mission 21 thoughts - pt 3
So, Thursday morning after another great time of worship led by Roy Searle and the Northumbria Community, Martin and I presented the research. I was glad that we did it as a team, I think it worked well (from where I was anyway!). The report will be available to download (when they get their act together) from www.togetherinmission.org and recordings of the meetings from www.stream247.com.

The presentation itself was a speedy run through some highlights of the report leaving much of the detail to be digested from the report itself.

We set the scene globally: what is God doing around the nations?
And locally (UK): the nineties and challenge 2000.
We then took a glance at the big picture with numbers of church members and actual churches over the past 15 years; over 1 million down and a loss of 2,340 churches.
Then we saw the figures for churches planted over the last 5-10 years (where available); this was only within the existing church structures; in total it was in excess of 500, and Peter Brierley’s recent church census seems to be indicating even more than that. This was positive; however the flip side is that the numbers of church closures still outweighs the plants!

I then outlined the 3 categories of church planting activity and we looked at a quick story from each. These categories were:
1. CP activity within the existing structures of church planting
2. CP activity on the edge…
3. CP activity beyond the edge…

I stressed that these categories were not important in themselves but were simply practical hooks to hang things in order to make it easy to quickly grasp the overall picture. I took some flack on this before the conference!

Martin then summed up and made some observations on each of these categories.

I spent a fair bit of time on the last category and as best I could tried to convey something of the new paradigm and what it looks like;

I talked about it being:
Apostolically committed
Simple and reproducible
Jesus led
Family shaped
Organic

It seemed to flow pretty well; we then allowed people on the floor to discuss it in small groups for a few minutes then we took a few questions. Generally the first thing people said was how they had been encouraged by what they had heard. We had some good questions and as time ran out we were just getting to the more sensitive issues – like ‘where does the clergy fit in with all this organic stuff?’ hmmmm! There had been a humorous comment the night before in the form of a reply to a question posed by a denominational pastor who had visited the church in Cuba; he had asked his host (who had seen the number of house churches explode in Cuba following the closure of church buildings and the departure or arrest of all clergy) what his advice was for the church in the UK, the answer, ‘close all your church buildings and fire all your clergy’. This was greeted with a loudish cheer around the room! I (jokingly) reminded them of this in answer to this question! I did also comment that I believe they have a crucial role to play, pastorally, and theologically/strategically. Time for questions then ran out. But I had a stream of people coming up afterwards to ask more questions which was great.

George Lings and Stuart Murray-Williams (the self styled grumpy old men in sweaters!) then responded to the report by asking each other questions. They raised some useful issues though some of it seemed a little pedantic. There was a suggestion that the DNA that I had identified seemed to lack any 'upward' element - very St Thom's type comment! And that it was dangerous to talk too definitively about any essential DNA at this stage. I would wholly disagree with this. Though I recognise that we are in as much danger of seizing on 'magic DNA' as 'magic models' for the key to 'success'; and that's definitely not what all this is about. However we do need to understand the underlying core DNA which allows multiplication to happen and how this differs from most of what we have been working with in the past.

posted by alexander @ 11:17 AM    2 comments

2 Comments:

For me the most significant DNA are...

- Intentionally and Intrinsically Holistically Missional (Incarnational).
- Inclusive and Organic - community and cultural expression
- Creative
- Comprehensivly 'lived' community (i.e. not a Sunday Club!)

By  Mark Berry, at 3:19 PM  

yeah, I'd go with all of these. Thanks Mark, good to catch up in Sheffield.

By  alexander, at 5:04 PM  

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