sustain:if:able kiwi

lighting the church year

The church has these white, straight, block walls. To be fair, it looks like a telephone exchange.

So I have been “dreaming” with some lighting friends about some external colour. And I also mentioned that the Church Year has different colours for different seasons; purple=Advent as we prepare for the King etc. My lighting friends were suitably inspired and went for a play.

It’s 19K if you want to have a look …

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he made my day

“Would you like another slide projector,” the voice on the phone asked. “Because I’ve just brought you one from a garage sale.”

One of the innovations I have introduced at Opawa over the last month in the evening service is two 20 metre long sheets of white cloth that hang on either side of the church. With the artful use of hooks and elastic, we can erect these sheets in about 1 minute flat. We can then rear project slide images and use simple Par 38 coloured bulbs, and in a matter of minutes, create visual and ambient space. Very simple, very effective.

So a notice in the church newsletter and all the returned missionaries and wise old-timers have been steadily, Sunday by Sunday, dusting up and dropping off their old slide projectors. Place a slide in each and you have tiled images, rear-projected, all around the auditorium. Which basically makes those old slide projectors the heart of visually creative worship.

And then the phone call. A wise old-timer, actually buying me projectors, scrounging garage sales, thinking of Sunday on a Saturday.

Makes my day. I’m sure they think I’m barking mad, but there is something slightly redemptive about this whole process; dusting off slices of history and re-using them visually.

mono-cultural philistine

I feel such a mono-cultural philistine. I need permission to use a contemporary art image in my book. The email trail lead to Germany.

So I ring Germany.

“Do you speak English”, I have to ask.

Click. New voice.

“Do you speak English”, I have to ask again.

Click. New voice.

I mean, how would I feel if someone rang me in New Zealand, asking me if I spoke their language. I was so embarrassing.

missional impotence

postmodern culture=postmodern cultures. John Drane notes
: desperate poor
: hedonists
: traditionalists
: spiritual searchers
: corporate achievers
: secularists
: apathetic
So perhaps Hillsong exists as a form of contextualisation among corporate achievers?

To do so would be to affirm it, while at the same time encouraging mission innovation among the plurality of cultures. It is just so frustrating when its apparent numerical success is used to discourage other mission innovation.

In the movie Super Size Me, excessive consumption leads to a loss of sex drive and muscular vigor for the filmaker, Martin Spurlock. It seems that same thing is happenning with ecclesiological and denominational ponderings; that the drive to up-size in fact leads to a slackening in reproductive vigor.

emerging church = hillsong?

The leader of our Baptist family of churches here in New Zealand has just returned from the UK. He writes in our Denominational magazine of a weekend in London, and of going to Hillsong where he believed he “caught a glimpse of the future church.” He was very impressed by six services with people “queuing up for a hundred metres down the road waiting to get in.”

He then writes:
“There are lots of pundits and theoreticians on the emerging church, but when you count the fruit of their strategies you could be forgiven for wondering if they’re as onto it as they claim to be. Is it true that most supposed experts on the emerging generation come from small niche-market churches with remarkably few transformed lives? Is it not also true that the largest Gen X church in the United States is Saddleback … I got the unmistakable impression that Hillsong in London was actually attracting lots of young adults -maybe they have something to teach us about how we might do it here.”

So this is the Denominational climate of vigorous missional critique and affirmation within which I work. As I ponder a response, I’d be interested in any more grounded UK comments on Hillsong London and what it might teach us about the future of the church?

missional discipleship as Growth Coaching and spiritual stepping stones

Ann Wilkinson-Hayes emailed a few weeks ago:
Got to do a lecture next week on missional discipleship. Something about missional church requiring a different way of learning faith. Any thoughts/resources?

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preaching the lamb of God

Jesus the lamb of God:

are there any contemporary metaphors that might illuminate this blood-stained, distinctly rural image in today’s urban context?

how to communicate such an image, especially today, 1 October, World Vegetarian
Day!?