Nomad

Nomad Extra 16: Simon Hall and Revive

2012-01-24T16:16:00.002Z

Nomad found themselves in Leeds again recently andso thought they’d catch up with Simon Hall for a little Nomad Extra bonusinterview for you. Simon is a founding member of the Revive community, whichstarted out as a group of young, arty adults, looking to do church and missiondifferently.

The thing that really stood out for me, as Simonwas telling us his story, was how over the years the community has adapted tomany internal and external changes. They started out with a vision, but theyweren’t slaves to it, and they’ve allowed God and each other to shape andreshape community life.

I’m the sort of guy who likes a plan, so I feltreally challenged by Revive’s flexibility and openness to change.

I’ve often been guilty of limiting the Spirit’srole to that of Comforter, but I’m increasingly seeing that a key part of whatthe Spirit does is to act as the Unsettler. It’s the Spirit who keeps us on ourtoes, keeps us moving, changing and adapting, if we remain open to him.

In response to this, I’ve built in a weekly prayerslot where I lay everything before God, all my plans and agendas, and try andbe open to the fact that God might want me to change something, or indeed giveeverything up, and do something else.

Ruth Holgate and the spirituality of silence

2012-01-10T11:26:00.000Z

This month’s podcast is a little different as rather than simplyan interview you’ll hear me reflecting my daily experiences of a five daysilent retreat before discussing it with our interviewee Ruth Holegate.

The BBC documentaries The Monastery and The Big Silencereally impacted Hannah and me (follow the links to check them out on YouTube).We’ve had a fair amount of teaching and encouragement in the spiritualdisciplines, but silence had never been mentioned. We then saw Ruth Holgatespeak on the subject at Greenbelt and we both felt a prompting to give it a go.So we signed up for a five day silent retreat at the Jesuit Spirituality CentreLoyola Hall. We were slightly anxiousthat we couldn’t really afford it, but then lo-and-behold we got a tax rebatethat paid for it exactly!

It was a remarkable five days. To our surprise neither of usfound the silence itself especially challenging (apart from the one hourcorporate silence in the evenings!). Instead the challenge came from what Godwas doing in us as a result of us committing ourselves to finding him in thesilence.

The sense of stillness, peace and God’s consistent presencewith us was profound, and something that neither of us expected. In fact weboth felt quite low when we had to leave, I think fearing that we’d lose thissense of closeness when we got back to the busyness of our lives.

We were both challenged in deep ways as God put his fingeron a number of personal issues and as he clarified the mission he was callingus to. But perhaps the biggest challenge was committing to this contemplativelifestyle back in the ‘real world’. Life is pretty frantic, and is only goingto get more so with a baby on the way! But we feel God is calling us to modelthis lifestyle for the increasingly pressured, stretched, drained and fracturedcommunity in which we live.

God's Grace

2012-01-05T14:25:00.000Z

As we walked back up the stairs having enjoyed a mince pieafter the carol service a phrase unexpected popped into Hannah’s mind, ‘intoyour hands I commit my spirit’. At the time she had no idea why she’d had thatthought, but two days later sitting in hospital having just been told by aconsultant that our baby (due in March) had died, we realised that as we walkedup those stairs God had received our daughter’s spirit.

Faith is rarely a journey of certainties; instead it is ajourney of trust. Like everyone, me and Hannah’s faith journey has had its upsand downs, but through it all we’ve come to trust in God. We can’t comprehendhim and often fail to understand his ways, but we do trust him. Most of all wetrust that he is good. For whatever reason the world he made is no longer goodin the way he intended, but God himself is good. He doesn’t always protect usfrom the pain of living in this imperfect world, but he always accompanies usthrough the pain, seeking to reveal his goodness.

So we prayed. We prayed that God would protect us from anyfeelings of anger or bitterness at Grace’s death and we prayed that her shortlife would lead to love and peace. We asked God to reveal his goodness.

Over the two weeks following that prayer God revealed hisgoodness in ways we’ve never experienced before. We had an intense sense of hispresence and deep sense of his peace. We saw his goodness in the miraculouslyquick labour, and even in the midst of the sorrow we experienced his joy at thebirth of our daughter. We’ve seen God’s goodness through the loving actions ofhis people, through the many texts, cards, emails, phone calls, visits, flowersand meals. And we’ve seen his goodness in the deeper love we’ve developed foreach other and for our friends and family.

Obviously we would never have chosen to go through this painfulexperience. But we can now see that the pain we felt was a small price to payfor the time we had with Grace. And this pain was far outweighed by thewonderful experience of God’s goodness.

Life is a gift and God gifted us with Grace for just under27 weeks and then he asked us to give her back. But our daughter lives on. Webelieve that she lives on with God in heaven, and we believe that she lives on throughthe love and peace her short life produced.

God is indeed good!

Tim

Nomad Spirituality 01: Moving into the neighbourhood

2011-12-20T11:00:00.000Z

Christmas seemed like a good time to add something new to theNomad Podcast portfolio. So welcome to Nomad Spirituality.

Every once in a while we’ll be uploading a meditation tohelp you reconnect with Jesus in the midst of your busyness. This month Dave isleading a reflection on the significance of the incarnation.

So turn up your iPod, close your eyes and let yourself driftaway. It’s our Christmas gift to you!

Thanks to the guys at proost to putting us onto thebackground music. It’s from Grace’s latest album ‘Landskapes’. The track is ‘Skape’by Electrik Café. Check it out at proost.

Chris Sunderland and Earth Abbey

2011-12-10T18:30:00.001Z

Nomad is on the road again, this month making theirway down to Bristol to meet up with Chris Sunderland.

Chris is involved in many Jesus-inspired communityenhancing projects such as Agora, but we wanted to speak to him about Earth Abbey.

Earth Abbey is a dispersed community who arecommitted to lives lived in harmony with creation. So after we’d had ourcreation theology straightened out by Tom Wright, we thought Chris would be theperfect person to show us what it means in practice.

I loved Chris’s phrase ‘the spirituality of soil’.His community talks about soil, soul and society. He believes that soil iscommon to all humanity (e.g. working the soil and eating from the soil) andthus can form a deep human and spiritual bond.

I can see a lot of truth in that. God is an earthyGod. He did after all make the earth, he walked on the earth, formed humans outof the earth, came as a human to live on the earth, and will return to live onthe earth again. It seems pretty clear that we’re now largely estranged fromthis earth, with little idea of how to live in harmony with it. So I loveChris’s idea of forming communities to figure out together how to better comeinto relationship with the earth, and in so doing connecting more deeply witheach other and with God.

Tim

Immanuel – God in us

2011-11-28T15:41:00.001Z

Christmasis a great time for a pioneer. A big part of a pioneer’s job is to discern whatmakes a particular culture tick, and then finding starting points for sharingthe gospel. Christmas is one of those few occasions in the year when everyoneis thinking and doing pretty much the same thing. That’s not to say, of course,that everyone has a very positive experience of Christmas, far from it, butit’s pretty hard in our society to escape its reach.

Themessage of Christmas is nicely encapsulated in one of Jesus best known titles,Immanuel – God with us. The Message translation brings this home nicely withits rendering of John 1:14 ‘TheWord became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood’. A transcendentGod became immanent in the person of Jesus.

But of course Godis no longer with us in this physical sense any more. Instead, something evenmore remarkable and unexpected happened. God is no longer with us; instead he is now inus. When Jesus ascended he sent his Spirit to dwell in his followers. God movedfrom transcendence to immanence and then to a depth of intimacy neverexperienced by humanity before.

This new intimacywith God, however, brings with it a great missional responsibility. Whereaspreviously Jesus himself demonstrated God’s love for the world, now we are thebearers of that love. With God’s Spirit dwelling in us, we are called to ‘moveinto the neighborhood’ and embody a life lived in relationship with God. Now weare God’s gift to the world!

So as a pioneer, my job – and all our jobs –is to prayerfully consider how we can be God’s gift to our community thisChristmas. Jesus is our model of how we should go about this, and more thananything else he partied and told [often cryptic] stories about God’s comingkingdom. So our job as Jesus’ followers is to throw parties, not just for ourfriends, but for those people we know about who are hurting this Christmas. Some and Hannah, for example, will be throwing a party for our street and atSycamore House, and inviting those people we know who are on their own to joinus for Christmas. And we’re also thinking about how to creatively tell thestory of God’s coming kingdom.

So as we prepare for Christmas this year let’smake time to prayerfully consider the missional implication of the amazingtruth that God is now in us.

Mark Powley's Consumer Detox

2011-11-10T17:57:00.000Z

This month the podcast finds itself in Leeds andthe abode of Mark Powley, founding member of the Breathe Network.

The network’s strapline is ‘Less stuff, more life’,(one of those strapline’s I wish I’d thought of!) The network’s aim is toencourage us to live more simply. Not in a monastic kind of way (no offence toour new monastic listeners), but in a positive, smart 21^st centuryliving kind of way.

It’s a great interview (even if we do say soourselves!), and one which has deeply challenged me. Since the interview, forexample, me and Hannah have made a ‘digital detox’ a central part of ourSabbath observance, and already we’re feeling the benefit. It’s amazing howmuch more space for life the detox has produced, and how it has influenced therest of our week.

So tune into the podcast for loads of encouragementand advice on resisting the relentless pull of consumerism and embracing asimpler, more life-enhancing lifestyle.

Nomad Extra 16: Tim and Dave’s pioneering adventures part 1

2011-10-24T13:57:00.000+01:00

Everynow and then we slip you a Nomad Extra. We’ve added these extra podcasts in fora number of reasons (sometimes, for example, because we haven’t had time topull together a proper podcast!). But they seem to have worked best when we’vespoken to people who are living out the theory that the big named thinkers havebeen feeding us.

So, wethought we’d start a new series of Nomad Extra’s where we track the pioneeringadventures of the podcast’s hosts, Tim and Dave.

As youmay have picked up, Tim is just starting out as a full-time pioneer inNottingham, working with young adult spiritual seekers. Dave is a farrier (i.e.he puts new shoes on horses), and is using this as an opportunity to drawtogether groups of horsy types in Nottinghamshire to explore Jesus-centredspirituality.

So asthey’re both just starting out on their pioneering journey, we thought it’d beinteresting to record their reflection every now and then. The first one is onlinenow, so download it and let us know what you think.

Why I’m not a Christian anymore

2011-10-17T21:33:00.000+01:00

It seems to me that good communication is not somuch about what you say, but what people hear. We can feel we are being veryclear and precise in what we’re saying, but our audience can hear somethingvery different.

Missionaries have always been mindful of this whenworking oversees. It’s never been enough to simply learn the language;missionaries have had to learn the culture as well before they can begin tocommunicate effectively. Of course this is nothing new. When Peter communicatedthe gospel to devout Jews at Pentecost he referred to Israel, scripture, theprophets, the patriarchs and resurrection (Acts 2), cultural symbols the Jewsunderstood well. In contrast to this, when Paul communicated the gospel to intellectualGreeks in Athens he used none of this language because he knew it would bemisunderstood. Instead he referred to Greek poets and philosophy (Acts 17). Andwhen Paul brought the gospel to hedonistic Corinthians, he hardly spoke at all.Instead he simply demonstrated the power of God’s Spirit (1 Cor. 2:4-5).

The question is therefore, what language should webe using when trying to communicate the gospel in the sub-cultures we’re a partof?

The young adults I hang round with are spirituallycurious (in varying degrees) but anti-religion. With only a handful ofexceptions, I’ve found that as I’ve used words like ‘Christian’, ‘Christianity’and ‘church’ to describe myself and what I do, conversations inevitably come toan abrupt end! A recent survey brought this into sharp focus. 85% of peoplesurveyed only had negative things to say about ‘Christianity’, but 100% onlyhad positive things to say about Jesus.

The answer seems pretty obvious. To effectivelycommunicate within the sub-culture I’m a part of, I need to stop referring tomyself as a ‘Christian’, or an adherent of ‘Christianity’. I’m not saying thereis anything inherently wrong with these words, simply that when I use thempeople are hearing something very different from what I’m trying to communicate.

In fact the name ‘Christian’ only appears 3 timesin the Bible, and seemed to start its life as an insult. Instead the earlyfollowers of Jesus referred to themselves as just that, followers (ordisciples) of Jesus, and they referred to the faith they were a part of as TheWay. People weren’t joining a ‘religion’ they were embracing a Jesus-centredspiritual lifestyle.

So I’ve decided to stop referring to myself as aChristian and instead call myself a follower of Jesus (or more precisely, someonewho is trying to follow Jesus). I’vealready found that this opens up conversations where the name ‘Christian’ hadpreviously closed them down.

Tim

Tom Wright, academia, Simply Jesus and the end of the world

2011-10-08T10:51:00.000+01:00

TomWright was in town recently for the British New Testament Conference, so wetook the opportunity to drag him away from his lunch (and a heated debate witha colleague) and ask him a few questions about his new job, his new book, andwhether God is going to blow this world up.

Thebelief that God is going to destroy this planet before he makes a new one hasbeen around for a while. It strikes me though that this belief isn’t going todo much to motivate care for the environment (why bother reducing our carbonfootprint if God is going to turn every atom of the universe into the mother ofall atomic bombs?!).

Soas Nomad finds itself increasingly concerned about the environment, we thoughtwe’d better track Tom down and get him to sort this one out once and for all.And I think he did a pretty good job.

Withthe possible exception of one hard to translate passage in 2 Peter 3, themessage of the Bible seems clear. Like us, this world isheading for a resurrection, where everything that is good will be preservedforever, and everything that is bad will melt away. That to me seems likereason enough to start knuckling down to the task of making sure there’s plentyfor God to preserve.

We’reheading down to Bristol in a couple of episodes time to meet up with the EarthAbbey guys to find out just how to go about this eternal task.

Tim

Pioneering rhythms

2011-09-29T20:09:00.003+01:00

The big news is I’m now a full time pioneer! The Methodist church has employed me as part of their Venture FX scheme. So from now on I’ll be considering what the good news might look like for my corner of Nottingham.

So me and Hannah have been spending a lot of time seeking God for vision and direction. Very quickly we felt God say that the ministry he’s calling us to has to be an expression of what he is doing in us. If we’re to effectively present a Christ-centred spiritual lifestyle to the young adults of this area, then we need to be firmly rooted in that lifestyle ourselves. And so we’ve felt God prompt us to shape our lives around spiritual rhythms. The beat of this rhythm is daily, weekly, monthly and yearly. Daily we’ve felt God call us to commit to meditation, Bible reading, and thanksgiving. Weekly we’ve committed to fasting and to observing the Sabbath, monthly we’re committed to a retreat day, and yearly we’re committed to observing the biblical festivals.

We’ve found it relatively easy to build this rhythm into our lives over the last couple of months (actually it’s something God has slowly been leading us into for the last year), with one exception, the Sabbath. Week after week we’ve failed to stop working and simply enjoying God (Isa. 58:13-14) and enjoying his creation (Gen. 1:32-2:3). The temptation to check emails, post a letter, finish an article, or do some jobs around the house is surprisingly hard to resist. And when I have managed to physically stop working, I’ve found it even harder to mentally switch off. But God has kept challenging us to stop working and to rest.

As we sought God for what the Sabbath might look like for us we sensed God calling us to two things. The first was a ‘digital detox’. This meant switching off the TV, radio, computer, and mobile phones. This would mean that for us the Sabbath was not only a slowing down our lives for a day, but also the quietening down of our lives for a day. Secondly we felt God encourage us to enjoy the day, to focus on rediscovering the simple pleasures in life, to do those things that give us life and help us enjoy God and the good things he has given us.

The first few weeks we observed the Sabbath I felt quite uncomfortable and even a bit anxious. But it has quickly become a day I really look forward to and a central part of the Christ-centred spiritual lifestyle we’re hoping to share with the young adults of Sherwood.

Tim

Nomad 30: Dave Ward and missional horse shodding

2011-09-09T17:48:00.001+01:00

After a month in the wilderness, Nomad makes its triumphant return!

The old team had decided to call it a day, but new boy Dave Ward has taken up the challenge, and along with old boy Tim Nash, Nomad can once again spread its wings bring you the very best in penetrating interviews and comment.

This month is an introduction to Dave and his journey from youth worker to farrier and from traditional church to new forms of mission and community.

So stay tuned for the new adventurers of Nomad.

Things to come

2011-08-19T21:00:00.003+01:00

Nomad is gearing up for its September relaunch. You may not have realised but we’ve been away for about a month now, and in that time the old team has disbanded and Tim has been joined by a new co-host (to be revealed in a couple of weeks).

In preparation for September, we’re hitting the road to track down some interesting fellow travellers to interview.

Next week we’re heading to Leeds hoping to have a chat with Mark Powley of the Breathe Network (Less stuff, more life). Mark recently released ‘Consumer Detox’ which challenges our consumer culture and urges us to live more simply. So, what questions do you want us to ask Mark?

There’s also a chance we’ll be crossing paths with Tom Wright as well (we’re planning to gate-crash a NT conference he’s at near here!). We’re thinking of picking his brain on the traditional Christian belief that the earth will be destroyed before a new one is created, and the affect this has had on Christian environmental concern. What do you want us to ask him about this? Or maybe you think we should take a different line of questioning.

Get in touch and have your say!

For more regular and concise updates, sign up to our facebook fan page and our twitter thingy.

Nomad 29: Final reflections

2011-07-24T08:47:00.001+01:00

It's hard to believe that it was only two and a half years ago that we were sat around Nick and Lora's dining table trying to figure out how to record our voices and upload it onto the web. And now we’re 44 shows wiser and have been mixing it up with some of the most interesting people Christendom has to offer.

But every party must come to an end, and the Nomad team has decided to call it a day. As our other commitments have grown, we've felt less able as a team to give it our best shot, so we felt the time was right to say goodbye. So tune into Nomad 29 for some of our reflections on the journey.

But, Nomad Podcast refuses to die. It will be back, with Tim at the helm, along with a new (soon to be announced) co-host. We're confident that the old magic will still be there, and with one or two interesting tweaks to the format, we think Nomad will be going from strength to strength.

See you in September!

Pete Greig, prayer, mission and new forms of church

2011-06-10T09:32:00.001+01:00

On this month’s podcast we’re having chat with Pete Greig. Pete is one of the founding members of the 24/7 Prayer movement. This movement has grown from a single night-and-day prayer vigil into an interdenominational movement of prayer, mission and justice that has spread across a third of the world’s nations in little over a decade.

We ask Pete a bit about how this movement got going, and how it relates to mission and new forms of church.

One of the comments Pete made that really struck me was how they didn’t start out with a strategy to begin a movement, rather their desire was for deeper intimacy with God. Pete likened putting strategy before intimacy as ‘getting married as a child raising strategy’. Love and intimacy should always come first, in marriage as well as in our relationship with God!

This is a really nice blend of the apostolic and pastoral. 24/7 has become a phenomenal movement, but it seems God took care of the movement side of things, while Pete and his co-workers focused on intimacy with God.

An important lesson for all us involved in mission I suspect.

Tim Nash, Peter Farmer and Pioneer Mission

2011-05-10T08:31:00.002+01:00

We’ve got a Nomad Extra for you this month on the podcast. I (Tim) interview Peter Farmer, a pioneer here in Nottingham, about a book we’ve recently co-authored.

Pioneer Mission: The Travel Guide for Missional Adventurers explores what Jesus himself had to say about how to engage with the process of making disciples and planting churches.

I’ve read an awful lot about pioneer mission and being ‘missional’ in recent years, much of which was very good and helpful, But I’ve not come across anything that has satisfied by desire for a simple biblical framework for pioneer mission. So I was very interested in the ‘pioneer process’ I heard Pete Farmer advocating. We connected and started working together on the streets of Nottingham, and I began to see this process in action (most recently with a short term missions team from America).

So we thought we’d get together and write about it. Pete likes apostolic processes and I like theological frameworks, so it seemed like a match made in heaven (until we actually started working together of course!). But after some months of sweat and tears (no blood was shed!), we’ve got the book on the shelves (actually, it’s not on shelves as such, but it is online).

It’s written as a travel guide, for you and a few fellow travels to guide you through the pioneering journey. It’s a mix of teaching, discussion points and suggested actions, so you won’t just be acquiring knowledge, but you will be hearing God’s voice and putting it into practices (listen-action-reflection, as Jesus modelled).

We’ve seen this process work a number of times now, so we can guarantee you if you prayerfully apply these principles, stuff will happen. We can’t promise you a smooth pioneering journey, but we can promise you an exciting one.

Get your copy here.

Tim

2011-04-13T09:37:00.001+01:00

It’s Mike Pilavachi’s turn on the podcast this month. Mike is the co-founder and leader of the Soul Survivor charity based in Watford, London and is also the pastor of the Soul Survivor Watford church.

We chat with Mike about all things mission, community and the future of the church, with particular focus on young people.

Oh, and there’s also some chat about cricket, so you might want to skip the last five minutes of the interview!

Another story from our week of mission

2011-04-05T08:24:00.000+01:00

Here’s another of the many stories from our recent missions week with a team of American students.

On the Tuesday we felt God prompting us to go into a local housing estate. We wondered around praying for a few people, but we all felt a bit discouraged at how quiet things were compared to the previous day. Two of the team were just about to call it a day when they felt God draw their attention to a certain house. They knocked on the door and asked the lady who answered if they could pray for her. She began crying and said that her husband had died a few weeks before. The team spent the rest of the afternoon listening to her story and praying with her.

The next day someone gave the team an undelivered bouquet of flowers to use. We initially thought it’d be a good idea to separate the flowers and hand them out on the streets. But as we prayed a number of us felt God saying to give the flowers to the lady we’d met the day before. So two of the team went back to her house and told her that Jesus wanted to give her the bouquet. She began crying and told us that it was the day of her 40th wedding anniversary and her husband’s birthday! Again the team was able to spend the afternoon praying with her. God’s perfect timing!

A week of mission

2011-03-24T10:11:00.007Z

Things have been a bit quite on the blog for two reasons. Firstly because me and a mate have been penning our first publication Pioneer Mission: The Travel Guide For Missional Adventurers. More on that in the next few weeks.

Secondly we’ve just finished leading our first short term mission week. We’ve been praying for a while that God would send us some more workers for our corner of Nottingham, and lo and behold we were asked to help host a short term mission team from California. So me and Hannah took four of them over to Sherwood to spent time spreading the love on the streets and in the pubs.

We didn’t really have a plan, other than to seek God’s guidance in ways to bless the community. We started off by simply handing out bars of chocolate and offering prayer on the high street. We were amazed by how open people were. The first person I spoke to told me they had been diagnosed with cancer, and as the afternoon went on people told us they’d been made redundant, they couldn’t stop drinking, and were struggling with all kinds of illnesses.

As the week went on God led us to more and more needy people who he wanted to bless. I’ll share some of these stories over the next week or two. Here’s the first.

On one occasion we sensed God prompting us to go to a particular pub. We sat down near the bar wondering how God wanted to use us. Almost immediately a man sitting on an adjacent table began speaking to two of the team. He had clearly been drinking and was distressed. As the team talked with him, he revealed that his teenage son had been killed in a car crash. The pain of this terrible event had led him to drink, and as his habit worsened his wife had told him to leave. He then confessed that it was his intention to continue drinking until the pub closed and then to take his life. The team shared Jesus’ love for him and his family, and laid hands on him and prayed for peace. He said that he did believe in God but was confused by everything that had happened to him. He said though that he now knew he wouldn’t kill himself. He left the pub leaving us feeling grateful at what God had done but still very anxious for him.

The next day we decided to take the evening off as it had been another intense day. Before heading out for food we asked God where he wanted us to go and two members sensed God prompt us to go to a different pub to the one we’d been to the night before. As soon as we sat down in the pub we realised the man we’d spoken to the night before was again sat on the table next to us, and he was with his wife! He told us that he’d gone home the night before and told his wife everything that happened and she’d accepted him back. Amazing!

Tim

Steve Hollinghurst and Mission-Shaped Evangelism

2011-03-20T16:03:00.001Z

It’s Steve Hollinghurst’s turn to be interviewed on Nomad Podcast this month. Steve is the Researcher in Evangelism to Post-Christian Culture, at the Sheffield Centre in the UK. He describes this role as ‘finding out how Christians can communicate their faith effectively with people who don't have a church background’.

I found this interview particularly interesting as it touched on many of the things I’m wrestling with right now. The town I live in (like most) has many sub-cultures, all with their own language, worldviews and perceived needs. So learning to navigate your way around this and presenting the gospel in a way that at least makes sense is quite a challenge.

One of my favourite quotes in Steve’s book speaks into this. He says:

‘The Gospel is not a single seed that we plant in foreign soil; it is a whole packet of different seeds that together make a harmonious garden...The art of a skilful missionary is to read the unknown soil and understand the seeds in the gospel packet well enough to know which ones to plant first, to discern when they have taken root in a healthy way, and know when it is time to plant the seeds that will be harder to nurture. Ultimately the whole packet needs planting for faith to be fully realised. Therefore the gospel message is not something we deliver once in a short presentation, but something unveiled piece by piece over a long period of time’ (p. 168)

I used to think I had a responsibility to tell the ‘whole story’ when sharing my faith. This led to many rather awkward situations where I tried to offer the gospel as a solution to a problem people didn’t think they had! So I find Steve’s metaphor of the gospel being a whole packet of seeds really freeing. The key is to discern which seed to sow first. More often than not he seed that seems most appropriate to sow first in my context is one that will make the gospel appear attractive. So I’m spending a lot of my time simply telling stories about the experiences of Jesus I’ve had. The hope is that over time I will then be able to sow more of the seeds from the packet.

Tim

Cathy Ross and the invisibility of women in mission

2011-02-17T11:23:00.003Z

We’ve got an interesting interview for you this month with The London School of Theology’s Senior Lecturer in Mission and World Christianity, Dr. Cathy Ross.

Cathy talks to us about how women have been overlooked in mission, both overseas and at home. She explores how this came about and what can be done about it. She also recommends some resources to help us dig deeper into this important issue.

We’ve wanted to look at this issue since a few of our listeners asked us why we’ve had considerably more men on the show than women. This wasn’t intentional by any means, it’s just that the majority of mission resources we engage with seem to be produced by men, and so they’re the ones we follow up with interviews.

I find it surprising that women are overlooked in this way. I understand the debate about women in church leadership in as much as there are biblical texts to be wrestled with. But when it comes to women’s role in mission I can’t see how anyone could base an objection on the Bible.

Mary Magdalene, for example, was the first to spread the news of the resurrection (which is the essence of the apostolic call). The Samaritan woman spread the gospel throughout her town. Dorcas worked with the poor and we’re told that Junais was a noted apostle.

Anyway, have a listen to the interview and let us know what you think. And if you have any suggestions of women missional thinkers and practitioners that would make for a good interview do let us know.

Billy No-mates!

2011-02-11T09:47:00.000Z

We thought it was about time we came clean and revealed that our Christmas show’s special guest, Billy Wordsworth, is in fact Nomad Podcast’s Nick Thorley! We’ve had a lot of emails and comments from worried listeners concerned that we’d lost the plot. But fear not, we’re still on the side of truth! Billy was merely a Nomad invention for your Yule-tide amusement!

The transforming power of Jesus and Buddha

2011-01-21T09:31:00.002Z

Having had a bit of a break over Christmas, I got back on the pioneering trail this week.

It’s interesting how God has been expanding our vision. We started out with only the spiritual seekers in mind and while this is still very much on the agenda (I’m hoping to run a ‘spiritual encounter’ course in the spring), God has laid other groups on our hearts as we’ve prayer walked.

We’ve felt increasingly drawn, for example, to two high-rises on the edge of a nearby park and to a particularly uninviting pub on the high-street. So we’re starting to pray through how best to engage with these people.

Anyway, yesterday we felt God prompt us to go back to the Buddhist centre. It turned out to be another great session. As is our usual practice, we went into the café and quietly prayed. Then, after about 15 minutes, an ordained Buddhist nun (robes, shaved head and all), turned around and said ‘Do you mind if I sit down with you, I’d really like to talk’! She was soon joined by another nun, and the woman working behind the counter, and we sat in a circle for nearly two hours sharing stories about our beliefs and spiritual experiences. It was a fascinating time. My feeling was that while they had found some peace and contentment in Buddhism, they hadn’t experienced the kind of transformation that only Jesus offers. So, for example, they seemed particularly impressed when I shared how Jesus had completely healed me from depression and a torn cartilage in my knee.

I did push it a bit at one point by asking if I could pray in Jesus’ name for one of the nuns who had Multiple Sclerosis and was clearly struggling with back pain. She said that while she was blessed by my offer, she didn’t feel it would be appropriate in a Buddhist centre!

Interestingly, both the nuns had previously been church goers, but had grown disillusioned with it, (although they both said they held Jesus in very high regard, seeing his as a ‘pure’ being). I think though that by the end of our time with them they had more respect for Christianity and saw it less as an empty religion and more as a genuine and living expression of Jesus centred faith and spirituality.

Tim

Neil Cole and Church Multiplication

2011-01-14T16:17:00.001Z

On our first show of 2011 we’re having a chat with Neil Cole. Neil is the founder and executive director of Church Multiplication Associates, which has helped start many hundreds of churches in thirty-five states of America and in over thirty other nations.

I interviewed Neil after he’d spent a day teaching on organic church multiplication. He shared some fascinating insights which really got the grey matter going.

Neil’s whole thing is church multiplication, i.e. planting churches that will plant churches. It is this, he believes, rather than addition (i.e. adding new members to existing churches) what will most effectively spread the gospel.

In order to achieve this he believes that we need to ‘lower the bar on how we do church and raise the bar on how we disciple.’ His concern is that we have made church so complicated that it requires experts and professionals to keep it running, and consequently it can’t easily be reproduced. He’s also concerned that within these church environments we’ve failed to produce mature disciples. He says, for example, that many Christians are ‘educated beyond their obedience’. Week after week experts teach us what to believe, but we’re not becoming radical disciples of Jesus.

Neil has built a church multiplication movement based on Life Transformation Groups, and organic church gatherings. So every week believers meet in twos and threes to share what God has said to them in their Bible reading through the week. They then work through a set of accountability questions, and then pray for their non-Christians friends. Anyone can do this, it doesn’t require any resources (other than a Bible) and an expert isn’t required. Every week or so three of four of these LTG’s get together to eat and share life together. Again, this is simple and reproducible, and provides an ideal environment for intimately connecting with each other and God.

So when someone comes to faith rather than being encouraged to join an existing church they form their own LTG, and then look to join with other local LTGs to form a larger organic meeting.

This simple method has led to an explosion of organic churches across the US. And it’s given me much to ponder about the way I’ve gone about forming disciples and shaping church.

Tim

Nomad Christmas Special

2010-12-23T21:33:00.000Z

December’s Nomad Podcast is now online.

On it we reflect with ‘Billy Wordsworth’ on the importance of words in relation to mission and new forms of church. We hope this will provide you with a rich resource for your ministries, helping you engage with the latest thinking in mission and church

Or, more likely, it will simply lead you to the [correct] conclusion that we’re a bunch of sarcastic chancers who’ve had one too many glasses of mulled wine.

But hey, it’s Christmas, it’s the season for some jolly rosy cheeked caperings!

See you in the New Year.

Nomad

Demonstrating God's kingdom among Buddhists

2010-11-24T16:42:00.003Z

Me and Pete were back in the Buddhist meditation centre the other day. We ordered a cup of tea and sat down, quietly praying that God would give us an opportunity to make a connection with someone. Then a member of the community came over and apologised for not giving us our complimentary biscuit with our tea.

As we chatted with him, he mentioned he had a chronic back problem that the doctors could no longer treat. I told him that we’d both experienced Jesus healing power in our lives, and offered to pray for him. After a little hesitation he allowed me and Pete to lay hands on him and pray in Jesus’ name for his healing.

I visited him the next day and he said that his back wasn’t aching as it usually did, although perhaps not surprisingly he was reluctant to attribute this to Jesus! We spent the next hour and half sharing stories of our spiritual experiences. I could see a real battle going on though as every time I told a story of how Jesus had healed me he either looked away or seemed quite moved, but then he’d immediately counter my story with Buddhist philosophy.

Its small steps I guess, but I do get the sense that God is doing something. We’ll go back to the centre later this week and see how things have developed.

Tim

Scott Boren and missional small groups

2010-11-12T10:50:00.001Z

We’ve just uploaded the latest Nomad podcast. This month we have a chat with Scott Boren. Scott is based at Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul’s Minnesota, but also works as a small group consultant. Scott has a particular passion for seeing small groups become a place of genuine community and mission.

I found Scott’s analysis of various forms of small groups really helpful.

Firstly he identified the ‘story of personal improvement’. This is one of the most common forms of group and it provides an opportunity for people to improve their normal lives. Consequently, people tend to come to meeting when it’s convenient and it can help them. I’ve definitely fallen into this category in the past, and as a small group coordinator for a church, this can be a frustrating phase of small group development.

Secondly, Scott talked about the ‘story of lifestyle adjustment’. This is where commitment to a group grows, but this is still in the form of a commitment to a formal gathering. This is where most of the groups are that I oversee, mine included. I suspect many churches would see this phase as a success.

Thirdly, Scott referred to the ‘story of relational revision’. This is there people begin to intentionally learn to do life together differently. Relational connections start to become more important than formal gatherings. I think my group is on the brink of this, as we’re starting to naturally mix outside of the group, as we help each other through life.

Lastly, Scott identified the ‘story of missional re-creation’. This is where God’s Kingdom begins to create something spontaneous, unexpected and unpredictable. Scott noticed that at this stage the need for structure decreases as the elements you are trying to build in become second nature. I’ve caught glimpses of this in groups, but it’s never quite become who we are.

Scott believes that to move towards this type of group we need to be people who listen and who are in rhythm with one another and with the community. This involves ‘missional communion’ where we practice the presence of God; ‘missional relating’ where we practice agape love towards each other, and ‘missional engagement’ where we begin to practice engagement with the community.

I think these principles could prove really helpful as we shape groups that are places where we love God, ourselves and our neighbours.

Making connections with new spiritualities

2010-11-04T12:04:00.000Z

I mentioned a few posts ago that I’ve been researching the spirituality of my local community. You’ve only got to wander down a few roads off the high street to realise that it is a hot bed of spiritual activity! So the question I’ve been pondering is how to engage with this clear interest in new spiritualities.

I thought a good place to start would be to try and make connections with these spiritual centres. I have visited them all and had some good general conversations about spirituality, but I’d really like to connect with someone in each centre.

I spoke at length to a shop assistant in one of the New Age shops, and I sensed an openness. So while on a retreat me and Hannah spent some time seeking God for this woman. We both sensed God give us a clear word and picture, which we wrote out and drew for her. When I gave them to her the next week she was naturally surprised, but also seemed really moved that we’d been praying for her. I’ll visit her again in a week or two to see what she made of the word.

I’ve also been trying to make a connection with someone at the Buddhist meditation centre, but no one ever seemed to answer the door or return my messages. But last week they opened up a cafe, so me and my mate Pete seized the opportunity! We sat in the café praying for an opportunity, when a cat wondered in and jumped up on my lap. One of the Buddhist nuns commented that the cat never acknowledges anyone, and wondered what it was about me the cat liked! This simple opening led to a great conversation about spirituality and gave me a natural opportunity to talk about my experiences of Jesus. Interestingly though, as soon as I mentioned Jesus, the cat attacked Pete! It literally jumped at him and tried to bite him. Weird!

Anyway, it’s early days, but I’m really sensing God is doing something within the new spiritualities of my community.

Tim

Warring against dullness

2010-10-21T10:20:00.002+01:00

‘We are in a war between dullness and astonishment. The most critical issue facing Christians is not abortion, pornography, the disintegration of the family, moral absolutes, MTV, drugs, racism, sexuality or school prayer. The critical issue today is dullness. We have lost our astonishment. The Good news is no longer good news, it is okay news. Christianity is no longer life changing, it is life enhancing. Jesus doesn’t change people into wild-eyed radicals anymore, He changes them into ‘nice people’.

If Christianity is simply about being nice, I’m not interested. What happened to radical Christianity that turned the world upside-down? What happened to the category-smashing, life-threatening, anti-institutional gospel that spread through the first century like wildfire and was considered (by those in power) dangerous? What happened to the kind of Christians whose hearts were on fire, who had no fear, who spoke the truth no matter what the consequences, who made the world uncomfortable, who were willing to follow Jesus wherever He went? What happened to the kind of Christians who were filled with passion and gratitude, and who every day were unable to get over the grace of God?

I’m ready for a Christianity that ‘ruins’ my life, that captures my heart and makes me uncomfortable. I want to be filled with an astonishment that is so captivating that I am considered wild and unpredictable and…well…dangerous. Yes, I want to be ‘dangerous’ to a dull and boring religion. I want a faith that is considered ‘dangerous’ by our predicable and monotonous culture.’

Robert Capon (Episcopal priest and author)

Ruth Valerio, mission and the environment

2010-10-12T18:25:00.001+01:00

On this month’s podcast we have a chat with Ruth Valerio. Ruth is the Manager of A Rocha’s Living Lightly project, which encourages us to live greener and simpler lives. She’s the author of L is for Lifestyle: Christian Living that Doesn’t Cost the Earth, and regularly speaks and writes on issues of justice and the environment.

I can certainly relate to what Ruth said about how environmental concern falls into that category of things you don’t see in the Bible until you see them! As I mentioned on the podcast, my eyes were opened when I got to the end of 2 Chronicles. There it makes the fascinating statement that ‘[Nebuchadnezzar] took into exile in Babylon those who had escaped the sword, and they became servants to him and to his sons until the establishment of the kingdom of Persia, to fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had made up for its Sabbaths. All the days that it lay desolate it kept Sabbath, to fulfill seventy years’ (2 Chron. 36:20-21)

This is a fascinating addition to the Kings account, which simply stated that the exile was due to idolatry and immorality (2 Kgs. 17:7-23).

For 490 years Isreal had abused the land God had given them. They had ignored God’s command to rest the land every seventh year (Lev. 25:1-7). As with the daily provision of manner (Exod 16:21-26), God promised that the land would produce enough food during six years of harvest to cover the year of rest.

Israel, it seems, had never once observed the Sabbath rest of the land. Their greed and lack of trust in God meant that the land was worked continually; they squeezed every last bit of fertility from it, in order to gain as much as they could. Rather than being good stewards of the land (Gen. 2:15), they exploited it. And so in response, God removed them from the land so it could enjoy the 70 Sabbath rests it had been denied.

So the exile wasn’t simply an act of judgment against Israel’s abuse of God (idolatry) or the abuse of themselves and others (immortality), but it was also an act of judgment against the abuse of the environment.

Once I’d seen this, I began to see this theme woven throughout the Bible. God is working to renew all things, our relationship with him, with ourselves, with each other, and with the environment within which we live. I believe that’s why environmental concern should be at the heart of Christian living and mission.

Enough

2010-10-08T13:19:00.002+01:00

Just came across another great video from the people at Conspiracy of Freedom

Unanswerable questions

2010-10-05T14:27:00.002+01:00

To celebrate their tenth anniversary, the search engine Ask Jeeves, have revealed the top ten ‘unanswerable’ questions in the past decade. The list is drawn from the 1.1 billion queries posted on their site since its launch.

It’s very interesting to note that the most asked ‘unanswerable question’ over the last decade is ‘What is the meaning of life?’ And, at number two, ‘Is there a God?’

Naturally some of the questions are a tad more trivial, such as ‘Do blondes have more fun?’ But throughout the top ten are deep and important questions. Number seven, for example, is ‘What is love?’ number 8 is ‘What is the secret to happiness?’ and number 10 is ‘How long will I live?’

So it seems that people are wrestling with the big questions of life, and hence there is an opportunity for us to share something of the hope and wisdom we have gained from our Christian journey.

The centre or the margins?

2010-09-20T10:03:00.001+01:00

One of the issues Kester Brewin touched on in our recent interview was the relationship between the institutional and emerging church. This is something that has been weighing on my mind for some time now, as I currently work for an institutional church (The Methodist Church) but am also very interested in and increasingly involved in new forms of church, and am also considering a pioneering role within Methodism.

So, I was very excited when Kester announced that he, Ian Mobsby, Maggi Dawn and Jonny Baker were going to thrash out this issue at a gathering in London. It was a fascinating discussion, with loads of really helpful insights.

If this is an issue you’re wrestling with, then I’d really encourage you to listen in. You can download the audio for free here.

Tim

Kester Brewin, pirates and the death of the emerging church

2010-09-14T16:03:00.002+01:00

On this month’s show we have a chat with Kester Brewin. Kester was one of the founding members of the alternative worship community Vaux, and through his writing and speaking has become one of the leading voices in the emerging church conversation.

I thought what Kester had to say was fascinating, and raised issues I’d given little or no thought to before. In particular I was struck by Kester’s belief that while relationships should be permanent, the way we structure our communities should be temporary.

I guess for most leaders the idea of letting a church die would seem like admitting defeat. But Kester is proposing that it could be seen as simply reflecting the death and resurrection that lies at the heart of our faith. Living in a rapidly changing culture, churches need to remain flexible and adaptive; they need to be ‘animals fit for their environment’. So I guess like the process of natural selection, it may be that churches need to die so that they can be reborn in a form suitable for their cultural environment.

This was the process Kester went through at Vaux. He described reaching a point where they could no longer pretend that everything was okay. And so after celebrating all that Vaux had meant to them, they let the community die.

I can see the wisdom in all this, but it does leave us with the obvious question, when is it time to die? If we put our churches to death every time we went through hard times, for example, there’d be no churches left! Kester gave a few helpful principles when recently asked this question at Greenbelt (you can download ‘Pirates of the Charism’ here), but I guess ultimately we’d have to be clearly guided by the Spirit.

I suppose in many ways this issue isn’t really relevant in my situation, as I’m still trying to form a community. But then again, I can see the wisdom in beginning a community with the possibility of its ending already in mind. As Kester said, in order for a positive ending to be a possibility, communities must resist the temptation to invest in things like buildings and salaries, as this would make the process of dying much more traumatic.

So perhaps endings should become part of our planning for new beginnings.

Tim

Home

2010-09-08T11:38:00.004+01:00

I came across a great video recently from the people at breathe and their conspiracy of freedom project. It sums up nicely what we've been trying to do on our street.

The spirituality of my local community

2010-08-19T14:39:00.001+01:00

I mentioned a few posts ago that I was going to start researching the spirituality of the town I live in. For a relatively small town of around 25,000, Sherwood has quite a bit of spiritual activity, with two magic shops, a psychic healer, clairvoyant, a yoga centre, a spiritualist church, and a Buddhist meditation centre. I’ve managed to spend time with most of these individuals and groups now, and have had some really interesting conversations.

All these groups confirmed that there is a strong spiritual ‘undercurrent’ in the town. It seems that while people don’t talk about spirituality in casual conversation, people are open if they are given the right environment. One yoga instructor described the people of Sherwood as very reflective and ‘looking for faith in something’. I asked one pagan whether business had been affected by the recession and they answered ‘not at all, spirituality is seen as a necessity, not a luxury’.

Apparently all the centres attract a wide range of clientele, although many said that they are particularly popular with mum’s whose children have just gone to school or left home as they are looking for a new focus and meaning in life.

The pagans said that young adults are usually sceptical, but curious, and often drop into the shops for a ‘reading’ or similar experience. In fact one young shop assistant I spoke to admitted to having struggled with a fear of death all her life, and so went to a pagan for advice, and the reading she was given was so accurate that she’s now committed to herself to paganism as a lifestyle.

I was keen to know more about whether these centres were offering one-off experiences or a lifestyle. They all said that while they are happy to lead people into isolated experiences, they were keen that people see what they do as a way of life. One yoga instructor said, for example, that while they are happy for people to simply come for a workout, their real focus is promoting a holistic lifestyle of physical, emotional and spiritual awareness and well being.

One of the key themes in all these conversations was spiritual experience. All my questions were answered with descriptions of tangible spiritual experiences, which drew people into a lifestyle. This reminded me of the way Jesus often ministered. He offered people an experience of himself—e.g. through healing, forgiveness, deliverance etc—and then invited them to follow him. And the early church followed a similar pattern. As Paul said to the Corinthians ‘my message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Sprit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power’

So it seems to me that in some ways, these spiritual practitioners are closer to the way Jesus ministered than the local churches. They demonstrate a spiritual reality and then invite people to explore further.

This has got me thinking about the type of mission we need to engage in, and the type of church that would need to emerge from this mission, if we are to be effective in our mission to this spiritually curious community.

Tim

Terry Virgo and new forms of church

2010-08-12T16:59:00.003+01:00

We’re having a summer break here at Nomad Podcast, so you won’t be getting our usual show with discussions and book reviews. But to keep you busy we’re uploading an interview with Terry Virgo, the leader of the New Frontiers network of churches.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, Terry Virgo and New Frontiers don’t sound much like emerging or Fresh expressions of church (and it is true, off air Terry admitted to not having heard of ‘Fresh Expressions’). But I was recently given a copy of his biography, No Well Worn Paths, and I was struck by how, in the early chapters, he was asking the same sorts of questions we’ve been asking. Having come to faith at the age of 16 he found church to be a ‘foreign culture’, and he craved genuine community without all the religious trappings, and he craved a genuine spiritual experience. This was at the time when the charismatic movement was just starting to form, and through that Terry had a life transforming experience of the Spirit. He immediately developed a passion for prayer and mission. Consequently, he gave up his job in the civil service and moved onto a deprived local housing estate. During this time he lived by faith so he could dedicate all his time to serving. He never once asked for money and never sent out any ‘prayer’ letters, but money arrived as he needed it. He would spend each morning in prayer and Bible study and each afternoon serving on the estate.

He then became the leader of a small local church, and worked hard to bring them into the same experience of the Spirit he had had. This soon developed into a ministry where he began to advice other churches on renewal. And so New Frontiers started to take shape, a network born out of church planting, and the reshaping of existing churches. New Frontiers now has over 500 churches worldwide.

To be honest, I only really enjoyed the first part of the book which described Terry’s early commitment to prayer, mission and the local church (and an interesting overview of the charismatic movement). The book then focused on the development of his global ministry, which I found much less engaging.

Terry started the book by saying there was a need for new wineskins for new wine, that the structures of church needed to change. But as I read on I became a bit disappointed that the only changes the book documented were the introduction of the gifts of the Spirit and more informal services. I started to find myself getting frustrated, hoping he would go on to more fundamentally challenging the way we do church. My frustration grew as his small house churches grew into more highly structured (and in many ways traditionally structured) ‘warehouse’ churches.

But then I guess the changes people like Terry Virgo have brought in I’ve taken for granted. Informality and openness to the Spirit were major victories for him, and many churches have benefitted from that.

So the book challenged me to carry on this journey and try to figure out what sort of wineskins are required for the church in my local context.

Tim

Lonely Society part 2

2010-07-30T10:05:00.000+01:00

Following on from my last post, I’ve come across another couple of reports that suggest one of our most pressing needs is to tackle the isolation brought about by our individualistic society.

The Young Foundation undertook a series of studies between 2007 and 2009 to try and map the needs of people in the UK. Obviously a variety of needs were identified, but under the category of psychological needs the report notes that a million people have no-one to turn to and no-one who appreciates them. That’s nearly 1 in 60 people who have no one in their lives who cares for them! That means that there is almost certainly someone living on my street and yours, who has no one looking out for them.

Co-operatives UK have compared data from 1982 and 2010 in order to compile a picture of the change in the state of neighbourliness in the UK. As you might expect, the news isn’t great. According to their findings, Britain is becoming a fragmented society of individuals who know fewer people well—whether neighbours or friends—and are frightened of speaking to strangers. And the number of people who say they suffer from loneliness has more than doubled. They conclude that the UK is half as neighbourly as it was three decades ago. For example, in 1982, the majority of us would speak to our neighbours at least once a day, compared to less than once a week in 2010. And in 1982 we knew the names of six more neighbours than we do today. Apparently we are still as willing to help out a neighbour in need, but of course if we don’t know our neighbours, we won’t be aware of their needs.

So there is a real need in our local communities and one which is relatively easy to meet. Simply inviting your neighbours round for a drink, or a barbeque, or asking how they are when you see them in the street, is a simple but potentially life-transforming expression of Jesus’ command to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’.

Tim

Lonely Society

2010-07-23T16:10:00.001+01:00

I recently read the Mental Health Foundation’s report The Lonely Society? It suggests that young adults are the loneliest age group in our society. For example, nearly 60% of those aged between 18 to 34 questioned spoke of feeling lonely often or sometimes, compared to 35% of those aged over 55.

The report puts these high levels of loneliness down to the decline of community and to a growing focus on work. It also highlighted the fact that the proportion of people living alone had doubled between 1972 and 2008. New technology also played a part. On the one hand it has allowed people to make connections they might not otherwise have made, but on the other it can weaken existing connections. For example, nearly a third of young people questioned said they spent too much time communicating with friends and families online when they should see them in person.

A lot of these findings ring true on our street. There certainly isn’t a strong sense of local community (although hopefully this is changing). People generally seem to leave their homes to go to work, come home, watch a bit of TV and go to bed. And a number of these people live on their own.

As part of our ongoing attempts to address this, last Sunday we had another street barbeque, and 24 people came along. It was a great time, with most people hanging around all afternoon (and no rain this year!). I had a good chat with a guy a few doors down that I hadn’t properly connected with before. Turns out his partner works away all week, so he’s on his own, so I’m hoping we’ll be able to draw him into a few of our other regular activities.

So while reports like The Lonely Society? don’t paint a great picture of our society, they do highlight real opportunities. We’re finding that simply offering time and friendship can have a profound effect on people’s lives.

Tim

New creation on the street

2010-07-15T20:39:00.001+01:00

One of our first prayers when we moved onto the street was that God would help us love and serve our neighbours. In a very general sense, the first need we identified was community. No one really knew anyone else on the street and so we’ve been working hard to try and address this (for example, we’re having another street barbeque this Sunday). But we’ve found it much harder to get close enough to people to identify more specific, individual needs.

One neighbour we have got to know really well, however, is Geoff from two doors down. For over a year now he has been unemployed, and throughout that time we have tried to encourage him, and pray that he’d find work. Last week our prayers were answered.

Nick has recently started work as a safeguarding training officer. He is visually impaired, and so needs a driver and assistant when he goes out to give presentations. Nick put Geoff’s name forward, and he got the job! So now Nick has an assistant, and Geoff’s got work. Perfect.

It really felt like a ‘new creation’ moment, as the consequences of sin were challenged, as both physical disability and unemployment were touched by God.

Ian Mobsby, post-secular culture and mission

2010-07-10T20:04:00.002+01:00

On this month’s podcast I headed down to the Scooterworks cafe in London to meet up with Ian Mobsby.

Ian is an ordained Anglican priest who is one of the founding members of, and works full time with the Moot Community in London. Ian is also an associate Missioner of the Church of England Archbishop’s Fresh Expressions Team, and an associate lecturer of a number of Ordination training institutes in England.

I thoroughly enjoyed interviewing Ian. Perhaps more than anyone we’ve interviewed, I think Ian’s ministry combines a deep spirituality, intellectual rigour, and a real practical, hands on, loving concern for people.

I was left contemplating a lot after the interview, but the idea of living in a post-secular, yet post-religious society has stayed clearest in my mind. How could our mission be shaped by a culture that when searching for meaning is seemingly less interested in knowledge and facts, and increasingly interested in spiritual experience?

This rise in interest in spirituality certainly seems to be the case in my city of Nottingham. The Centre for the Study of Human Relations at Nottingham University produced a report called Understanding the Spirituality of People who Don't Go to Church. It compared the spiritual experiences of those in 2000 with those in 1987. They found that on average, people’s awareness of the spiritual dimension of life had risen from 48% in 1987 to 76% in 2000.

The report concluded by saying that ‘people increasingly see themselves as ‘spiritual but not religious’’ and that they don’t see the church as a vehicle through which they might meet a genuine spiritual world.

Again, statistics back this up, as during the same period that this study was conducted, church attendance in Nottinghamshire fell from just under 8% in 1989, to just under 6% in 2000 (and I suspect these trends have continued over the subsequent 10 years).

So I’m starting to give some serious thought and prayer to how we might go about engaging with these trends in mission, and what sort of church might be required for this context.

I really don’t know what the answers are yet, but I’m going to start by researching the spirituality of my particular corner of Nottinghamshire, Sherwood. In this relatively small suburb we’ve got two magic shops, a physic healer, clairvoyant, a yoga centre (and not the typical watered down western variety, one that actually teaches Hindu spirituality), Tai-Chi, a spiritualist church, and a short drive away we’ve got a Buddhist meditation centre. So I thought I’d begin by visiting these spiritual centres and hopefully understanding how they perceive the spirituality of this area.

I’ll let you know how I get on over the next few months.

Another reminder of what’s important

2010-07-01T12:25:00.000+01:00

I’ve just heard that a lady who’d been coming along to one of my small groups has died of a heart attack.

She was one of the more motivated of the group, in terms of both attendance and the contributions she made. She was also, however, the one who struggled most with the Christian faith. In fact, just last week I was leading a discussion on the idea of new creation and God’s plan to restore all things, and she really struggled to accept it. She’d been through a lot in her life, and found it hard to imagine that every tear could be wiped away. I spent just a few minutes with her taking her through some passages and trying to relate them to her experiences. I’m sure I’d have spent longer had I known her fate the following week.

The good news is, despite the fact she seems more comfortable with traditional church culture than she did with Christianity (I usually find it’s the other way around), I’d really seen her move closer to God during the couple of years I’d known her.

Her death, though, was another reminder to me of the importance of giving everyone I interact with my full attention. I lean more towards the ‘task orientated’ end of the personality spectrum, and so I can find myself talking to people while at the same time thinking about a job I need to be getting on with.

Every time I read one of the gospels I’m struck by how Jesus managed to give individuals his full attention. He often did this despite being surrounded by crowds, his disciples asking questions, and even when hanging on the cross. I can’t quite figure out how he did that, so I’m just praying that his Spirit will dwell in me and transform more and more into his likeness.

Mission on my own terms

2010-06-24T14:47:00.000+01:00

As you know, we’ve been trying hard to get to know the people who live on our street. With barbeques, house parties, meals and film and craft club, we’ve done quite a bit to try and kick start a sense of community. All of this though has been on our own terms. We’ve laid things on and invited others to join us.

Quite early on, one or two of our neighbours would periodically invite us along to something they were involved in, for example, a quiz night at a pub, a gig they were involved in, or just for a drink. Being the busy people we are, we often had to say no to many of these offers. We didn’t really notice how many times this was happening until the offers dried up. If you say no to someone enough times they will, of course, stop asking.

We had to make the decision that we would rearrange our plans if someone invited us to something. If building relationships on the street was really important to us, then we had to make it a priority.

So, when a neighbour came round t week to tell me his car treasure hunt partner had dropped out and asked whether I’d stand in, I agreed (even though it was a Sunday morning and I was expected at the Sunday service).

I didn’t really know what a car treasure hunt was, but it turns out that it involves driving all over the county (not only did I have to miss church, but I had to lay aside my environmental principles!), trying to solve clues and locate insanely well hidden ‘treasure’. Fortunately my neighbour was well experienced, and so was able to compensate for my obvious inexperience (my directions were okay, but I only answered about 3 of the 30 questions!).

I actually didn’t enjoy it all that much, and as the day wore on I was increasingly concerned about what an environmental disaster it was! Having said that, it was a classic example of a ‘third place’. There are about 30 regulars in the club (and about another 15 who come occasionally), and they are a really tight group. They do a treasure hunt most months, and once a month get together for a social (apparently the treasure hunt itself doesn’t qualify as a social event!). They also regularly get together for a meal, to play golf, and a number of other spin off activities. And, each year they all go on holiday together. Consequently, there was a really strong sense of community, but it wasn’t a closed community, they are always looking to draw new people in, and made me feel really welcome.

So if it wasn’t for the fact that what they do involves needlessly burning gallons of fuel, I think I’d consider joining (even though I found the treasure hunt itself pretty tedious). It’d be a perfect place for making new connections, and sharing my faith.

Since the treasure hunt, my neighbour has dropped round a few times; we’ve had a drink together, and watched the footy (come on England!). So by dropping my plans, and accepting his invite to go on the treasure hunt, our connection seems to have really deepened.

The Big Lunch

2010-06-18T11:02:00.001+01:00

We’re just starting to plan our second annual street barbeque. We were inspired last year by the Big Lunch initiative, the brain child of the Eden Project. They reckon over a million people were involved in some sort of community meal last year, which is great news for a society which seems to be suffering from an increasing disintegration of local communities.

Last year’s barbeque had a profound impact on our street. About 35 people showed up (probably two thirds of the street), and with one or two exceptions, no one seemed to know anyone else! But despite this there was a brilliant atmosphere, and we ate, drank, and laughed for the whole afternoon (despite the rain).

The event really seemed to lift the atmosphere in the street, and now most people at least recognise the people they live near, and often stop and chat in the street. Me and Hannah made good ongoing friendship with 5 people, and have had a number of opportunities to talk about and demonstrate our faith.

So we’re really looking forward to this year’s party, especially as a number of new individuals and families have recently moved in (some of them very ‘challenging’).

If you’ve never done anything like this before, I strongly urge you to get involved. It’s a really easy and low pressure way to get to know better the people you live near. All we did was knock on doors inviting people to come along and bring drinks and food to share. Then we hired a big gas barbeque and got some public liability insurance (apparently people have sued for various injuries!). The only slight complicating factor can be where to hold it. If you’ve got front gardens then use them. But if not, you can either get permission from your local council to close the street, or if you have a wide pavement like we do, then use that, but put up signs telling cars to drive dead slow.

The official day of the Big Lunch is Sunday July 18th, so you’ve still got a few weeks to get involved!

Nigel Pimlott, Youth Work and the Emerging Church

2010-06-10T14:07:00.002+01:00

On this month’s podcast (online later today hopefully) Nick has a chat with Nigel Pimlott, author of Youth Work After Christendom and Deputy CEO for Frontier Youth Trust.

I have almost no experience of youth work, so I wasn’t expecting to connect with this interview very well. As it happened, though, there was a lot that really resonated with me.

My ears pricked up when Nigel made the observation that a lot of the ‘alternative stuff’ that we see the emerging church experiment with is the ‘bread and butter’ of youth work. This observation helped make sense of a lot of my struggles with church over the years.

Although I didn’t find faith until ’93, I had flirted with the church on and off through most of my life. My parents dutifully sent me to Sunday school each week, which from what little I can remember was quite an engaging experience. After only a couple of years of this, however, I was dumped in the church service, which I only tolerated for a couple of weeks before leaving never to return. A few years later I ended up in a youth group, which again I recall enjoying, but again after a couple of years I was ‘promoted’ to the Sunday service and subsequently quit the church. And again, a few years after this I found myself in the youth group of another church, and once again the pattern was repeated. I just couldn’t make the transition from the creative, informal, relational, edgy, whole life encompassing youth groups, to what I saw as the rather one dimensional, formal, philosophical, and just plain boring church services.

A number of years after this I made friends with a Christian at work, and ended up having a profound experience of Jesus. Consequently I thought I’d better to go back to church. I really thought that now I was a Christian, church would be different. But it wasn’t. I started to think that maybe the problem was with me, and so I spoke to the pastor, and he confirmed that I did indeed have a ‘spiritual problem’. I struggled with this over the next 15 years, and it has only been in the last few years that I’ve begun to realise that perhaps the problem wasn’t with me after all.

I can now see that the youth workers had worked hard to form a genuine sense of community and to present the gospel in a way that was natural and authentic. The church services, on the other hand, hadn’t. They had expected me to extract myself from my culture, and become part of theirs. The ‘culture shock’ that this led to was explained away as part of the process of becoming a mature Christian.

This was painful, frustrating and confusing at the time, but it’s an experience that I’m now glad I had. I can now see that culturally sensitive fresh expressions of church are absolutely essential if we ever hope to pass on our experiences of Jesus.

So I write this post to gently rebuke (in love!) all those ministers who blamed me for not connecting with their churches. And I write it in thanks to all those youth workers who took the time to get to know me and presented the gospel in a way that I could relate to. Although I didn’t find faith on their watch, they played a big part in moving me in that direction.

Tim

Sean Stillman, Zac’s Place and the need for fresh expressions

2010-05-24T17:17:00.004+01:00

We’ve decided to make a slight tweak to our pattern of podcasts and make Nomad Extra more of an occasional thing (which was actually our original intention). Nick’s gone and got himself a proper 9-5 job, and things are pretty busy for me right now, so rather than being a regular monthly affair, Nomad Extra will appear from time to time when we come across interesting people doing interesting things. The main podcast will continue as normal though, coming out on the 10th of each month (or there abouts).

On this month’s Nomad Extra Nick had a chat with Sean Stillman. Sean is based in Swansea in South Wales, and has been involved in mission among bikers, musicians and artists for a number of years now. This work led to the formation of Zac’s Place, the progress of which you can follow on Sean’s blog.

What really struck me about Sean’s work with Zac’s Place was that it was born out of necessity. It wasn’t some interesting ecclesial experiment, but it emerged out of a real need. Sean had made good connections with the biking community through a kind of chaplaincy role, and people wanted to continue those conversations, but understandably weren’t interested in doing this in a traditional church setting. So Sean started to meet regularly in a local bar, and from that Zac’s Place was born.

I guess in some ways the little community I’m apart of did start as an experiment. We’d been thinking, praying and reading a lot about incarnational mission, and so we thought we’d give it a go and see what would happen. Things have slowly been developing over the last year though, and I’m increasingly seeing a need for a fresh expression of church. Me and Hannah, for example, lead a little group of Christians all of whom have struggled to make much more than a superficial connection with traditional church. Nick and I have formed a film club often leads to great conversations about spirituality, but none of them would ever come to church. And we’ve also made numbers of other connections with people who are curious about spirituality, but who are not at all interested in anything formal or ‘religious’.

So we’re starting to wonder as a group where all this is leading us. Do we just carry on as we are, meeting together as a small community, and developing connections on our street? Or do we start to seriously think about expanding our horizons and forming something that can meet the needs of people over a wider area? At the moment we’re really not sure. But listening to Sean’s story has firmed my resolve to seek God and discern what it is he’s calling us to.

Tim

Stuart Murray, Post-Christendom and the emerging church

2010-05-10T16:16:00.002+01:00

On this month’s podcast we have as chat with Stuart Murray. Stuart is chair of the Anabaptist Network, and is a trainer and consultant in emerging churches, church planting and mission after Christendom. So Nick took the opportunity to quiz him about what church and mission might look like in our post-Christendom culture.

I felt a real connection with a lot of what Stuart was saying in relation to Christendom and its impact on the way we understand and go about church and mission. It really make sense of, and articulated well, a lot of the frustrations I have felt over the years.

I also liked the way Stuart didn’t just pander to those people frustrated with the worst elements of the Christendom church, he also challenged the emerging church as well. My conscience was prinked, for example, when he said that emerging churches are often clearer about what they don’t like and don’t want to be, than what they’re heading towards. I’ve certainly been guilty of that.

In fact, much of our time on Nomad podcast has been reflecting on what we don’t like about church (as some of our critics have noted!). I guess to some extent it’s human nature. I’ve heard, for example, a number of friends say that their parenting style has been based on not doing what their parents did! And I guess to some extent I’ve adopted a similar attitude towards church. I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally wrong with this as a way of kick starting us into doing something new, but we have to move on from this, we can’t define ourselves by what we’re not.

We at Nomad are starting to think through who we are and what we’re doing. So far things on the street have been developing nicely. But where are we headed? Are we just a group of friends who for a time got together to share their frustrations, or are we a group with a longer term positive vision?

Stuart said his hope is that the next wave of emerging churches will be more missional, hopeful, and creative. I feel inspired to try and make a contribution to that future.

Tim

Never too old to be radical

2010-05-05T10:01:00.001+01:00

A friend sent me the following article, which was written for the weekly notice sheet at his parent's Methodist church. What’s interesting about it is it wasn’t written by a young, radical, missional thinker, but a long serving Methodist who is over 80 years old.

“The first decade of the 21st Century is now behind us...We now have the opportunity to look forward.

What will the church look like in 10 years time—what will be our vision in 2020? Will there be any new people in our church who are ‘at home’ enough with our age-old liturgical ways of worshipping, or will it be the same people, only 10 years older, some of whom will be ‘looking on’ from the ranks of the saints in glory? Will the core of people keeping our churches on the road just the way we like it have reached the age when they just cannot do it any more—because they are 10 years older than now?

I have no desire to be alarming or alarmist, but there is a need to be realistic—and that includes all of us. These are amongst the uncomfortable questions that all churches everywhere in this country have been addressing in recent years. Put simply, we are burying our heads in the sand if we persist in thinking that the Methodist Church can exist in the future as it exists today, most crucially, just like it always has in the past.

The sociological and cultural changes that have hit our world in the last 20 years have been massive and irreversible. It’s the reason why both children and parents—that’s two whole generations worth of people—see church as something that can be opted in or out of, or, more commonly, left on the supermarket shelf as a non-essential part of life. People coming to church in these days see sitting in a pew or seat for an hour or so as a meaningless activity. They can’t see the point of buying into a set of rituals that says nothing to them.

There is far less need to be a ‘member’ anymore—of any club or organisation, including a church. There is no longer any need to be dutiful and obliging. These are the values of yesterday and not of the present generation under the age of fifty. If you want something, you buy it and you stick with a brand only if it provides the satisfaction and fulfilment that you are expecting from it.
This year, therefore, we need to ask the serious questions, ‘What is church for?’, ‘Whom do we serve?’ Put simply, the church is God’s people meeting together with God in their midst. Church is not a museum! Church is what you have left when you remove buildings, history and traditions! We are left with us—God’s people. We serve God in his world.

Jesus’ own vision of 2020 is seeking God, his kingdom and his righteousness first. This means that our prime directive is not the preservation and custodianship of arcane styles of worship, or even the stewardship and upkeep of our facilities. It is finding and joining in with the activity of the God of love in this needy world...It has nothing to do with rules and regulations, traditions and styles. It has nothing to do with whether something works and pulls in the crowds. It has nothing to do with raising money and paying bills. That is not seeking God’s kingdom.

We need to see the future as Jesus sees it. If we do, then in 2020 we will be able to say that our vision is the same as Jesus our Lord in this year of 2010. Let us explore together God’s future and place ourselves in his hands.”

Mission, films and how to do theology

2010-04-30T10:54:00.008+01:00

One of the things we’ve got going on our street in the last few months is a film club. Every other week about 7 or 8 of us (Christians, agnostics and atheists) get together to watch a film and discuss its themes.

Last week we had a brilliant discussion after watching the Cohen brother’s No Country for Old Men. Maybe I read too much into it (a weakness of mine), but I suggested that the film represented a clash of worldviews.

It seemed to me that the killer, Anton Chigurh, represented an atheistic worldview. Chigurh’s ‘success’ in his environment was mainly due to his physical and mental superiority. Yet at the same time much of his actions seemed to be dictated by chance, as he often tossed a coin to determine whether or not to kill. And sometimes before killing he’d ‘comfort’ his victim by encouraging them to accept their fate because ‘life’ had brought them to this point. Although he did have some sort of moral code (like killing a victims wife because he’d promised he would!), it was a code personal to him with no external reference point. So it seemed to me that he represented the random chance, natural selection and subjective morality of the atheistic evolutionary worldview.

In contrast to this was the sheriff Ed Bell. Bell seemed to represent religion, but one which was struggling to cope with its rapidly changing and decaying environment. Over his career Bell had seen all kinds of horrors, and his faith was deeply shaken. He said at one point that he used to think that one day God would show up, but he now realised that that was not going to happen.

The film ended ambiguously, with Bell describing a dream that perhaps gave him some hope that God might still offer him guidance (although that’s maybe just my reading of it). But it was Chigurh who although badly wounded, had again survived and continued to dominate his environment, while Bell was left staring into his coffee cup wondering how to make sense of his place, and God’s, in his environment.

Anyway, my analysis of the film led on to a fascinating discussion. It was a broad ranging discussion, but I felt it was most engaging when I pushed my atheist friends to justify the grounds for their moral code, and when they pushed me to explain a church that seems to them unable to make sense of, or relate to, its environment.

As everyone drifted away, I was left with the thought of how much more interesting theology is when done with non-believers. This seems to be how many of the church fathers went about it, such as Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho, Tertullian’s Against the Jews, Origen’s Against Celsus and Theophilus’ To Autolycus.

So I was left reflecting on the fact that if my faith is genuinely going to make sense of and relate this rapidly changing world, then I need to start thinking about how I can genuinely listen to and engage theologically with this world.

Tim

Beth Keith, learning networks and Resource

2010-04-20T15:15:00.004+01:00

On this month’s Nomad Extra (which Nick assures me will be online Saturday), I have a chat with Beth Keith.

Beth is the Learning Networks Coordinator for the Fresh Expressions team.
She coordinates a range of networks, with a geographical, mission or denominational focus. These networks allow emerging churches to support each other through sharing experiences and learning together.

Being a part of various networks has become increasingly important to me over the last year. Last weekend, for example, I went to the newforms conference which seeks to network together people involved in, or interested in, simple/house/organic forms of church. The teaching and worship times were excellent, but it really was the networking that I appreciated the most. I learnt a ton of stuff listening to the stories of people all over the country who are planting simple churches, much of which really challenged my understanding of church. Just knowing there are others out there asking the same sorts of questions, wrestling with the same issues and feeling the same frustrations is hugely encouraging.

So if you’re not a part of a network and it’s something you think you and your community might benefit from, then drop Beth an email at beth.keith@freshexpressions.org.uk or go to the share website.

Beth is also on the team of the ReSource missional church planting course. ReSource really has been one of the highlights of the last six months for me and Hannah. The course consists of four training weekends for people who feel called to pioneering new forms of mission. Each weekend is set in a different context with a different theme. On the 2009/10 course we’ve been to Sheffield to explore mission and culture, we’ve spent time with two communities in London looking at mission and worship, we spent time with three communities in Leeds exploring community transformation, and in May we’re going to Southampton to reflect on personal and team formation.

The course is a brilliant mix of lectures, discussion, storytelling, worship and lots of eating, drinking and hanging out with people who are on a similar journey. I’d recommend it to anyone serious about exploring new forms of church and mission. If you’re interested then have a look at the ReSource website, or drop Beth an email.

Tim

Ways into Small Missional Communities

2010-04-15T16:25:00.007+01:00

I’ve been enjoying Ian Adam’s sereis of posts Ways into Small Missional Communities. Ian is co-founder of mayBe in Oxford and CMS’s missional community developer.

So far he’s written 14 articles, all of which are really insightful and practical.

starting out in company
what's the big idea
beginning to live a simple pattern
finding the spirit of the community
being shaped by our setting
small is good
eating and drinking together
finding a name
earthy good news
a transparent, light and freeing framework
children and community
eucharist
accessible and committed – the travelling band
love your roots

You can follow the continuation of this series at Ian’s blog. He’s also posted them on his kindling page so that others can join in the conversation.

Brian McLaren, mission and the importance of asking questions

2010-04-11T08:52:00.002+01:00

On this month’s show Nick has a chat with one of the leading figures of the emerging church movement, Brian McLaren.

Despite being one of the nicest guys you could meet, Brian McLaren is a controversial figure among many evangelicals. Our interview with him didn’t touch on any areas of controversy as we were primarily concerned about his understanding of ecclesiology and missiology. Having said that, it seems that the areas where he’s got into hot water have been because of mission. A number of times he said that it was his passion for mission that led him to embark on this ‘journey’ and to ask the questions he does.

Regardless of whether I agree with, for example, his understanding of God as portrayed in the OT, or his views on judgement, or whatever, I really admire his openness in wrestling with these questions.

Before I came to faith I was totally turned-off Christianity by the ill-considered, pat answers that I heard Christians give to what I felt were complex and important issues. Back then, faith seemed to me to be little more than mindless optimism. It wasn’t until I met a more thoughtful, considered Christian that I began to warm to the idea of God’s existence and care for me.

When this journey led me to church, however, I encountered people who considered me ‘lacking in faith’, and even suffering from a ‘critical spirit’ when I asked questions. It wasn’t until I got to theological college and was actively encouraged to ask questions, that I found real depth and stability in my faith.

The early church was pretty open to questions. For example, some of the New Testament’s most famous evangelistic ‘sermons’ were actually responses to questions, such as Peter’s address at Pentecost (Acts 2:13-40), and Paul’s in Athens (Acts 17:18-34). Paul adopted a similar style in his teaching. When he was speaking at a church service in Troas, for example, we’re told he ‘spoke to the people’ (Acts 20:9). In the original Greek the word for ‘spoke’ actually relates more closely to the English for converse, discourse, argue, or discuss. The same word is used to describe Paul’s teaching in Ephesus (Acts 19:9).

In Paul’s letter to the Corinthians we catch a glimpse of an early church service, and again we see Paul encouraging discussion. In fact, there seems to have been so much interaction that Paul had to write to remind the church that their services should be conducted in an orderly fashion (1 Cor. 14:26-40).

The early church, therefore, encouraged questions and discussion in both mission and in its church services. So while I might not agree with all Brian McLaren’s conclusions, I welcome the questions he’s asking and the debate it is stirring up.

Tim

Resurrection Sunday

2010-03-30T16:23:00.000+01:00

Have you ever wondered why Jesus was raised from the dead on a Sunday (or is it just me who ponders such questions!)? Surely the Sabbath would have been a more appropriate day as it was the significant day for Jews.

Well actually the Sabbath wouldn’t have been a very appropriate day, as Saturday was their day of rest. The Sabbath was based on the idea that after 6 days of creation, God took some time off to rest from his work and enjoy all that he had created. The resurrection, however, signalled that God was once again going about his creative work.

Sunday was the first day of the working week for Jews, so it was the perfect day to symbolise God’s new creation, to symbolise God going back to work. When we read in Acts that the first Christians met to worship ‘on the first day of the week’ (Acts 20:7) it meant that they met to worship before they went off to their jobs. This would have been powerfully symbolic as they were coming out of the Sabbath rest day on the Saturday, and into the new working week on the Sunday. For the early Christians, then, Sunday would have symbolised going back to work with God.

We’re all aware how sin has affected every area of our lives. It has affected our relationship with God, with our neighbours, with our environment and with ourselves. Jesus’ resurrection was the day when God marked a definitive breaking in of new life into this fallen world. The power of sin was finally broken, and a new relationship with God was made possible. Every area of life can now be restored, as we rebuild our relationships with each other, ourselves and the environment. Mission, then, is joining God in his work of new creation as he seeks to restore these relationships.

It was on a Sunday that God started the creation of the universe when light overcame darkness for the first time, and it was on a Sunday that God created a new body for Jesus when the Light of the world overcame the darkness of death. So Resurrection Sunday (and indeed every Sunday) should be a working day for us, when we start the new week by joining God in his mission of new creation.

Tim

Martin Smith, worship and mission

2010-03-24T19:10:00.004Z

On this month’s Nomad Extra Nick gave Martin Smith a call to chat about the end of delirious, and the connection between worship and mission.

Martin cited the band’s tour through parts of the developing world as the spark that eventually ignited the CompassionArt project. As delirious went from country to country leading hundreds of thousands of Christians in worship, they were eventually confronted with the reality of the terrible poverty in many of those countries. As Martin said, he couldn’t ‘keep getting on a plane and going home without making a response’.

Worship and mission is clearly linked in the Bible. The connection is most clearly seen in Israel’s annual festivals. The festival of Purim, for example, was described as a time when the people would not only feast and give presents but also give ‘gifts to the poor’ (Est. 9:22; cf. Neh. 8:10). Interestingly, though, the provision for the poor wasn’t simply material, instead they were actually drawn into the celebrations. At the festival of Weeks, and similarly at Tabernacles, for example, the Israelites were expected to:

‘…rejoice before the LORD your God…you, your sons and daughters, your menservants and maidservants, the Levites in your town, and the aliens, the fatherless and the widows living among you’ (Deut. 16:11)

The festivals were, therefore, not only a time when the poor and marginalised were provided for but also publicly recognised and included.

The obligation to care for and protect the poor and marginalised was, however, largely overlooked. Consequently, the prophets frequently condemned the festivals as being empty ritual. The problem was not that Israel’s worship at the festivals was insincere, but that they were not providing for those in need:

‘I hate, I despise your religious feasts; I cannot stand your assemblies…Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps. But let justice roll on like a river…’ (Amos 5:21-24)

Only justice could transform these festivals into meaningful worship. Israel’s worship festivals in themselves meant nothing, however carefully they were observed, unless they symbolised proper care and protection for the marginalised and oppressed.

Similar abuses can be seen in the New Testament. Paul had ‘no praise’ for the Corinthians because at the Lord’s Supper the poor went away hungry, while others had eaten and drunk in excess (1 Cor. 11:21). Consequently, Paul concluded that ‘it is not the Lord’s Supper you eat’ (1 Cor. 11:17-22).

The message seems clear, that we can’t express true love for God in worship, unless we love our neighbour (e.g. 1 Jn. 4:20). So what a great idea CompassionArt was, getting together a group of songwriters, whose songs are now not only helping us express our love for God but are also directly helping those most in need.

Tim

Jonny Baker and new forms of worship

2010-03-16T15:10:00.003Z

I was brought up going to Sunday school so I was somewhat familiar with ‘planet church’. It wasn’t until I actually had a life-transforming encounter with Jesus at the age of twenty however, that church became a problem. I knew that something real had happened to me, and I wanted to express that with other people who had had similar experiences. But what I found in the church left me confused and frustrated. It wasn’t even as simple as finding a dualistic divide between planet church and the real world, instead I found three worlds, planet church, the real world, and a relationship with Jesus.

Of course as a young Christian I didn’t know how to articulate this. I honestly thought that because I was struggling to connect with God through singing soft rock romantic ballads, that I had a spiritual problem. So I went to the pastor and explained my concerns, and he confirmed that I did indeed have a spiritual problem!

Little did I know that at the same time Christians all over the place were feeling these same frustrations. Fortunately some of them, like Jonny Baker, were starting to do something about it.

I’ve been following Jonny’s blog for some time now, and have found it a really helpful way to stay in touch with the alternative worship and emerging church scene (and of course to plunder his ‘worship tricks’). So it was a great pleasure to interview him for this month’s podcast.

It was on the ReSource course that I had chance to visit Grace, the alternative worship community Jonny is a part of. What I experienced at Grace was, in some ways, no less a culture shock than my first experiences of church. Only this time it was a shock because I was stepping out of 17 years of life on planet church, into something that seemed to be both the real world and church. Jonny had said before the service that Grace’s intention was to worship God using ‘everyday stuff’ and that is exactly what I found. Rather than trying to describe it to you though, have a look at some pictures from this service, entitled rest, and some previous ones.

The evening I spent at Grace reminded me somewhat of the Last Supper. I don’t mean that Jonny is some kind of messianic figure come to lead the church in an exodus from the bondage of traditional forms of worship! Rather, I could see many similarities in the service Jesus led and the one I found at Grace. Jesus led a service that included eating, drinking and hanging out, scripture, some teaching, questions, prayer, praise, movement, and every day things given symbolic meaning. This required the worshipers to touch, taste, look, listen and to move.

So I guess really the new forms of worship that communities like Grace are experimenting with aren’t anything new at all (as I’m sure they’d be the first to admit). Rather they’re taking the principles of ancient forms of worship and making them contemporary. They’re simply trying to do what Paul encouraged the church at Rome to do 2000 years ago, to offer their whole bodies to God as an act of worship (Rm. 12:1).

Tim

Mission and resurrection life

2010-03-02T12:34:00.000Z

Last week I went to a funeral of a young woman who had taken her own life.

She had had a stable upbringing, and had been actively involved in the church. She was good looking, fun loving, widely travelled, and loved music and dance. She had a loving husband, and two beautiful children. By all accounts she had everything going for her.

A few years ago, however, she developed quite bad post-natal depression. She sought help and seemed to make good progress. Then her father suddenly died, and she slipped back into depression. Again she sought professional help, including admitting herself into psychiatric care. After a few more cycles of improvements and deteriorations, she ran away, and eventually ended her life.

So many thoughts were swirling around my mind during the funeral, but, strange at it may seem, mission was the predominant one.

Sin has affected every area of life. It has screwed up our relationship with God, with our neighbours, with our environment and with ourselves. If we let it, every area of our lives can easily slide towards chaos. But Jesus’ resurrection marked a definitive breaking in of new life into this fallen world. The power of sin was shattered, and a new relationship with God was made possible. Every area of life can now be renewed and restored, as we rebuild our relationships with each other, ourselves and the environment. Mission, then, is joining God in seeking to restore these relationships.

As I sat in that funeral, looking at the devastation death had brought, I firmed my resolve to commit my life to joining God in his mission to bring new life to this fallen world. I firmed my resolve to never miss the opportunities to care for those people God brings across my path.

I’ve realised that I may never know where someone’s struggles will lead them, however trivial they may seem to me. And I may never know the significance of my offer of help, however small it may appear to me. So as I begin to reflect on Easter and the celebration of the resurrection, I’ll be asking God to show me where he is working to bring resurrection life in my local community, so I can join him there.

Tim

Matt Rees and Home

2010-02-24T16:47:00.003Z

The sort of interviews I really enjoy doing on Nomad podcast are with those people who have deeply reflected on the nature of church and mission in their cultural context, and who are actually living out the conclusions they’ve come to. Matt Rees is person who falls into that category. I wanted to interview Matt to carry on our theme of fresh expressions of church, which we started with our interview with the archbishop. Matt is involved in a fresh expression of church in Oxford called Home.

I found a great deal of what Matt said encouraging and challenging, but it was the centrality of community at Home that really struck a chord with me. When I asked him, for example, what held Home together he answered ‘the relationships’.

The question of what holds a small community together has been on my mind for a while. I’d previously assumed the answer was found in having an external focus, something that the group could work towards together. Obviously mission does provide this, and I think it should be the organising principle of a group. But there was something about this idea—that what holds a group together is found outside that group—that left me feeling a bit uneasy.

I think Matt is right, at the heart of a group needs to be loving relationships. Our primary indentify must be community, and it is a commitment to these relationships that holds a group together.

What brought me to this conclusion? I remembered that loving relationships lay at the very heart of God. The Trinity is surely our model for all relationships, and the Trinity is community, the Trinity is relationships, the Trinity is love. And when John revealed that ‘God is love’ he was careful not to leave it hanging as an abstract concept, but to root it in human relationships. So he immediately followed with ‘whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him.’ (1 Jn. 4:16)

Jesus modelled this. The group he formed was committed to mission, but primarily these people were his ‘friends’, friends who he was prepared to die for (Jn. 15:9-15). Jesus came to show us how to love God and to love others. He came to show us how to be community.

Tim

Mission in the moment

2010-02-17T12:19:00.002Z

I’m convinced that the mission we’re called to is essentially a relational one. The small amount of time we spend at our local care home has shown me again the immense value in simply spending time with people, particularly those who might otherwise be overlooked by society.

The trouble is I’m not naturally relational. I was brought up by a very ‘task orientated’ father, whose first love in life seemed to be doing jobs, and unfortunately I’ve inherited something of that trait.

Take yesterday for example. Me and Hannah decided to fast in support of some friends who are going through some tough times. The going without food bit was easy, because it was a challenge; it’s was a task that could be crossed off when completed. But trying to quieten my mind to actually seek God, well, I failed miserably.

Obviously this has implications for mission as well. If mission is essentially relational, then it can’t be treated like a task to cross off a list. Just a couple of hours ago I cycled past my neighbour, and the thought immediately popped into my head ‘invite them in for a cuppa’ (God’s voice perhaps?). But no sooner had that thought entered my mind than a list of all the jobs I had to do pushed it out, and I cycled past.

That’s one of the things that really impresses me about Jesus. He never seemed distracted by what he had to do next, but remained fully committed to the moment. Clearly he planned for the future (e.g. Lk. 9:51-52), but it didn’t distract him from the present. He always fully entered into every conversation, every prayer, every need he saw, every moment of his life. Even when he was dying on the cross, rather than being distracted by the prospect of death, he fully lived out his last moments by encouraging the man hanging next to him (Lk. 23:39-43).

The majority of the jobs that distract me are necessary and meaningful, but there’s never going to be a time when they’re all done, so that I’m free to spend more time with people. So I’m trying to learn from Jesus how to get the job done, while remaining fully committed to the moment and every prayer, conversation, and opportunity to share a cuppa, that it bring along.

Tim

Rowan Williams and fresh expressions of church

2010-02-10T16:41:00.002Z

It was a great experience getting to meet the Archbishop of Canterbury (apart from having to get up at 4.30am to get to Lambeth Palace on time, which I failed to do!). Obviously his time as archbishop has not been without controversy, and I certainly don’t agree with him on a number of issues, but I have to say, he came across as a really warm, and sincere man, who has a genuine passion and concern for the church.

One of the archbishop’s main concerns seems to be that new forms of church don’t develop in isolation to ‘traditional’ church. He seems keen that strong links are maintained between the two, and that new forms of church draw from the traditions of all that has gone before. He seemed to have a particular concern that new forms of church can be rather ‘too much on the surface and ‘too much froth’, and need to learn from traditional forms of church how to ‘slow down and breathe more deeply’.

Far from a weakness though, I’ve discovered that this has been one of the strengths of the new forms of church. New monasticism, for example, is an excellent example of how ancient patterns of devotion and worship are giving contemporary Christian communities real spiritual depth. And I’ve been really impressed with the way alternative worship communities are using contemporary forms of liturgy.

In fact, in my admittedly rather limited experience, it seems that rather than new forms of church learning from traditional church in this area, it is traditional church that has the learning to do. It’s in traditional forms of worship that I’ve felt most rushed, as the service has crammed in all the traditional elements such as the notices, singing, sermon, prayers of adoration, prayers of confession, prayers of intercession, the children’s talk, sharing the peace, taking up the collection, sharing communion, the benediction etc. More often than not I find myself leaving a service feeling quite exhausted.

It’s actually been in my more recent experience of new forms of church that I’ve discovered how to slow down, breathe more deeply, and enter into God’s presence in a more meaningful way. I’ve found that it’s the more organic, less structured nature of these churches that allows them to find the space and time to slow down and go deeper. This has been a new and deeply transforming experience for me, and its one I only discovered outside of the traditional church.

Anyway, I might not agree with everything Rowan Williams said, but I do find it really encouraging that a man whose role is so immersed in traditional church clearly believes that the future of the church depends on doing something radically new.

Tim

Mission and not doing much

2010-02-03T10:05:00.001Z

On Monday me and Hannah and the small group we oversee went into a local care home for the elderly to spend some time with the residents. We were all a bit nervous as none of us had any experience of working with the elderly before and we didn’t really know what to expect.

We decided to put on a ‘reminiscence evening’. Each of us brought along an object that represented our jobs, and then we asked the residents to try and guess what we do for a living from that object. For example, we had a sleeping bag to represent working with the homeless, a small hammer to represent being a doctor, a paint brush and a psychology textbook to represent art therapy (the idea of art therapy was greeted with the comment ‘people just need to pull themselves together’!), and many others. They didn’t guess one correctly. After this we then talked about our jobs for a few minutes and then got them talking about what the workplace was like when they were our age. I was particularly interested to see how they responded to my job, and to hear about any experiences of church they’d had. It seemed that their perception and experiences of church were much more positive than the young adults I spend my time hanging out with.

So the evening seemed to go well, but all the way through I found myself doubting whether what we were doing would bless them in any way. It seemed like such a small thing we were offering them. However, after we’d finished, the staff and residents couldn’t thank us enough. One of the nurses was teary eyed as she thanked us for making the commitment to come in every month. As I chatted individually to the residents I could soon see why it meant so much to them and the staff. For many of them their whole life is their small bedroom, the dining room and the lounge. The majority of them are just too frail to do anything else. A number of them made excuses for their own family, who were ‘just too busy’, or have ‘moved away for work’ and so rarely visit (I’ve paused from blogging at this point to ring my mum!). And of course they regularly see their friends physically declining and dying.

It was so humbling, as all we’d done was chat to the residents for an hour, it really felt like we hadn’t done much at all, but for them it meant so much.

The idea of ‘doing mission’ can get so elaborate and complicated, but going into this care home reminded me of the immense value of simply spending time with people, particularly those who are lonely and vulnerable.

Tim

Laura Stewart and communal mission

2010-01-25T11:12:00.001Z

On this month’s Nomad Extra we’re following on from our interview with Steve Timmis, by having a chat with Laura Stewart, a member of one of the Crowded House’s gospel communities.

I really like the emphasis this network places on community. Laura was clear that this community was more akin to a family than a series of meetings. What really struck me though was their emphasis on mission as a community activity.

Mission for me has largely been an individual activity. Apart from occasional church ‘mission events’ I’ve been encouraged to see mission essentially as individual encounters. Obviously there is good biblical precedent for this with individual encounters like that between Philip and the Ethiopian (Acts 8:26-40). But as mission is at the heart of what it means to be a follower of God, and we’re called to follow him as a community, then surely mission should be a communal activity. And of course this is what we see in the way Jesus went about mission. He carried out his mission with his disciples, and expected them to continue this in small mission focussed groups (e.g. Lk. 9:1-6); a pattern the early church would later follow.

I’ve discovered that there are many advantages to communal mission. Firstly, mission can be very intimidating for some people, so sharing this as a group can be a great help. Me and Hannah, for example, are on the introverted side of the spectrum, and so wouldn’t naturally think of organising and hosting an event in the street. But sharing this with Nick, Lora and Michael has not only made this much easier, but actually very enjoyable.

Secondly, mission works best when we are functioning as a body, each contributing our unique gifts. So for example, I’m a good organiser, Nick’s a great ‘front man’, Hannah and Lora are both very creative, and Michael’s great at mingling in a crowd, and all these gifts have worked well together as we’ve gone about trying to bless the street.

Thirdly, I’ve also found that doing mission as a group seems to be more impacting on people, than doing it individually. If an individual does something good it can be dismissed simply as the actions of a ‘nice person’. But, I’ve found that if a whole group regularly does something good, people begin to ask questions. So, for example, the care home my small group is going to start serving, were amazed that a group of 11 young adults were making this commitment. The home has been open for decades and they said that while they often get individuals volunteering, they’d never had a group make this sort of commitment.

Finally, Jesus revealed God to his followers during mission. Jesus never led abstract theological discussions, rather he revealed God to his followers as people were healed, delivered, forgiven and set free into God’s love.

So I was really encouraged to hear about the emphasis of communal mission in Laura’s gospel community. I found it really inspiring to hear how they were using group activities like their knitting club, and their involvement in the local music scene, to make connections with people, to bless them, and draw them into their family.

Tim

Transitioning to missional communities

2010-01-18T15:50:00.000Z

After I’d spoken to my boss about the possibility of transitioning our small groups into missional communities, we felt it was right to immediately speak to the small group leaders. We wanted to keep them in the loop right from the very beginning. There was a general sense among the leaders that this was a good idea, but naturally many of them had practical concerns.

Rather than trying to address all these concerns, when we ourselves didn’t really know how it would all hang together, we decided to use a couple of the more established groups as test cases. This would give us the opportunity of ironing out any mistakes before the rest of the groups got involved (which we hope will happen around September time). We also hope these pilot groups will inspire the rest of the church as people see the positive impact the new mission focus is having on them. So rather than just talking up this new idea, we’re going to demonstrate it.

So I started to ponder how we’d go about finding mission opportunities in our town that would be suitable for our groups to get involved in. I’m not all that keen on starting up ‘Christianised’ versions of already existing social action programs. We don’t want to compete with our community, but join our community and bless them in what they’re already doing.

So I started to visit all the local charities and community projects, looking if there were any ways in which we could help out. My only criteria were that we could get involved as a group, that they were sympathetic to our Christian beliefs, and that we’d be working directly with people. So I visited the local hospital, prison, hospice, care homes, soup kitchen, asylum seeker/refugee project, and a number of other local projects. Much to my surprise most of these fitted the bill and I was able to quickly draw up a list of around 10 opportunities that our groups could get involved in.

One of the pilot groups decided to go for working with asylum seekers and refugees because there was an immediate need for volunteers to run a lunchtime drop in. My group decided to help out in the local care home because we all felt that we no longer had any regular contact with this generation, and we felt that not only could we make a positive contribution, but we’d also be greatly blessed ourselves.

Last week we visited the care home to meet the staff and discuss how we might be able to help out. Even though we didn’t actually spend any time with the residents, it seemed to have a really positive effect on the group. Firstly, the whole group turned up, which rarely happens! And secondly there was a real sense of new life. Everyone seemed really energised and positive as we focussed on this new, external, vision.

Obviously its very early days and there’s much more to becoming missional (in the sense of actually allowing mission to be the group’s organising principle), than to start visiting a care home. But just taking this first step on the journey felt really significant. We’re really excited about joining God in his work to bless the community, and seeing how that reshapes our group and hopefully, in time, the whole church.

Tim

Steve Timmis and gospel communities

2010-01-11T10:16:00.002Z

On this month’s podcast Nick had a chat with Steve Timmis, one of the founding leaders of the Crowded House Network. Steve has helped form a network of local Christian groups which he describes as having been radically shaped around gospel and community. He tells us how his experience of church and his theological understanding led to him to this way of organising church.

I was particularly interested to hear Steve say that his network of communities wasn’t a protest or reactionary movement, but rather it was a positive movement based on what they felt the Bible taught, and from a desire to reach people who weren’t being reached by traditional forms of church.

For the first couple of years working in a church I found myself reacting against a lot of stuff that I wasn’t happy with, particularly in relation to a ‘come to us’ style of mission. Consequently a lot of the new initiatives I proposed were, in a sense, a protest. But increasingly I felt God challenge me to return to the gospel, to return to the person of Jesus, and begin to build from there.

It was in doing this that I began to see how Jesus went about discipleship, i.e. how he equipped and released his disciples. Mission and community seemed to lay behind Jesus’ understanding of discipleship. He largely equipped his disciples as a community, and he equipped them in the thick of mission. It was this discovery that inspired me to begin working towards transitioning our small group network from rather traditionally structured Bible study groups, to groups where prayer, worship and Bible study would be born out of the challenges, questions, successes and failures of communal mission.

This lunchtime the first pilot group will be putting on a lunch for local asylum seekers and refugees, and tonight the second pilot group (which me and Hannah lead) will be going along to a local care home to begin to explore how we can bless the elderly residents.

So rather than a reaction to what the church had tried before, we hope these groups will be a positive movement based on what the Bible teaches and our desire to join God in transforming the community he’s placed us in.

Tim

Life outside of Nomad

2010-01-08T08:51:00.000Z

Over the last year I’ve mainly blogged about what we’ve been doing on the street, but as well as bring involved in Nomad I also work for a small, traditionally structured church here in Nottingham.

I clearly felt God call me to this church after my time as a researcher at Bible Society came to an end. At first, though, my role in the church felt at odds with the way God was guiding my thinking in mission and community (and there were many meetings where I think the other leaders felt the same!). More recently, however, I’ve had opportunities to slowly start implementing some of the things we’ve been thrashing out in Nomad. So, I thought it was about time I started blogging about life outside of Nomad.

When I started my job nearly four years ago, I was employed as an outreach worker to young adults. But as the job developed and a good size group of young adults formed, we realised that there was a church wide need for a more structured approach to discipleship. Consequently, I was asked to oversee the formation of a system of small groups. Remarkably at launch over 70 people joined (out of an average Sunday attendance of around 90-100). These groups have been running for a year now, and despite one or two relatively minor problems, attendance has held steady, and there is a real sense that the church is sharing in a new corporate journey (I write studies for the groups, which they adapt for their local context).

It wasn’t long after these groups were established, however, that I started to feel that we were missing something. All the reports from the groups were generally positive, and people felt they were moving on in their faith. But I couldn’t shake off the feeling that all we had done was to establish discussion groups. We were having some good times of creative worship and prayer, and each group was developing its own sense of communal identity, but at their core was simply a discussion about what we did and didn’t believe. Obviously there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but I felt there needed to be more.

At the same time I was increasingly struck by the way Jesus went about discipleship. He didn’t organise discussion groups, rather he equipped people for a life of worship and mission, and he did this on the job. Prayer, worship, and teaching largely happened while his group was out on mission. Jesus rarely, if ever, discussed abstract theology, rather he revealed God while on the road, in the everyday, as people were healed, delivered, forgiven, and the kingdom of God was made manifest. Worship, prayer, discipleship and community were naturally born out of these experiences.

So I spoke to my boss about the possibility of transitioning our small groups into missional communities, i.e. groups that had mission as their organising principle. Much to my surprise he’d been thinking along similar lines.

Next Monday two pilot missional communities are being launched, so I’ll let you know how that went and how we got to that stage in my next post.

Tim

Building local community

2010-01-06T11:55:00.001Z

I read a report a few weeks ago by the housing provider Circle Anglia. Their recent survey of 2000 people revealed that a third of young people don’t know the names of their neighbours, and only 26% said they’d like to spend time with their neighbours.

Our experience in our street confirms these findings. When we started putting on parties in the street it quickly became apparent that no one knew anyone else, even the people living next door to them. For example, we had 35 people come to our street barbeque, and no one seemed to have any connection with anyone else in the street.

Having said that, while people haven’t seemed motivated to build a sense of community, there has been a real appreciation for what we’ve been trying to do. Everything we’ve done in the street has been met with genuine gratitude. In fact just last week we had a card pushed through our door thanking us for what we were doing.

When we first began to get to know our neighbours it felt a little awkward as it wasn’t something any of us had intentionally done before. However, it soon became quite natural and very rewarding, and has definitely been one of the highlights of 2009. It really feels like the atmosphere of the street has lifted now that people recognise each other and deeper connections are starting to form.

Christmas proved to be a great opportunity to deepen these relationships. 16 people showed up to our Christmas party, and we were able to share our Christmas celebrations with two people who were on their own.

So I feel like we have a great opportunity to build community with people who seem unable or unwilling to initiate it themselves, but who do have a genuine desire for it. And I believe that as we demonstrate community we’re also revealing something of God’s character, who in his triune nature is community.

Tim

Nomad Extra: Christmas Special

2009-12-23T16:33:00.003Z

Our final podcast offering of 2009 is now online for your amusement (or bewilderment!).

Join us for some after dinner chat, as we reflect on a year (nearly) of podcasting and missional engagement.

Laugh with us as we recall how Hannah told one of our neighbours to “GO AWAY!!” at the end of a house party (she thought he was Michael. Not that that’s any excuse!) . Cry with us as we hear how Lora nearly threw up before interviewing Rob Bell. And stand amazed at the shocking revelations of the lengths Tim went to, to cover up the amateurish quality of his first interviews.

As some of our longer serving listeners may recall, we used to have an unsigned band slot on the show. Well, as it’s Christmas, we thought we’d revive this feature, and give a new up-and-coming artist some exposure and a shot at the big time (and, oh how we regretted it!)

We hope you all have a great Christmas. See you in the New Year.

From all of us at Nomad

Rediscovering Christmas

2009-12-17T14:19:00.001Z

My enthusiasm for Christmas first began to wane when I started to receive socks and handkerchiefs for presents, rather than the year’s must have toy. Then, some years later, I discovered that Jesus wasn’t in fact born on Christmas day, and that the church didn’t celebrate Jesus’ birth until the emperor Constantine ‘Christianised’ the festival of the Unconquerable Sun god, in order to try and unite his empire. On top of all that, I became increasingly uncomfortable with the consumerism that surrounded the festival. Consequently, I’d pretty much given up on Christmas. Over the last couple of years, however, I’ve rediscovered it!

It’s true that Christmas isn’t a biblical festival, but Paul is clear that we have the freedom to observe special days if we want, as long as we dedicate them to God (Rm. 14:5-6). And it seems to me that Christmas is a great time to demonstrate two key elements of God’s kingdom.

Christmas is the time when we’re encouraged to reflect on the incarnation, when ‘the Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighbourhood’ (Jn. 1:14). Through the incarnation God had radically changed the way he related to the world, he was no longer an invisible, transcendent God, instead he was like us and lived with us. I believe the incarnation is a model for the way we should relate to the world. God is calling us not to just go about our lives in the area where we happen to live, but to truly move in the neighbourhood.

If Christmas is going to be a festival dedicated to God, then surely it’s got to practically reflect its main theme, that of incarnational love. I read recently that approximately 1 in 3 people experience depression, loneliness and anger as Christmas approaches. So Christmas seems like a pretty good time to bless those people around us who are in need.

I always thought it was strange that Jesus began his ministry by miraculously producing wine at a party which the guests had drunk dry (Jn. 2:1-11)! Before he healed, delivered, or had forgiven anyone, he used all the power invested in him by the Spirit to save a party! It seems then that another key feature of God’s kingdom is having a good time. I think partying is a prophetic sign of the way the world should be. It points to a future where` every tear will be wiped away. So Christmas can also be a great time to show the world how to party.

So me and Hannah are trying to shape our Christmas around these two themes, incarnational love and celebration. We started last night by throwing a party for our neighbours, and blessing everyone with mulled wine, mince pies and presents, and we’re trying to make time for those people we know who are in need.

I’m not suggesting that your Christmas should look like ours, but I do think that if our celebrations are to be meaningful, then we have to demonstrate the festival’s central theme, incarnational love.

Tim

Steve Chalke, mission and the cross

2009-12-10T18:14:00.002Z

On this month’s podcast we spoke to Steve Chalke, the founder of a number of highly influential social action projects in the UK, and founder of the Oasis church network.

Steve has become quite a controversial figure among evangelicals in the last few years due to his rejection of the penal substitution model of the cross (i.e. that God punished his own son for our sins, so that we could be forgiven).

While I don’t agree with Steve on this, I do share one of his concerns, that on its own this model of the cross leads to an unhelpfully individualistic understanding of salvation.

I was brought into the faith on the idea that ‘Jesus died for my sins’. While I do believe this is true, in recent years I’ve come to realise that Jesus achieved more than this on the cross. Paul understood the cross to have cosmic implications. He told the Colossians, for example, that:

‘God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross’ (Col. 1:19-20)

So through the cross Jesus began a work of reconciliation with everything, all of creation, not just me. He ‘disarmed the powers and authorities’ (Col. 2:15), he destroyed ‘the devil’s works’ (1 Jn. 3:8), and he was ‘reconciling the world’ to himself (2 Cor. 5:19).

Because we play the key role in ordering God’s world, the fact that the cross has reconciled us with God and freed us from the power of the devil, means we are able to join God in the restoration of his creation. Just as our sin led to the fall of creation, so our reconciliation should lead to its restoration. As Paul told the Romans, ‘creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed’ (Rm. 8:19).

So while I do hold to the penal substation model of the cross, I’m glad that Steve Chalke and others (most notably Greg Boyd) are reminding us of the cosmic significance of the cross.

If Jesus only died for my sins, then my response need only be personal faith in him. But, if Jesus died to reconcile all of creation to himself (of which I am a part) then my response needs to be faith in him and a commitment to joining him in this work of reconciliation.

So the cross should inspire us to mission. It should inspire us not to a privatised faith, but to a comprehension of our place in God’s plan of salvation for all creation. It should inspire us to join him in his work of cosmic reconciliation.

Tim

Network Church

2009-12-03T16:20:00.000Z

When I started out on this journey of thinking through what Christian community and mission means in my context, I found myself becoming increasingly critical of ‘traditionally structured’ church (and on many occasions, with good reason!). But one of the unexpected blessings of making more of an effort to get to know the people in my area has been discovering other Christian who are involved in a variety of different expressions of church. One of the things I’ve discovered as I’ve got to know these people is that God isn’t limited by our ecclesiology.

The thing is, I keep bumping into Christians from all sorts of ecclesial backgrounds, who are being used by God to impact their communities and who have really blessed me.

The trouble is, I’m the sort of person who wants to find the definitive answer to a problem and invest all my resources there. I then tend to dismiss everything else. The same has been true of my attitude towards church, and as a result I’ve found myself becoming quite judgemental and dismissive of people who are doing things differently.

Don’t get me wrong, I still firmly believe that we need to wrestle with issues of ecclesiology and missiology so that we can shape our churches in such a way that allows us to love God and our neighbours in the particular context we find ourselves in. It’s just that I’d forgotten how graceful God is. God isn’t waiting for us to discover his divinely approved ecclesiology and missiology; he’s just waiting for us to get stuck in as best we can.

This has impacted me in a number of different ways, but most significantly I’ve begun to see that I’ve had a very limited understanding of what it means to be part of God’s church. Over the last few months, as I’ve met, prayed and shared with Baptists, Anglicans, Methodists, people who go to Vineyard, New Frontiers, simple churches and Christians who don’t go to ‘church’ at all, I’ve discovered a much broader sense of community.

So, while I’m still committed to the idea of a local community of believers, I’m increasingly seeing myself as part of a network of believers across the area. I’m not talking about formal ecumenical gatherings, but organic, relational connections that have formed as God has criss-crossed my journey with the journeys of others in the area.

As I’ve allowed myself to be drawn into this informal network, God has used people with a variety of understandings and ways of doing things to challenge and inspire me and to keep me committed to the task of figuring out what it means to love God and to love my neighbours.

Tim

Graeme and Tracey Guthrie and indiscriminate grace

2009-11-25T09:56:00.006Z

On this month’s Nomad Extra we spoke to Graeme and Tracey Guthrie, a couple we’ve been fortunate enough to get to know a bit over the last couple of months. Graeme and Tracy felt God call them to move to a rough inner-city area of Nottingham to incarnate his love. I found listening to their story both challenging and humbling.

One of the things we’ve found hardest when trying to get to know and bless people in our area is handling the rejection of those who aren’t interested. So I was particularly inspired by Graeme and Tracey’s emphasis on Jesus’ grace. They made the point well that Jesus blessed people even when they didn’t show any interest or gratitude. Tracey, for example, pointed us to Jesus’ healing of the ten people with leprosy, of whom only one returned to say thanks (Lk. 17:11-17).

This is a side of Jesus ministry I’ve often found hard to grasp. I was struck by this again this morning as I was reading Mark:

‘As soon as they got out of the boat, people recognised Jesus. They ran throughout that whole region and carried the sick on mats to wherever they heard he was. And wherever he went—into villages, towns or countryside—they placed the sick in the marketplaces. They begged him to let them touch even the edge of his cloak, and all who touched him were healed.’ (Mk. 6:54-56)

What an amazing story of indiscriminate grace. Everyone who came into contact with Jesus was healed. Did Jesus identify the spiritual ‘seekers’ and bless them? Did he identify those who were most in need? Did he heal people with the expectation that’d they’d listen to an evangelistic sermon, or join his movement, or at least join a follow-up discipleship course? There’s no mention of any of that, Jesus just blessed everyone he came into contact with. His only agenda was to bring something of God’s kingdom to everyone he met.

And of course, this indiscriminate grace is at the very heart of our faith. ‘While we were still sinners, Christ died for us’ (Rm. 5:8). While I couldn’t care less who Jesus was, while I was quite happy doing my own thing, while I was using his name as a swear word and was making fun of his followers, he gave his life for me.

Listening to Graeme and Tracy reminded me that I’m called to demonstrate this indiscriminate grace to all the people I come into contact with. I’m called to love those who may never love me back, to serve those who may never say thanks, and to show Jesus’ love to those who may never become his followers.

In fact Jesus specifically calls me to bless those who have no intention or means of blessing me back (e.g. Lk. 6:27; 14:12-14), because that’s what he did for me.

Tim

Mission and knowing when to pick a fight

2009-11-18T14:53:00.002Z

There were two firsts for us in the interview with Alan Hirsch. It was the first time a guest asked the interviewer a question (which completely caught Nick off guard!), and the first time a guest swore!

As I remember, Alan’s words were ‘if you’re not pissing off religious leaders, you’re not being Christlike’. These words reminded me of Jimmy’s critique of the portrayal of Jesus in a passion play, in the film Man Dancin’. Jimmy said of Jesus:

‘The guy’s a trouble maker. In the space of about...ten pages he manages to seriously piss off half a dozen people, important people. And he knows he’s doing it!....It’s Gary Cooper, High Noon, and you’re turning it into Mary Poppins.’

I like the fact Jesus wasn’t afraid to roll up his sleeves and wade in to a fight when the situation required it. What I find challenging about this side of Jesus, however, is that rather than dealing with difficult situations when they arose, Jesus often actually provoked these very situations.

On one occasion, for example, Jesus went to eat with a Pharisee. He knew the Pharisees were big on symbolic hand washing before meals, and so he could have easily have just splashed a bit of water on his hands. Instead, he chose to ignore this custom, and in doing so insulted his host (Lk. 11: 37-54). On another occasion, Jesus healed a man knowing full well this was breaking the Pharisees’ Sabbath tradition. Presumably Jesus could have waited a few hours until the Sabbath was over before healing this man, but instead he went right ahead and healed him in front of everyone. (Lk.14:1-14).

Couldn’t Jesus have been a little bit more culturally sensitive, especially when he’d been invited into someone’s home? Instead, time and time again we see him deliberately stirring up trouble.

Of course Jesus knew exactly what he was doing. He knew which battles to pick, and it was invariably with the religious leaders and scholars. What really seemed to wind Jesus up was seeing leaders erecting unnecessary barriers between people and God. Hand washing rituals and Sabbath traditions suggested God was more concerned with the external religious practices and piety of the religious elite, than with blessing the poor (Lk. 11:41; 14:3-4), and this infuriated Jesus. As he said at the end of one rant ‘you yourselves have not entered [the kingdom of God], and you have hindered those who were entering’ (Lk. 11:52).

It’d be easy to use these stories of Jesus to justify having a go at the people around us who we feel are holding things up in church. But of course the real challenge is to look at ourselves. How am I like these leaders? How does the language I use, the assumptions about people I make, the doctrines I cling to, the rituals and traditions I cherish, put barriers between God and the people who are seeking him?

I think to be truly missional means to open ourselves up to this provocative, challenging, confrontational Jesus and let him shake his fist at us from time to time.

Tim

Alan Hirsch and ReJesusing the Church

2009-11-10T21:24:00.008Z

On this month's show Nick had a chat with Alan Hirsch, a leading missional church thinker and practitioner.

Alan said a lot that got me thinking, but the thing that stuck in my mind was his belief that our Christology should inform our missiology which in turn should inform our ecclesiology. This basically means that our understanding of Jesus should shape our understanding of mission, and our understanding of mission should shape our understanding of church.

In short, Alan is saying that church should look like Jesus. So, for example, sinners loved hanging out with Jesus, and so should love hanging out with church (which they rarely seem to, as a neighbour of mine recently summed up, 'church? I'm not good enough for all that'). Conversely, religious people hated Jesus, and so should hate church (when in fact church is often full of religious people!).

So what's gone wrong? Alan believes that quite simply, we need to get back to the gospels. We need to start following Jesus again. We need to 'ReJesus' the church. If we truly committed ourselves to this task, what would our churches look like I wonder? In Alan's mind, such a community would be:

1. A Christlike community that reflects his character, life, and activity

By making an intentional corporate study of the gospels to model our lives on the example of Jesus, preferring no lesser hero from our tradition.

2. A holistic community that seeks to offer up all of life to the lordship of Jesus

By de-emphasizing Sunday and equipping all followers to hand over every sphere of their lives and every day of the week to Jesus.

3. A peace-loving community that is considerate, submissive, merciful, fruitful, impartial, and sincere

By moving outward to serve others, knowing that community is forged by our collective commitment to a cause beyond ourselves.

4. A worshipping community that exalts Jesus and declares his sovereignty

By understanding that worship includes singing but is never limited to it and involves a whole-of-life exaltation of Jesus.

5. A devoted community that experiences intimacy with Jesus

By practicing the presence of Jesus in prayer, solitude, fasting, and missional action.

6. A graced community that relies on the work of Jesus for salvation

By insisting continually that it is not by our own efforts that we are saved-that is, through a continual re-evangelization of believers.

7. A holy community that seeks after the righteousness of Jesus

By learning and living the values of Jesus, as distinct from the piety of middle-class good-manners conventionality.

8. A healthy community that feeds on God's Word and the ministry of his Spirit

By corporately devoting ourselves to the Scriptures and the exercise of the spiritual gifts (ReJesus: A Wild Messiah for a Missional Church, p. 175)

A pretty good set of principles to shape our churches by, I reckon.

Tim

Mission isn’t about me

2009-10-30T10:48:00.003Z

A couple of posts ago I wrote about how the early church was a provocative movement that caused people to ask questions about their beliefs and behaviour. I compared this to my own experiences of witness where I'd felt I had to try and give people answers, even when they weren't asking questions! There's another important side to witness, though, that I want to briefly explore, and that is the work of the Holy Spirit.

A week or two back we invited a young couple on our street over for drinks. We were chatting away about books, films, travel, all the usual stuff, when one of them asked us why we went to church, and what our beliefs about God were. Now this may not sound unusual to you, but we've spent months regularly praying for opportunities to share our faith, and literally not one person in the street has ever asked us one question about why we go to church or call ourselves Christians or do things like throw house and street parties. So this couple's questions were a welcome surprise, and we had a great afternoon discussing the meaning of life, the nature of God and the Bible and how me and Hannah became Christians.

This experience reminded me that mission really isn't about me.

For most of my Christian life I'd been taught that the Holy Spirit's main job was to bless me, to give me a sense of God's presence, and to give me gifts to edify myself and other Christians. Obviously there is truth in that, but Jesus said that the Holy Spirit would come to 'testify about me' (Jn. 15:26), and that he will 'convict the world of guilt in regard to sin and righteousness and judgement' (Jn. 16:8). So, the Holy Spirit was primarily sent to earth to work as an evangelist, and when he does empower us it's primarily so that we can join him in his work of evangelism. And that's exactly what we see in Acts. Time and again we see the Spirit moving people towards Jesus, and directing and empowering the missionary activity of the early church.

It was clear to me that the Spirit had been working in the lives of this couple on our street, long before they met me and Hannah. Paul was pretty clear that 'There is no-one...who seeks God' (Rm. 3:10-11). Our natural inclination is to turn away from God, not towards him. But God's Spirit is going throughout the world trying to persuade people of their sin, of their need for righteousness and the coming judgement. So when someone begins to ask questions, like our friends on the street, it's a clear sign that they are starting to respond to the Spirit's work.

So mission isn't about my plans, strategies and programs. Instead it's about me joining God in what he is already doing. So being sensitive to what the Spirit is doing in the lives of those around me must be foundational to my understanding of mission. For months me and Hannah have been trying to discern what God is doing in the street, and the other week was our first clear indication, so that's where we're going to start focussing our prayerful attention.

Tim

David Mitchell, community living and consumerism

2009-10-24T18:53:00.003+01:00

We’ve got a really interesting interview for you on Nomad Extra this month. Me and Nick spoke to David Mitchell, the leader of Woodlands Church, a large city centre church of around 800 adults in Bristol.

What makes Woodlands really interesting is their emphasis on community. Like most churches they have a system of small groups, but in addition to this they have mid-sized ‘pastorates’ and a number of community houses. David himself lives with his wife and five children in a community house of 23 people.

David made lots of interesting points about community but one thing he mentioned that really got me thinking was the anti-consumerist nature of community living.

Jesus spent quite a bit of time challenging the consumerism of his day, for example he said ‘Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth...But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven...For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.’ (Mt. 6:19-21). Jesus was clear that we don’t need the stuff the world says we need, and that if we do accumulate stuff it will draw our attention away from God.

Indeed, this seems to be one of the underlying dangers of consumerism, that our emotions increasingly get directed away from relationships and community, and towards objects. I confess, for example, to feeling much better about myself when I know there’s a new book in the post!

To counteract this danger I think the New Testament teaches us to live simple (e.g. Mt. 6:19-21), contented (e.g. Philip. 4:12-13) and generous (e.g. 2 Cor. 8:7) lives.

This is exactly how the first Christians lived, for example, ‘All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favour of all the people’ (Acts 2:44-47).

The first Christians, then, didn’t consider their possessions to be their own; rather they saw themselves as stewards of God’s resources. Consequently, they were free to pass these resources on as they saw a need. So rather than finding contentment and satisfaction in objects, they found it in their relationship with God expressed in community life.

So, while I don’t think the Bible teaches that we necessarily have to live in a community house (although doing so can certainly be a wonderful expression of these principles, as Woodlands Church is demonstrating); it certainly does teach us that we need to live a shared life.

It seems to me, then, that Christian community can the perfect antidote to consumerism, as it shifts our thinking from the individual to the corporate. It reminds us that we’re not owners, but stewards, and that our concern is not just for ourselves, but for our community. Consequently it reminds us that our sense of contentment and satisfaction will never be found in stuff, but in relationship with God, expressed in community life.

Tim

Mission and provoking questions

2009-10-18T09:25:00.000+01:00

For many years I really struggled with the idea of sharing my faith. On the one hand I’ve wanted to tell people about the experiences of God I’d had, but, on the other hand, I’ve felt awkward and embarrassed when I tried to do it. These feelings have been compounded with guilt as I’ve read about the apparent ease with which the first Christians boldly shared their faith.

As I began to study Acts, however, I noticed an encouraging pattern. More often than not, the apostles shared their faith by answering people’s questions. Peter’s evangelistic sermon at Pentecost, for example, was actually an answer to the crowd’s question (Acts 2:12). Similarly, it was the jailer who asked Paul ‘what must I do to be saved?’ (Acts 16:25-30), and it was Cornelius who asked Peter to visit (Acts 10). Indeed, Peter encouraged his churches to, ‘Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.’ (1 Pt. 3:15).

Of course, on occasions the apostles did take the initiative. Paul, for example, preached in marketplaces, but it was a common practice to debate religion and philosophy there (Acts17-21). He also preached in synagogues, but that too was a place where interpretation of the Bible was discussed.

On reflection, I think the embarrassment I’ve felt about sharing my faith came from the self-consciousness of trying to give someone something they didn’t want, of trying to give people answers to questions they weren’t asking. In contrast, the early church simply responded to people’s needs and questions.

The early church’s way of sharing their faith doesn’t let me off the hook though, it simply raises another question, ‘why don’t I get asked questions in the way the first Christians did?’

Have you ever noticed how the author’s of the New Testament never wrote to their churches saying ‘go out there and tell people about Jesus’? Of all the things they had to remind their churches to keep doing, they didn’t remind them to do that (in fact ‘evangelism’ is only mentioned three times in the NT).

Instead, the apostles wrote to their churches to remind them how to be church. In short, they wrote about the person and work of Jesus and how that should impact their personal and corporate behaviour. I think they assumed that if the churches got that right, and communities of radical disciples of Jesus were formed, people couldn’t fail to notice and ask questions. If only one or two of them had lived like that, they could have been dismissed as naturally ‘nice people’. But when whole groups of them committed themselves to serving God and their communities, people took notice and questions were asked.

The early church, then, was a highly provocative movement. They demonstrated a radical, whole-life embracing commitment to loving God and loving their neighbours. So, far from being awkward or embarrassed, the early church boldly shared their faith by simply explaining to enquirers the reason for the hope that they had.

Tim

Rob Bell and the meaning of mission

2009-10-11T21:26:00.005+01:00

This month’s podcast sees our first on location interview. We’ve resisted the temptation to personally meet up with interviewees (unless they’re local) as it takes a lot more time and petrol. But Rob Bell’s not into telephone interviews, so Nick and Lora headed off to Cheltenham to meet him.

I really liked Rob’s definition of mission, which he described as joining God in his task of repairing and restoring the world. I also liked the fact the Rob rooted this in the resurrection, which was a dramatic demonstration of God’s ability and desire to overcome sin, and its consequences, with new creative life.

It seems to me that sin has affected every one of our relationships. Firstly, sin has broken our relationship with God. The first question in the OT is God asking Adam, ‘Where are you’ (Gen. 3:9), and interestingly the first question on the NT is “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews?” (Mt. 2:2). Sin has hidden God from us and us from God.

Secondly, sin has broken our relationship with each other. After the fall, for example, the way Eve related to Adam changed significantly, ‘You will want to control your husband, but he will dominate you’ (Gen. 3:16 NET). Even more alarmingly, their children’s relationship quickly deteriorated to the point of murder.

Thirdly, sin has broken our relationship with ourselves. Our bodies no longer work in harmony with our spirit and we are susceptible to disease and we age and die. And we no longer understand ourselves and have to ask God to ‘search me...and know my heart…See if there is any offensive way in me’. (Ps. 139:23)

And fourthly, sin has broken our relationship with creation. The world has become ‘subjected to frustration’ (Rm. 8:18-22), and we no longer live in harmony with it.

It seems to me that God’s plan and purpose has always been to reverse these consequences of sin. Ultimately, God sent his son so that although we are estranged from him, it is possible to join his family (2 Cor. 5:18). Although we are estranged from each other, we can join God in his plan to make ‘one new man’ (Eph. 2:15). Although we are estranged from ourselves, it is possible to pray for increased harmony between body and spirit, as we wait for the hope of new bodies (1 Cor. 15:42-44). And although we are estranged from creation, we can prophetically demonstrate the harmony with creation promised on the new earth (Isa. 11:6-9).

We can join God in this task by, for example, trying to reconcile people to God through evangelism, or demonstrating racial and socio-economic diversity in our churches, or helping someone understand themselves better through prayer and counselling, or demonstrating harmony with the environment through recycling, reclaiming waste land, or learning to relate to animals in ways beyond just eating them.

It seems to me, then, that any activity that intentionally seeks to reconcile us to God, to each other, to ourselves and to creation, is mission, and is glorifying to God.

I find this broad view of mission hugely exciting.

Tim

Mission and the nature of friendship

2009-10-02T15:26:00.002+01:00

Making friends has always been something I’ve taken for granted. In fact, thinking about it, intentionally making friends isn’t something I’ve had to do much in my life; friendships have always just seemed to happen. A good chunk of my life has been spent in education though, which is an environment where friendships form easily, due to daily contact with people who have similar backgrounds and aspirations.

Trying to establish relationships with people on our street has, however, shown me that intentionally making friends can be quite a challenge. The street barbeque we did in July helped us make initial connections with people and as a result we found ourselves having plenty of opportunities for chit-chat in the street. But moving from polite conversation to really sharing your life with someone, who you have nothing in common with other than living in the same street, isn’t easy. We’ve tried to show genuine interest in people and invite them to eat with us, and this has started to lead to a few deeper connections, but there have been a number of occasions where our efforts haven‘t been reciprocated.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a friend as ‘a person with whom one has a bond of mutual affection...’ The majority of the friends I’ve had throughout my life have been based on this definition, i.e. they’ve been with people I like. Over the last few months, though, I’ve been taking note of what the Bible says a friend is, and not surprisingly it challenges this definition.

Of course there are friendships in the Bible based on mutual affection; David and Jonathan are a good example (e.g. 1 Sam. 18:1-4). The Bible, however, spends much more time describing friends as people you emotionally support (e.g. Jdg. 11:37-38), you help when in trouble (e.g. Prov. 17:17), you advice (e.g. Prov. 27:9), you share your possessions with (e.g. Acts 27:3) you share intimately with (e.g. Jn.15:15), and ultimately someone you’re prepared to lay down your life for (Jn. 15:13). But underlying all this is the real challenge, a friend is someone you do all these things for even if they don’t treat you in the same way. Jesus, for example, called his disciples friends even though they denied him and abandon him, and he called Judas ‘friend’ even at the point of betrayal (Mt. 26:50).

So friendship, like marriage, can start with mutual affection, but it is so much more than that. Its foundation is in a commitment, specifically a commitment to demonstrate God’s love for a person.

I find this challenging, but also encouraging, as I’m not primarily called to seek out bonds of mutual affection. Instead I’m called to be a friend to those people around me, despite how they might act towards me, just as Jesus has befriended me despite the way I often treat him.

Tim

Organic church and hearing God’s voice

2009-09-24T21:15:00.002+01:00

On this month’s Nomad Extra Nick and myself continue the theme of organic/simple church from our previous interview with Frank Viola. To help us do this, we had a chat with Mark Cutliffe who is involved in an organic church near Swansea.

As I listened to Mark talk about his experience of a more stripped down simple way of being church I noticed the reoccurring theme of hearing God’s voice. As he described the way his community organise their meetings it was clear that one of the overriding aims was to create an environment where everyone could hear God for themselves.

This is something that has been on my mind for a while. The Bible describes our relationship with God in very intimate terms. God is described as our Father, and we are his children. We are also described as Jesus’ friends, brothers and sisters, and as his future bride. These relationships; of parents, children, marriage partners and friends, are the most intimate we can have. The Bible seems to be anticipating a correlation between the way we can relate to God and the most intimate relationships we can have. Intimacy of course has its foundation in communication and so the Bible also gives us an expectation that we’ll clearly hear God speak to us. Jesus, for example, said that he is our shepherd and we follow him because we know his voice (Jn. 10:3-4). But how many of us can honestly say that we have this level of intimate communication with God?

Of course there are many reasons why we struggle in this area, but I think Mark is right that the way we structure church can actually discourage hearing God for ourselves. It’s just too easy to passively sit back and consume. I’m not saying that large gathering are inherently wrong, they can obviously be a place of great blessing, but I think it can be spiritually unhealthy if that is our primary experience of church. The early church did have times where the ‘whole church’ came together (1 Cor. 14:23), but their week by week experience of church was undoubtedly small, relational, uncomplicated gatherings where everyone had the opportunity to participate.

Even so, it would seem that passivity was at times still a problem in the early church. Paul, for example, had to write to the Corinthians to remind them that ‘everyone has a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation.’ Paul was quick to challenge their passivity because he believed that it was essential that everyone was involved, ‘for the strengthening of the church’ (1 Cor. 14:26). So Paul believed that the church could only grow to maturity and fulfil its mission when everyone was hearing God for themselves.

Paul demonstrated the importance of this, for example, in his own experience of mission. He seemed completely unconcerned about the consequences of his actions or what had worked in the past, instead his only concern was being obedient to what God was saying to him (e.g. Acts 16:6-7).

So the interview with Mark has reminded me of the importance of organising church gatherings in such a way that we create an environment where everyone is encouraged to hear God for themselves. This surely is fundamental to our being equipped to live lives of worship and mission.

Mission and institutional baggage

2009-09-17T12:17:00.001+01:00

I’ve started reading Alan Hirsch’s The Forgotten Ways. In it he presents the following challenge:

Hirsch estimates that in 100AD there were as few as 25,000 Christians, but by 310AD (just before Emperor Constantine was converted and made Christianity the state religion) there were up to 20 million Christians. Hirsch then asks the obvious, but deeply challenging question, ‘How did they do this? How did they did they grow from being a small movement to the most significant religious force in the Roman Empire in two centuries?’

Hirsch goes on to remind us that this period of massive growth occurred while Christianity was illegal and undergoing what was sometimes severe persecution. It was also a time when the church didn’t have any dedicated buildings, they didn’t have access to the Bible as we know it, they didn’t have any institutional structures such as a professional leadership, they didn’t have theological colleges, worship bands, youth groups, Bible commentaries, or any of the other resources we take for granted. And what’s more, they actually made it hard to join their movement, expecting new members to go through a lengthy period of initiation.

Hirsch then prevents us from dismissing this period of church growth as a ‘freak of history’ by drawing our attention to a very similar situation in China.

Before Mao Zedong came to power, the church in China was well established with around 2 million members and was largely organised on a Western model. But with Chairman Mao’s rise to power came a systematic removal of religion from society. All foreign missionaries were expelled, all church property was nationalised, senior leaders were killed and other leaders were either imprisoned or killed and all public meetings were banned on pain of torture or death. When this period of persecution came to an end and foreign missionaries were allowed back in, in the early 80s, they expected to find a decimated church. Instead they discovered that the church had in fact flourished, and that there were around 60 million Christians. So like the early church, they grew despite a significant threat to their survival, without dedicated buildings, without professional leadership, without access to Bible resources and without large gatherings.

Hirsch goes on to look at reasons for this phenomenal growth, focussing his attention on what he calls the church’s ‘missional DNA’ (I’ll reflect on that when I’ve read further). It strikes me, though, that in both these examples, the church thrived when it was free from institutional baggage. It’s true that both the early church and China suffered persecution and that persecution often leads to growth, most likely because only the really committed stick around. But I wonder if it’s possible that growth also comes through persecution because the church is forced to strip away all its institutional baggage. Is it possible that all the layers of leadership, programs, meetings, and myriad of resources we surround ourselves with are actually distracting us from what we’re called to do, to love God and love our neighbour. Is it possible that the church described in the NT—small, simple, relational and flexible—is church in its most authentic form, and is the model that we should be adopting?

At the very least, these two examples of church have firmed my resolve to thoroughly critique every church activity I’m involved in, and to radically prune away any activity that isn’t helping us live lives of worship and mission.

Tim

Frank Viola and organic church

2009-09-10T10:21:00.001+01:00

On this month’s podcast we’ve got another thought-provoking interview, this time with a leading voice in the organic church movement, Frank Viola.

Frank is proposing that we adopt the model of church described in the New Testament. He’s summarised this as a ‘grassroots experience that is marked by face-to-face community, every-member functioning, open participatory meetings (as opposed to pastor-to-pew services), non hierarchical leadership, and the centrality and supremacy of Jesus Christ as the functional Leader and Head of the gathering’ (Finding Organic Church, p. 20).

So, is this the way we should be organising our church meetings? I think it’s true that this is the early church way of organising gatherings. What we can see from 1 Corinthians 14, for example, clearly shows that everyone was involved in an open meeting. And there’s no hint in the NT of hierarchical leadership within the local church.

The question is, then, are passages like 1 Corinthians 14 descriptive or prescriptive, i.e. are they just a record of what the early church did, or are they there to provide a model for us to follow? I guess the vast majority of us think they are simply descriptive, as it’s very rare to find churches that organise their services in this way.

I think it’s important to start by asking the question ‘why should Christians gather together?’ I’d always assumed we primarily got together to worship. Clearly corporate worship is a good thing, but the NT states that worship is firstly obedience to God and involves the whole of our life and so isn’t primarily an activity for a special place and time (e.g. Rm. 12:1-2; Jn. 4:21-23). We also don’t gather primarily for mission, as again this should firstly occurs in our everyday lives (Col. 4:5-6: Gal. 6:10; Rm. 12:14-21; Phil. 2:14-16).

Rather than worship or mission, the NT states that the primary purpose of church gatherings is for our growth, strengthening, equipping and transformation (i.e. edification, 1 Cor. 14:12, 19, 26; Eph. 4:11-12). This prepares us to live lives of worship and mission.

I think the early church organised themselves in the way they did, because they believed in was the best way to edify their members. So despite its rapid growth, the church remained in small house groups so they could share meals and share ministry (1 Cor. 14:12, 19, 26), although on occasions ‘the whole church’ in a city would come together (1 Cor. 14:23; cf. Rm. 16:23). This meant that everyone could get involved in the meeting and everyone’s gift could be valued (1 Cor. 14:26; Eph. 4:11-12). No one could hide in the crowd; rather everyone was encouraged to minister to each other. There was no single leader who people could defer to (the apostles were church planters who moved on when the church was self-sufficient), everyone had to seek Jesus for themselves.

So it seems to me that the NT isn’t simply descriptive, but is prescribing a way of organising our meetings in order to create the right environment for growth and equipping. This is hugely challenging to me for two main reasons. Firstly, it means I have to ask the difficult question ‘why do we do this?’ of every aspect of the meetings I’m involved in, in order to determine whether they are equipping people for a life of worship and mission. And secondly, it means that I’ve got to help shape these gatherings in such a way that everyone is seeking Jesus for themselves, and has an opportunity to share their contributions. It’s challenging, but I think essential if we’re going to be equipped to live whole lives of worship and mission.

Tim

Principles of missional communities

2009-09-03T16:46:00.000+01:00

I’ve been reading quite a bit recently about different examples of missional communities. This has included historical examples, such as Methodism, the Salvation Army and the Clapham Sect, and contemporary examples, such as Base Ecclesial Communities in Latin America (I’ll perhaps post some summaries of these over the next few months).

Although by their very nature there is no ‘formula’ for missional church (as they organise themselves around the needs of their local community), I can see clear principles in all these examples.

1. In all the examples there was a clear dissatisfaction with the institutional church and in particular its role in mission. Although the new missional communities started within the institutional church, they often felt they had to move away from it.

2. None of the missional communities followed a formula or model. Instead they were simply obedient to meeting the needs of the people they believed God had put on their hearts.

3. The missional communities formed organically as they responded to a specific need in their community. This was often a need the institutional church was aware of but hadn’t responded to.

4. All the communities were incarnational, that is they went to the people, rather than expecting the people to come to them.

5. All the communities were aware of and effectively met the social, religious or intellectual challenges of the surrounding culture.

6. All the founders of the missional communities had an experience of God that resulted in personal transformation. This experience produced a desire to meet the needs of their local community.

7. None of the missional communities saw a distinction between proclaiming the gospel and social action.

8. All the communities were initially opposed (primarily by the institutional church, but often also by the local community).

9. All the missional communities eventually established strong relationships with their local communities. Local authorities, community groups and businesses recognised the work of the missional communities and offered to form partnerships with them.

10. All the missional communities relied heavily, if not exclusively, on the laity.

It seems to me that these principles are a pretty good summary of the biblical model of church. Indeed, many of these principles jump right off the pages of Acts.

I’ve found reading these stories of missional communities really challenging and inspiring. I can sometimes get quite despondent with ‘the Church’, but these stories have reminded me that when we seek God and courageously follow his call, the church can be an incredibly exciting and powerful movement.

Tim

Mission and missed opportunities

2009-08-25T21:10:00.001+01:00

The latest edition of Nomad Extra is now online. This month Nick chats to Peter Farmer, who felt God call him to move into St. Ann’s, a rough inner city estate in Nottingham, in order to proclaim the gospel and build a community.

As I listened to Pete talk, I was reminded of the importance of being sensitive to God’s guidance in mission. Pete made some really courageous life changing decisions, based solely on what he felt God was saying.

One of the clear challenges of the book of Acts is that successful mission only occurs under the direction and power of God’s Spirit. Philip, for example, was told by God to ‘Go south to the road—the desert road—that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza’. Philip obeyed and was able to witness to an Ethiopian eunuch. (Acts 8:26-27). Humanly speaking this didn’t make any sense. Philip was in the middle of a revival in Samaria, but God told him to leave in order to speak to one man. What evangelist in their right mind would do that? But Philip followed God’s guidance and as a result the gospel spread to Africa.

Paul naturally wished to extend his missionary work into Asia Minor. This seemed like a logical step to take, to continue pushing on with the gospel. But God’s Spirit stopped him and sent him in a different direction. (Acts 16:6-7)

It seems to me that the apostles didn’t really consider the consequences of their actions and they didn’t seem too concerned with what had worked before. Rather they were only interested in God’s guidance. They weren’t concerned about their own plans and strategies; they were only concerned with not missing a divine opportunity.

This is a real challenge to me, as I’m often tempted to stick to my own plans, rather than dropping what I’m doing and following God’s Spirit. Take last week for example. We’ve been trying to build relationships with our neighbours, and towards the end of last week one of our neighbours dropped round for the first time. They wanted to know if me and Hannah were free to go down the pub for a drink and a chat. I had a sneaking suspicion that this might be ‘one of those God moments’, but we’d already made plans to meet up with friends. So rather than putting our friends on hold, I put our neighbour on hold. We’ve tried to meet up with her two or three times since, but can’t catch her in, and we’re away next week, so I’ve got a nagging feeling that I missed an opportunity.

When I look back to those people I’ve been fortunate enough to lead to faith, there’s always been that sense of God’s timing and leading. The early church knew this well, and were quick to change their plans as soon as they saw God moving.They knew that the mission they were on wasn’t theirs but God’s and he was inviting them to join him.

So I guess the challenge for me is to make a conscious effort every day to be open to whatever God might be prompting me to do or say, and to be prepared to drop everything when he does.

Tim

Mission and apostolic fighting

2009-08-14T18:29:00.001+01:00

I’m still pondering how mission fits into church life, and the level of importance it should hold in relation to other church activities. So I thought I’d look at what the apostles were prepared to fall out over, as a roundabout way of uncovering their priorities. Three incidences come to mind.

The first public falling out was between Paul and Barnabus and some representatives of the apostles in Jerusalem (Acts 15:1-11). The mission of the church was going well and the apostles were freely spreading the gospel among the Gentiles. Then some of the believing Pharisees from the Jerusalem church threw a spanner in the works by saying that the Gentiles had to obey the Old Testament law. The implications of this were considered so serious that the first church council meeting was called (if only this disagreement had never occurred there’d be no biblical justification for church council meetings!). This was not just an abstract theological debate as the consequences could have been devastating for the church’s mission. Paul and Barnabus were concerned that if this theology was adopted, it would hinder the Gentiles reaching God. So this disagreement was essentially about mission.

Shortly after this, Paul and Barnabas themselves fell out (Acts 15:36-40). Paul was planning on visiting the towns where he had previously preached, but he decided he didn’t want Mark to come. This was because Mark had deserted them on a previous mission trip (Acts 14:24-25), and so presumably Paul was fearful that Mark would let them down again. This was a proper run-in, and the two leaders went their separate ways. It would seem then that Paul was prepared to put these relationships under strain for the sake of mission (just in case you’re wondering, Mark did eventually become a trusted helper of Paul’s, 2 Tim. 4:11).

Paul also fell out with Peter (he clearly wasn’t an easy guy to get on with! Gal. 2:11-16). This disagreement was similar to the one between the apostles and the believing Pharisees in Acts 15. Peter knew that the Gentiles did not need to observe the Law to relate to God, but he was coming under increasing pressure from ‘the circumcision group’ and so had begun to distance himself from the Gentiles. Other believing Jews, including Barnabus, joined Peter in this change of heart. So as soon as the opportunity presented itself, Paul was on Peter’s case and opposed him face-to-face. Again, Paul was prepared to confront a fellow leader because the church’s mission to the Gentiles was being threatened.

Of course there are many other examples of disagreements in the church (all of Paul’s letters were written to straighten out one mess or another), but the apostles themselves, who were pretty hot on unity in the church (e.g. 1 Cor.12:25; Eph. 4:13), were prepared to fall out only when the church’s mission was jeopardised.

When Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment was he said, in essence, ‘Believe in God, love him with your whole life and then go and love your neighbour’ (Mk. 12:29-31). Clearly there was never any doubt that the apostles loved Jesus, but whenever there was a hint that they were backing away from loving their neighbour, they were quickly challenged.

This challenges me in a couple of ways. Firstly, is mission at the heart of my understanding and experience of church? And, secondly, is it only when mission is jeopardised that I’m prepared to fall out with other Christians?

Tim

Mission and joining the priesthood

2009-08-11T10:43:00.001+01:00

It was really inspiring interviewing Mark Stibbe for this month’s podcast, and hearing him talk about how he and Andrew Williams courageously restructured their mega-church into small missional communities. One of the things that struck me was how Mark said that through this process they rediscovered the doctrine of the ‘priesthood of all believers’.

The priesthood of all believers is something that’s been on my mind as I’ve been reading through the Old Testament. I’d always thought about it in terms of the level of involvement of people in church life. I’ve begun to see recently though, that it also clearly relates to mission.

Israel was placed in the Promised Land to be a ‘Light to the nations’ (Isa. 42:6). They were given the Tabernacle within which God’s presence resided. Priests were then consecrated to attend to this sacred space (Exod. 28:1-4), offering sacrifices for the people’s sin, mediating between them and God, and interceding on their behalf. But the nation of Israel itself was considered to be a ‘kingdom of priests’ (Exod. 19:5-6). They offered sacrifices on behalf of the world (e.g. the 70 bulls sacrificed at Tabernacles was later thought to represent the 70 nations of world), they mediated God’s word to the world (e.g. Jonah, Nahum, Obadiah), and interceded on behalf of the world (e.g. Gen. 18:16-33). So while the individual priests acted as a kind of interface between God and Israel, Israel herself acted as an interface between God and the world.

The New Testament describes Jesus as the new high priest (Heb. 4:14), who fulfilled everything the priesthood represented. He offered his own body as a sacrifice to remove our sin (Heb. 9:11-15, 25), he mediates between God and us (1 Tim. 2:5), and he intercedes on our behalf (Heb. 7:25). So Jesus now acts as the interface between God and us.

As Christians, we are born into the family of the high priest, Jesus (Jn. 3:3), and consequently, we are also priests. Like Israel before us, our community is a kingdom of priests (1 Pt. 2:9), called to be a light to the world (Mt. 5:14). So we now take on the responsibility of acting as an interface between God and the world.

As priests, we must now offer sacrifices for the benefit of the world. For example, we offer the sacrifice of our lives to those around us (Rm. 12:1), the sacrifice of the proclamation of God’s glory (1 Pt. 2:9), the sacrifice of financial gifts to enable the spread of the gospel (Phil. 4:18), the sacrifice of our spiritual gifts to demonstrate the power of the gospel (1 Cor. 2:4), and the sacrifice of our good deeds and our possessions (Heb. 13:16). As priests, we also act as mediators between God and the world. For example, we are called to teach the world about the source of our hope (1 Pt. 3:15) and of God’s purposes (Acts 17:16-31). And as priests we act as intercessors, praying on behalf of the world (1 Tim. 2:1-2).

So I’ve realised that overlooking the significance of the priesthood of all believers doesn’t just hinder our community life, but also our mission. We are all priests, who are called not just to function in the church community but also in the world. So in all the environments God has placed me—at home, work, and in the third places—I am called to the role of priest. I’m called to offer my life as a sacrifice, to mediate God’s presence, and to intercede for those around me, in order to draw people closer to the high priest, Jesus.

Tim

Mission and food

2009-07-24T19:03:00.005+01:00

The latest edition of Nomad Extra is now online. It was great to hear Michael describe his journey from being brought up in church to asking the sorts of questions he is about Christian community and mission. Now the whole Nomad gang has been interviewed, we’re hoping to interview other people who are trying to live out community and mission in interesting ways.

Last Sunday we had our second attempt at outreach in the street, by putting on a street barbeque. It really seemed to go well, and we all had a strong sense of God’s blessing. Nearly 30 people turned up in all, and we made some great connections and identified some needs which we’re hoping we can follow up in the coming weeks.

Eating with our neighbours reminded me what a surprisingly important role food plays in the story of the Bible. The first sin committed involved eating, and the consequences of this included being banned from eating from the tree of life (Gen. 3:22). When the nation of Israel was formed they were given a law to live by, which identified clean and unclean foods. The Nazirites showed their dedication to God by a special diet (Num. 6:1-21). Food also played an important part in worship, festivals and covenant making, for example in the Passover festival (Exod. 12:1-11). Food and drink symbolised Jesus’ sacrificial death at the Last Supper (Mk. 14:22-23). The New Covenant, which Jesus established, made all foods clean again (Acts 10:9-15; 1 Tim. 4:3). Eating food sacrificed to idols became a tricky ethical question for the early church (1 Cor. 8:4–13). Jesus’ followers are said to eat a banquet when he returns (Rev. 19:9). And finally, in the New Jerusalem believers will be able to eat from the tree of life again (Rev. 22:2-3).

I’m not entirely sure why food features so prominently in the Bible. I wonder, though, if it’s because food and drink are such basic physical needs that they came to symbolise our most basic need, that of a relationship with God. Jesus suggested this when he said ‘man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God’ (Mt. 4:1-4).

Perhaps this is why food also played an important role in mission. It was seen as quite scandalous that Jesus ate with ‘tax collectors and sinners’ (Mk. 2:16; Lk. 15:2), because doing so was a sign that he was welcoming them into his community. Jesus clearly did a lot of this, as he was accused of being ‘a glutton and a drunkard’ (Lk. 7:34). This is why Peter’s vision of all unclean animals becoming clean was hugely significant (Acts 10:9-16). It meant that Jewish followers of Jesus could now share meals with Gentiles, and in doing so draw them into the new Jesus community.

The significance of this was made apparent by one of the few bust-ups between the apostles (Gal. 2:11-21). Peter had made eating with Gentiles a regular part of his ministry, but after a visit from some Jewish believers who thought Christians were still bound by OT law, Peter began to withdraw from the Gentiles. This led Paul to publically challenge Peter, something the Apostles only did if it was over an issue that threatened the mission of the church (e.g. Acts 15:1-11, 36-40). Paul was fearful that unless the Jewish Christians realised they were free to eat with Gentiles, the whole mission of the church was endangered.

I caught a glimpse of the significance of all this on Sunday when we were eating with our neighbours. There is something very intimate and community building about sharing the basic human need to eat and drink. Me and Hannah are great believers in opening up our house to others and sharing a meal, and we’re hoping that the connections we made at our street barbeque will greatly increase our opportunity to do this.

The language of community

2009-07-16T16:13:00.000+01:00

I’ve been working my way through the Old Testament over the last few months, and one of the things I noticed is how much temple language we’ve imported into our Christian vocabulary. It seems to me that this is a really unhelpful thing.

The temple represented God’s presence among his people (1 Kgs. 8:10-13), and so was considered to be ‘God’s House’ (e.g. 1 Chron. 22:1). Only the priests could work in the temple and offer sacrifices, and only the high priest was allowed to enter the holy of holies and stand in God’s presence (Lev. 16). A calendar of commemorative festivals was established, the foundation of which was a special weekly day of rest when the people would stop working and focus on God (Lev. 23:3).

The New Testament writers were clear, however, that the temple, sacrifices, priests and indeed the whole OT law, were prophetic pictures pointing to Jesus, and that now he had come they were obsolete (e.g. Gal. 3:19; Col. 2:14; Rms. 7:4-6). This understanding came from Jesus himself who said that he had come to fulfil everything that the law had pointed to (Mt. 5:17-18). Consequently, he likened himself to the temple (Jn. 2:19-21), and he looked ahead to when his spirit would dwell in his followers (Jn. 14: 16-17). He stated that worship would no longer be restricted to special days and places (Jn. 4:21-24), but would instead be an expression of his followers’ whole lives. The tearing of the temple curtain at his death symbolised that all his followers were now free to enter into God’s presence (Mk. 15:38).

This radical reconfiguring of what it means to be God’s people can be seen in the life of the early church community. They understood everyday to be holy and dedicated to God (Rms. 14:5-8) and they met wherever was convenient (e.g. Acts 2:46; 19:9; Rm. 16:5). They understood worship to be the sacrifice of a whole life lived in obedience to God (Rm. 12:1). Jesus was their new high priest (Heb. 8:1-2) and they all were priests serving under him (1 Pt. 2:5), with free access to God’s presence, each with their gift to serve the community and the world (1 Cor. 12:7). And even more remarkably, they began to understand that their community was no less than God’s new residence (Eph. 2:22).

In my experience, however, the church still holds onto a lot of temple language. For years I used the word ‘church’ to describe a special building or meeting, and worship occurred in this building on a special day, and was led by one of God’s specially anointed people.

I’ve been accused of being pedantic when I’ve corrected myself or picked up others in their use of temple language to describe church. But I think it is important because the language we use can, over time, subtly shape our beliefs and consequently our behaviour. I think using temple language can reinforce the false sacred/secular divide of ‘everyday life’ of family, friends and work and our ‘spiritual life’ of holy places, times and people. This really held me back as a young Christian, believing that the church building was the place to come into God’s presence and Sunday was the time to do it.

Jesus, however, calls us to a radical, whole-life embracing community, in which everything is dedicated to God and done for his glory. So I’ve come to the conclusion that if I’m serious about exploring Christian community, then I need to be serious about the language I use to describe it.

Nomad on facebook

2009-07-14T15:40:00.001+01:00

If you let your eyes wonder to the right you’ll notice another new feature on the side-bar, this time it’s a link to our new facebook page. I’ve resisted the lure of facebook for quite a few years now, but it seemed like a jolly good way to get the Nomad word out.

We’re planning on using it to give some more regular updates on what we’re doing, and to give some links to resources we’re finding helpful in our journey.

So if you like the look of it, why not join up and invite your friends.

Shane Claiborne, belief and mission

2009-07-10T15:35:00.000+01:00

This month’s podcast is now online, and features a chat with Shane Claiborne. What I find so inspiring about Shane is how uncompromisingly he lives out his theology. He’s got no time for abstract theological speculation, instead he sees the Bible as a very practical book, urging him to live a radically counter-cultural lifestyle.

In the interview, Shane said ‘the Christianity many of us have become accustomed to is marked by a set of doctrines or beliefs that we hold in common. But in Jesus we don’t just see a presentation of ideas or of doctrine; we see an invitation to join a movement of God’.

I’ve been university educated (three times!), and so the need for philosophical, detached, rational, belief has been drilled into me. So in some ways, when I started going to church I felt right at home, because we were predominantly taught what we needed to believe. I did hear the occasional talk on how faith needed to be expressed in action, but I was certainly never encouraged to express my belief in Jesus by following his radical counter-cultural lifestyle. The overwhelming emphasis was on right belief.

Recently, however, I’ve come to see that the biblical understanding of belief necessitates action. Paul, for example, clearly stated that ‘All scripture is God-breathed...’ (for most of my Christian life I stopped reading at this point to engage in an abstract theological discussion about the nature of inspiration! But Paul goes on) ‘...and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work’ (2 Tim. 3:16 and 17!). So God inspired the writing of the Bible not just so that we would believe the right things, but that in believing the rights things we would do the right things.

Earlier Paul had told the Romans ‘For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved. As the scriptures say, “anyone who trusts in him will never be put to shame.’” (Rm. 10:10-11). So in Paul’s mind, true belief involved three things. We believe something to be true, we then profess it, and then we act on it (trust is acting on a belief).

Jesus made a similar point when he was asked what the greatest commandment was. He said, in essence, ‘Believe in God, love him with your whole life and then go and love your neighbour’ (Mk. 12:29-31). So again we see that belief and action come together. Believe in God, worship him with your whole life, and then take his love into the world (i.e. belief equals worship and mission).

I thought Shane summed it up nicely when he pointed out that Jesus’ picture of the final judgement wasn’t a doctrinal exam, but an assessment of how our beliefs impacted our behaviour, ‘Did you feed the hungry, did you give the thirsty something to drink, did you invite the stranger in...’

So again I’m reminded that mission lies at the heart of what it means to be a follower of Jesus.

Challenging stuff

Tim

Mission and people who don't want to know

2009-07-02T20:13:00.000+01:00

One of the ways we’re planning on blessing our street is by throwing a street party in a couple of weeks. We’ve spent a few evenings now knocking on doors seeing who’s up for getting involved, and pretty much everyone we’ve spoken to has been really positive about what we’re trying to do.

There was one house, however, where no sooner had I said ‘Hi, we’re Tim and Hannah from across the road’ than we had the door slammed in our faces! I put an invite through the door to let them know why I’d come round, just in case there’d been some sort of misunderstanding, but by the time I was back home, the invite was in their wheelie bin.

This isn’t the first time this sort of thing has happened to me. I was in the garden one day, when I felt God say ‘offer to cut your neighbour’s lawn’. My neighbour rarely came out of her house, and had never said more than hello to me, so I felt a bit awkward going round. When she eventually answered the door, however, she seemed really thankful for my offer. It turned out she’d hurt her back and couldn’t get out much, and was really worried about her garden as she couldn’t afford a gardener. It took me 3 hours to cut her lawn (it was knee high), but I was inspired by the thought that God was in it, and that he was trying to lead her closer to him. Over the next year I cut, watered and fed her lawn, cut her hedges, and put her bins out. Rather than any thanks or interest in God, however, she just started giving me more and more grief. In fact she never once mentioned the garden but instead started putting notes through my door and then shouting at me on my doorstep about all kinds of strange things, like me shutting my kitchen draws too loudly (strange that none of these things were a problem before I started helping her out)! Finally she announced to me that I was the neighbour from hell, and that she was going to have to take time off work because of the stress I was causing her.

I really struggled to understand why God would want me to try and bless and witness to people who appeared so uninterested and even hostile? Today I was reading Ephesians 5 and I think God gave me the answer:

‘Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God’ (Eph. 5:1-2).

God is calling me to imitate the way Jesus loves. How did Jesus love me? For most of my life I rebelled against Jesus, I was openly hostile to him, and I rejected his numerous attempts to bless and reach me. I gave Jesus every reason not to love me, and yet he never gave up. I think God is calling me to love like that. He’s calling me to love my neighbours for no other reason than because I’m called to reflect his love.

I don’t know what’s going on in the lives of my neighbours—I suspect there’s a lot of pain—but whatever is going on, I’m called to love them. God’s love for a sinful world compelled him to become human and to die. Love was at the heart of his mission, and I’m starting to see that God’s love needs to be at the heart of mine.

Mailing list

2009-06-30T19:49:00.001+01:00

If you have a little look to the right, you’ll notice a new feature on our side bar, ‘join our mailing list’. A few people have emailed asking whether we’ve got a mailing list to let them know what’s coming up on the podcasts each month. Well, we do have a mailing list, and if you want to be on it, just click the icon, and send off the email (no need to write anything on it, unless you want to of course, but try and be nice).

Just in case you haven’t got the energy to click on the icon, but you’re still wondering who’s going to be on the July edition of the podcast, I can tell you that we’re having a chat with Shane Claiborne, author of one of the most challenging Christian books I’ve ever read, The Irresistible Revolution. So if you feel like your faith needs a jolly good challenge, then tune in on July 10th.