God Space

East Taieri Church recently hosted Doug Pollock on his God Space Tour.  It was a privilege to spend an evening with Doug, who in addition to being a thoroughly nice guy, has one of the soundest, most effective approaches to evangelism in a postmodern context that I know.  You can find out more about Doug at his website http://www.godsgps.com/

I read Doug's book God Space: Where Spiritual Conversations Happen Naturally in a couple of hours.  A must read for every Christian - at least every Christian who wants to get better at having spiritual conversations so others can come to know the Saviour!  This is an easy read in that it is full of wonderful stories, and practical advice.  But it is a hard read in that Doug's style forces you to apply what you read and to look at yourself.

Key insights:
It starts with us.  "If we’re going to create God Space for others, it has to start inside us.  It takes safe people to create safe places.” p.16
He suggests that the reason we so often have spiritual conversations with people on airplanes is because on airplanes our spirituality has no bearing on where we sit.  It forces Christians to have time with people who aren't Christians yet.  We are fellow travellers on common ground, in close proximity, without distractions of cellphones...  The challenge is for us to find ways of creating this kind of God Space in the rest of life.

We need to notice people and be sensitive to the Holy Spirit's promptings.  Doug gives us some exercises to help us notice - seeing with Jesus' spectacles.

We need to grow in listening.  There are connections here with the Alpha Course, and with Dallas Willard's wisdom on evangelism.

We need to wonder - asking questions more than preaching at people.

And we need to be able to offer "spiritual appetisers" or bite sized chunks of the gospel peppered with our experience of it.  The challenge here is not to "share our testimony" - one size fits all - but to ask the person if they would like to hear aobut part of our experience that is relevant to the questions they are asking.

What does this mean for ministry at East Taieri?

1. I will be altering the first part of "Sharpening the Saw" - the training programme we have developed which helps people share their faith with others.  I'll do more on listening and asking appropriate (not pre-packaged) questions.  Interestingly the gospel illustrations we use on Sharpening the Saw, which come from the XEE course correspond well with Doug's idea of "spiritual appetisers", provided we don't force the whole menu on people if they aren't ready.
2. We need to consider how we are creating "God Space" within our various ministries.  Alpha already does this quite well.  FUEL also creates this over breakfast and during their discussions.  Night Church has been experimenting with this in various ways.  Other services also need to ask this question.  Our community ministries, including things like Mainly Music also need to wrestle with the question of creating room for spiritual conversations.
3. We need to wrestle with where drinking coffee and eating together fits into our ministry scene.
4. We also need to consider what physical God space we are offering.  Sometimes this can occur within the church building, but more often it is before and after services, and we could be more intentional about this in our morning services.
5. It is interesting how directly this connects with the preaching series I have just finished which used a title based on a book by Bill Hybels.  I called the series "The Power of God's Whisper."  It was about us all being sensitive to God prompting us to do or say something, and having the courage to respond.

May we all become more passionate about having spiritual conversations with people who don't yet know Jesus.
Martin.

Taking Discipleship Personally

Recently I wrote this short article for Candour Magazine and I thought others might be interested in it.

Discipleship as personal interaction rather than programme

In my early days as a Christian I was taken through the Navigator discipleship stuff (the Design for Discipleship Series): Bible study, memory verse, giving my testimony, the whole nine yards. Actually, it was good foundational material that contributed to my Christian growth. But what was most influential was my time with the man who led me through this course. I learned much more from the personal interaction with him than from the discipleship course itself and our relationship lasts to this day. He was an elder in a Presbyterian church and led the youth group and a home group. During our runs together I learned about a pastoral heart when, to my initial annoyance, he would allow our run to be interrupted by stopping to talk to someone we met. I learned about prayer from praying with him. Our prayers became more desperate when his first child had complications during birth. We weren’t sure if she was going to survive. It was a first hand example of trusting God in the midst of a trial, and then praising God together when his daughter survived and thrived.

Character discoveries occurred and rubbed off on me. One Sunday evening I was helping him show a gospel movie at church. We had invited lots of people who didn’t normally come to church. A good crowd had gathered, popcorn was popping and we were all praying, excited at the opportunity for changed lives! The movie was on an old reel-to-reel movie projector (before the days of data projectors) and just as we began, the film began jumping at the projector gate – chunkety, chunkety, chunk. Unless we could fix it, our carefully planned outreach evening was going to be a disaster. In the stress of the moment, I heard my mentor muttering under his breath and thought, “This will be interesting.” I leaned closer to find out what he was saying and heard the words, “Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord!”

My mentor sometimes addressed me “Martin, Martin my son” (from words attributed to one of Martin Luther’s mentors who said, “Martin, Martin my son. I see nothing but a cross before you.”) Once, when I had moved to another city, he phoned me and my flatmate answered. Mistaking my flatmate for me he said, “Martin, Martin my son...” My flatmate called out, “Martin, it’s your Dad!” We laughed, and yet in a 2 Tim 1:2 kind of way it was my Dad.

I have benefitted from many programmes over the years, and I have so appreciated the mentoring that people are able to do from a distant century through their writing, but my most significant discipleship moments have been with people like this man. It takes time, but it is lasting. Their personal interaction has shown me what life is like as an apprentice of Jesus.

We need to take discipleship personally, and not rely on programmes, because it works and of course because Jesus modelled it. But there is another reason. I believe life on life interactions are crucial in discipleship because of the nature of truth we are seeking to pass on to others. A Christian disciple is not someone who simply understands and gives assent to certain doctrinal statements. A disciple is one apprenticed to the master, who said, “I am the way, the truth and the life.”

Lesslie Newbigin wrote: "The manner in which Jesus makes the Father known is not in infallible, unrevisable irreformable statements. He did not write a book which would have served forever as the unquestionable and irreformable statement of the truth about God. He formed a community of friends and shared his life with them."  [Lesslie Newbigin, Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt and Certainty in Christian Discipleship (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), 89.]

Thankfully we can read in the scriptures what Jesus did and taught, and the effect Jesus had on those around him. But when we are discipled we experience another dimension to learning that is beyond reading a book. Michael Polanyi observed that the skills of a master are lost if they are not passed on first hand to apprentices in the next generation. The line of apprentices who made violins like Stradivarius has been broken.

"It is pathetic to watch the endless efforts – equipped with microscopy and chemistry, with mathematics and electronics – to reproduce a single violin of the kind the half-literate Stradivarius turned out as a matter of routine more than 200 years ago."


"To learn by example is to submit to authority. You follow your master because you trust his manner of doing things, even when you cannot analyse and account in detail for its effectiveness. By watching the master and emulating his efforts in the presence of his example, the apprentice unconsciously picks up the rules of the art... " [Michael Polanyi,  Personal Knowledge  (London: Routledge, 1958), 53.]

That sounds a lot like discipleship to me.

In my current role I contribute to discipleship in a variety of programmatic and structural ways. I preach, pray, lead worship, foster small group life, and ensure a range of programmes are running, including intentional discipleship using material such as the Omega studies. However, my most lasting impact is probably still time intensive, life on life discipleship. I think of the delight in seeing young ministry interns mature in Christ and go on in Christian ministry. I think of the challenges and joys of seeing people (including my own children) take steps in following Jesus. This doesn’t impact big numbers of people quickly, but I remain committed to having at least one person I’m relating to in this way. I’m taking that personally.

Inspired by the Good News of Easter

Maundy Thursday communion at East Taieri Church was thoughtful and meaningful. Easter Sunday was a great celebration of the resurrection of Jesus. All my children had great Easter Camps. I had some quality time with Sue. I even enjoyed some Easter eggs. However the most life-transforming moments for me this Easter were those I spent in the Milton Prison.

In January, David, a member of East Taieri Church, told me he felt prompted by God to form a prison ministry team. God has clearly been in this, and to our delight a team came together easily and has been inducted and joined the roster of churches taking service in the Otago Correction Facility. I am a member of that team. The first service I was involved with was on Good Friday. I feel that God spoke to me in several ways through it:

1. All the unknowns forced me to lean on God and not to trust on my years of ministry experience. That was a great reminder for me. I also felt very appreciative of the Prison staff and the other members of the team as we made our way through the security checks into the facility.

2. I was struck by how young the prison congregation were. In contrast to many church congregations around the country, I would say the majority of these men were in their 20’s. This is a sad reflection on the choices being made and situations faced by young men in our society. (43% of prisoners are younger than 30 years old).

3. I was encouraged by how friendly they were. Sadly I have visited churches where people have been much less friendly than these men. They walked up to us, introduced themselves, and thanked us for coming.

4. I was in awe at how carefully they listened to the Bible Reading of Jesus dying on the cross (Mark 15:22-39). Familiar, even routine words, which many church congregations on Good Friday may have taken for granted, rang out with fresh relevance as Mitch read them in that setting. One prisoner near me said, “Mean story!” at the end.

5. I was astounded at the openness of the prisoners in talking about Jesus dying for us all. I had more conversations about the sacrifice of Christ after that service than after any one church service in 20 years of ministry. Forgiveness, a new life, and the promise that there is more to life than this, truly do make for good news!

6. The importance of participation was highlighted for me by the prisoners taking ownership of the music and leading us in three worship songs.  They were great!

7. As senior pastor, one of the most inspiring things has been the way this enthusiastic prison ministry team has come together.  One church member felt prompted by the Holy Spirit.  He was supported by ministry leadership, who had hoped for such a team for some years and had invited the prision chaplain to preach at ET.  After the opportunity was promoted in one church service, others felt called to join the team and now it's underway.  This encourages me that God is speaking into the "missional imagination of the congregation".  By this I mean that God is prompting us to think like missionaries to Mosgiel, living the good news in our surroundings.  See Alan Roxburg's book The Missional Leader (San Francisco, Jossey-Bass, 2006), p.151.

May you also be inspired about the good news of Jesus dying for our sins!

Martin.

Search and Rescue

We won't easily forget the images of the Urban Search and Rescue USAR teams working through the collapsed buildings to save people trapped after the Christchurch earthquake.  In the early moments volunteers like Ahsei Sopoaga desperately tried to free people from under the rubble.  Then the professionals moved in.  I had to wipe a tear from my eyes when I saw footage of the international USAR teams coming to help.  Now it is New Zealand's turn to help after the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

I applaud these brave rescue efforts.  They challenge me to bring greater ugency and focus to my efforts to see people rescued from sin.  My friends and neighbours are not trapped under fallen rubble, but many are trapped in a fallen world and do not know that Jesus can save them.  Oh that Christians would feel the same sense of urgency and motivation that Ahsei Sopoaga demonstrated.  Oh that we would have the same professionalism and focus that the USAR teams show.

One key way East Taieri is helping people discover the rescue that Jesus offers them is through the Alpha course.  We have run Alpha for many years now, but in recent years Alpha has been gathering more momentum for us.  Currently our night church are using the student Alpha material with over a hundred people attending last Sunday.  Every time we run Alpha people are set free from sin and from other things that have bound them up.  People discover the Saviour and grow as disciples.

This year we are seeking to build momentum even more as we host a regional Alpha training day, and as we organise an Alpha reunion for anyone who has done Alpha in the past.

Isn't this something we need to be urgent and focussed about?  I believe a key issue for the future well-being of our nation, and the demonstration of the kingdom of God, is our passion for seeing lost people rescued.  If we really believe humans need redeeming (rescuing) from sin, and that the wages of sin is death, then we would have the same passion and urgency the rescue teams demonstrated in Christchurch.

Now I realise that Christians sometimes feel inadequate and are scared off evangelism.  To press the analogy: just as we need USAR specialists, we need people with special gifts in evangelism.  However, everyone can help lift some rubble, and every Christian can invite a friend or neighbour to Alpha.  I actually believe every Christian is called to be able to say something about their faith in Jesus, but leaving that for now, surely we can all invite someone to a dinner.  That's all Alpha requires of us.  And yet, personal invitation is the key for Alpha.

Looking forward to week three of Student Alpha at night church tomorrow... and also looking forward to the next Alpha dinner.  Who will you invite?

Martin.

Another Tragedy for Christchurch

Hard as it is to believe, another earthquake has hit Christchurch.  It is clear from news reports that the damage is worse than the September 4th earthquake, and because it occurred in the middle of the day when many people were in the CBD, casualties are high.

What can we do as a church from Otago?
First we can pray!  I know people are praying individually, and in groups.  In particular, those people trapped in collapsed buildings need our prayers.

We are opening East Taieri Church for an extra time of prayer at

7.30pm

Wednesday 23rd February.

Second, people with specialist skills may be needed to assist emergency services in Christchurch.  I know that medical folks from ET Church have already been contacted about relieving staff in Christchurch.

Third, we need to check in with friends and family here in case they have loved ones badly affected by the earthquake and so need our pastoral support.  Talking and praying together can be a great comfort.

Fourth, we need to be sensible and safe ourselves in our desire to help.  We will not help the people of Christchurch by clogging phone lines and roads by rushing up there in an uncoordinated way.  In due course we will be talking with contacts in Christchurch such as through Horby Presbyterian Community Church to offer assistance as we did after the September 4th earthquake.  At the appropriate time there may be need for teams to assist with the clean up, or people willing to host Christchurch people for a break away from the city.

Finally we need to place our trust in God who can see us through all things.  God's love and mercy comes to us even in the difficult times (like the valley of the shadow of death in Psalm 23).  As I wrote on my blog after the first earthquake, it is not helpful to suggest that this represents God's judgement on Christchurch.  Jesus didn't equate people dying in a disaster with their sin (Luke 13:1-5).  In Dunedin, we are as much sinners as people in Christchurch.  Rather than making simplistic judgements, let's offer our compassion and our prayers.

Martin.

ET Leadership Summit - Lead Where You Are

I'm looking forward to our first East Taieri Leadership Summit on Saturday 5th March. This is an opportunity for everyone who gives leadership to sharpen their skills! Whether it is parents leading in the home, students setting the tone at school or with their mates, people giving leadership in the workplace or business, or an obvious church ministry.

Our speakers are:

Bill Hybels who will speak on “From Here to There” - leadership lessons from over 30 years of leading a growing church. Bill is the founding and senior pastor of the Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington Illinois and the bestselling author of more than twenty books. He helps inspire church leaders around the world.

Jim Collins’ topic is “Never, Ever, Give up”. Jim is a world class business thinker and bestselling author of “Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t” and “Built to Last: successful habits of visionary companies.

Christine Caine will speak about “Leading on the Edge of Hope.” A passionate, out of the

box, and empowering speaker, Christine has been part of Hillsong Church’s key leadership team for over 20 years and is Director of Equip & Empower Ministries and founder of The A21 Campaign, an organization dedicated to the care and healing of victims of human trafficking.

You have probably guessed, that we won't have these speakers in person, but are using the Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit DVD. These are world class speakers however who will inspire and equip us in leading where we are. After each session there will be opportunity for us to discuss the material and identify the principles which will transfer to our own situations.

Saturday 5th March 2011, In Oak Lounge

9am - 3pm,

Morning Tea and Lunch provided.

To register the Office 489 6308

Email: office@etchurch.co.nz
Registrations close 1st March

No Cost

Register & come along if you possibly can!
Martin.

Copland Shelter

During the holidays my 17 year old son Sam and I climbed to Copland Shelter in Mt Cook National Park, along with a good friend and experienced mountaineer, Andrew.  The plan was for us all to climb up from the Hooker Glacier to the Shelter (1,960m  or 6,430.4 ft), and then the next day we would climb the remaining 190m to the Copland Pass.  Sam and I would walk out the Copland valley to the West Coast and Andrew would return down the Copland Ridge to Mt Cook Village.

The day up to the Shelter was beautiful - almost too hot - but sadly a westerly front came in sooner than we hoped and the winds coming over the main divide were too strong to allow us to go over the pass safely.  That second day we all returned to Mt Cook Village, tired, a little frustrated that we only did half the trip, but delighted to have had time in such fantastic alpine country.

My reflections?
I value that kind of time with my son Sam, and our friend Andrew.  Great talks, testing ourselves against the mountains, trusting each other...

It taught us more about peseverance.  I was fairly fit, and Sam was even fitter, but our legs felt the test of the 7 and a half hours walking and climbing.  We were very glad to see the Shelter at the end of the day.  We got there because we kept on going, even when it was hard, even when I got cramp, even when it was a bit airy scary.  Yes, we stopped to rest.  Yes, we refueled with meusli bars, chocolate, nuts and water.  But we kept on going.  It was a lesson in pressing on no matter what.  It's amazing how far our legs can take us if we keep on going.

But it was also a reminder of our limitations.  The shelter is a 4 bunk, round drum. Without it we would have spent a cold, uncomfortable, even dangerous night in the wind.  And it was that wind that convinced us to return to the valley below and wait for another time when the weather would be better.  Against the splendour and power of God's creation, we are quite small and weak.

It also taught us about the importance of disciplines and procedures.  We filled out our intentions with the DOC staff.  One of those staff checked in at the scheduled radio call.  We carried our share of emergency gear, GPS, Satellite phone, first aid kit...

And yet there was also risk.  We managed the risk with safety gear like ropes and helmets.  We avoided unnecessary risk by chosing our route carefully.  We treated the weather with respect.  And yet there were risks involved in our climb.  There are always risks in life.  Not always obvious risks, but risks are present if you look hard enough.  The obvious danger we faced reminded us that as long as we are alive we face threats of some kind.  The Macaulay Clan motto is dulce periculum, "danger is sweet."  It reminds us we are alive!

Martin.