Out the front of our house we have our lawn, then a pavement and closest to the road a 2 metre strip of lawn that spans our block and is considered council property.

I was reading Simon’s blog today and the neighbourhood initiatives he was writing about and couldn’t help wondering what would happen if we were to start a veggie patch in the front of our yard rather than the back – and what if we got others in the street to do similar and we allowed people to come and take what they wanted from what was created.

In his excellent book on neighbourhood mission and spirituality (God Next Door), Simon wrote about how we have lost the ‘front porch’ vibe in our streets and how most living is now done at the back and of course the end result is that we finish up living much more separate lives. It prompted me to consider how we design our homes and whether we could create homes that help us ‘live out the front’ a bit more.

Perhaps using that verge area for a veggie garden could be a starting point in redressing the balance and who knows, if it caught on it could change the whole vibe of a street.

Of course it has risks and associated problems, but wouldn’t it be a fund experiment?…

Now, if only I had the smallest interest in gardening I’d give it a go!

I often think David Fitch says it well and he does again here with his comments on whether the whole ‘emerging’ scene is dead, sick, passe or whatever.

I really couldn’t give a rodent’s posterior whether nametags gain traction or die, but that the church is renewed and re-inspired to focus on the things that are close to God’s heart… well that’s a biggie.

I was a missionary before I knew about emergent, missional, organic churches and I don’t think anything is going to change that. I have been blessed to be heavily involved in the conversations, training and agitating to see the church re-imagined, but I’m not going to die for a brand or a name tag.

In fact the need to sustain a brand is in my opinion one of the potential undoings of any move of God. We then ossify what was once dynamic and in doing so drain it of the potency it once held.

Let’s keep focused on the stuff that matters and that gives shape to the kingdom and let’s not waste time on the stuff of ego and empire.

Here are some great thoughts on world engaging holiness from my good friend Alan Hirsch. I think he says it clearly and succinctly.

Before we move on to some of the many wonderful expressions of the Holy Spirit, we thought it important to address some of our misunderstandings around the issue of holiness. As mentioned in chapter 1, often our understanding of biblical holiness is one that leads us to see holiness from a negative perspective or as a list of “don’ts” and prohibitions. One of the key roles of the Holy Spirit is to oversee the change process by which we become holy, and when holiness is properly understood, it is actually an incredibly redemptive, highly missional concept.

Part of the problem with our understanding of holiness relates to the fact that we understand the word “holy” as a passive adjective when we refer to the “Holy” Spirit. But there is another, more distinctly Hebraic way of translating the original language that emphasizes other dimensions of the work of the Spirit in our lives. Rather than translating hagia as a passive adjective (“the Spirit who is holy”) we can legitimately translate it far more dynamically as “the Sanctifying Spirit”—that is, it is the Spirit who is actively engaged in making the world a more holy place. Isn’t this who God is, and doesn’t it far better describe what he is doing all the time?

When we talk of God as being holy, or of Jesus as holy, or of the Holy Spirit, we must resist the temptation to see holiness in moralistic terms, or else we do violence to the idea of the redeeming God and end up seeing God as the ultimate moralist! That is simply bad theology. God is the model of holiness and we must become like the One we love. “As obedient children, let yourselves be pulled into a way of life shaped by God’s life, a life energetic and blazing with holiness” (1 Peter 1:15 Message).

A Hebraic understanding of holiness suggests that all of life is actually in the process of being redeemed and brought into the sphere of the sacred: Holiness begins with God, flows into our own hearts and our lives, moves from there into the community, and eventually reaches every aspect of life in the world. God is extending his sanctity over ever-increasing portions of life until all is made holy. God is never a detached observer, but is deeply involved in the sanctification of the world. In fact he leads the charge!

This way of understanding holiness is far more world- engaging, and is best exemplified in the life, teachings, and ministry of Jesus. As we have seen, the biblical concept of holiness provides us with a much more active, and therefore missional, understanding of holiness than we are used to in the Western tradition. Holiness is not gained by withdrawal from the world, but by active, redemptive, engagement in the world.

Instead of looking at holiness as a list of “don’ts,” see it as a list of “do’s”; for every prohibition in Scripture actually implies its positive. In fact, positive virtue generates the prohibition. For instance, in the Ten Commandments, “do not kill” actually teaches that we should value and preserve life. “Do not commit adultery” implies we should actively pursue holiness in relationships, and so on.

My last post only garnered two responses but they both challenged me to rethink whether we can stop ‘beating the missional drum’ and I think they are right to say ‘no!’.

It is our default setting to think ‘me first’ and to enjoy comfort rather than sacrifice so I think the commenters were right to say ‘we will probably never really get it.’

Perhaps what I was expressing was a bit of my own weariness after 10 years of saying the same stuff. I’d like to think people have heard it by now and are moving forwards, but that may be more wishful thinking than reality.

Perhaps those of us responsible for leading Christian communities simply need to keep saying this stuff over and over and over until we see real significant change in the communities we are part of. Having mulled it over, I have actually been re-inspired to add my voice to the cause yet again.

I do long for the day when we ‘get it’ and we can ease it back a bit, but for now I reckon some of us will need to keep on banging that drum!!

“Lesslie Newbigin, born 100 years ago , launched a new career at age 66 by calling Western churches to act like they were in the mission field.”

Read the whole article here

Newbigin has been a huge inspiration behind the recalibrating of church and mission all around the western world over the last few decades.

Some days suburban transience really does give me the irrits.

We have been gone 6 months and on Saturday we arrived back in our street and caught up with friends and neighbours and the church community we will be leading. It was beautiful to see those people again and yet what strikes me this morning is just how much has changed in just 6 months.

While we were gone a family who were amongst our closest friends and who lived nearby left – for Spain – not to return. We didn’t know they were going when we left, but we discovered it on the trip. That made us sad, the girls especially who were very close. Good friends would not be there when we got home. While we didn’t feel their loss so much on holidays, I imagine we will now that we are home.

Two other close friends from Upstream have also decided to move on – interstate – not to return – friends we love dearly and will miss greatly from our lives and our Christian community. They won’t be replaced overnight and we feel that too. We have been friends for 25 years and those relationships are like gold.

And then there’s our street… Since we’ve been gone 4 houses have sold and yesterday we discovered that the last of our original neighbours is selling and leaving. In a street of 12 houses we have now seen over 30 families come and go in the 6 years we have been here. We have some great neighbours and we all get on well, but I sometimes wonder how long they will be around… and I suspect they may wonder the same about us.

As we wandered into church yesterday and sat quietly towards the back, we recognised many familiar faces, but were also curious to see plenty of new faces. I imagine there will be many more new faces in the year ahead as people move house and go church shopping (blech).

I don’t have any great insights on this, except to say that at times it erodes my own sense of permanence and commitment to the area, as the hope of longer term significant relationships seems quite remote – but maybe I was foolish to ever imagine that as a possibility?

And then at other times it strengthens my resolve to hang in and be some semblance of permanence and dependability in a shifting world.

Some days it just gives me the shifts…

Does it ever strike you as odd that while many churches appoint ‘pastors’ and may even call them ‘Pastor X’, they don’t do the same with apostles?…

In my own tribe we don’t have much problem with the role of pastor, teacher or even evangelist, but when it comes to prophets and apostles we seem a little less interested, maybe even averse. I can tell you many churches that have appointed ‘pastors’, but none that I know of that have intentionally appointed an apostle or a prophet.

Why would that be?..

Doesn’t it seem odd that of the 5 broad areas of gifting described in Ephesians the role of apostle and prophet are most often left out of the 21st c church?

I was discussing this with a mate recently who has gone to the dark side and joined the AOG (humour… in case you are getting offended…) where there is a very strong emphasis on the importance of the apostle in church leadership, even to the point of people calling themselves ‘apostle X’. Leaders are intentionally appointed as apostles and their role is developed to reflect that kind of gifting.

I imagine we will have a tough time really developing apostolic leaders while we continue to refer to those in church leadership as ‘pastors’. If you’re actually gifted and wired as a pastor, then the role description of ‘pastor’ fits perfectly, but if people were to call me ‘pastor’ they would inevitably end up disappointed.

I know there are plenty of ‘apostles’ in pastor’s clothing in the churches I mix amongst, but I wonder what that does to their sense of identity and to the expectations of the people they lead?

Could it be that in a consumer driven world we like to hire pastor/teachers because they care for us and look after us and teach us, while the apostle’s primary focus is on new work and beyond the congregation which doesn’t represent good value for money to the average paying customer?

I would actually find it very wanky to be called ‘Apostle Andrew’ and I am not at all arguing for the use of titles (I neither want to be called ‘rev’, ‘pastor’ etc for similar reasons) but I am concerned that in a missionary context we recognise the unique gift of the apostle and prophet to the church every bit as much as the other three.

I remember vividly the first Forge intensive I attended at BCV in Lilydale way back in 2002. I had just transitioned from being a youth pastor to a team leader in my church at Lesmurdie and I was grappling with how we lived out the missional calling both individually and corporately. Those 5 days rocked my world and I have never been the same since.

It was the early days of the current ‘missional’ movement and the word ‘missional’ itself was rarely being used if at all. Prior to discovering the Forge tribe I had been on a parallel journey wandering a lonely path and wondering if there was anyone else out there who questioned the way we did things and who saw the church as a community of missionaries rather than just a cosy family who studied the Bible, ran services and loved one another.

I was inwardly dissatisfied with so much of what I saw in church life – a lip service adherence to evangelism, but an every day avoidance. An inordinate amount of time invested in trying to get people to come to us, while all the time avoiding going to them unless it was absolutely necessary. I realized that even as the pastor, I didn’t want to go to church half the time and I sure as hell wasn’t about to invite anyone else to share the experience. The dissonance disturbed me and I lay awake at nights wondering what had gone wrong, wondering if it was just me.

The extent of our Christian sub-culture made me ill and I found myself revolting against it. Some of my critique was quite intentionally acerbic and incendiary – I had had enough of the nonsense we accept as normal – but some of it was also necessary and was my way of finding a different way of being a disciple of Jesus in a system that really didn’t like non-conformists. By and large conservative evangelicalism is a tradition that ‘tells’ often, listens little and questions even less. I found myself doing the things that made me ‘difficult’ and a little odd. I know some questioned if I had lost my way.

I hadn’t. I was just beginning to find it again.

Way back in 1996 I felt deeply that God had called me to be a cross cultural missionary and I thought I was going to end up in the Philippines, a place where I had completed several sports mission trips. But in a convoluted series of events my ‘missionary friend’ from the Philippines who I was supposed to meet with didn’t show up to discuss the next leg of the journey with me and my home church needed a youth pastor right at the same time. So I drifted into being a ‘pastor’ and my missionary calling became subservient to the pastoral role.

I began to change into who I wasn’t.

I led a youth ministry, ran programs, met with leaders and young people but my natural focus was always on those who weren’t involved rather than those who were. This continued into my next role at Lesmurdie. Parents sometimes complained because I seemed more concerned for the kids in the school than I was for the kids in the church. I knew both mattered but my heart was with the people who didn’t know Jesus – even if those who did happened to ‘pay the bills’. Those who had grown up in Christian families knew their way around, but some had chosen to simply rebel and leave their faith. I wasn’t interested in being the person responsible for cajoling them back even if some felt that was ‘why I was being paid’.

Throughout this time I used to have strange experiences whereby every time I would meet with a missionary and hear their story I would find myself choking back tears. The sheer mention of unreached people groups would cause a physical reaction in me and I wondered what was going on. I remember one morning I had reluctantly agreed to meet with a mission agency rep feeling that it was a waste of time, but just not being able to say ‘no’. As I sat with this relatively uninspiring man and listened to his dreary spiel I once again found myself moved by the sheer thought of someone giving their time to reaching the ‘unreached’. I shed some tears again as I thought of those who lived their lives far from God, but who were still seeking spiritually. I began to pray and ask God about what was happening to me and I had a kind of revelation. I felt like God said, ‘the way you feel about those people is the way I feel about them’.

Pretty simple really, but it begged the question, ‘what am I going to do with that?’

In leading a church I was busy with so much internal business that I didn’t have much time to connect with those who were outside that realm. My life had become consumed with my ministry and most of it revolved around the already convinced. They paid me well, encouraged me and supported me, but I began to realize than I was a square peg in a round hole.

Overseeing the day to day operations of a church was not where my heart was, nor was it what God had made me to do. It wasn’t bad stuff to do. It just wasn’t who I was supposed to be, but I had been assimilated into this role by circumstance, training and the fact that I could do it reasonably well.

I couldn’t conceive of a different way of being myself as a vocational Christian leader but I knew I needed to start.

When I ventured into Forge almost accidentally at first I had little knowledge of what I was exploring, but the further I went the more I realized I had found a tribe who intuitively ‘knew me’ and were like me. They ranged from the edgy and wacky to the plain jane middle class, but they all shared that same core missionary identity that I had unknowingly suppressed but was now beginning to listen to again.

It was a group of people who gave one another permission to ask questions – big gnarly questions that would get us in trouble in the wrong company. We were encouraged to experiment and learn without fear of failure – which is easier said than done. And we were challenged to ask what of our church upbringing we needed to keep and what we needed to jettison if we were to be faithful to the gospel and the missionary task.

The journey since then has been the focus of this blog – discovering what it means to be a ‘backyard missionary’. Were it not for my experience of Forge I would probably have never begun this journey and I may still be living in the dissonance of being a missionary in pastor’s clothing. Instead I have experienced the great joy of living in the centre of my calling and truly being the person I was created to be.

After 13 years of operation we have recently decided to make some significant changes to Forge in Oz, that involves a closing of some operations and a scaling back of others. These were big decisions and not made lightly. The official spiel is here and I won’t copy and paste it below as this post is long enough already.

Personally I will be taking a break from my own involvement in the organization after 7 years and focusing my energy on both my role as a missionary leader in Quinns Community Baptist Church and in my business. It will be interesting to see how my last 7 years of missionary learning shapes the way in which I lead within a church context these days. It’s a new adventure – again.

In case anyone is wondering ‘what really happened’ you should probably know that there isn’t much to say. There hasn’t been a split in the ranks or a loss of conviction about what we are on about. We simply felt the time had come, the context had changed and that was about the size of it.

So while the organization scales back the missional movement is very much alive and the same passion burns deep in all of us.

So, I give thanks to God for the impact Forge has had on my life and the friendship of all the crew who have shared the journey with me. The two best known names are Hirsch and Frost – two blokes who have inspired me greatly, but there have been plenty of others also who are not so well known, but who living faithful missionary lives in the places God has them.

I’m looking forward to seeing what the next chapter brings

No.

I realize that’s a short abrupt answer, but I don’t think we would struggle to hear it as much if it were framed the other way.

Try it.

Can a pastor survive as a pioneer?

No. Of course not. That’d be a silly thing to expect of a pastor!

Ok, maybe ‘survive’ is a little strong… but only a little. Certainly neither will thrive in roles that direct their best energies into tasks for which they are neither gifted nor inspired and eventually both will reach a point of either frustration or incompetence that may well see them walk away in disillusionment and /or despair.

Let’s not try and make pioneers into pastors and pastors into pioneers. The kingdom needs both to do their job and do it well, but we also need to accept that they are very different animals.

While I’m making bald statements I’ll make another, a personal one. I am a pioneer, but I am not a pastor. My friends will attest to this. I can dream up new ideas, I can inspire people to give them a go, I can even work with people to make stuff happen, but I am not very good at the ongoing nurturing and caring work that is integral to classical pastoring.

I used to be ashamed of this and felt my deficiencies regularly (and deeply) as people in the church community would tell me I was ‘unrelational’ or ‘task oriented’ always with a deprecatory tone about it. I guess telling them to ‘piss off because I am busy’ didn’t help (only joking…) but it was true. I am naturally task oriented and while I do enjoy people, I don’t get energy and joy from some of those specific pastoral activities that are required to make any community healthy. I am definitely not a ‘cups of tea’ person…

If your church is unhealthy and in a mess then I am not the bloke you want to come and help you heal thru the pain. I recognize that there are gifted godly people with these skills and passions and I am grateful for them, but I am not wired that way. However if your church is keen to explore new initiatives and wants to enter some fresh territory then I reckon I have some skills to offer you and the energy to make it work.

An obvious issue is that we call paid church leaders ‘pastors’ and naturally we then expect them to function in that way – as a caring shepherd. When a person is task oriented, fast moving and outward focused they don’t seem to fit the typical pastoral profile, but speaking as one of those people, I need to say that in my 20 years of leadership there has always been a great sense of care, love and responsibility for the people in my community. I hear Paul say that every day he feels deep concern for the churches under his care and I resonate with that, but it is less care for the specific needs of individuals and more care for the overall health and well being of the community. A pioneer/apostle will guard and protect a community theologically and they will seek ways to help the body maintain health – all big picture stuff, but they may be less involved in the minutae of people’s every day lives.

One problem, that has been discussed around the web in various places (see my previous post) over the last week is that our tendency is to expect pioneers to morph into pastors once a project is established or once a church is planted. But this is a sure way to kill both pioneer and church!

I think most pioneers can make the shift incrementally to a point, but it is not a sustainable arrangement. These days if I were leading a community I would be seeking to identify the ‘pastors’ in the community and helping them to get on with that job amongst the rest of us. Equally I’d be seeking out the other pioneers /entrepenuers to so that we should share ideas and energy.

I was just chatting this around with Mrs Backyardmissionary (who is very pastoral and nurturing) and she suggested that part of the reason we seek to convert pioneers into pastors is that we aren’t sure the project/church they have initiated will survive in their absence. A church can become unhealthily dependent on the founding leader, but ultimately that co-dependence is a failure of the leader to empower and hand over and the community to take up the responsibility.

This ‘start up’ focus of pioneers can also present problems if we see mission as long term and relational, because many pioneers do get bored easily and feel the need to move on to new ventures. I know I feel this regularly and need to ‘tame’ the wandering spirit. (I’m sure this is partly why I got married!) My own solution to this has been to make sure I am free to create and develop new ideas within the longer term setting. If I am able to have an outlet for creative ideas where I am then I am less likely to seek a whole new experience. However if I am asked to simply ‘grease the wheels’ then I will get bored in days and start vomiting soon after.

When Ephesians 4 speaks of prophets, apostles, evangelists, pastors and teachers it is a picture of the diversity of gifts required for a body to be healthy. Simply pioneers and pastors are not enough either – we need the whole lot.

Sadly the giftings of one skill set can highlight the inadequacies of the other and unless we are secure enough in ourselves then we can find ourselves trying to be omnicompetent and doing everything. A bad place to be…

So can we let pioneers be pioneers and pastors be pastors?

I think we’ll find it hard but why don’t we give it a shot?

If you would like to read a different perspective then head over to Steve’s blog where he explores how pastor and pioneer may be able to held in creative tension.

Other posts:
Mark Berry who started the conversation
Simon Cross

Quote from the Nimbin World Cup Poetry

“Why are churches so full of people who are so empty of questions”

Half of his quote is disturbingly accurate. The reticence of many Christians to ask questions and simply accept the party line is taking its toll.

As you get to know the creator may you continually discover more and more questions.