Sunday, July 3rd, 2005
Just sitting in the Melbourne Airport waiting for a flight back to Brisbane after the Australian Emerging Missional Church Summit held by the Forge network over the weekend. Was a good gathering of the clan - people engaging with a missional approach to church.
So how did it go?
1. With over 500 people there it was an excellent opportunity to make connections across denominational, age and style barriers. No one had name tags on which meant we went in blind. No ‘big names’. Meal times were long enough for lots of conversations.
2. Input from Alan Hirsch, Michael Frost, Tom and Christine Sine, John Smith. Nothing radically new - more a chance to articulate what has been practiced and thought for a while now. Michael did have a go at the romance discourse of praise and worship. The Sines gave us their dream of alternatives to individualism and consumerism, with a plug for shared living as in the new monasticism coming through.
I attended the forum on the future of the Church, with Michael Frost, Ruth Powell (NCLS), Tom Sine, Carolyn Kitto and Steve Addison. The most interesting comment came from Steve, responding to unease about the success of the Pentecostals. He suggested that from his studies of similar movements in history, the future leaders of the AOG and their peers are likely to mellow out and provide a mainstream contribution to the future of Australia.
It’s interesting to see the flavour the Forge crew put on the emerging church movement. There’s a fair amount of antagonism towards ‘attractional’ church coming from Michael and Alan, the authors of “The Shaping of Things to Come”. There’s not a lot of interest in the engagement with postmodernity found in other quarters. Alternative worship is seen as just a tinkering with the gathered worship model.
Maybe this approach is what the Australian Church needs to get over some of its addictions to ‘doing church’, employing staff and inhabiting buildings.
Tags: Alan Hirsch, Emerging Church, Forge, Mike Frost, Mission
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Friday, May 20th, 2005
I’ve spent the last two days at a Mission Advisory Forum for the Uniting Church in Australia Queensland Synod. We hold it four times a year. It’s a chance for Presbytery ministers, mission consultants (like myself), Agency Mission Directors (Health etc.) and Moderator to get together and work through how we lead the Church into a mission paradigm. Some of our conversation goes round in circles. But occasionally we get somewhere.
These last two days we’ve been looking at growth and change areas in Queensland, looking at Frost and Hirsch’s The Shaping of Things to Come.
Today we worked through the Synod Leadership Team’s Draft Strategic Vision. It’s been a work in progress, leading on from previous work on re-imagining the church of the future. This document is basically outlining a framework in which we can invest resources and time in fresh missional initiatives. I’ve heard a bit of cynicism from the front lines. But what they don’t know is that this is leading us to unleashing millions of dollars in new ways. We looked at a couple of seemingly desperate scenarios with mission eyes today - wondering what might happen if we didn’t have to worry about resource limits when it comes to starting new initiatives.
Today the Synod Leadership Team agreed to change the name from ’strategic vision’ to ‘Missional Vision’ or ‘Vision for Mission’. It’s not just another strategy, plan or program. It’s about reframing our mandate in missional terms.
The three core questions we’re asking at every level of the church:
- What kind of world is God calling us into, as bearers of God’s Good News?
- How do we engage with God in this world, in obedience to God’s call?
- What resources will we need in order to respond to God’s call?
I’m wondering if these questions could be used at a local level when we prepare individuals for mission membership/partnership .
The Missional Vision (in its third draft) is available to download at the Queensland Synod web site. No doubt the new draft will be uploaded soon, with the work from these last two days.
Update - the plan is now the Vision for Mission, in implementation. See www.visionformission.org.au
Tags: Alan Hirsch, Emerging Church, Mike Frost, Mission, Uniting Church, Vision for Mission
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