When your life is in a major transition there is a constant inner temptation to jump at all the opportunities that come along, or even to force things to happen that really are best left alone. Since selling the retic business I have had the quietest summer in 15 years and it has been so good to get up each morning and go to the beach, then come home and see what I may choose to do next. It doesn’t pay very well, but fortunately we squirrelled away a stash during winter in anticipation of this.

There are a number of opportunities for ‘work’ of various sorts on the horizon, but we are treading carefully, very conscious that a ‘yes’ to one project, inevitably means a ‘no’ to something else.

As the year began Danelle took 5 days to engage with a prophetic process that helped people focus on where God wanted to direct their lives in the coming 12 months. I didn’t participate, but I tuned into what she was doing and learning. It was a significant time for her and quite defining as she had to hone the lens of ‘who am I?’ and ‘what am I going to do with that knowledge?‘ She finished up with the sharpened realisation that she loves to take people ‘from pain to peace‘. That’s a great piece of clarity hey? And she does it superbly. Then a recent conversation about hospital chaplaincy piqued her interest and as a result she is exploring some study options in that area with the goal of getting work in that sphere. I feel like she hit the nail on the head with that tight synopsis of who she is and what she is called to do. She strides into painful situations with great love and confidence, helping people to settle, take a breath and refocus.

Someone once said that Jesus came to ‘comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable‘. If she is the comforter of the disturbed, then I find much of my own sense of purpose and joy in pursuing the other half of that description – of poking our churches to give serious thought to the shape mission takes in an Australian context, because I sense too many are simply ‘playing for the draw‘. It’s been a very good 32 years of working together, as we complement each other well. I look forward to seeing the hospital chaplain emerge (and hopefully she can be the primary wage earner for the next 20 years and support me as I go surfing 🙂 )

As we discussed her own experience, she posed a few of those same questions to me that she had been pondering. One of them was ‘which movie would you identify as reflecting your life?’ I went straight to Jerry Maguire (which I feel sounds pretty lowbrow and base), but I loved the storyline and the character that Jerry became. He summed it up with two sentences. ‘I was losing the ability to bullshit. It was the me I’d always wanted to be!’

In case you are under 40 and missed it when it came around, it is the story of a sports agent whose job is seeking to acquire as many clients as possible to make as much money as possible. He is part of the ‘sports agent machine’ and he is good at it – but one night he has a revelation that they are doing it all wrong – that they had missed the point and that they needed to start again with a genuine focus on people and not money. So he writes his ‘mission statement’ titled ‘The Things We Think And Do Not Say‘, (tangent – did you know that there is an actual document that is the ‘mission statement’ and it is quite long and detailed?) He prints off copies for every staff member and then in that classic scene he makes a public exit from the company, much to the mirth of his co-workers who think him crazy. While they are laughing at him he calls ‘who’s comin with me? Who will come with me?’ But his co-workers either think him stupid, or they have too much to lose – they have retirement soon and will lose their bonus – or they won’t get health cover if they go with Jerry…

But Jerry has had such a significant moment that he simply cannot do business as usual. In a very humiliating exit, as his appeal appears to fall on deaf ears, he leaves with just one office worker (ok so it’s Renee Zellwigger – you could have done a lot worse) and he embarks on his project of trying to keep it real – trying to focus on the people and their good rather than his own success and bottom line.

It’s a cataclysmic paradigm shift. Not surprisingly what unfolds is an entire series of struggles as he enters this liminal and terrifying space. It’s great to have a ‘grand reversal’ idea but to actually put it on the ground in some form is much more of a challenge when the whole arc of the world is geared to the existing paradigm.

For those of us who have at one time or another felt like we are part of an ‘ecclesial’ machine the message of this movie can be wonderfully inspiring and highly provocative. To be fair, not everyone in a larger, more complex organisation will inevitably have this experience. Some people are able to enter humbly and live with humility and clarity in the system. Personaly, I needed to abandon ship and start over. I was so success/achievement oriented, that ministry became a competition and people became ‘resources’ to build the organisation. I’m sure a good counsellor would help me understand why I was wired that way – but it’s a super dangerous wiring to have in Christian leadership, because it can lead to all sorts of pragmatic and often unloving decisions. The last few years have seen a series of tragic train-wrecks as we have watched many of those high profile A type leaders self destruct in various ways.

Of course I’m not opposed to seeing churches grow and thrive, but I don’t think I could ever sit easy in a church where the goal is simply ‘bigger and better’ (in Jesus’ name of course) – because it really does sound like ‘bullshit’. It sounds more like middle aged men seeking to make their mark on the world in what happens to be their career of choice.Yeah… I’m sure it’s more complex than that – our motives are always mixed – but the scent of bullshit lingers and I am deeply averse to anything that veers that direction.

So what does that have to with calling and vocation? I feel like it sharpened my own focus. From as early as 1996 I sensed that my own calling was simply to communicate the Christian story to ordinary Australian people in ways they could understand. It was about moving past churchy language and experiences to figuring out how to speak of Jesus with the blokes in the surf, the people in my street and the clients I come across in business. Growing up in the end of Christendom I encountered a lot of ‘communication’ that just didn’t connect at all, because the speakers were focused on those who already believed. Having a regular spot on 98.5FM for the last 10 years has really helped to hone the ability to speak to those outside the community of faith.

And then as the years went on I sensed my calling expanded to include ‘creating communities of faith that were both true to scripture and engaged in the context’. When missionaries enter new environments they practice this thing we call ‘contextualisation’, but over the years as Christendom wove it’s way into culture we stopped doing this – we just assumed that one size fitted all and while churches had minor variations depending on denomination, the overarching message was that ‘you could come to us’ and we would do our thing our way. That stopped working (noticeably) around the time I was a teenager, but i sense it had been brewing since the 60’s.

One model we see being employed is church franchising as if every context were identical. Churches pop up like McDonalds as if it were a one size fits all world. (Want more on this? Read The McDonaldisation of the Church by Scottish theologian John Drane. Each local community has it’s own heartbeat, it’s own unique challenges and needs. The church we planted in Yanchep is similar to the one we had been leading in Quinns – but it is also different because the community is different. That’s important.

So part of my own calling has been to step away from the more generic, ‘church growth’ shaped environments and to ask ‘what does it look like for the kingdom of God to take shape in this neighbourhood and with these people?’ This evening I spent an hour or so at our ‘Food4All’ project which provides food to those in the local area who are doing it tough. Our Yanchep church does this – and it’s a perfect fit for both the needs of the local community and the crew of people who make up the church. I don’t go every week any more since ‘retiring’, but also because there is always an oversupply of people ready to serve and love the local people. It’s a project we engage in that fits the context perfectly. It probably wouldn’t be needed in some of our wealthier western suburbs.

What’s this rambling mean going forward?

I dunno if much will change for me – I have held that sense of calling ‘to disturb the comfortable’, for a long time now. To be fair, it’s an approach that is better suited to the interim or short term visits we have been engaged in over the last year or so as that approach every week would quickly grow old and people would end up bruised and battered rather than inspired and equipped. But I still feel it deeply, that not only do we need to speak the message of faith in words that people can grasp, but we also need to be willing to re-think this thing we call church – and if radical change is needed then we need to be courageous enough to step into that.

I imagine if we landed in a new church community for a period of time, it would mean putting legs on this idea of the kingdom of God locally. It would mean less strong disturbing and more process helping people move in a direction that embraces both their identity and that of their local neighbourhood.

So as the year unfolds if you need someone to patiently love you and nurture you call Danelle… If you need someone to help you lose the ability to bullshit then I’m your man.