Seminar at Spring Harvest

Spring Harvest went really well - including my seminar on the church. A good group turned up despite the sunshine and we talked a lot about why people struggle with church and how we can help them find a place.

In the course of the seminar we drew up an ecclesial minimum - a brief list of things a group has to have to be church. Here's what we came up with - see what you think:

The presence of Jesus
teaching and learning
sacraments - especially communion
relationships
catholicity - that is relationships with other groups of Christians (I think this one came up because it had been the aspect of the church that was the theme of the previous day!)
Able to face tough times as well as good ones

Worship did not appear because I ruled it out before I set them compiling their lists in small groups. I suggested that the early Christians didn't meet to worship because that was a 24/7 activity along the lines of Romans 12:1. My full argument about this is in chapter 2 of Building A Better Body.

What I was really impressed by was that no one suggested that any of these activities had to happen in a special building or involve large numbers of people.

That gives me hope for the future of the church.

Off to the seaside

Off to Spring Harvest in the morning for five days on the pastoral team.

The weather forecast for Skegness is sunny and warm - a first for us up there! So we're looking forward to a good week with a great team.

back blogging next week....

meeting Jesus

On the road to Emmaus this morning - a good place to be. We were definitely joined by Jesus who came to walk with us and share in our conversation as he did on that first Easter afternoon.

I was struck again by how gentle and unassuming Jesus was. I'd have bounced up behind Cleopas and his companion (almost certainly, I reckon, Mary his wife) and said 'ta! da! it's me!!' but Jesus didn't. He quietly joined them and listened in to their conversation.

Have you noticed the glorious irony in Luke 24:24 where they tell Jesus that though people have heard stories, no one has seen him alive!

I love the way Jesus handles this. He listens, allowing Cleopas and Mary to tell him how they feel and what they think the events of the past months and especially the past few days might mean. He doesn't leap in to correct but gives them space to tell him what they think is going on.

I wonder how we often we do this with people we're chatting to about faith. We evangelicals are so quick to get to the answers, we ride roughshod over the questions. People might 'get the gospel', but often they don't hear it because the people telling them obviously don't care enough about to listen to their concerns and struggles before leaping in with a spiritual band aid.

Jesus did.

When he'd heard, he shared his view of events. We know that his interpretation is the accurate one - but Cleopas and Mary would have had to weigh it up. Yes, some of it would have felt familiar; Jesus had indeed talked about death and resurrection - but they didn't really get what he was on about (we are all slow learners - patience is the key fruit evangelists need to manifest!).

Clearly, they wanted to hear more because they urged him to stay with them. It was at the meal table - so often in Luke the place of revelation - that Jesus completes his showing them the truth of what he's been sharing by showing them that it is Jesus - alive and eating - who is offering the explanations. Then he vanishes, leaving them to work out the implications and enormity of what's just happened.

That's why I love this story.

But I love it too because we're often on the Emmaus road, feeling unsure, battered, baffled by life, searching for the scraps of our hopes in the debris of our sins and failures. And Jesus joins us gently offering a listening ear and sharp observations about life, the world and everything. And our hearts begin to burn and we want him to stay. As he speaks, we know it's him - not just a vague presence, but the risen saviour and lord, come to our aid, come to show us his hands and side, come to point the way to the renewal of all things and invite us to be his partners in the adventure.

Good Friday thoughts

Here's a thought prompted by Jars of Clay Liquid, the Vigilantes of Love When you're blinded by the Light and 2 Corinthians 5:21...

No one noticed that first Good Friday – except a handful of angry priests, a rent-a-mob crowd and a few baffled soldiers on crucifixion detail. It was just an ordinary day in the Roman Empire, not written up in the annals of the Caesars and histories of the elites – no one pays attention to obscure corners and unimportant people.

Likewise, today so many are oblivious to its significance – the grace of God slips in under the radar; God reconciling the world to himself and no one notices; Jesus who knew no sin, quietly and resolutely becoming sin for us and the world so that we might have a shot at righteousness – and the world carries on shopping and gardening and planning BBQs if the weather holds

But for us who are paying attention, he invites us to come and see, to gaze in wonder at these events, to bring our fears, pretence and sorrows and find them melting away in his embrace.

This is the one thing, the one thing that I know – he didn’t die for nothing; he died for me and you; he died to put things right; to reverse the unravelling of creation caused by human sin and rebellion; he died for the small sins – our greed, bitterness and unkind words; he died for the big sins – the slave trade, the holocaust, the world system that means someone dies of poverty every three seconds.

Somehow – in a way only God can fathom and organise – in that obscure corner of the Roman empire, a man on a stick was God putting things right; Jesus became sin – with all its ugly consequences – so that we might become like Jesus – the righteousness of God and part of his wave for putting things right breaking across the world.

Easter thoughts

I love Easter; it gives us an opportunity to be creative in ways normal weekends don't. So over the next four days we're having a tanebrae, a reflective Good Friday gathering and two services on Sunday, one of which promises to be very different from anything we've done in previous years (though Jonathan is piloting that one...)

Thinking of fresh angles, looking for film clips and music helps one to appreciate the core Easter message in a new way.

Tomorrow at our lunch time service I'm reflecting on how much the gospels show us Jesus praying in the run up to his arrest and what a contrast that is with the disciples, especially Peter. Jesus is calm and focused, Peter is all over the place. Jesus is able to embrace the unfolding reality and achieve God's purpose in it; Peter is overwhelmed by events, taken by surprise and unable to get his act together. And it's all down to prayer. Simple and hugely difficult at the same time.

I've found some really good stuff in the Jonny Baker Doug Gay collection Alternative Worship and am using a great Vigilantes of Love Song - When you're blinded by the Light - as part of Good Friday's reflection. Having lamented how pear-shaped his love-life has gone, Bill Mallonee sings 'Lord, show to me your face/Lord, show to me your skin/Lord show to me the places/ where the nails went in/gonna crawl in there with all my fears/introduce them to my pretends/ introduce 'em to my sorrows/who've become the best of friends.' Wonderful.

I'm using Jars of Clay's Liquid as the call to worship and a Steve Stockman poem - so there's plenty to help people think about the cross from a variety of fresh angles. Let's hope they do.

I couldn't find a way of including anything from the new Arcade Fire album, however - maybe next year.

Introducing Roxburgh

Stuart's comment about Alan Roxburgh made me think an introduction is in order for those of you who haven't come across him.

Roxburgh is a Canadian Baptist and, I think, one of the key missional church thinkers working today. Author of a number of books - one of which, Crossing the Bridge, is available free, gratis and for nothing at the following website: http://www.percept.info/pacific/PDF/CrossingBridge.pdf and is well worth getting into.

The Misisonary Congregation, Leadership and Liminality (Trinity Press International 1997) is essential reading for understanding our calling as ministers who offer missional leadership. The book at just 70 pages is fabulously over-priced and yet curiously worth every penny.

The Sky is Falling: Leaders Lost in Transition (ACI Publishing 2005) is a perceptive and engaging discussion of the nature of the changes we face in culture and church and how leaders could be responding to them. It's available only from the missional website Allelon, where you'll also find a ton of his essays and articles by a range of other stimulating thinkers. You'll find it all at http://www.allelon.org/

He's also written - with colleague Fred Romanuk - The Missional Leader: Equipping your church to reach a changing world (Jossey-Bass, 2006 in the Leadership Network series) which I am working my way through at the moment.

There's lots to like about Roxburgh. He's widely and well-read - in particular, he analyses the changing nature of the world we inhabit through business books and sociology texts and not just theologians. He's as likely to cite Beck, Castells, Giddens and Handy as he is Gunton, Hauerwas and Willimon.

But I guess the reason I have warmed to him afresh over recent weeks is his emphasis that those who want the church to change completely and those who created the churches we're mostly all part of need to talk to each other. The church of the future will be an evolution from the church of the present because the church in all times needs to embody core and key Kingdom values.

And he also stresses the need for leaders to look at where God is at work in and on the edge of our congregations so that we might get behind what God's already doing. Often leaders spend their time trying to refocus the congregation, move folk away from what they're doing to things we want them to do. Roxburgh urges us to look and listen and recognise and support what's already happening. Our role becomes one of creating the environment for mission to happen rather than coming up with detailed blueprints for that mission.

Finally, he has an unnerving singularity of vision - something he shares with Michael Frost in his new book Exiles: Living Missionally in a Post-Christian Culture (Hendrickson/Strand 2006). He argues that the conversation about how we get from the old world to the new world is over because whether we like it or not we are living in that new world. Our task is to map its shape and work out how to be church in it. At the same, however, he stresses that the place we find we find ourselves in is not our final destination. this is why the metaphor of liminality recurs in his writings. We are truly people living between times, not just theologically, but also sociologically.

Do check him out.

It's good to talk

Just returned from recording a programme at Premier Christian Radio with Jeff Lucas and Ruth Dearnley which was fun. I was there to talk about - and frankly, rather mercilessly plug - my new book.

Called Building a Better Body: A Good Church Guide, it's published by Authentic and is in the shops next week. It's the third incarnation of a book that started life as Struggling to Belong in 1998, doubled in size to become Why Bother with Church at the turn of the millennium and has been mildly revised and updated and given a sparkly new cover for this outing.

I'm quite pleased with it and found myself warming to its central theme as I chatted with Jeff and Ruth. That theme is that leaders of churches must take those who struggle with church much more seriously, listen to their concerns, make room for their gifts and interests; and that strugglers must find ways to remain engaged with church.

The reason I'm sticking with this theme - much to my surprise, I have to say - is that Alan Roxburgh's The Sky is Falling: Leaders lost in Transition takes a similar line. Roxburgh has been hugely influential on my thinking over the past decade. His The Missionary Congregation, Leadership and Liminality is one of the books that has defined my understanding of my ministry and the call of the church. If you've not read it, I urge you to.

In the The Sky is Falling, Roxburgh talks about liminals and emergents - which he defines really helpfully - needing to work and walk together in order to create churches that work for all concerned. He argues everyone struggles with the world of discontinuous and perpetual change we are living in - but for different reasons. Only through dialogue with each other will we create churches that embody Kingdom values to our neighbours and colleagues at work.

As well as Arcade Fire, I've been listening to Josh Groban this week. He's an American singer that my younger daughter has introduced me to. He's intriguing, half his stuff is in Spanish but there are a couple of English songs that are absolute blinders. He sings big emotional ballads that pack a punch. I've also been reliving my youth - well, childhood actually! - listening to the Doors. What a band! And I've got tickets to see the Who in June - how cool is that?

stopping the traffik

We had an excellent Freedom Day yesterday. A group of us marched from Wilberforce's oak in Keston in chains to the High street in Bromley where another group of us were manning a stall highlighting the issue of children being traffiked into the cocoa harvest.

As well as selling fair trade chocolate, we were giving away free and getting people to sign the Stop the Traffik petition.

All in all, it went really well. But I am absolutely cream-crackered this morning (I also preached yesterday morning and led the worship at church yesterday evening, so it was a pretty full day).
Still finding Tobias Jones' book on Utopia's fascinating and jammed full of insights into community and the shape of contemporary culture. In particular his observations about Christians and Christian teaching are provocative (in a good way). I'll blog properly about it later in the week.

More from Acts

Continuing our journey in Acts, my student is meant to taking us to Thessalonica (17:1-9), but sadly he's taken to his bed with a heavy cold instead. So it falls to me to wrestle with this lovely story.

I have been greatly helped in this by an excellent article by a baptist NT scholar called Justin K Hardin who teaches at Oklahoma Baptist University. His essay 'Decrees and Drachmas at Thessalonica: An illegal assembly in Jason's house' (New Testament Studies 52, 2006 and available on-line at his page on his university's website) makes sense of this story in a way the commentaries up till now haven't.

His argument is that Jason and the other believers are the ones on trial in Acts 17:6-9, not Paul and Silas in absentia - which is kinda obvious if you read it but most of the commentaries suggest it's Paul and Silas who are being tried here. More importantly, Hardin argues that the law Jason has breached has to do with voluntary associations. Because associations were associated with political trouble-making, Julius Caesar and Augustus after him enacted decrees outlawing them unless they had dispensation from the senate in Rome.

Hardin suggests that Jason was prosecuted for holding an illegal voluntary association in his home and was fined and effectively bound over to keep the peace (i.e. don't do it again on pain of losing this sum of money). For this reason Paul and Silas - though notice not Timothy - left pretty sharpish, so as not to put Jason at more risk than he already faced.

It's the first article I've read that tackles this issue of Rome's antipathy to political associations head-on and it's full of good things (if anyone knows of any others, please let me know...).

I'm reminded of the situation in many parts of the world where the followers of Jesus meet in homes and face the wrath of civil authorities if they are discovered. I'm impressed by Jason's commitment, too. He puts his liberty and resources on the line for the travelling missionaries and his Lord, so that the work of spreading the good news of Jesus can continue.

Of course, what this story emphasises again to me is that the followers of Jesus were not seen as a religious movement by their contemporaries but rather as a political one. Jesus is seen as a rival king to Caesar by those who dragged Jason and his friends in front of the beak, suggesting that this had been part of Paul's preaching in the synagogues and elsewhere.

The other thing Hardin's paper does is help with assessing the length of Paul's stay in Thessalonica. Read quickly, Acts suggests that Paul stays barely a month. But in Philippians 4:16 and in 1 Thessalonians, Paul gives the impression that his stay was longer. It seems clear that there is a big time gap between 17:4 and 17:5. It must have taken some time for the jealousies described to form. So many weeks probably elapsed between the missionaries initial preaching, their growing success at attracting converts (the list hinted at in 17:4 wouldn't necessarily have come at once) and the head of steam that built up behind the opposition.

But even more interesting is that Jason is introduced very abruptly. It is clear that when he enters the story in the second half of v5, he is already hosting a gathering of Jesus followers and his neighbours knew it. indeed, he is seen as a key leader in the new movement - hence the raid on his home. Both Roger Gehring in his book on house church and mission and Rainer Riesner's tome on Pauline Chronology make the same case.

Now what angle do I take on Sunday....? There's a sermon in all that, somewhere.

Christian groups in Acts (part 2)

I'm back from church now....

I think Stuart is right to raise questions about how we should see the house gatherings in acts 2 and 4 - of course, I'd add that the Jerusalem community is odd because it continued meeting at the temple as well as in homes.

we can be very sloppy in our use of labels and i think we need to be really careful if we are going to learn useful lesson from Acts for us in our context as we try to create and maintain communities of people who want to follow Jesus.

This morning we were looking at Acts 16 and the arrival of the gospel in Philippi. The believers met in the home of the richest woman (Lydia) convert. is this a good model? It seemed to work well for Paul. he used it in many of the cities he evangelised. we, of course, wouldn't dream of adopting it as a model for us today - though I'm not really sure it's any worse than any of the models we do use!

There is a fluidity about the movement of Jesus followers at this time, any structure appears to have been contingent on what was needed at the time. so when the leaders of the groups in Jerusalem and Antioch met in 49AD(ish) as recorded in Acts 15, they were trying to thrash out the answer to a key question - did you need to be a Jew to be a fully-fledged Jesus follower? The answer they arrived at was 'no' - Jews and Gentiles were welcome on an equal footing.

I'm not sure what kind of contemporary gathering this meeting is like - a church meeting? an association gathering? BU council? It's often described as the first church council - but was it anything like the gathering at Nicea or Chalcedon? I don't think so.

So, Acts 15 contains useful principles for us in settling differences, in deciding issues that might divide us unnecessarily, in moving forward together, accepting one another as equals whatever our cultural or racial background. In terms of structure and organisation, I'm not sure it's any help to us at all.

Does any of this make sense? I'll return to it in the week - and I haven't forgotten some mature thoughts about Tobias Jones' fascinating book on utopia; they'll come this week, too

Christian groups in Acts

Stuart is right to raise the question of terminology in Acts (see the post 'Shoved into Action' and Stuart's comment). In particular, I am increasingly uncomfortable using the term 'church' to describe any of the groups we encounter there.

The reason for this is simple (though the explanation sometimes gets a bit convoluted). When we use the word 'church' we interpret it with 1500 years of Christian history in these Islands where 'church' has come to mean a pretty fixed community, with a structure of belonging and leadership, a geographical location and boundaries that mean it can be easily identified by friend and stranger alike.

None of these things were true of the groups of Jesus followers that we encounter in Acts. They didn't call themselves Christians (the Romans did that - look at E. A. Judge or Bruce Winter for the evidence there) and the term ekklesia which they settled on as a label for their gatherings was not a religious badge but a political or business one, a label drawn from the world of associations so prevalent in the Roman Empire.

This means, at the very least, when the outside world looked at the gatherings of the followers of Jesus, they weren't sure whether they were seeing something political, something like a network of like-minded business people or something religious. Of course, the likelihood is that they didn't make such neat separations in their thinking as we do.

So when we get to Acts 15 and the meeting that took place in Jerusalem, what are we seeing? And how would other folk in Jerusalem have seen it? I think what we're looking at is two very loose groups of Jesus followers - one more settled and more structured and resident in Jerusalem; the other more fluid but increasingly taking shape and resident in Antioch. I'm not sure anyone else is there; I'm not sure anyone else is invited.

It's not that others weren't interested. If I am right about Galatians (see the introduction and a couple of Digging Deeper sections of my Crossway Bible Guide for my view), then Paul wrote it ahead of the meeting in Jerusalem because the issue of whether Gentiles needed to be circumcised to be followers of Jesus was affecting the believers in Lystra, Derbe, Pisidian Antioch and the other places in Galatia where Paul and Barnabas had planted groups on their first missionary adventure (Acts 13:1-14:28). And Paul returns to those places - interestingly with Silas as part of his team; Silas, one of the prophets from Jerusalem sent to Antioch to explain the outcome of the conference - to report that what he'd said in his letter to them was what was agreed at the conference in Jerusalem.

So, I'm not sure that we can take our baptist local congregation and association language and place neatly over the Acts story and expect to see a fit that makes any sense.

I've got to go to church now, so I'll finish this later....

What's belief like?

Last night I started reading Tobias Jones' Utopian Dreams (the night before I'd finished Bruce Longenecker's excellent the Lost Letters of Pergamum)

Jones' book is a travelogue of his journey to a number of intentional communities in the UK and Italy - the two places he knows best - in a bid to see whether such alternative communities offer a way of living in today's world.

I've only read the introduction so far but it contained a sentence which I thought cast interesting light on our mission as intentional disciples in today's world.

Having said that he grew up at a time when there were micro-beliefs but no macroscopic, cosmic creed, he said: 'I was fascinated simply to find out what it feels like to believe in something, actually to believe that the world could get better rather than worse.'

That set me thinking. And will set me blogging once I've had time to see where my thinking leads. I share it as a thought for Sunday. have a good one.

Shoved into action

Have you noticed the frequency in Acts of God taking the initiative? This shouldn't surprise me really, but I confess it still does. It's why our current morning series is called shoved by the Spirit because I like those early followers of Jesus needed a good push from time to time to get on with the task at hand.

In the story of the conversion of Cornelius, Peter's still speaking when the Holy Spirit falls on the assembled company. In fact when Peter is reporting this to the leaders in Jerusalem, he says, 'as I began to speak, the Holy spirit came on them.' As a result of the Spirit's action, peter had no choice but to accept these Gentiles into the church.

It's the same at Antioch - people (probably Hellenistic Jews converted on the day of Pentecost, part of the group influenced by Stephen) shared the gospel with Gentiles and they believed. When Barnabas arrived possibly with instructions to calm the excesses, he sees the grace of God at work and gets stuck in (11:23).

So when we get to Acts 15 and the gathering in Jerusalem, experience tells them that the Gentiles are coming into God's people because they are responding to the Gospel and the Holy Spirit is bringing them alive entirely separately from the cultural boundary markers that have distinguished God's people from everyone else for a thousand years.

It was a momentous change

I can't help thinking that we facing a pretty momentous change at the moment - certainly in the relationship of the church to western culture. Christendom is decaying rapidly. The church is an increasingly marginal presence in our culture, jockeying for a place with a load of other beliefs and philosophies all clamouring for the attention of an increasingly apathetic populace.

Where's God? What's the Spirit up to? Which conversation is he going to rudely interrupt by falling on everyone in the room/pub/cafe/cinema/street corner/shop/whatever?

The other awkward issue for a baptist about Acts 15 is that it's the leaders of the church who gather to thrash out the response to this new situation they find themselves in. 15:2, 4, 6, 13, 22, 23 indicate that it's apostles and elders discerning God's leading and communicating that to the church. I guess it would be unrealistic to gather everyone together - you'd never find a time they could all make, not everyone would feel able to speak, not everyone who wanted to speak would get a hearing.

So, I guess this is a good model for us. Have the leaders thrash things out and then communicate it to the rest of the congregation. there's a hint in 15:22 that the decision was owned by the whole church in Jerusalem as they seem to endorse the sending of the letter and then the church at Antioch were over the moon at the outcome (15:31). It's interesting that we think of this as a council of the whole church but in fact it was a dispute between Jerusalem and Antioch - though as Paul's letter to the Galatians (written, I think, just before Paul sets off to the meeting - see my Crossway Bible Guide for justification of this) it affected every church that Paul planted.

Catching up

I'm becoming a once a week blogger - bad boy!

Listening to Arcade Fire's new album, Neon Bible. Can't decide whether I like it as much as Funeral, but it's got some storming tracks on it.

I've also been thinking about our church conference in April when our discussions about membership and belonging will reach some sort of conclusion. At the moment I can't really get my head round how this is going to work but I'm sure inspiration will strike.

I've been reading Bruce Longenecker's The Lost Letters of Pergamum which is surprisingly convincing and very informative and some stuff on the social position of early Christians, particularly poverty levels in Pauline communities. An article by Steve Friesen in JSNT is worth checking out if you're interested in these things - though I think he's a little too prone to reduce everything to economics and dismiss discussions of social status. He'd align himself more with Justin Meggitt than Wayne Meeks, I suspect. It's a fascinating area of NT study.

This Sunday we'll be looking at the Jerusalem Conference as told to us by Luke in Acts 15. I'll be suggesting to our people that we need to face the changing circumstances of our ministry and mission with the same boldness as everyone in Luke's story did. In particular, just as it was the Jewish Christians, the in-group, who had to change to accommodate the late-coming Gentiles, so too we have to change to welcome those outside the church into our communities. Often we expect new Christians to take on our culture - derived more from the 1950s than the bible - along with our version of the gospel.

I've also been putting together the Spring edition of Talk, the Mainstream magazine. This one is devoted to missional church - what is it? And it features an interview with Jonathan Edwards, an excellent piece of Baptist church planting by Stuart Murray Williams and great reflections on Christian youth work by Clare Hooper. A rich and heady mix!

Actually, I quite enjoy editing it - but the week when I put it together (three a year) get to be a bit fraught and hectic.

I'm also loving the new Kaiser Chief's album.

So, it's been a good, though somewhat busy week

Relations with the powers that be

As our group of churches staggers into a partnership with our local authority, I've been reflecting on Paul's relationship with power.

We're used to thinking of him being arrested for causing a breach of the peace - in Thessalonica, for example (Acts 17:1-9) - but what about him using a relationship with the powers-that-be to further his mission.

This Sunday I'm preaching on the first missionary journey in particular homing in on Paul and the proconsul Sergius Paullinus (Acts 13:4-12). It seems that there's good evidence that this Roman official had strong links not only on Cyprus where Paul meets him but more particularly in Pisidian Antioch and its environs. Certain inscriptions have been found that suggest a pretty firm and significant link over a number of generations (look at Rainer Riesner's thorough examination of the evidence in Paul's early Period: Chronology, Mission Strategy, Theology [Eerdmanns 1998] - I really hope he's working on a follow up on Paul's later period!)

So when we ask the question why did Paul go to Pisidian Antioch and the not the towns and cities nearer to Cyprus on his first missionary journey, one answer that many scholars suggest is that Sergius Paullus sent him on his way with letters of introduction from him to family members and others (including officials) in that city. It's possible that this accounts for the favourable reception from the Gentiles after Paul and Barnabas are rejected by the synagogue community.

It could account for why, when the Jewish community rejected them, Paul and Barnabas were not immediately arrested by the secular authorities for causing trouble, introducing foreign gods, disturbing the peace, etc. Does this and other experiences along the way also account for Paul's relatively sanguine attitude to the Empire in Romans 13? Though he believes unequivocally that Jesus is Lord, not Caesar, that the only empire that will last is Christ's not Nero's, he does seem to think that the secular authorities can hold the ring in a sinful world in a way that can be advantageous for the gospel.

So, can we find a model for our seeking partnership with local and national government in Paul? It's a nice thought. Perhaps all you biblical scholars can put me right!

Making community

I came across this lovely Henri Nouwen quote this morning:

‘In solitude we remember that community is not a common ideology, but a response to a common call. In solitude we realize that community is not made but given.’

This coupled with my reading of Roxburgh and Romanuk is helping to think about the balance between the leader as maker of things and the leader as cultivator of an environment in which things grow.

We hatch all kinds of strategies to make community but, as Nouwen says, community is given. I take that to mean, given by God. I further reckon that it happens as people grow to love one another.

As a leader I can't get my people to love one another any more than I can push water uphill with a fork. As a leader all I can do - with others - is create the environment in which that love, and hence that community, can grow.

I guess this is about preaching and modelling, allowing God's Word to shape people's lives through the faithful unpacking of it Sunday by Sunday and being an example of how that Word shapes my life and the lives of those around me.

Hence Paul's prayer in Philippians 1:3-11: I wonder how often and how honestly we can pray these words for our churches?!

Of the making of books

Having just had a birthday, I have even more things on my growing pile of books to read.

I'm currently reading Reggie Kidd's Wealth and Beneficence in the Pastoral Epistles as part of my preparation for my MA (I have an interview about that on Thursday, so here's hoping...)

I am also reading Alan Roxburgh and Fred Romanuk's The Missional Leader: Equipping your church to reach a changing world. Roxburgh's slim volume on mission and liminality is a key text in my understanding of my ministry, so this beefier tome is proving to be pretty stimulating.

I'm also reading CJ Sansom's Winter in Madrid - not as compelling as his Matthew Shardlake novels but good all the same.

I'm also dipping into Richard Bauckham's Jesus and the Eyewitnesses from time to time (in those quiet moments I have so many of!)

Now onto my pile has come Eamon Duffy's Marking the Hours: English People and their prayers 1240-1570. Duffy is the author of the wonderful Voices of Morebeth, one of the best studies of the Reformation in England published over the past 25 years. So I'm looking forward to this new one. He has a great eye for detail and is able to show how those details fit the broad sweep of a historical narrative.

And I also got Toby Jones' Utopian Dreams, his story of travels among various intentional communities in search of the good life. I heard him talking about it on Start the Week on radio 4 and he strongly suggested that it was the Christian communities that seemed to offer most to troubled people in a confusing world. So I'm looking forward to that as well.

Ah, i just need six weeks with my feet up by a pool, a waiter bringing long cooling drinks and the sun setting over a palm fringed beach.....

The sermon passing near you....

On Sunday evening, I had one of those moments that preachers frequently have while delivering a sermon: a better sermon crossed my path, winked and said 'you ought to be preaching me!'

I was mid-way through some reflections on kindness based on the story of David and Mephibosheth. Most of us know this story from 2 Samuel 9. I was tracing the story from where Saul's grandson enters the narrative in 2 Samuel (4:4) through chapter 9 and on into 16:1-4 and 19:24-30.

It's a wonderful and subtle piece of writing and I managed to make some valid points along the way - things such as kindness is about welcoming people into our community, is willing to take risks and is what God wants. Furthermore, the narrative in 2 Samuel is a great illustration of what Paul is talking about in Galatians 5. There the apostle is arguing that if we keep in step with the Spirit we will display the social qualities needed to ensure that our differences don't tear our communities apart.

All well and good - and people said so afterwards.

The reason I felt a better sermon was drifting just beyond my reach was that I should have stayed rooted in the Samuel narrative showing how our kindness is a political and social act that has the power to change the context in which we do our politics. More than that, David's kindness to Mephibosheth is contrasted with the way he treated other people - notably Uriah, Bathsheba and members of his immediate family.

We see a hint of it in 2 Samuel 16 where David, under pressure and desperate to save his own skin, acts in an unkind way towards Mephibosheth because another person has interpreted Mephibosheth's behaviour unfavourably to the fleeing king.

Here we have an illustration of how the pressures of life and circumstances affect our ability to be kind.

It, of course, raises the question of what kindness is. In one sense it's about being faithful to one another - the word used in 2 Samuel 9 is hesed which means covenant loyalty. To honour a promise to his friend, David takes risks with his safety and his political advantage to show kindness to a potential rival for his throne.

We often see kindness as a bit of a warm and fuzzy quality, offering tea and sympathy to those who need it but hardly world-changing. What this narrative reveals is that being kind to one another is the basis for a social ethic that could make the difference between young people carrying guns on our streets and those same young people being steered into productive and fulfilling lives.

New improved

My blogger account has changed to a new improved version - so I hope you can tell the difference! One thing it allows me to do is to label my posts which sounds fun.

When I went to it this morning I had to log in twice which was a pain but apart from that it seems pretty similar to the previous version. I'll explore its features and hopefully find exciting new ways to convery my shallow thinking.

I've been listening to the new album by Taureg band Tinariwen. Called Aman Iman (meaning Water is Life) it's a wonderful mixture of jangling guitars and haunting vocals.

Fondling Galatians

I'm finally holding my copy of Discovering Galatians - it arrived last Thursday. A colleague asked me this morning how I felt about getting it, was I excited. And I guess the answer to that is 'yes'.

A book like this - 140 pages of mid-level biblical exegesis - takes a fair amount of time to put together. This one was road tested on our men's Bible study group, tweaked and honed over time and subjected to some pretty thorough editing once the manuscript was delivered.

There's a sense that once you've sent the proofs back, you never want to see it again! But holding it in my hand just now does give a little frisson of achievement.

Now I just need herds of you to go out and buy it and recommend it to all your home groups, cells, coffee bar discussion groups, pub-based bible studies....