Blog Room

We’re flying out of Sydney, heading for Melbourne and the Forge ‘grassroots’ festival and as we do so we’re crossing from one church culture to another and as such it’s a good moment on the plane to reflect on our time in Perth and Sydney.

We have spent time with church planting teams, supporters of church planting, staff teams wanting to either transition their church from what has become known as an attractional model (time and place) of church to a missional (life and love) model, and staff teams supporting a new missional plant from their attractional mother church. We have met people working from the bottom up, wanting to start something from scratch, to people asking top down questions (how to transition).  Everyone seems receptive to the theological principles behind a life and love model of church.

This is a genuine question. This is not a clever hook to get you to read a blog entry that will answer its own question. It’s an invitation to a conversation that will genuinely help a church be a missional community to a group of hard to reach people.

At this years EMA Tim Keller said that so much of our discipleship teaches people how to be a Christian on the weekends and in the evenings and leaves out the rest of life. Paul Tripp has said that evangelicals always know the gospel for past sins and future glory but not for life change in the here and now, after the Cross and before Christ’s return. In other words we don’t know how the gospel gives grace for change in everyday life. We are not used to talking about the gospel beyond not stealing staples at work. We live by a gospel with an excluded middle.

I had an interesting conversation with someone in our congregation a few weeks ago who’s just started out doing household church for the first time. He said he felt that the problem with household church is that it moves too fast – there’s no time to reflect, to sit back and be in awe at God’s majesty.

Just read this on a blog about caring for pastor's wives. The entry has some very helpful advice on how churches can care for their pastor's wives better. However it did strike me again that although great advice is given, once more the fundamental structures of modern western ministry are not being questioned.

On the corner of my street there is an old Methodist Church. On the dilapidated, crumbling old building, it reads "Methodist New Connexion 1887"‚ This year, 2007, it closed for business. The handful of elderly people who used it must now go elsewhere. The building is for sale.

It seems fitting to mark a new TCH blog with a confession: I'm tired of church planting!