The Simple Pastor
Simplicity & Generosity
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This is from his foreword to Dave Stroud’s Planting Churches, Changing Communities
“Church planting is not simply a matter of getting a number of individuals saved; it is about the advance of God’s community in the earth. He wants a community, his city, his family in which he could dwell. Church planting is an extension of the community, not simply an exercise in multiplying the head count. Part of God’s purpose in saving us is to overcome our intense selfishness and isolation.” (bold added)
Amen.
It’s a shame on churches all across the country that our nation needs a credit card company to foster community. Still anything that does that is a good thing. Why not consider joining in
It’s a shame on churches all across the country that when someone wants to build community in our nation they turn to a credit card company for help. Should be our job. Still anything that does that is a good thing. Why not consider joining in
Here’s a few convergences noted from my blog reading while I’ve been away.
A great quote here from Paul Tripp:
“I’m more and more persuaded as I study Scripture that my life is intended by God to be a community project. We were designed to live in community – first, community with God and second, community with other people. We were formed to be social beings, and all of the places where I need to grow and change – the development of my gifts, my understanding, my wisdom – doesn’t happen individually. It happens in community. In addition, one of God’s best tools for revealing and changing hearts is marriage. So it’s [through community, marriage and family] that I actually become more of what God has designed me to be. You could argue that, in God’s design, the fundamental social building block of human culture is marriage. Isn’t it interesting that the marriage relationship is the picture that God uses of His relationship to us?”
Colin Beavan is No Impact Man, one of the top sustainable living bloggers and recently he’s written a couple of posts that have made me think. This one community and this on contentment. He’s searching for answers yet for some reason the church and the Christian faith don’t hold out much hope to him. That saddens me. Because if its anywhere on this planet where you should find people loving one another and contented with their lot, its in the church of Jesus Christ.
I guess like many of you I use a RSS reader (Google Reader in my case) and it’s easy to just continuously add blogs to your reading list. I tend to scan and skim a lot, looking for something to catch my eye. I’ve started to become a little more rigorous in my unsubscribing from blogs and watching the amount of time I give to reading blogs (probably still too much).
So a question. What techniques, ideas, hints and tips do you have for reading and managing your blog reading list to stop it becoming unmanageable? And as I’m curious to know, my new poll will be on this question: How many blogs do you regularly read? (I’m currently subscribing to 48!!!)
A new blog I’ve added and trying out is Life Together and two posts that immediately caught my eye was The Recession – A revealer of true community and Home is a Small Group for Mission
This stood out “researchers suggest that our low ‘trust and belonging’ score may be ‘the result of the development of a highly individualistic culture in
the UK’. Basically, the suggestion is that we are in danger of becoming the most selfish nation in Europe.”
It goes back to the basic claim that money is important. The lack of it will make you feel unhappy, but also that money is not the most important thing because once you reach a certain level of income, there are a little gains in happiness for trying to increase your income beyond that point. Richer does not always mean happier.
This is clearly not ingrained into our national pysche because when the economy is booming we obsess over property and the stuff that fills the properties and when it busts we obsess over the depth, length and breadth of the recession. It seems if your British then money still equals happiness.
At root this is a sign of our spiritual impoverishment, we lack the spiritual resources to see credible alternatives and the failure for this, I would argue, lies squarely with the Christian church. We may be different but not nearly or clearly different enough. We must make it an urgent task to recreate a community life that is a clear witness to the world that we don’t worship at the altar of the gods of stuff.
On a similar vein to the previous post, this time Todd Hiestand illustrates why we need teams of leaders not single leaders and why community is great. He writes,
“When someone stands up and advocates for something that is not your passion. How do you respond? Are you frustrated that your thing isn’t being spoken about? Or, do you realize that you are lucky they are advocating for that idea. Of course, at the same time they are lucky you are advocating for your idea.That’s the beauty of community.
Each person brings their gifting and passion to make the community more whole.”
Read the whole thing here
Marcus Honeysett has a great article on community and the role of the leader. He writes,
“Congregations want and need leaders who are open, vulnerable and authentic. People who know them and are known by them. If the church is the community of God’s people, there can be no stand-offishness from the leaders, no professional detachment. They have to be community people to the core if they are to build God’s communities of purpose for others.”
Read the whole thing here
It’s an issue I find challenging – getting the balance right between on the one hand getting the work done, meeting non-Christians, spending time with my family and spending relational time with family in the church as well as friends outside it. It’s hard not to think you’re building shallow not deep.
My friend Ian has just posted a passionate plea to live differently. He writes,
“I do not want to accommodate the consumer society – I want to change it. I want to live differently, and to raise my children to live differently as well. I will not conform to this. I will find a better way to live – one more in harmony with the teaching of Jesus – principles of justice, mercy, righteousness, truthfulness, generosity, sacrifice and mutuality.”
and
“I look at some of the excellent examples that have found a different way to live, such as The Simple Way in Philadelphia, USA and the Northumbria Community in the UK and rejoice in what they do. But I want something that works here and now in Shrewsbury, Shopshire, with the people I know. I want something that I can do now”
Read the whole thing here and join in the conversation
Sometimes when I write about community I do so with instinct, i.e. ‘I think this is the way it is’ but haven’t done the hard work of researching it for facts which prove my case. That was probably the case when I wrote ‘What about community?’ In that piece I said, “Perhaps more importantly, why is there a sense that community is often missing from modern life?”
It was something I ‘felt’ to be true but hadn’t done the research. Fortunately for me the BBC has come to my rescue with this article headlined ‘Life in UK has become lonelier’
It begins by saying ‘community life has substantially weakened over the past 30 years’ and the reasons are: “Increased wealth and improved access to transport has made it easier for people to move for work, for retirement, for schools, for a new life. The decline in marriage, increasing divorce, immigration and a growing student population are also said to be contributory factors.”
So I wasn’t too far off the mark. It’s a legitimate question to ask over the past 30 years as our society has fragmented where has the church been? So, comments please on what your church (if you go to one) or community group is doing to combat loneliness and isolation. What is being done?
Some of you will read that post headline and think ‘Doh, talk about stating the obvious’. Here’s the thing though, apparently pubs up and down the country are closing, at the rate of 36 a week.
Not because we’re drinking less, because we’re actually drinking more. We’re just drinking more at home and watching TV. Forget what this says about our nations physical health but also what it might say about any sense of community. It’s dying.
Anyway, a group of our nations lawmakers are very upset about this and a House of Commons Select Committee have been saying some very strong things about the importance of the great British pub.
“The government needs to wake up to the importance of the pub,” says Liberal Democrat MP Greg Mulholland. “Instead of regarding them as businesses which can go to the wall we need to look at changing planning law to enshrine the pub. Whenever a pub is proposed to go to a different use, be closed or demolished, the local community needs to be consulted. At the end of the day, who owns the pub? Legally it’s the pub operating company or the landlord. But morally, surely, a community, a village owns a pub that’s been there for hundreds of years.”
I can’t recall anyone making such a fuss about churches that close, can you? Maybe it’s because like the pub they’ve lost connection with the community and the community no longer cares.
In a statement the owners of a recently closed pub said, “Traditional rural pubs that are at the heart of their communities, with good, motivated licensees satisfying their customers’ needs, will not only survive, but thrive.” – Could the same be said for churches?
Community. It’s in the name of the church I lead, we aspire to be a community church. It’s one of our values, we want to build a genuine community of believers that has influence and impact on the wider geographical community. But what is a community and why do we want one so much?
Perhaps more importantly, why is there a sense that community is often missing from modern life? Plenty of observers have noted how increasingly mobile people have become as education, work and relationships pushes and pulls them around the country. Less people live in the town where they grew up than ever before and people are constantly moving. Add that to the fact that people are often eager to improve the quality of their dwelling that increases our mobility. Each year a few doors from where you live a stranger will move in, if you don’t say hello sooner or later you’ll know no-one who lives near you.
Add that to an increasing mobility in the workplace and the almost total erosion of job security that means many people work in a place they care nothing about with people they care nothing about and you’re adding a potent ingredient into a recipe of isolation.
Lastly, there is the ascendancy of the TV. We are now fully entertained in the comfort of our own homes. When we come home tired from work we care little about and we don’t know our neighbours or care for our colleagues what incentive is there to leave the safety and security that is your new sofa? And while you’re being amused to death with mindless soaps and informed about places you’ll never see, you’re also being scared and frightened about ‘them’. The world is full of evil people – child abusers, kidnappers, identity thieves, drunken louts on the weekend and gangs of teenagers for the weekdays – added to your drug addicts, dealers, and usual mix of car thieves and burglars. The world is also full of unseen dangers – germs on everything, diseases to be scared of and as we’re no longer in contact with our spiritual sides – what is more frightening than death? So insure it, sterilise it, protect it and stay away from everyone else. Don’t let your children play outside.
But the problem goes deeper than statistics and demographics it goes to the heart. We’ve bought into a dream that has ‘me’ as the hero. I’m the centre of the story and everyone else is an ‘extra’, if the hero isn’t happy – he can change the sidekick, dump the gang, find a new country, move to a new town, buy a new look and get some new gadgets. Everything is up for grabs as long as the hero is happy. Hmm. No place for loyalty, faithfulness, integrity, contentment, commitment in this story.
Consumerism has a lover called individualism and together they spin a web of lies that pulls us away not towards other people. Community is part of the antidote of kingdom. As we become part of a kingdom that seeks to bring reconciliation to the WHOLE world, we are pulled towards people, called to meet them, get to know them, love them, fight with them and make up again with them. Called to spend time with them and share our lives with them. As we do that we open ourselves up to correction, encouragement, generosity, compassion and true friendship. We can live differently and live deeply.
Community is without question the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to do – building a church is easier, getting my quiet times in order is easier, breaking stubborn habits is nothing but building genuine community has been genuinely difficult. This makes me think it’s spiritual warfare but also that it means the treasure that comes when you get glimpses of it – as unexpected gifts are given, when people pull round to offer unconditional and extravagant love is beyond comparison. The kingdom is not a collection of individuals but a community of people. Be a part of it.
“Christianity entered history as a new social order, or rather a new social dimension. From the very beginning Christianity was not primarily a ‘doctrine’ but exactly a ‘community’. There was not only a ‘Message’ to be proclaimed and delivered, and a ‘Good News’ to be declared. There was precisely a New Community, distinct and peculiar, in the process of growth and formation, to which members were called and recruited. Indeed, ‘fellowship’ was the basic category of Christian existence.”
- Georges Florovsky, ‘Empire and Desert: Antinomies of Christian History’
Taken from Jesus for President by Shane Claiborne and Chris Haws, p226
Today was another good day in the life of North Shrewsbury Community Church with a talk by Terry Hotchkiss (from Barnabas Community Church) on healing. We saw people recommit themselves to following Christ and some take that step for the first time, we saw people seek God for healing in their own lives and that of others.
We also experienced God’s presence as we worshipped Him, we were built up as people encouraged one another and worked out what it means to follow Christ in a difficult world. It was a good day. We were challenged and encouraged to be outward looking in our prayers, because if life really is this good with God, how can we keep it to ourselves?
All this is true, and I delight in it. At the same time, I’m stirred to continue to seek to be part of a community that ‘outclasses’ society in the quality of its life. One that respects creation, that lives on what it needs rather than living for its wants. One where relationships are built to last, not last until a better offer comes along (see Matt Hosier’s blog for thoughts on marriage), one where the poor and needy of the world find acceptance, love and compassion – as well as a nice cup of tea! One where we share, care and pray for each other. There is so much more to being the church and every additional angle challenges the poverty of communal life in our nation. I love the fact that I worship a God who changes us from the inside out, but never leaves the outside unchanged. There really is nothing like the church.
I’m using “A Year with Dietrich Bonhoeffer” as a devotional and this morning’s reading was very powerful for me as he talks about community. I thought I’d share it with you…
“Even in this new situation all the members of the community are given their special place; this is no longer the place, however, in which they can most successfully promote themselves, but the place where they can best carry out their service. In a Christian community, everything depends on whether each individual is an indispensable link in a chain. The chain is unbreakable only when even the smallest link holds tightly with the others. A community which permits within itself members who do nothing will be destroyed by them. Thus it is a good idea that all members receive a definite task to perform for the community, so that they may know in times of doubt that they too are not useless and incapable of doing anything. Every Christian community must know that not only do the weak need the strong, but also that the strong cannot exist without the weak. The elimination of the weak is the death of the community.” – Life Together, 95-96
Yesterday I preached on discipleship (click to listen) and the importance and priority of following Jesus and I tried not to pull any punches. I hoped to share how following Jesus is both costly but rich in reward, as Martin Luther said a religion that costs nothing, suffers nothing and gives nothing is worth nothing.
But I left with the feeling that despite my best efforts, the message I unwittingly communicated was “DO MORE” when I was passionately hoping to communicate “LOVE MORE”. Sometimes in order to love more we need to DO less.
Fortunately, as the main speaker in our church I have another opportunity to correct this misconception and I’ll be attempting to unpack what it might look like to follow Christi in a busy, harried and hassled world with a talk titled, “Generous Living”.
What this means is be willing to open up our lives to the presence of another. Most of us open up to people we love, partners, children, close friends – our nearest and dearest. Christ calls us to love our enemies and to head to the byways and alleys of our world to seek out the crippled and the lame and invite them too the banquet of the king. Where I live those translate into single mums abandoned by yet another responsibility averse male, teenagers and young people who literally have no ambition, no drive, no aim in life other than to claim dole and then drink it and many others. Loving those people isn’t easy, extra grace is required and I don’t think I can do it on my own.
Yet to be able to even try, I need to make room first of all in my heart and then in my diary. If there’s no space to be with someone then there’s no way to love them. Programmes can help but they can’t hug. Sometimes those ‘others’ are in a foreign land but they hold our hearts, babies with HIV, the orphans and widows of this world. Sometimes those others are across the street.
Generous living makes room to include others into our lives, to do what we are doing, be it washing the car, walking the dog or watching a film. There may not be room for everyone person in your life, which is why it takes a community to reach a community but if there’s not room for the least of these is there really room for Jesus?
I’ve realised that I haven’t completed a series of posts I started in November on the 3 main aims I saw from greater community living. They were Authentic Mission, Increased Generosity and at last now the aim of Greater Simplicity.
Simplicity can seem a mile away in the aftermath of the Christmas season when our accumulation of stuff as well as debt has gone steeply up.
Simplicity, first of all though is not the order of our lives but the order of our hearts. It comes from first of all knowing what we are living for, and as a Christian that means primarily following Christ with our eyes firmly fixed on living out the two great commandments to ‘Love God’ and ‘love neighbour’. This is what gives me my primary purpose and calling as a Christian. It is a universal, for whatever else may change the requirement to do these two things does not.
I may worry or wonder about many other things that I might do with my life or time or energy or resources but instead I should give more of all the above to living out these two crystal clear things that Jesus gave us to do. When it comes to following Christ the requirement is simplicity itself for on these two things, everything else hangs.
This simplicity of heart can bring simplicity of thinking and focus if we let it, setting a framework of freedom for our lives and releasing us to fulfil our potential.
It would seem strange then if that simplicity didn’t filter on down to the level of our possessions, if we are indeed giving ourselves to love god and loving people, seeing us building community and sharing in authentic mission as the people of God, taking the opportunity to be generous to our brothers and sisters and to those in need both near and far away that it that it didn’t result in a reduction of stuff and a greater simplicity in our lives.
These aims go hand in hand, if I reduce the amount of things I need and stuff I want my opportunity to be generous increases, if my heart yearns for the opportunity to give more than I am currently I may think about ‘selling what I have and giving to the poor.’ Listening to the God I love with all that I am may well lead to similar things happening.
In the end, I am sated and bloated by possessions, I buy them, insure them, protect them, care for them and repair them, then I throw them away and replace or upgrade them. All around me are hearts and souls alone, waiting for someone to protect, heal, and provide care for them. One will reap rewards into future generations and the other will disappear about roughly the same time I do. So why is something so simple, so hard to do?
I get sent so many books and there are literally hundreds on my shelves that I want to read but haven’t yet got to, the pressure of the backlog sometimes kills the joy of reading. As a result I sometimes just pick the shortest book I can find, so I can read it quick and move on to the next one. The aim being to reduce the pile of unread books not enjoy the experience of reading. This book was one such choice.
Bonhoeffer is a theological hero of mine, his theology, his bravery, his involvement in the pains of his people and his experience of community all drew me to him. In prison he wrote among other things a number of excellent poems and this coffee table gift book reflects on just one: ‘Who Am I?’ Part Psalm, part deep soul searching it provides worthy material for meditation and self-reflection. Here’s a line that struck me about community:
It is infinitely easier to suffer in community than alone
Perhaps as our society becomes increasingly fragmented and isolated so our ability to handle suffering is diminished.
I believe Jesus when he said 'life does not consist in the abundance of our possessions'. I believe he offers something better. This blog is mostly about that search.
I'm also a church pastor, a bookshop owner, a husband, a father, a keen runner, reader, and motorcyclist. These and a few other things make guest appearances from time to time.