I’m loving our current series on Matthew’s Gospel at Creek Road… the catch is that it might make blogging here a little more irregular than usual over the next 10 weeks.
It’s a series not just inspired by reading Matthew’s Gospel and noticing how much supernatural stuff is happening around its ‘epic’ story; it’s not just inspired by observing that Jesus follows the ‘Hero’s Journey’ common in many epics, it’s not just inspired by Charles Taylor’s analysis of the problem with disenchanted modern-western ‘secular age’ life, or by Tolkien and Lewis’s writings on the Gospel being ‘true myth’… it’s not just a series featuring some pretty fantastic (in every sense) graphic design stuff… It’s all of that… and it has a kids spot series thing with dragons! Cause in some sense the Gospel story is the ultimate dragon slaying story (I mean, seriously, read Revelation — that’s what Jesus does).
“Atheist philosopher A.C Grayling is one of those who wants to dismiss belief in more than the natural world as the equivalent of belief in fairy stories as though that’s a bad thing. He sometimes calls himself an ‘a-fairyist’ because “this properly implies that there is nothing supernatural in the universe – no fairies or goblins, angels, demons, gods or goddesses.”
No magic. No enchantment. Nothing to answer the longing of our heart for something more, except, perhaps, technology and science. It’s a soul-crushing story. And man-made technology can’t deliver on the desires of our god-made hearts. Technology over-promises and under-delivers. You just have to walk into a crowded space full of people alone-together; captivated by smartphone screens and desiring to be anywhere-but-here, or look at how technology is used to make us more efficient killers, or more brain-addled addicts, to see that technology crushes hope and desire as much as it might answer them.
The story of the Gospel answers our longing for meaning beyond simply the natural; in Jesus, the fully divine, fully human, hero we our desire for life to be enchanted is met with the one who shows us how the natural and supernatural overlap and are completely inter-woven, rather than separate streams of reality.”
Chances are you’re reading this because you’re my friend, you may have worked with me, gone to school with me, you might always have that nagging suspicion about my sanity because I work for a church.
Are you one of the many Aussies who grew up going to a church run school, or who occasionally got dragged along to Sunday school by a friend, or relative? Are you a little bit curious about why, given your experience of church, anyone bothers getting out of bed on a Sunday to hang around with a bunch of people they don’t really know, who they probably have no good reason to love?
We’d love to help answer this curiosity, and so, this video is something our church Media Team put together to help re-introduce the idea of church. Most churches have moved on from the sort of church you might have experienced in your childhood. We’re mostly only 10 years behind the curve now when it comes to technology and our ability to understand and make culture. But hopefully we’re catching up.
If you haven’t been to church for a while, and don’t know what to expect if ever you ‘darken the doors’ of a church now, or don’t know what it is that churches that aren’t the church you might remember from your school years, or Sunday school as a kid, here’s a little run through of how and why we do things the way we do at our church.
You might be watching this video because you work for a church and you’re trying to figure out what you have to say about your church, or what you can offer the people around you. I quite like this as a departure from some of our previous ‘vision videos’ where we describe who we are in terms of what we want to achieve. I was very involved in some of those, this time around, my version of this video involved a talking smart fridge of the future. I think we can all agree this is a better video because it didn’t go with that idea.
If you haven’t been for a while, and you live in Brisbane, then why not come check us out one Sunday — or, if you’re not in Brisbane, or nowhere near South Bank, Carina, or Springfield (where Creek Road churches meet) let me know where you live and I’ll introduce you to a church near you.
This term at Creek Road we’re looking at the life of Jesus as recorded in Mark’s Gospel. Mark brings the story of Jesus to life through the eyes of different people who meet him on his journey to the Cross. The people in the stories are a way in to seeing and hearing Jesus.
The word Gospel is a media term — Roman emperors used Gospels to proclaim their own greatness or to establish new titles so that the citizens of Rome could honour/worship them appropriately. The people who wrote about Jesus and called their writing Gospels didn’t do so in a vacuum — it was a very deliberate subversion of the Roman Empire (whose emperors called themselves the “Son of God”), leading up to the very deliberate subversion of the meaning of crucifixion and the symbol of the Cross.
So how should we recapture this approach to media in our day and age? That’s one of the things that thanks to our clever Media Team at Creek Road, we’re aiming to do in this series, called Jesus: Watch, Listen, Follow — and we’d love the online part of what’s going on to be something fun for people all over Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, and the world. We’ve brought a bunch of the characters from Mark to life, on Twitter and Instagram and there’s a central website watchlistenfollow.org which introduces the characters and collates the posts. They’re posting as though the events of the Gospel are happening and they’re reacting, they’re interacting with people who tweet or comment on these posts, and then they’re appearing on Sundays as part of our kids talks at church.
Anyway. This is a big preamble to tell you that you totally have to, at least, follow the Roman Centurion (@r0mancent — Twitter, Instagram), especially if you need some motivation to soldier on, exercise, or read Roman philosophy.
Obviously some tweets are going to be closer to the Gospel narrative than others (which are character building). But if you’re keen to take part why not follow along, watch the story unfold, interact with the characters and share the good bits with your friends. That’s kind of how Gospels work.
There’s a bit of a conversation happening in the Australian Evangelical Blogosphere (so about the smallest pool in the world) about inner city church planting. They’ve got me mulling over next year and life at Creek Road South Bank – a new church, in Brisbane’s inner city, that I’ll be serving as the Campus Pastor (note, I think just about any name/title for a ministry position can sound a bit ego driven, the emphasis here hopefully will remain on the “serving” not on the “Campus Pastor”).
The answer to the question “do we need more inner city church plants?” is clearly a yes.
It’s the answer to any question about “do we need more churches?” Churches are like broadcast towers that send the message of the Gospel around Australia – we need something like the National Broadband Plan to ensure good Gospel coverage around Australia. We also need more workers to work in these churches, and we definitely need more Christians. Australia isn’t meaningfully becoming less Christian, Australia has never been particularly “Christian” – church attendance was high when we started because people were forced to go to church. Australian laws might have assumed or reflected a Judeo-Christian moral framework – but that was the default, it didn’t mean they were written by people whose hearts were owned by Jesus, even if some of our early colonists were passionate Christians, others weren’t. We need more churches in Australia because Australia is full of lost people. And so are our inner city areas.
Which is why, for want of a better understanding of the nuance of what the church I’m part of is doing (hopefully this post will clear this up a little) – next year I’ll be an “inner city church planter.”
I’m finishing college soon. I’m thinking about what life in ministry, post-college, is going to look like for me, and what I thought it would look like before college. So just indulge me a little with this poorly structured stream of consciousness response to the posts above. It’s more about me than most posts you’ll read here, but indulge me a little.
Why I do what I didn’t want to do…
I feel like this whole South Bank thing is forcing me to think through a whole heap of competing thoughts and passions of mine in a way that hopefully ends up being consistent and a healthy compromise on my youthful idealistic zeal.
Before college I was prettyoutspoken and cynical about church planting (or church planters) – and what I meant was inner-city church planting. I was cynical about the guys who wanted to plant churches without working with an established church, in a hip, non-denominational way (or even in the denomination but not of the denomination) – they’re the guys who were a little bit too sure of themselves, a little bit too sure of their central place in God’s plan. Or so I thought (and still think). I was especially cynical about people who wanted to plant megachurches.
It’s amazing how many young pastors feel that they are distinctly called to reach the upwardly-mobile, young, culture-shaping professionals and artists. Can we just be honest? Young, upper-middle-class urban professionals have become the new “Saddleback Sam”.
Seriously, this is literally the only group I see proposals for. I have yet to assess a church planter who wants to move to a declining, smaller city and reach out to blue collar factory workers, mechanics, or construction crews. Not one with an evangelistic strategy to go after the 50-something administrative assistant who’s been working at the same low-paying insurance firm for three decades now.
One of the problems Josh Dinale identified with the current crop of church planters is:
“1) pastors wanting to be the next Mark Driscoll
the more I connect with young pastors (yeah I know I am still generally young, having said that, I have been in Christian minsitry for 10 years, I have been around the block a few times) I am seeing guys who look like Driscoll, speak like Driscoll, act like him, teach like him. I am sorry to tell you, but you are NOT him. you are fearfully and wonderfully made, God has a plan for you, and you alone. I am pretty sure it is not to be like Driscoll but to be the best pastor God has created you to be. Be content with where you are, minister out of your gifts not someone elses.”
Mike Bird also identifies a similar trend.
“I’ve come across many young men who seem to think they have some kind of destiny to become the next Mark Driscoll or the next Tim Keller. They have a church planting strategy from the movie Field of Dreams. Remember the motto of that movie: If you build it, they will come. But the reality is a bit more complex as church planters are not just battling against a secular culture, but competing with existing churches in their area and even competing with existing church plants. In addition, many church planters are abandoning their denominations to plant these new independent churches, leading to a kind of righteous remnant mentality, cultivating a very low ecclesiology without historic bonds to the past, and looking down disparagingly on pastoral leaders who decide to keep working within their existing denominations.”
The whole “thinking you’re the new Driscoll” thing is nothing new (see this post from 2009 – five years ago) – Driscoll has an incredible ability to create fanboys out of the disenfranchised. But I haven’t spoken to many Driscoll fanboys lately, most people in that sort of camp seem to be man-crushing pretty hard on Matt Chandler. And most people of the generation slightly above me seem to be keen to shave their heads, read CS Lewis, and be Tim Keller.
Part of my reluctance to embrace the inner city thing is that there’s a perception that to do this sort of ministry you have to be some sort of bleeding edge hipster. And while I score pretty well on the “Are you a Christian Hipster?” tests because I like specialty coffee and craft beer (and I have a decorative typewriter, and a beard), I don’t want to be that guy.
As soon as ministry becomes about the minister it starts being dead.
This is also my problem with Josh’s thoughtful corrective – I may have been fearfully and wonderfully made – but more importantly I’m being amazingly remade into the image of Jesus – and it’s him people should be thinking about when they go to church. Not me. Or any pastor. If we talk about something a pastor brings to the table, or the locale, and it’s something other than Jesus, we’re talking about the wrong thing. I’m not naive, I think there are good pragmatic reasons that I’m not a bad fit in the inner city, but as soon as I start thinking about myself being a good fit, or being in any way necessary, or the inner city needing me to come in and save it – the narrative is wrong.
I don’t want to be an inner city church planter.
I don’t want to target the yuppies with a trendy and edgy ministry.
I do want to play my part in God’s program of reaching people, including the yuppies, including people in the inner city, and the regions, and the small towns. Sacrificially, doing ministry that resonates with people of whatever culture is around me – a bit like Jesus did when he entered Jewish culture as a Jewish man who spoke the language of the people around him, and told stories they could understand… using imagery they were familiar with… everywhere he could.
I might be a pseudo-hipster, but I have good reasons not to want to be an inner city church planter. I love regional Australia. I grew up in country town New South Wales (after a few years in Sydney), I worked in regional Queensland after uni. And regional Australia punches above its weight on the evangelical scene. In my experience. I think, and still think, that the human resources we suck into cities would, in the providence of God, also produce great results in regional areas. Regional areas and regional people need the Gospel.
““Surely God’s command to exiled Israelites applied to Christians in New York: “seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you” (Jer. 29:7). Long before that, God had designated cities as places of refuge when Israel entered the Promised Land. They remain so today, Keller noted—which explains why poor people, immigrants, and vulnerable minorities such as homosexuals cluster in cities. They attract people who are open to change. Paul did most of his missionary work in cities, and early Christianity flourished within them. Revelation portrays the final descent of the kingdom of God to earth as a city, although a garden city, with fruit trees and a life-giving river at its center. Keller suggests that, had Adam and Eve lived sinlessly and obeyed God’s directions, they would have made Eden into just such a city.”
I get the appeal of the vision of transforming a culture from the city out (ala Tim Keller), but having spent time in a parochial regional centre that wanted no bar of most of what came from a city, simply because it came from the city, I’m not sure how effective this nationwide campaign of transformation is going to be beyond the urban elite, and those who wish they were urban elite in regional cities – who never really gel with the culture of their town or regional city.
I do, however, think that cities are incredibly useful for producing dominant cultural narratives, that do filter out into the regions via the consumption of media and advertising. But if you’ve ever watched the ads on regional television, you’ll know that even the impact of these zeitgeisty narratives is limited, and watered down by being presented along with not so slick regionally produced media.
And I do think the Gospel is the best story there is going round, and it should be told more, and it should become part of conversations where different narratives compete – ala Peter Hitchens presence on Q&A last night. We need to get better at telling the Gospel story in the places where stories are told or presented professionally. And being crucified for it.
I like what Keller’s attempts to transform culture from the city, but I’m pessimistic about the impact of his method beyond the city. Though less pessimistic than Carl Trueman. I’m less Presbyterian than him too.
“And, to put it bluntly, Keller is the transformationists’ best shot today. It does not matter how often we tell each other that our celebrity transformationists are making headway, such claims are only so much delusional hype. A Broadway play and a couple of nice paintings do not help the man who cannot rent space to worship on the Lord’s Day. Indeed, I wonder if any of these transformationists have ever asked themselves whether what we are seeing are not in fact transforming inroads into the culture but the modern equivalents of bread and circuses designed to gull the gullible — meaningless trivia, conceded by the wider culture, that make no real difference; where and when the stakes are higher and actually worth playing for, no quarter is, or will be, given.
Surely it is time to become realistic. It is time to drop the cultural elitism that poses as significant Christian transformation of culture but only really panders to nothing more than middle class tastes and hobbies. It is time to look again at the New Testament’s teaching on the church as a sojourning people where here we have no lasting home.”
I think the example we get from the New Testament church, especially from Paul, is that it’s incredibly unlikely that we’re going to change a city by producing cultural artefacts – the Roman Empire was eventually transformed by the sheer weight of Christian converts, but I think we produce Christian converts by borrowing or subverting cultural artefacts to tell the story of the Gospel. The early church grabbed hold of a bunch of terminology associated with the announcing and promoting of a new king, they used terminology and titles for Jesus that were identical to the terminology and titles used of Roman emperors, but they promoted a king who was crucified, which was a cultural anathema, and was never going to result in immediate wholesale change.
Paul’s Areopagus speech, probably the best strategic attempt at cultural change we see in the New Testament, ends in what many would suggest is a failure to transform… most people laugh at him, and only some are transformed… and yet his speech, which presents the Gospel in a culturally informed way, is recorded in one of the longest lasting transformative texts in the world.
“The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’
“Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by human design and skill. In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed.He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.”
When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said, “We want to hear you again on this subject.” At that, Paul left the Council. Some of the people became followers of Paul and believed. Among them was Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, also a woman named Damaris, and a number of others.
Paul goes to the heart of the city, the best place to tell the story of the Gospel, and he tells it in a culturally engaged way. But it doesn’t instantly transform the whole city (Jonah might be a better story about a city being transformed).
Which is why I’m excited that Creek Road South Bank is telling this story, hopefully excellently, at the Queensland Theatre Company’s Billie Brown Theatre, every Sunday. And it’s why I’m excited that our band is aiming for musical excellence, and Creek Road Media is aiming to produce culturally engaging video that tells this story in excellent ways. And I hope this does result in transforming the lives of enough individuals so that the fabric of our city starts to change. Person by person.
I also get that inner city ministry is incredibly hard. Because of the Inner City Pressure (cf this Flight of the Conchords song).
It’s hard because people who live in places that tell incredible narratives that provide apparent satisfaction to deep desires are often pretty convinced that they already live in heaven, while simultaneously feeling profoundly dissatisfied because they are surrounded by lots more people who both are broken, and reveal one’s own brokenness through interpersonal interactions.
But ministry is hard everywhere. Because it involves gathering a bunch of people who naturally think about what’s best for their sinful selves – even while God is uniting them behind the cause of the gospel by his Spirit. Let’s not fall into the trap of hyper-spiritualising inner city ministry.
Inner city ministry – and by extension, inner city church planting, is important because there are people in the inner city.
And, in a city like Brisbane, it’s strategic because there is public transport to the inner city from just about every corner of the city – and evangelical churches in Brisbane are not well represented in the statistical breakdown of religious belief in our city. So if people from parts of the city where there’s no evangelical presence can get to a place where there is, because they’ve been invited there by people who work in the City, then that’s a good thing. The notion of place or a patch for churches is just culturally out of touch. We don’t live, work, and play in the same suburb. Our relationships are likely to stretch not just across suburbs, but across cities, states, and countries. Building a strategy for church planting based on geographic saturation is a bit old school. People travel. We’re better of putting churches in strategic hubs – in Brisbane this might mean places where there are major shopping centres, that people are already in the habit of travelling to…
Image: Relationship networks visualised using Facebook friendships and flight routes, Credit: Robot Monkey
South Bank is also exciting for me because we’ve got a burgeoning ministry to refugees in Brisbane, and many of them live around where this church plant is happening. We’re reaching the world from Brisbane. I’m not sure Iranians on bridging visas are going to be all that enthused about a pastor with a fixie, and a well manicured ironic moustache.
… to do what I do want to do (or rather, what God wants us to do)
Paradoxically, part of the reason I’m excited about being an “inner city church planter” is that I didn’t ever want to be an “inner city church planter.” The bigger reason I’m excited is that I’m not going out on my own as some gung-ho, got all the answers, inner-urban hipster type who is cutting all ties with pre-existing structures. I’m part of a team, that is part of a church, that is part of a denomination, that also has a bigger agenda in terms of church planting. That’s a great way for ministry to not be about me.
While it looks like I’m an “inner city church planter” because each Sunday I’ll be at a new church in Brisbane’s inner city, that’s not what really excites me about next year. As exciting as it is. I went to college as a Presbyterian because being a Presbyterian is a great boat to fish from in Queensland to do Gospel ministry, because I’m theologically pretty Presbyterian, and because I like the attachment to a narrative that has history, that unfolds and is deliberately linked to things that have happened in the past, rather than being deliberately disconnected. I think it’s a little disingenuous to attempt to start a church with a clean slate. With no ties. With no baggage.
I’m excited about being part of the Creek Road team for a few reasons. Mostly because I’m excited about what I think is a reinvention of “team ministry.” I’m excited about team ministry at least in part because I’m an extrovert, but I’m theologically excited about team ministry in terms of what it looks like for a church to function well as the body of Christ, where each bit of the body uses different gifts in complementary and sacrificial ways, that benefit a variety of congregations who are either part of Creek Road, or part of our network. The approach we’re taking at Creek Road has the potential to be incredibly scalable – with some of the benefits of franchising a business in terms of quality control, pooling of resources, and some sort of “brand identity” (which, lets face it, is part of the appeal of denominations), but also the flexibility to do things differently in different places based on who is there – both in the pulpit, and in the congregation.
I think if people in ministry are just thinking about their immediate patch they’re thinking too small. If we’re only thinking about the city, but not the regions, if we’re only thinking about reaching Australia, but not reaching the world, then we’re omnifocused to our detriment, and the detriment of the church’s mission. It’s possible to focus on more than one thing at once. Despite what certain personality types will tell you. Jesus was pretty happy to leave this mission global (making disciples from every nation), while providing a starting place that was geographically bound (first in Judea, then Samaria, then the ends of the earth). We not think global, and act local and global, simultaneously?
Physical presence is a big part of ministry, but the God we serve is transcendent and omnipresent. And prayer works. And prayer is ministry. And communication isn’t geographically contained anymore. Physical distance has collapsed into bits and bytes that can be fired through the skies. Why are we so keen to limit our footprint to our suburb? Using the incarnation of Jesus as a paradigm for local ministry is terrific and necessary, but we’ve also got to learn from the Apostles who used mediums that could be copied and spread, and fly through communication networks (like the Roman roads), whose relationships and span of care stretched across geographic boundaries.
I don’t think of myself as an inner city church planter because I want to serve the church and its mission wherever I can, not just in South Bank.
I don’t think of myself as an inner city church planter because I’m part of a team that is intentionally trying to create resources that will serve churches anywhere.
I don’t think of myself as an inner city church planter because, as part of the team at Creek Road, I’m contributing, with the rest of the team, to what happens every week in three different locations.
Mike Bird’s suggestion, in the face of this whole inner city church planting trend thing is:
“So I’m wondering, without disparaging church planting efforts, if we need to focus more on church rejuvenation over church planting in areas already well served with churches.”
I think this question presents a classic false dichotomy (on the back of a false premise – that there are areas well served with churches). And I don’t buy it. Why not do both? Why not focus equally on both?
Denominations are in a position to do that – so are bigger churches within denominations. Just about every objection to “inner city church planting” raised in those posts linked above is addressed by a model that sees big churches using their resources to serve and help smaller churches, be it starting them from scratch, or in partnership. And this is why I’m excited about the Creek Road model (you can read a bit of an explanation of this model here), and why I’ve signed up.
Big churches have an incredible opportunity to provide resources for small churches – in their own city, or beyond, that help in the rejuvenating process, they have the opportunity to start new churches that share the economies of scale and resources of the mothership. Whether or not regional churches take up the opportunity is entirely up to them, and there’s a gap between city culture and regional culture that needs to be carefully bridged. But Australia is full of people who don’t know Jesus. I’d really like more people to know Jesus. That’s why Robyn and I quit our jobs and left Townsville to go to theological college. It’s why I’m a candidate for ordination with the Presbyterian Church. It’s why despite myself I’ll be hanging out in a new church in Brisbane’s CBD next year with Creek Road.
We need more churches in the inner city because we need more churches everywhere. Brisbane will have a population of 3 million people in 2020. That’s heaps of people who need to know Jesus. That scales up the wider you cast the net – Queensland’s population is growing, Australia’s population is growing, the global population is growing. We need more churches. We need better resourced churches.
My last year of being a “Candidate for Ordination” for the Presbyterian Church of Queensland. And it’s almost September.
It is traditional, at these times, if one is a college student, to be thinking about one’s future. To be thinking about next year – and the years after, and where one might end up serving the body of Christ, his church, and in what capacity.
Long long time readers might remember some things I wrote in my pre-college years about ministry in regional parts of Australia. And might remember some of my passionate pleas for people to take the gospel to regional Queensland.
You may also remember some of my cynicism about missional theology centered on “the city” – as if inner city ministry is hugely transformative and thus, of more value.
You may remember some of the things I said about “church planting” and the types of people who are attracted to the glamour and excitement of not having to deal with “traditions” and stuff.
It’s all here in the archives.
You may know that Robyn and I have continued to champion the cause of Queensland’s regional areas in our time at college.
You’ll be happy to know – on the basis of these well documented commitments – that our immediate, and probably short to medium to long term future has been sorted.
God, it seems, has a sense of humour.
Next year, and beyond (subject to me passing college, my trials for license, and a congregational meeting) Robyn and I will be continuing to serve with the saints at Creek Road in a new campus. Creek Road is going multisite (don’t worry – all the stuff I said about video preaching and the need for a preacher to have a flesh and blood presence with his congregation still stands).
This campus is in South Bank. Brisbane’s cultural hub. Brisbane’s inner city.
We’re very excited about serving with Creek Road – it is a church that is serious about the gospel, and is serious about reaching the lost. It is a church that has a clearly articulated theology of ministry, and philosophy of ministry, and approach to ministry that I’m more than on board with. It is a church that makes sure Jesus is at the heart of each sermon, each song, each Growth Group study.
If you come to Creek Road on a Sunday – you’ll hear about Jesus.
Which is great.
South Bank is a really exciting part of Brisbane. It’s where a lot of the good cafes are. It’s where culture happens. We’re even meeting at the Queensland Theatre Company.
We’re going to be opening a campus, a church, in the heart of Brisbane – where stories are told – and we’ll be sharing the best story in the world – the gospel of Jesus.
Which is exciting.
This may all seem something like a slap in the face to regional Queensland – but it’s not. At least not in my head.
I still love regional Queensland. Especially North Queensland. I’m still keen to see great ministry happening outside of the south east corner, I’m hoping that I’ll be able to be a part of that in a more effective way than I would be were I to head somewhere else (and there aren’t a huge number of competing offers out there this year).
I’m particularly excited about Creek Road’s commitment to partnering with, and resourcing, churches all around the state, and even all around the country. There are concrete examples of this happening already – in regional Queensland and beyond. That is one of the things that really excites me about joining the team at Creek Road.
There are a heap of synergies in terms of things I’m passionate about seeing our denomination do to share the gospel and this role at Creek Road.
One of the things I’ve become really passionate about since I wrote all that stuff about regional ministry is the sort of public Christianity sphere this blog has started to occupy, that represents a significant aspect of my thinking about ministry, and there have been a few conversations I’ve had with people around the country in recent weeks on that front that make me think this is an area I should continue exploring and developing.
If it is you, we’re a couple of days away from launching a new website at Creek Road – this has been a labour of love for a few of us for a month or so – including a pretty handy web developer who can do just about anything, a writer or two, and some talented graphics types, and we’re now so caught up in it that it’s very hard to be objective. If you want to check it out, and let me know what you think in the comments here – that’d be great. I’ll update this post with a link to the actual site when it goes live too… I’m hopeful it does what we wanted it to do, and I’m also hopeful that with a little bit more work we’ll be able to turn what we’ve done into something that can be used as a WordPress theme by other churches without too much trouble.
Our big aim is for the website to be something that’s aimed at people who aren’t from a church background, so we want the gospel to be the focus, and to be pretty clear. If you find any unhelpfully complex jargon I’d love to know that too.
There are a couple of things that aren’t exactly what I want them to be – when you hit the link for more posts the alignment goes funny – but that’s the nature of pinboard type sites. I’m hoping to replace some of the wordiness with videos, but words do better things with search engines…
But wait. You say. John’s gospel doesn’t have a nativity scene.
Indeed. But Revelation does.
A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. 2 She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. 3 Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on its heads. 4 Its tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that it might devour her child the moment he was born. 5 She gave birth to a son, a male child, who “will rule all the nations with an iron scepter.”
This ain’t no stable story.
I’ve preached on it before – but my last talk wasn’t great. So I’m gutting it. And rewriting it. It’s difficult to turn this pretty weird passage into something evangelistic. But I like the coolness of it, and the timing – given that the Hobbit is coming out on Boxing Day and it is pretty dragony.
I’m going to lean heavily on this bit, and just fly over the weird stuff with a short, sharp, explanation of why Revelation tells the Christian story in a symbolic way.
10 Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say:
“Now have come the salvation and the power
and the kingdom of our God,
and the authority of his Messiah.
For the accuser of our brothers and sisters,
who accuses them before our God day and night,
has been hurled down. 11 They triumphed over him
by the blood of the Lamb
and by the word of their testimony;
they did not love their lives so much
as to shrink from death.
Sound enthralling? Come along.
Meet this guy… and the baby who smashes him.
One of the things I’m finding tough is how to articulate that as Christians we do believe in something bigger than ourselves, something supernatural, other than the intangible God and his tangible son, Jesus. That we believe Jesus’ birth, death, and resurrection had some meaning beyond what it achieves for us as individuals, and for humans with the arrival of the crucified king of the world… that there was, and is, an entity who didn’t want this to happen. The dragon. Satan.
I find it pretty easy to talk about Jesus. Because he was a man, in history, who is historically plausible. But Satan? And Satan presented as a dragon? I’d rather deal with that in brush strokes and get back to safe and rational ground as quickly as possible.
I can’t figure out why.
We’re pretty good at buying in to struggles between good and evil in just about every story we consume – the Hobbit is an example – so I can’t figure out why I baulk at presenting the “evil” entity, not just the evil that dwells in each sinful person, when it comes to telling people the gospel.
We’re really enjoying being part of Creek Road this year. I love the way we’ve got a clear vision about the role we’d like to play in our city – we want to help people in Brisbane meet Jesus (like every other church that loves Jesus)… But mostly I love that so many people in our congregation are fired up to serve God, serve our city, and be on mission together.
Its been fun to fuse my PR stuff with ministry in opportunities like this video, that the very talented Wade Iedema from Lifetone Media put together. I helped write the script, my friend Joe polished it, and came up with the idea of getting people from church to read it, and my baby girl, Robyn’s knee, and my coffee machine, make little cameos.
Yesterday we bid farewell to our home of two years. It was idiosyncratic and mould ridden, but it was familiar. We also, thanks to a bunch of willing helpers, said hello to our new home, in Camp Hill.
Which is reasonably well set up upstairs (though has a minuscule kitchen), and full of boxes of stuff downstairs.
Blogging will be sporadic in the next few days as we finish up the cleaning at the old place, and the setting up at the new – and as we rely on mobile broadband for interwebs.
We’re glad to be in our new house, and looking forward to this year, and the dust settling.
If you’re in the neighbourhood, and have my number, drop by for a coffee. If you don’t have my number and want to drop by, shoot me an email or something, and if you’re not too weird, we’ll sort something out. There’s plenty of room here for interstate and international visitors too.
There’s a list somewhere in the world of the most stressful experiences in life. Top of the list, I think, is losing a loved one. Which we haven’t had to experience for some time. But the next cabs off the rank, from memory, and in no particular order, include:
1. Having a baby.
2. Moving house.
3. Changing jobs.
4. Changing churches.
By the end of next week we’ll have done all four of those.
We farewelled Scots Clayfield, and Andrew and Simone last Sunday. This isn’t really the time or the place for reflections on ministry at Scots, suffice it to say, the Richardsons have a tough gig, in a tough part of Brisbane to do ministry, and people leaving a small church sucks. We’ll keep praying for them, and will remember our time there fondly.
On Monday we started a new era – heading to the staff retreat for our new church – Creek Road – which, including students and trainees – was about half the size of the entire Scots congregation. So it’s going to be a very different couple of years.
Today we signed a new lease on a new house in a new suburb on a new side of the city. We’ll be much closer to church than we have been in the last two years, and a handy public transport trip to college.
I found a stress scale on Wikipedia – the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale – which suggests that I’m, given the time of year this is happening – a 292 on the scale, which means I’m at a moderate risk of stress related illness, and eight points off the high risk category. A speeding ticket would push me over the cusp.
But I feel pretty good, and our little family (complete with almost perfect baby), is collectively pretty excited about the year ahead.
