Tag: new eden project manifesto

The New Eden Project: What shape might this take for a church community

I’ve posted a preamble, and manifesto, about this New Eden Project thing yesterday. And it’s all nice in theory, right? But what might it look like in practice?

The TL:DR; version is: the New Eden Project is about revitalising and renewing the spaces churches already occupy, and reclaiming other spaces, for communities of up to 150 people, that duplicate and spread into other spaces, while not relying on any ‘one’ particular church leader. Its practices are built around re-narrating life around God’s Jesus-oriented story, as we are re-created by his Spirit, to resist the patterns of the world, while living lives in communities that anticipate and testify to the renewal of all things, re-imagining the status quo in our church communities, but also for our neighbours.

I mentioned that this project is prompted by our experience as a church meeting in rented venues for the last six years, and in the context of a denomination where lots of buildings seem to be being ‘consolidated’ or whatever corporate euphemism you want to use for selling up properties. We’ve been part of that; our first few years hire costs were covered from the sale of an old church building. The church buildings around our city that aren’t built for massive communities (and we have a few of those), typically have physical limits for how many people they can accommodate (and carpark limits) of around 150-200. There’s a sociological number (the Dunbar number) that suggests 150 is about the size of a group (or tribe) where the members feel safe and so there’s a natural limit there. So, as we ponder the future we’re exploring the possibility of meeting in a suburban church building — and such buildings are typically a bit older and built prioritising function over form. So if this whole ‘project’ is going to go anywhere there are some fundamental convictions about what buildings should look and feel like, and what they should be used for, driving things; but also, cards on the table, I think there’s stacks out there about growing churches through the 150 or 200 barrier and the systemic changes you need to make to make that happen, and I’ve been increasingly thinking we’re actually better off creating healthy churches of 150ish that are trying to duplicate.

Our church growth models that are often built on an exceptional leader/preacher are problematic because we don’t have heaps of those around (sorry other leaders), and because when we do, those churches tend to grow at the expense of other churches around them; and that’s fine, big churches are in a position to do great things for the kingdom, but this is part of why we’ve got empty buildings and pastors burning out all over the shop (this is also fed by a consumer mentality where people last in a small church until there’s an ‘essential program’ missing and so drive to the next suburb over to a different church). If I’m going to lead a church, I don’t want to lead a church of 500, I want to train and equip people in my church community to occupy another building and grow a church of 150-200 that duplicates.

We’re also in a weird position as a community where because we have been a city church we have people driving to us from all over the greater Brisbane area; and our challenge is that we want people to be building relationships with the people they work, live, and play near (we’re pretty keen on Sam Chan’s Everyday Evangelism gear from his book (see review)). Being a city church has been fun, and I love the people who live a long way away from me, but we need some structural changes in how we meet on Sundays, and in small groups, so that our community can get involved in ‘team style’ evangelism (see that review), where people are naturally building good relationships and connections; not expecting non-Christians to travel across the city to come to a Sunday church service (though some might).

Here’s a shape for church life that I’m pitching; it’s a mix of semi-traditional church structures (with a few tweaks), small groups, and ‘fresh expressions’ of service/participation in the kingdom/New Eden Project, and of informal church structures (that can be a bit more of a movable feast/less tied to a physical ‘hub’). This is the bit where I’m really picking up and playing with the model Rory and Stephen from Providence in Perth have been developing (I think). So credit where it’s due, but they can, of course, distance themselves from the bits that they see ending somewhere bad…

Once again, after you have a read over this, I’d love your reflections.

Hub and Spoke Network

The New Eden Project values space and seeks to reclaim and renew it; ordering the physical space’s form (aesthetics) and function (architecture) towards the Bible’s story. Physical spaces aren’t just rain shelters. Habitats shape habits. The trend to prioritise function over form in church spaces, especially around AV requirements or turning churches into ‘multi-use’ space with an eye to commercial imperatives has led to church buildings being ‘non-places.’ Since spaces tell stories (and the medium is the message) this has served to tell a competing story to the Christian story; there’s no ‘neutral’ story or space, really. There are ways to create desirable common spaces that are organised towards a ‘telos’ or a story, that might still benefit the community outside of church activities. But a neutral aesthetic or layout is not neutral at all; for too long the church growth movement has sought to grow the church by ‘adapting’ worldly forms for the proclamation of the Gospel; but those forms actually adapt or colonise the content of the Gospel message. When we’re trying to dig into the problems of a consumer mentality in church communities and we’re not asking questions about how our ‘commercialisation’ of space is contributing then we’re missing the link between architecture and practices and belief.

Buildings are hubs for this New Eden Project; whether church spaces, homes, or, potentially, commercial spaces reclaimed for social enterprise type activities. Revitalising churches must necessarily include revitalising our physical spaces — even though the church is absolutely the people, not the building, habitats shape habits.

Houses where Gospel Communities or Growth Groups meet are part of the ‘spokes’ in this network; but they’re also an engine room for church planting or duplication, and a key part of how leaders are trained. Where these groups meet is likely to overlap with any future ‘hubs’ emerging. The goal of a healthy small group is to be part of some sort of local church renewal.

In terms of how this project might kick off in a church building, homes, and public space, a week might look something like this (taking up the practices from the manifesto).

Sunday Mornings (Hub)

Re-narrate // Re-sist // Re-imagine // Re-enchant

  • The church community gathers to be formed by God’s story in spaces cultivated and kept as ‘tastes of Eden’… gathered around God’s word as it is read, preached, sung, and practiced (prayer, spiritual disciplines, sacraments, liturgy, etc). Minimal technology. Relaxed vibe.
  • The preaching would be shaped by our theological anthropology (how we think people work and are transformed), our theology of the church (that we are the body of Christ and each one of us has a part to play for the sake of the other), our Biblical theology (that we think the Bible is one “Eden-to-New-Eden” story fulfilled in Jesus), and our understanding of different types of speech going on in the New Testament church (preaching, teaching, prophecy, etc). Biblical exposition is some, but not all of the diet in these terms (and, for example, penal substitution is some not all of the substance of the Gospel). Faithful preaching could involve story telling, performance, a time of sharing, encouragement, etc, with the agenda set by not just the content of a passage of the Bible, but ‘media’ questions like its form (you don’t find many expository talks given in the talks recorded in the Bible, sometimes the epistles we preach on are shorter than the sermons we preach on them, the original recipients of the New Testament writings weren’t actually literate so sometimes simply reading scripture out and discussing it together might be enough, etc).
  • The application of talks to the real world is not carried out solely by a male preacher operating as an authoritative priest (though I do still think there are roles in church that are determined, in part, by gender), but by the community via Q&A, a panel of members of the church (or guests), or in discussion groups. So our diet includes men and women offering Godly wisdom and proclaiming the resurrection of Jesus to one another, and listening to each other. Whatever ‘male leadership’ looks like in a world marked by the patriarchal power structures of the Genesis 3 curse, it has to look like men using our privilege and strength to cultivate ‘Eden like’ space for partnership with women who feel safe; some part of male leadership/eldership (which I think the Bible establishes), I believe, is providing such space, hearing, and elevating the voices of women. I get that some people will dismiss this as a sort of ‘benevolent patriarchy’ — but I think the first Eden and the picture of the New Eden are places where males and females come together in genuine cooperation, rather than one holding a particular position of dominance over the other.
  • Kids program. Play based. Mix of outdoor and indoor time. I’d love to have a kids church curriculum integrate with the adult program but featuring lots of Duplo (ages 2-4) and Lego (ages 4-99+) where the imagination is being engaged around God’s story and how whatever part of the Bible we’re digging into fits into that story.
  • Eating together. Both taking part in communion (or as we Presbyterians call it the Lord’s Supper), and a shared meal.

Sunday afternoons — Gospel Communities ‘in action’ (Spoke)

Re-create // Re-sist // Re-plant // Re-enchant

If Sunday is a day people are setting aside, at least partly, for church, it’d be good to see church not just as time spent in a building with other Christians, but as a time to participate in Jesus’ mission of renewal. This wouldn’t be an every week activity for everyone; but would be planned activities with buy-in and encouragement from the leaders of the community. These groups would be prayed for and ‘sent’ by the morning gathering; with an invitation for anyone to join (the church community is a plausibility structure for the Gospel so we want people to belong before they believe, and belonging involves some sort of participation in church life). These activities would be more geographically scattered (ie not just near the church building, but closer to where people live/Gospel Communities meet).

These activities could include renewal projects like tree planting or acts of service in the community; resistance projects like political action; rest or play together as a community (re-creation), but involve opportunities for groups to discuss the day’s passage or service side by side. They ideally are activities that include children as participants not bystanders.

Sunday Nights — Dinner Church (Hub)

Re-narrate // Re-sist // Re-create

Over time we’ll be looking for opportunities to invite non-believers to experience a taste of the Gospel, and of the rhythms of life in church community. This may or may not work best in ‘church’ space (it probably needs to have had a pattern of moving from ‘public space’ to ‘private space’ as relationships have developed — see Sam Chan’s stuff on “Coffee, Dinner, Gospel” and moving from the “front yard” to the “back yard.” and Mary Douglas’ Deciphering a Meal).

These would look like a stripped back gathering around a meal. Dinner church is a thing. It might meet in a home, or a community hall rented for a shorter period of time. These would involve a short talk, a Q&A or panel, and discussions (and maybe some singing). Coming to a ‘dinner church’ gathering would be a legitimate expression of participating in church life; it’s not a ‘come to everything’ operation.

Midweek : Growth Groups/Gospel Communities (Spoke)

Re-claim // Re-sist // Re-narrate
Midweek our small groups commit to spending time in community with each other, and embedding in a more ‘local’ context. These groups involve a commitment amongst members to meet one-to-one to read the Bible and pray together. The groups themselves are outwards focused — looking for opportunities to ‘merge universes’ (as Sam Chan describes it). But the regular rhythms of the group are eating together, reading the Bible (using a stripped back, resource-light approach — either the Swedish Method or the Uncover method AFES has developed, or other approaches that are big on digging in to the text). These groups meet in places we see as outposts for mission; homes or third spaces. They can be a movable feast, but hospitality involves being hospitable guests who partner in this work, not just capacity to host. A group might commit itself to the physical renewal of the places they meet in (spending time side by side working on projects in each others homes).

These ‘Gospel communities’ are open to outsiders as a first step towards Sundays. The church calendar is deliberately uncluttered outside Sundays to allow these communities to shape the rhythm of life together.

Midweek — Community Dinner

Resist // Re-claim // Re-create
Where a ‘hub’ type building exists we use it to host community meals and/or food pantries to provide a taste of Eden. These are for the marginalised, but also for those in our neighbourhood seeking community. These would be a great gateway to something like a Dinner Church series on the “Gospel in Four Meals” (a great evangelism course from Providence). Community meals could also happen before local Gospel communities meet (ie dinner at 6, the group meeting at 7:30) to provide a natural avenue for invitations into those groups (my friends at Village Church here in Brisbane have been doing something like this). Our Creek Road campus of Living Church does a great Friday night community meal for families after the afternoon kids club, and before the night time youth program.

November 14, 2019

The New Eden Project: Manifesto

Manifestos are cool. Here’s a bit of a primer on what this is for in the form of a preamble. I did not follow the convention on Manifestos that I said I would back in 2011. Sorry.

The New Eden Project

 “Certainly there was an Eden on this very unhappy earth. We all long for it, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is still soaked with the sense of ‘exile.” — Tolkien

Why the “New Eden Project”

The story of the Bible anticipates a re-creation; what was lost in the beginning is ultimately restored and renovated; what was a garden created for God’s image bearing people to “cultivate and keep” is, in the end, spread across the face of the earth. The last page of the Bible describes the scene this way:

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him. — Revelation 22:1-3

The prophet Ezekiel describes the end of exile from God as a return to Eden — a re-creation and restoration of humanity from the inside out, and a return to God’s presence. Ezekiel chapters 36 and 37 are full of vivid language, prophecies, describing this renewal. Ezekiel promises God’s scattered people, Israel, will be returned and restored, and through this, God’s promise to bless all nations will also be fulfilled. Israel’s return from exile makes return to Eden possible for all of us…

“‘For I will take you out of the nations; I will gather you from all the countries and bring you back into your own land. I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. — Ezekiel 36:24-27

Jesus, the son of God and the new Adam, comes to lead Israel home, and all nations back to Eden. It is Jesus who, in Revelation, “makes all things new.” It is Jesus in whom “all things are reconciled.” Jesus, the image of the invisible God, is the new image that we God’s people are transformed into by the Holy Spirit. It is Jesus who pours out the Holy Spirit as the fulfilment of the Old Testament promises to restore and recreate God’s people. When Jesus enters the world as ‘God with us’ and then, with the father, pours out the Holy Spirit, our exile from God ends; the new Eden project begins.

The liberation of creation begins with Jesus, and his kingdom of resurrected people living lives filled with the Holy Spirit. In his letter to the church in Rome the Apostle, Paul talks about the whole creation being under bondage to the curse of sin; subject to decay; he says the creation waits for the ‘revelation’ or literally the apocalypse of the children of God for its liberation. He says the Spirit marks us out as God’s children (Romans 8:16-17), and in the Spirit, we have the ‘firstfruits’ of this renewal.

This revelation and renewal ultimately happens in the new creation; the world is still broken; suffering because of sin, death, and curse, still marks our reality. We’re still waiting for the total renewal of all things. We wait eagerly for this future; but we do not wait idly. We are invited to testify to the future re-ordering of all things by re-ordering some things.

We are new creations in Christ. For us the “old is gone” and the “new has come.” We are already united to the resurrected Jesus whose new Eden project is already underway. We live in the ‘now and not yet’ of his kingdom. Our lives, our bodies (as temples of the Spirit), and the places we occupy, are part of the New Eden Project. The longing for the end of exile, for Eden, that Tolkien identified is fulfilled by Jesus but we are invited to provide a taste of Eden here and now.

What is the New Eden Project

The New Eden Project is Jesus’ mission — the mission to “seek and save the lost” and the re-creation and reconciliation of all things. The “Great Commission” to go into the world and make disciples (Matthew 28) is a renewing and renovating of the commission to the first people, in Genesis 1, to “be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it” — to spread the conditions of Eden.

The New Eden Project is our project as a community of people gathered by Jesus and called to make disciples; to invite people to be transformed into the image of Jesus as they receive the Holy Spirit and become citizens of the New Eden. We go knowing that “Jesus is with us always, even to the end of the age” — our exile from God’s presence is over. God is with us, he dwells in us by his Spirit.

A project is action — it is action pursuing some sort of future. Our project is to act in a way that pursues and participates in the New Eden described when Jesus returns to make everything new.

The New Eden has some continuity with the Old Eden; what humanity was created for before sin and death entered the world is what we are re-created for in Christ. We were created, male and female, to be God’s image bearing people in the world, to be like God, to imagine and create, to be “fruitful and multiply” — to expand God’s life-giving, hospitable, loving kingdom — his presence — over the face of the earth as we ruled for him. In Eden, Adam was given the job of “cultivating and keeping” the garden, a task he couldn’t complete alone. Eve was created as Adam’s ally — his partner — in this task. Taken together, Genesis 1 and 2 give us the picture that humans — male and female — are created to co-operate in the task of spreading Eden, God’s temple-like dwelling place where he is present with his people across the face of the earth, a result we finally see in Jesus’ work in the New Eden.

Genesis teaches us that God made the world and made us to partner with him in stewarding it. The Bible also consistently describes the world as part of how we know God (Psalm 19, Romans 1). Eden, like the Temple that later is an echo of Eden, is the high point of the world fulfilling its function. Sin means we’re kicked out of Eden, and also that we don’t see the world according to God’s purposes for it, but rather our own. We have our own little kingdom building projects that lead to death and destruction because really they’re Satan’s building projects.

Our tasks, as children of God, in this New Eden Project, in a world exiled from God but haunted by a longing for Eden, are to:

  • Re-narrate the world and our lives in it. The New Eden Project is shaped by the Eden to New Eden story of the Bible. The Bible is God’s word — it is also God’s story. This is the story of the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, for the forgiveness of our sins and his pouring out of the Spirit to re-create and restore us, ending our exile from God replacing our sinful nature with something new. Our lives, our words, our songs, and our actions retell God’s story of salvation in Jesus; they tell not just of the forgiveness of our sins and a pie in the sky future, but our union in the life and love of God so that we become the ‘body of Christ’ in the world. We are a people who live with Jesus as our king and the mission of renewal as our mission. Though we know this mission is ultimately fulfilled in his return and we know that the world and our lives are still marked by sin, suffering, death and curse, we live as those raised with Christ and seated in the heavenly realm. We reject idolatry and grasping self-gratification and seek to bring all things, including our own lives, towards their ultimate ends (or purposes). We live bringing a taste of the resurrected new creation, living now in our persons and our community even in our suffering. We invite people to taste and see that God is good in our lives and spaces as we tell this story.
  • Be Re-created by God’s Spirit, as we move from the patterns of this world, the pattern of Adam and Eve in the fall, to the pattern — or image — of Jesus, and so re-create our lives and the world in alignment with Jesus’ New Eden Project. Eden was a place of work and rest and play; it was a place of ‘re-creation’ as we people, made in God’s image, were to take up the task of ‘cultivating and keeping’ the garden using our God given imaginations and his good gifts to make life and culture (the conditions and creations that flow from pursuing life in God’s presence with him as our God). We work and ‘re-create’ (both rest and re-creation) with the goal of bringing the life and beauty and order of the God of the Bible into the world. We adopt habits consistent with this story and pursue transformation through a renewed mind as we let it dwell among us richly. We do this as people being re-created, in Jesus, by the Spirit, to be people of his eternal kingdom, anticipating the new creation, the new Eden. By the Spirit we are new creations now.
  • Re-enchant our understanding of space, time, and our lives — because God has “broken in” to this world in Jesus (a cool place to notice this is in the tearing of the sky at the start of Mark, and the Temple curtain at its end), and through the pouring out of the Spirit, we reject the secular/sacred or natural/supernatural divide and see every moment as holy and the world as enchanted. We see creation as a gift from God and the proper use of creation as “revealing his divine nature and character of God” as we enjoy it and cultivate it with him present in our lives. We see work and rest and play as Spiritual practices that proclaim the kingdom we belong to and shape us in the image of the God we worship. We worship the God revealed in Jesus and serve him as our good and loving king. We seek to love God and love our neighbour as ourselves, living lives in his kingdom, participating in his renewing and reconciling mission, a mission that culminates in the New Eden.
  • Re-sist the patterns of this world — by deliberately rejecting the pull of idolatry and by deliberately counter-forming ourselves through different practices. The nations of people exiled from God are often depicted after the Old Testament as ‘Babylon’ — this is particularly the case in Revelation, the last book of the Bible. Babylon has the power to capture the hearts of the people brought into its power, and its stories. We resist Babylon through deliberate acts of counter-formation and resistance (including cultural critique and protest or political action). We have our own distinct aesthetic and practices rather than imitating the world and its forms. This could be in something as radical as hospitality and sabbath, or as mundane as protest or tree planting. The catch is, there is no mundane because every part of our life is marked by the sacred.
  • Re-imagine our relationships as we re-image our humanity in the image of Jesus, the image of the invisible God. We, as males and females, are invited to co-operate in Jesus’ project. The first witnesses to the resurrection — in the garden, where Jesus appears like a gardener, are women. We still, though anticipating a new Eden, live in a world whose patterns are shaped by the curse of Genesis 3, where men have used their strength to grasp for power and control.
  • Re-claim space, time, and our bodies as ‘spaces’ where the New Eden is being anticipated and presented in the world as a taste of what is to come. We recognise our bodies as fundamental to our nature as image-bearing creatures. We are not just souls or minds waiting for some ‘disembodied’ future. How we use our bodies shapes our hearts and souls. We seek to love and serve Jesus as embodied people who belong to Jesus’ New Eden Project. We use our spaces — those we share, occupy, and own — to provide a taste of the sanctuary of Eden, both old and new. They are places of beauty and hospitality. Places where God is glorified and where we recognise his presence and provision. They are places of life and light and water.
  • Re-plant ‘Eden’ in our homes, shared public spaces, and community spaces. There are lots of old buildings dedicated to worshipping God that have, at times, become too close to Babylon or that need new life. We commit to re-claiming and re-creating whatever space possible, ‘church building’ or otherwise, to be used towards the ends of God’s kingdom, bringing a taste of the New Eden and God’s presence in the world by whatever means possible. We are committed to ‘renewing’ (and so also renewables, recycling, and up-cycling). We also commit, in our resistance of Babylon, to re-plant natural spaces — to be ‘gardeners’ and stewards who ‘cultivate and keep’ the world God made — so that they reveal his divine nature and character, rather than our ravenous idolatry. We recognise that as humans sinfully degrade the planet this is evident in the natural world; and so we commit to an alternative pattern of life that stewards and re-creates the life-giving conditions of Eden wherever possible, from community gardens to tree-planting to our own backyards.

I have some ideas what a church community shaped by this sort of manifesto might look like. Do you? I’d love to hear them. I’ll share mine in a future post. If this sort of vision for church excites you, I’d love to hear that too. Also, if it leaves you cold and you think this is a diabolically bad idea, please tell me.

November 13, 2019