e~mergent kiwi

the blog year gone

Most commented on posts in 2006
1. 7 things I learnt from Bono about worship leading
2. My God questions
3. Dub spirituality and worship
4. There is no such thing as emerging church
5. Flamed for Spirit as love

5 blog hopes for 2007.
1. To find a better way of balancing a gift economy with the pressures of life
2. To form a good robust panel discussion are each "my God question"
3. To have less spam
4. To have a great set of emerging church postcards and make them available as hard copy through lulu.
5. To develop an interactive on-line community around the missional reader project.

christmas worship 1

This worked well as Christmas worship. I hung 4 nappies across the front. My (sermon) reflected on Christmas in the 4 gospels:

: Luke's Christmas is the stuff of childhood carols
: Mark's Christmas has no Christmas and Jesus is an adult, announcing the Kingdom
: Matthew's Christmas includes foreigners
: John's Christmas is God giggling.

On each nappy was a different visual image, taken from a contemporisation of the Book of Kells. The images had been digitally scanned and, using inkjet printer transfer paper, ironed onto the nappy. So each nappy represented a different gospel.

So the Christmas response was the invitation for people to come and rip a piece off the nappy from the Christmas that most challenged them. So if you look closely, John's gospel got a thrashing.

christmas worship 2

This is the Christmas worship moment I like best - mixing the stars. After each Christmas service, the pastoral team sprinkle little stars over everyone; with the blessing "May Jesus Christ, the true star of Christmas, shine on you today." It is quite a special moment, individually "blessing" each person with sprinkled stars.

I love mixing the stars before worship; getting the blend of blues and reds and golds. I love that people find them for days afterward, in their sheets and pillows. That for me is what worship should be, sustaining us in our everyday lives.

i have never been in a church with so much life

This was a comment made to me at the door, after the service, this Sunday morning.

Signs of life could have included;
- the kids praying the pastoral prayer with me up the front of the church;
- reflection on our 4th Advent art piece. (We focus on an art piece each Sunday in Advent by giving them out as postcards at the beginning of Advent, by having an artist speak to each art piece Sunday by Sunday, accompanied by a piece of live music). The actual art piece was present in church this morning;
- celebration of an Opawa sermon being published;
- a story of God at work touching a person's life in the Christmas Journey;
- commissioning 2 people on overseas mission: 1 short term to Cambodia, 1 for a year to Puerto Rico;
- the energy in the room; kids anticipating Christmas, a great musical mix of carols and contemporary chorus, lots of visitors ...

reminder: emerging church postcards 06

Emerging church postcards 06 are starting to roll in, so just a reminder:

that come the new year I am publishing on-line a series of emerging church postcards . All contributions welcome; simply send me at steve at emergentkiwi dot org dot nz;
a) 1 photo of your emerging community this (06) year;
plus a few sentences in response to these 4 questions;
b) what has been a helpful Scripture in the formation and life of your church community?;
c) what has your emerging community been learning about spiritual formation?;
d) what movie (or scene) might sum up your year?;
e) what has been your best mission moment in 06?.

kiwi sandwiched between richard hays and brian mclaren

My authors copy of Proclaiming the Scandal of the Cross arrived today.

It is such an important book; offering 18 sermons on preaching the atonement today, putting contemporary preached wheels to the multiple images of the atonement in the Bible. I have already used 3 sermons from it as case studies in my Living the Text class at Fuller Theological Seminary. There are sermons from CS Lewis, Rowan Williams (Archbishop of Canterbury) and me. A little Kiwi! Sandwiched between New Testament scholar Richard Hays and Brian McLaren.

My semon is titled "Participation and an Atomized World: A Reflection on Christ as Representative New Adam" and is part of a series of 10 sermons I preached around the communion table in 2004. The editor notes of my sermon; "Rather than discarding the biblical imagery and language, however, Taylor digs into the contemporary context and experience of New Zealanders ... to breathe new life and meaning into biblical images. Therefore Taylor not only stands on firm biblical ground ..[but] ... also in line with fine theological work done by one of the church's early theologians." (pages 103-4, 109.)

imagination, leadership and humming Mary's song in the emerging church

Update: I have added below a somewhat excellent conversational email response to this post from Alan Roxburgh - reflecting further on imagination, leadership, emerging church and Mary's song

"There is then a twofold work for those projects involved in developing transformative practices of hope: the work of generating new imaginary significations and the work of forming institutions that mark such significations." (Ward, Cultural Transformation and Religious Practice, 2005, 146.

This captures so much of the pain around the emerging church movement. The emerging church movement is gift as it embraces the work of generating new imaginative acts of church and worship. This is what drew me to the alternative worship movement back in 1995. I saw a picture of Visions in York in worship, projecting multiple slide images on church walls. Their imagination allowed my eyes to catch a glimpse of what it might mean to worship God body, mind and soul. Time and again I have seen in the emerging church glimpses of new ways of being church, renewed missional practices, Incarnational worship.

At the same time, I have seen emerging church groups remain profoundly distrustful of institution forming. Leadership and structures are often a dirty word. Listen closely and you hear stories of abuse. Yet Ward reminds us that our imaginative task is always two-fold. We need the breathe of new life and generative power for institutional life.

Equally, I have seen the emerging photocopied. The challenge is not to reproduce Visions worship on your wall. Instead it is to worship God body, mind and soul, Incarnationally in your context.

Creativity is never formless and void. It always looks for the containers of time and space that will mark day from night, form from void. Such institutions are never timeless, but rather contextual markers that best fit the new imaginations. Such is the hard work of the church emerging. It is easier to despise the church of your fathers and mothers than to hoe the hard yards that are the forming of contextual containers for a new day.

I have been working on Mary's song in Luke 1 this week. At base it is a song. It is a creative response to the generative and birthing work of God. As the Spirit of God hovers over the waters in Genesis 1, so the Spirit of God hovers over Mary's womb. The Christmas story in Luke offers 3 other new imaginations, the songs of Zechariah and Simeon and the angels, that hum into life around the birth of Jesus. Mary walks in a long line of Biblical woman, like Miriam and Deborah and Hannah, who sing in creative response to the work of God. Mary's song invites us to respond to the generative work of the spirit with new imaginary significations.

Mary's song offers a theological imagination. Mary seems little interested in singing in a song in response to sociological observations of church practice and church decline. Instead her song emerges from her personal narrative of excluded woman and young teenage. So must all our songs, for God dwells among the stories of the poor and dispossessed. But Mary's song refuses to remain stuck in her moment. Instead it becomes a form, a contextual hum, that will shape a movement toward God for the poor and marginalised. Such is the task of mission today. To sing Mary's song for our day, bounded by our context, listening to the stories of God in life, in response to the hovering work of the Spirit. May the power of God's Spirit be twofold this Advent, to breathe new imagination and generate institutional life, for the sake of the poor we pray, Amen.

Update: A somewhat excellent conversational email response to this post from Alan Roxburgh - reflecting further on imagination, leadership, emerging church and Mary's song

Thanks for the gift of these reflections. I have been working through Ward's wonderfully rich book - it provides us with generative materials for framing the work we are about. I look forward to continued conversations around its content.

The lines you pick and connect with Mary's song connect me with a conversation I had this week with three people from down the valley who've been planting an 'emergent' church for the past few years. One teaches philosophy at a nearby university, another is a counsellor and teaches psych and the third is the relatively new 'pastor' of this group of 150ish people. Like a lot of emergent experiments they began several years back out of an awareness that many of the people they knew had left the church bruised, hurt and abused by the seven-day-week, programmatic and propositional nature of their experiences. They sensed there was something more to Christianity but could no longer sustain life in an existing congregation. You know the story as well as I. What strikes me about these stories is the depth of murmuring around loss and longing that hangs in the air. So many out there sense something is wrong with the story of Christian life they've been given. Week by week they come out of church services with a murmuring inside shaped by a grief and hurt which, I think, is a whole lot about hunger to know God in the midst of a people. It is less and less likely they find it in busy churches shaped by arguments and preaching that have little to do with their lives - so they leave.

The philosopher and psychologist sensed all of this. They set up a Sunday night meeting built around theological conversations coming out of people's lived questions. People came, they kept meeting and grew. Their narrative background is a fairly conservative denomination formed in and by modernity.

These folk were meeting with me for a couple of reasons. First, they just felt lonely after three years. Their own denomination doesn't get what they're about. The conversations they have scare the modernist propositionalist views of Scripture and truth in that denomination so these folk feel like orphans and are searching for places to connect and belong. It was poignant to here them describe this desire to be connected, understood and blessed. Second, they were trying to figure out what to do next. They had so reacted to their church experience that, as you indicate in your note, they are deeply distrustful of institutions, programs and organization. This distrust goes down deep - so much so that they really are struggling to know how to form and organize themselves as a church rather than a dialogue and happening on a Sunday night.

Obviously, other issues are at work. But here is an example of Ward's point. These folk have been experimenting with whatever practices of hope they've been able to figure out (inside their narratives this has to do with creating spaces for dialogue around people's lived questions) and in so doing generated hope and expectation. At the same time they are so burned by and suspicious of institutions that they have no idea how to give form to the hope and imagination. I have a lot of time for these kinds of folk.

I find it fascinating that many emergent folk speak of 'institutions' in quite Platonic ways as if there is this reified thing out there that is just objectively destructive of creatively and imagination. This is modernity deeply embedded in imagination even when its considered 'postmodern' to be anti-structure (when, in acts, its very modern). But it is also an illustration of how good people with a deep hunger for God's future are struggling to break out of the systems that have shaped them - because we're in a place where it is hard to articulate alternatives most of the time these folk kick against what has shaped them. But then there is this murmuring going on. The kicking and critique is also this other song that seems unable to find form. You talk about humming and breathing as you reflect upon Mary's song. I wonder about Mary and Zechariah and Simeon. They lived in a geography and time when each knew that the narratives were broken and destructive to life. And there was this other song going on under the surface, this background murmuring of God's past promise of a future that was not now. In the midst of their 'making do' with life they must have felt this song in some way but it did not have form or voice, it was murmur and humming. When I hum its because I'm not sure about the song. I was never trained in music and have no ear for tunes yet inside me is this hunger to sing out loud. But I dare not because all that would come out is noise. So I hum and in the humming I'm listening and longing to find someone who knows the tune and can lead me in the song. Mary, Zechariah, Elizabeth, Simeon and so many of my emergent and non emergent friends today are in this experience. When I can only hum I mostly can name what isn't the song but just can't find inside the way to blast out the song that's rumbling somewhere in the universe. Don't you think that's what's going on all over the place in so many people and so many churches?

Then there is Mary and her song - a song that comes forth from her womb. "My soul magnifies the Lord..." I love those words! She knows, in her humble estate (what an understatement of poetic form and power), that the humming has been given form and voice by He who is being formed within her womb. Her breathing has now found words because the blessed Spirit has filled her womb with God. So now she sings with words no young peasant girl in rural Palestine could utter (our social science makes singing this song an impossibility in this situation) but her womb is full and it is the Lord who has done this thing. What am I going on about? In the midst of all the murmuring and humming of people who know something is wrong and kick against their inherited structures the Spirit is at work. How might we be poets and midwives to the murmuring and humming? This is what I see you doing so well, Steve, in your context. As I listened to you talk a few weeks ago in Christchurch I was so moved because this is what you're doing. How do we midwife others into this vocation?

Mary's womb is the place of God's creativity and life. Ordinary Mary - a young girl who becomes the handmaiden of the Lord! I can't imagine God's Spirit just invaded Mary's womb. We call that rape; minimally it would be the denial of human choice and freedom. So I can only imagine that this girl said Yes to God. What could that have meant to her in that culture? What a massive risk of hope! In Mary I see God's future so much more clearly than in the power brokers and elites of culture. In the ordinary, insignificant life of this girl God's future is born. So, in this little gathering of people down the valley with no idea about how to be a church is God's future. But in these seven day a week congregations where pastors have grand plans for big futures there sit ordinary men and women who sense its all so artificial and long for God - there too is God's future shaping itself in the womb of their lives.

Mary's womb is the place of God's life for the world. Within her, beginning as simple undifferentiated cells and emerging into greater and greater hierarchies of complexity, is Jesus. Wow! The emergent creative future of God, the hope of the world formed through delicate and intricate structures of organiztional development and the complex formation of cellular hierarchies. In each womb, in every place, the form taken is always new, always different, always the place of God's future. The womb is the location of Ward's both/and - the new imaginary of God and the formed institutions that mark the particular signification.

God's great joy to you and your community in this time of Advent. Thanks for the conversations and the partnership on this journey.

overseas travel in 2007

I have a group in the US who have asked me to speak in the Los Angeles area either May 19, 20 OR June 2, 3. All expenses are paid but it is a long way to go and a lot of personal energy for one gig. Are there any other groups around the Pacific Coast-area who could use me either side of these dates?

In terms of my other overseas travel plans in 2007; I am
- in Melbourne with Churches of Christ May 5, 6;
- in Auckland with the Anglicans July 3-5;
- in Los Angeles July 9-13 at Fuller Theological Seminary (pencil booked), then Seattle 16-19 July.

Contact me if I am in your area and you think I could help your emerging and missional church conversations around any of those dates. I can consult and converse and speak.

discipleship material

I am playing around with discipling options for next year. We already have 1-1 options around growth coaching. But we've been playing with adding in block course based options. My underlying principle is: multiple options for multiple learning styles.

So I am considering 3 options
1 : a visual option, using the Nooma videos
2 : a storytelling option, (more on this as it develops cos it is something that is being Opawa designed.
3 : a content based option. I am quite drawn to Living Faith by Tom Wright, because I like the breadth of topics (including 5 on the Bible plus Christian history).

Just wondering if anyone out there has used either Tom Wright stuff or the Nooma videos in discipleship? If so, what was helpful? what was not? Only answer if you've used them small group and discipling contexts (compared to in a worship service context).

5 things

Pernell has tagged me: 5 things you probably don't know about me.

1. My brother Mark died at birth. I never met him and I've missed him more and more in the last few years. I find that a bit wierd.

2. I used to love marmalade as a kid. I used to spread marmalade on every one of my pieces of toast and school lunch sandwiches. Then suddenly one day I hated marmalade and didn't touch it for years.

3. My favourite books growing up were Biggles books. As a kid I was intrigued by the fact that Biggles never seemed to go to the toilet.

4. I stand responsible for my younger brother badly burning his feet. I managed to con him into running across the smouldering ashes of a bonfire. Half way across he just started screaming.

5. My favourite movie is Jesus of Montreal. I love the musical score and the urban landscapes.

And I tag Tash McGill, Laura Drane, Darren Wright, Steve Garner, Fernando Gros.

written on city walls

8 shipping containers, placed in the centre of Christchurch, around the Christchurch tourist tram route. Each is wrapped in fabric. These are gifts, each an interactive art installation, waiting to be unwrapped, a present to our city, telling part of the Christmas story.

While this is a huge undertaking, the Lectionary Scriptures for today were of immense encouragement to the tired and stressed and nervous among us, for in Daniel 5, God writes on the walls of the place. God's words are displayed in the corridors of power.

Interestingly, sown into each shipping container are scriptures. The words of God hang on container walls, around our city.

Today, as in Daniel's time, God's words are being written on the walls of our city, in the places where lawyers walk and shoppers shop. We at Opawa rejoice in being God's handwriting. And we pray that today, as in Daniel's time, our city might have the wisdom to discern the words of God.

8 christmas presents

8 shipping containers, each wrapped in 40 metres of fabric to suggest a Christmas present. Each placed in the centre of Christchurch, around the Christchurch tourist tram route. Inside each is an interactive art installation, telling part of the Christmas story;

container 1, God of the Universe come to earth in Cathedral Square;
container 2, enforced family get-together, on Worcester St Bridge;
container 3, angels and ordinary people and a Kiwi musterers hut, Art Gallery;
container 4, the stable, Arts Centre;
container 5, consumerism, outside Museum;
container 6, suffering of innocents, at Armagh St, Bridge;
contianer 7, moving on with a refuge theme, Cramner Square;
contianer 8, our response as a chapel in Victoria Square;

Open from 10 am to 9 pm (hours of the Christchurch tram), from Saturday December 16-Sunday December 24.

This is part of Opawa Baptist and Side Door Arts Trust gift to the city in 2006. This is public mission, taking Jesus back out of church and telling his story in our marketplace, in the City Square and outside the Art Gallery and Museum.

After months of negotiation, we gained Council permission 3 weeks ago. We have been scrambling ever since. In an ideal world, each container would have a person at the door, to offer welcome and provide security. If there are any Christchurch readers of my blog that have 4 spare hours between now and Christmas, please email me, steve at emergentkiwi dot org dot nz, as we desperately need volunteers.

doodling at Jesus birth OR Trinity, annunication, communion and eschatology

How would you express the annunciation of Jesus as a visual image?

Many of us like to doodle on paper as we listen. So how would you doodle the angel appearing to Mary and announcing the impregnation? Here is a marginal manuscript, a sort of doodle from the 9th century, from the Byzantine Khludov. It comes from After the After the Spirit. A Constructive Pneumatology from Resources outside the Modern West (a fascinating book by Eugene Rogers) and I used it on Sunday.

I then noted the Christian belief that the economic Trinity = immanent Trinity; that what God does = who God is. That God in Jesus acts the same before he was born as during his life, and as he will come again.

That God starts (God has a surprise for you. Luke 1:30); that Spirit works (the Holy Spirit will come upon you. Luke 1:35); that creation matters (You will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. Luke 1:31).

It led me to offer the following table; integrating the Trinity with Jesus birth, Jesus return and communion.

We concluded around the communion table. Often at communion we just look back, memory of a night 2000 years ago. Yet in communion we are entering into Jesus, the economic Trinity = immanent Trinity, that Jesus acts in the Bible is the same as who God is before the Bible.

Christmas can be a very busy time. We have presents to buy, food to prepare, a long list of social functions and breakups. And it's easy to get tired. When I do, when I get tired in December, I return to this doodle. The reminder that it is not my energy, for God starts, for the Spirit is working and that as creation matters and God wants to touch our human bodies with God power.

As we come to communion: you might like to think about: What is God starting in you? Where is the Spirit working?

emerging church postcards 06

Again, this Christmas I am compiling a series of emerging church postcards . I want to publish on-line a visual snapshot and digital diary of the emerging church in 2006. I welcome contributions from any emerging churches. Just send me at steve at emergentkiwi dot org dot nz;
a) 1 photo of your emerging community this (06) year;
plus a few sentences in response to these 4 questions;
b) what has been a helpful Scripture in the formation and life of your church community?;
c) what has your emerging community been learning about spiritual formation?;
d) what movie (or scene) might sum up your year?;
e) what has been your best mission moment in 06?.

During January I will be post your image and responses as a series of postcards06 on my blog. (Feel free to use the emerging church postcards 06 image above and to spread the word.)

Now last year I was very United States-allergic. I was tired of the way that the emerging church was so often reduced to emergentUS. I thus refused to accept any American postcards. It was a blog-stake in the ground, because I wanted to provide a visual reminder that the emerging church is global, not American.

This year I repent! I am accepting US postcards. However, I will only post them in proportion to their percentage of world population. That's 5% (according to here). So, for every 20 postcards I get, I will post one from the United States (in the order they come from the US).

Why emerging church postcards 06?

Well, my 2005 book, the Out of Bounds Church?, was based on a series of 8 postcards, posted from emerging churches around the Western world. Each "postcard" is followed by a chapter exploring the challenges and opportunities faced by the emerging church. The 9th chapter invited readers to go and write their own postcard by planting their own emerging church!

A book is static. Once published, it cannot change. The web is not. So last year I invited postcards from the edge;
a) 1 photo of your emerging community in 05;
plus a paragraph answer to these 4 questions;
b) how were you as an emerging community birthed?;
c) what do you as an emerging community value?;
d) what music track sums up your year;
e) what was your best mission moment in 05?

The result was postcards 05, a visual glimpse of emerging churches in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Denmark, Germany, Malaysia, Ireland and the United Kingdom. The complete set is here.

At the end of another year, I want to provide a digital and visual reminder of the journey that is emerging church.

Korean translation of Out of Bounds Church?

I have just been informed that Zondervan have licensed Jeyoung Communications to translate and publish The Out of Bounds Church? into Korean. It should be available in bookstores in about 18-24 months.

Links:
Out of Bounds Church translated into German

10 day celebration

Last nite was the first time in 10 days that just the 4 members of the Taylor family have sat alone around the table to eat our evening meal. I cooked a delicious vegetarian creation: nacho chips sprinked with cheese as a base, cooked vegetables layed on top (including peas fresh from the garden), topped with an avocado, tomato and spring onion mix. There was a lot of laughter as we remembered all the diverse things we've been doing in the last 10 days - theatre rehearsals, an overseas visit, international friends staying.

on the jet plane

I flight up to Auckland in a few hours to do a live radio slot. Feel free to drop in and listen.

Then up early on Monday to fly to Sydney for a 3 day conference: Faith in a hyphen, exploring one of the key issues facing Christian faith and contemporary society, that of how to respond to issues of cultural and religious diversity.

I am delivering a paper Faithful Other or Guilty Other?, exploring themes of migration in relation to Jacob's journey in Genesis 28:10-18. I am trying to read the Bible from a post-colonial perspective, using a range of literature, including the diaries of Captain Cook and Te Horeta (Maori who observed Cook's arrival). If you're interested you can read it here.

Hoping to catch up with Matthew Stone also. Back home late Wednesday nite, when I play host to Al Roxburgh and Andrew Menzies, as we begin to discuss the Allelon Mission to Western Culture Project and how it might shape up in Australasia.

It promises to be a stimulating week. I am praying this prayer, our Benediction for the 4 weeks of Advent at Opawa.

God,
please find me faithful in helping others
to celebrate the birth of your Son this Christmas,
Amen