit over the years sketching out some areas where I think church could and should change — from a set of ‘theses’ to mark the 500 year anniversary of the Reformation, to some ideas about how church might function in a post-Christian, secular, culture, then how we might re-capture our story, to a thing about zombies and the “Benedict Option,” to sketching out an aesthetic that might support the telling and living of the Christian story as a sort of architecture of belief, pieces on rest, and play, and finally a sort of theological vision for how we should live as Christians in a world facing climate catastrophe. In that last post I used the phrase “the New Eden Project” so many times that it became a brain worm for me. And thus, bringing all those threads together, an idea for a model of church was born. This model owes quite a bit to a subject I took at QTC with Rory Shiner and Stephen McAlpine on “Ministry and Mission in A Secular Age,” and in some ways is an adaptation of their model (as I understood it).

This is a long pre-amble for my next post — which will sketch out a picture of church community and life in Jesus’ kingdom that I’m calling “The New Eden Project.”