gardening as a metaphor for the church
In my forthcoming essay on the next two mDNA components – Organic systems and communitas not community, I have been playing around with the gardening motif for leadership of faith communities.
Steve Addison posted up some interesting comments on the life cycles of movements and this paragraph caught my eye:
The Church is like a garden. New plants are sprouting. Others are growing and reproducing. Others are dying and decaying. Ultimately what matters is the health of the whole eco system rather than any one plant.
Read the whole post here
July 27th, 2005 at 1:09 pm
This is exactly the point. Any ecclessiology that equates the local congregation as the church - and structured itself accordingly - has missed the point. The local congregation is not the church merely an expression (or gathering) of the church in a particular time and place. No more, no less. Each expression is there for a season…
It doesn’t preclude the establishment of para-church organisations that own buildings, manage finance, employ people in ministry. In reality the local minister/priest (whatever) is actually employed/stipended by the para-church for the benefit of the church and its ministry.
July 27th, 2005 at 1:15 pm
As a gardener for a few years, I heartily agree. Healthy plants spring forth from healthy soil. Often the health of the whole ecosystem is related to things in a bigger or wider-angled picture than most of us typically think. Also if gardening is more about working the soil - which it is in my opinion - then pastoring is more about co-laboring with God in working the soil of hearts - than it is about organizational success - however one might define it.
July 27th, 2005 at 4:38 pm
There’s a lot of manure being spread around this church..and heavily-fertilised churches like it.
Why does ‘contemporary’ necessarily have to equate with ‘wanky’ in the Australian church?
http://ship-of-fools.com/Mystery/2005/1102.html
July 27th, 2005 at 4:43 pm
Come on, you know the answer to that one, Lance. It’s because the contemporary church is full of wankers.
July 27th, 2005 at 5:44 pm
Yes, but why?
How do wankers get into positions of authority to lead other wankers?
Why don’t non-wankers blow the whistle on them?
(are they closet wankers?)
And the answer - “because they’re wankers” is not acceptable.
I’m after something a little more in depth, because this totally mystifies me.
July 27th, 2005 at 5:51 pm
For example, why is this pastor being a wanker, and why are these people nervously laughing at him being a wanker?
mms://www.myinternetchurch.com/SampleSermon56 or mms://www.myinternetchurch.com/SampleSermon128
July 27th, 2005 at 6:02 pm
You really want my rantings?
Ok – churches are full of wankers for a few reasons. Firstly, churches house a lot of people who aren’t real big achievers in life. They don’t go far in their jobs, they weren’t very popular at school, and they’re just really not life’s winners. And suddenly they’re in an environment that says all that’s ok – so they hang around. And they start to treat church like it’s their own little circle, where they can be important and gain the ego stroke they don’t get anywhere else. And they turn into wankers.
Alternatively, churches tend to be led (in the sense of elders, deacons, a lot of preachers etc) by people who grew up in churches, and were groomed for leadership from a young age. They’ve never left the church – they might well have gone to the same church all their lives. Church is their social scene, their dating scene, their babysitter…as well as their religion. Apart from family (who go that church anyway, more than likely) and their employment, their world is that church. How can people like that, with that narrow world-experience, possible NOT be wankers?
Dunno – just sleep-deprived thoughts.
July 27th, 2005 at 6:24 pm
Yay, some honesty in the conversation about church.
You see, I didn’t grow up in church..and during the time I spent in church ..I tried really hard to become a wanker, and I very nearly achieved it at Churchlands, but found there seemed to be these missing ingredients in the wanker mindset that I couldn’t get my head around. (I eventually decided to become a ‘knob’ instead of a wanker).
I’m thinking of wankers in church who fit your first description…the no hopers who find they can become ’somebody’ and get their ego stroked (much like the original reason I got into radio)…but I can also think of churchgoers who fit that description of the ‘no-hopers’ who aren’t wankers, who don’t strive to become wankers and are not the least bit narcissistic.
I very much agree though with the ‘recycling their own’ concept….of 21 year olds with no life experience..who’ve been in the church all their lives, suddenly knowing everything about leadership ..and being given key leadership roles.
I had a conversation with one former pastor (a reformed wanker) who said only one member of the church’s staff had come to Christianity ‘from the world’ later in life..and he was the only one on staff who struggled with the whole Christian wanker sub-culture.
And BTW, the emerging church is doing the same, it’s just the traditional church ‘recycling their own’….
I think there is a small place in Christendom for the wankfest church by the way, because it will appeal to the wankers in the community who can’t make sense of a non-wanker church mindset.
I suppose I’m more asking….why the ‘contemporary’ church has become synonymous with wankers and the wankers’ mindset, and why, when discussing what’s right/wrong with the Australian church..it isn’t a legitimate question to be asking that. And I know that I know that I know that I know that various pastors think other pastors are wankers, but the wanker culture in contemporary churches doesn’t allow for the really hard question to be asked….’why is it the wanker way…or the highway’?
Another problem I think too ..is that as Aussies, we tend to take the lead from the American church, as to what is ‘acceptable’ or ‘cutting edge’ for our church….so, as the concept ‘wanker’ is foreign to Americans, we’re not going to get the answer to this question from Americans, who will be asking us, “hey Bud, what’s a ‘wanker’?”
We have to figure this one out for our Aussie church all by ourselves, without hunting for Rick Warren’s latest book, ‘How not to be a wanker in 40 days’.
July 27th, 2005 at 6:35 pm
I was a teenage wanker.
My old man’s a pastor, and most of my mates were on the pathway to wankerdom themselves. But I was saved from a life of Jesusisms by sex, drink and rock ‘n’roll…
July 27th, 2005 at 8:23 pm
I can understand now how you can speak fluent Wanker.
I think I surprise a few Wankers…who are giving me a right spiritual rogering for being gay, that I speak fluent Wanker as well.
And it’s fortunate..and indeed blessed that you got into sex, drugs and rock and roll, because Jesus probably is more likely to want to be in relationship with you….(waits for the expected Wankerese from someone… “receiving grace is not a licence to sin”)
I’ve had further thoughts about this Wanker thing.
Now ..I’m a regular listener to the http://www.stupidchurchpeople.com podcast.
Now these are two pastors who are a couple of wankers.
But I AGREE with their wank, so to me, they’re not really wankers.
So maybe it’s because most Australian Christians AGREE with what their wanker pastors in contemporary churches are saying, that it doesn’t bother them that they’re wankers.
This might explain the Brian Houston phenomenon….where he is strongly defended by Hillsong devotees, even when everybody else’s Wankerdar is going…’beep…beep…beep….beep…whirp..whirp….whirrrrrrrp.’
It just never occurred to me that people could actually believe Brian and Bobbie’s nonsense.
July 27th, 2005 at 8:27 pm
So is your dad a wanker Luke?
July 28th, 2005 at 9:03 am
This whole conversation reminds me of a card my (non-christian) friends once bought me - Jesus loves you - but everyone else thinks you’re a dickhead.
July 28th, 2005 at 10:38 am
“How do wankers get into positions of authority to lead other wankers?
Why don’t non-wankers blow the whistle on them?
(are they closet wankers?)
And the answer - “because they’re wankers” is not acceptable.
I’m after something a little more in depth, because this totally mystifies me.”
My guess is that if it is true that the only people in ‘church’ are ‘wankers’ then there are no ‘non-wankers’ to blow the whistle on them!
And while it may seem trite, what is a ‘wanker’ to one person is a ‘non-wanker’ to another.
I have been in the church all my life; family has been too. From my ‘narrow-minded’ point of view one of the general difficulties we face is helping people see a new reality, change their mind-set about ‘church’, God, salvation, compassion, acts of justice and so on.
For so long, there has been one mindset about what ‘church’ looks like and what it means. Until recently. A great deal of effort has gone into changing ‘wankers’ mindset. The only problem is, ‘wankers’ are only told to change. No one sits with them and helps them understand why change is necessary, what the change will lead to and how they can change authentically and with some integrity.
July 28th, 2005 at 10:39 am
My dad seems pleasantly devoid of the great majority of wanker characteristics - mostly because I think he has a bit of compassion in the place where most christians have self-righteousness.
That said, he does like crappy 70s church music way too much.
July 28th, 2005 at 2:18 pm
Perhaps it might be useful to define some characteristics of a church wanker.
One person’s wanker…is another person’s (usually self-appointed) ‘visionary’.
A church wanker is someone who -
* Adopts a completely different persona in a church gathering to appear ‘more spiritual’. I’m not talking about someone who speaks a little more clearly in church than when they’re mumbling at home about where they might have left the car keys. I’m talking about someone who invents a completely different character when they’re in church. Brian Houston is a good example, because when he’s being interviewed, he talks like a reasonably normal person, but put him in front of a crowd, and everything is suddenly ‘awesome’. (”We’re extending our car parking ministry…isn’t that AWESOME everybody!!!!????”) Wanker….
* Anybody who thinks showing people where to park their car is a ‘ministry’, is a first-class industrial strength wanker. (make sure you wave to all the blue coats doing ‘ministry’ outside the MCG on Saturdays…remember they’re doing it for Jesus apparently)
* Anyone who thinks a church must stick to a set routine at all costs (Mark O’Brien’s Warnbro Community Church had someone die in the middle of the service a couple of weeks ago..and they just kept on going as if nothing had happened) Waaaaaaaan-kers….
* Anyone who preaches in a white suit.
* Any Christian or pastor who believes in ‘behave to be saved’ (you become right with God through eventually ‘not sinning’ one day)…as opposed to ‘behave BECAUSE YOU ARE saved’ through faith in Christ’s finished work on the cross.
* Self-appointed Bishop Brian Tamaki (deserves a category of all his own)…and any ‘Christian’ who supports him.
* Christians who become frozen in time. Whether that be in the time of the KJV, the time of John Wesley, the time of Menzies, the time of Larry Norman, the time of the 80’s prosperity doctrine, the time of X-treme youth ministry, or this time, (Guy Sebastian will in 20 years be the ‘Stryper’ of the 2000’s….remember, Mark Holden was ‘cool’ when he was on Countdown with a carnation in his lapel singing ‘I wanna make you my lady’.)
* Anyone who builds a brand spanking new church building…..to look like an 1800’s church…
* Anyone who compiles a list in point form of characteristics of church wankers…………….oh……..shit.
* Anyone in church who acts like God is directly speaking to them, keeps nodding their head….and then goes on to say…..’God has shown me…..blah blah blah….’
* (Now, this is where I really get in trouble) … anyone in the ‘emerging church’ who writes long rambling pieces about ecclesiology vs missiology, without ever providing specific practical examples in real life about what the fucking hell they’re talking about.
* Any churchgoer who thinks worship is their ‘ministry’ and that’s it.
* Any Christian or pastor who says ‘God loves you and has a plan for your life’ (Presumably therefore God’s plan for Mike Yaconelli’s life was for him to be killed in a road crash at the age of 61).
* Any Christian who uses the following expressions.
- “Love the sinner, hate the sin”
- “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve”
- “Awesome” (as in ‘today we drove the youth group down to the shop to buy a loaf of bread and it was ‘awesome! No people got saved!’)
- “Turn to 5 people around you who you don’t know, and shake their hand.”
- “Turn to the person next to you and say….you’re a beautiful person”.
- “Have good conversations after the service”
- “We need to be ‘on fire’ for Jesus’
* Any worship musician who immediately repeats the same song in a church service (when was the last time you listened to music on a CD and sang along with it and immediately played back the same song over and over…apart from when you were a teenage girl and it was the Bay City Rollers?)
I’m sorry, I have to temporarily stop here before I put my fist through the computer screen.
This list is by no means exhaustive.
July 28th, 2005 at 2:27 pm
*Anyone who says ‘ay-men’ to that list.
July 28th, 2005 at 3:28 pm
Ay-men.
July 28th, 2005 at 3:31 pm
I know you don’t mean it…..no-one can be that cruel.
July 28th, 2005 at 3:34 pm
I used to define wanker as “anyone I would not want a new Christian to meet”. But that was hard to define, because at my church, everybody there fitted into that category. Luckily for us, we never saw any new Christians.
I’m not a cruel man, Lance - I’m just utilising my internet ministry.
July 28th, 2005 at 4:00 pm
But seriously (wasn’t that a great Phil Collins album, I mean, wasn’t it? I mean..this is still the 80’s ..isn’t it…..isn’t it) ….if the perception out there is ‘Jesus loves you, but everybody else thinks your a dickhead’…(and it is the perception…then a benchmark or a defining feature of the ‘emerging’ church has got to be non-wankerism or non-dickheadedness.
Everybody’s say……’come on ..come on..what’s so different about the emerging church?’…..well, I think instinctively there is a felt need in the emerging church to move beyond that which has been associated with wankerism and dickheadedness (self-righteous postering on ‘family values’, charismatic hype, etc.) so……I think broad agreement could be reached among emerging church practitioners…on a Charter Against Wankerism and Dickheadedness. I mean, would there be people in the Emerging Church movement who would be FOR dickheadedness and wankerism?
I believe it to be a distinguishing feature of the movement, where it would love the dickhead, but hate the dickhead’s actions.
It’s 31 years since Lausanne. It needs updating.
“We, members of the Church of Jesus Christ, from more than 150 nations, participants in the International Congress on World Evangelization at Lausanne, praise God for his great salvation and rejoice in the fellowship he has given us with himself and with each other [but not in any way that makes us act like dickheads, or cause people to think we’re wankers).. We are deeply stirred by what God is doing in our day [but not too over the top], moved to penitence by our failures [and for being total tools at times] and challenged by the unfinished task of evangelization [which we haven’t really got around to yet, because we’ve been playing silly buggers at church]. We believe the gospel is God’s good news for the whole world [including GLBT who we’ve slandered and bullied and point-blank refused to tell about Jesus Christ Himself, because of our need to one-up ourselves about ‘family values’] , and we are determined by his grace to obey Christ’s commission to proclaim it to all mankind and to make disciples of every nation [including the US, even though it already thinks it’s God’s gift to the planet]. We desire, therefore, to affirm our faith and our resolve, and to make public our covenant [because we like attending conferences in good tourist spots and drawing up motherhood statements that make us feel better but really change nothing because no-one outside of the Christian sub-culture has heard of the Lausanne Covenant].
July 28th, 2005 at 4:02 pm
“I used to define wanker as “anyone I would not want a new Christian to meet”. But that was hard to define, because at my church, everybody there fitted into that category. Luckily for us, we never saw any new Christians.”
I like that…….. short, snappy, easily understood, good definition.
July 28th, 2005 at 4:27 pm
This includes the “Christian” groups on campus at uni….after reading the Bible on his own initiative, and asking me the odd question, a mate of mine at uni decided the Christian faith was the one religion he’d ever seen, and that made sense. What’s more, this Jesus was a pretty amazing person, and a good guy.
He asked me what he should do next. Intellectually, he was there. He saw his own need for grace, and Jesus as the answer to that need. (that sentence on reflection, sounds wanky. But on I go).
He wanted to know what to do next. And the first thing I thought was, keep him away from EU and the other campus groups. I couldn’t see too many positives in sending a normal, healthy, well-adjusted person to a group whose idea of effective evangelism was to offer and massively advertise to the whole uni open talks on the book of James, or that held a seminar on “Why Homosexuality is Wrong.” Way to get your audience onside, fellas.
That’s a big wanker characteristic - piss everybody off, and then use their anger and reaction as a way to reinforce your own sense if holiness and righteousness.
I sent him to the salvos in the end. They seem to have done ok…he still believes in Jesus, so I guess they haven’t totally destroyed his faith.
July 28th, 2005 at 4:46 pm
So are university Christian groups the breeding ground for wanker and dickhead church leaders?
Lots of teenage Christians without effective supervision who suddenly believe they’re ‘educated’…..the blind leading the blind.
July 28th, 2005 at 4:56 pm
Awesome going by that list - I’m definitely one. But I won’t say the word because it is too naughty. I have a Hillsong CD too. Send your friends to me.
Are you a salvo Luke?
July 28th, 2005 at 4:59 pm
Actually, a grovelling apology is warranted here.
In the late 80’s I was roped into being part of an exercise at Queen’s College at Melbourne University, where the new university entrants went through exhaustive signing up procedures, and then at the end of it all, there was a table they had to pass, run by the Maranatha Christian Fellowship, an American-based organisation which aggressively sought converts on university campuses.
The new uni boys and girls were told they had ‘one more set of papers to sign’ which was getting their personal information for Maranatha.
It was a con. It was dishonest. They did not need to sign anything there. They could walk out of the building into the hot sun and continue on their way.
One of the organisers of this, a former schoolfriend, now co-pastors a church out in Templestowe. I have told him in no certain terms I think he and Maranatha were wankers for the way they conducted themselves in those days, and he has now acknowledged my assertion that they were being ‘pharisees’, however he still retains strong wanker tendancies, picked up from his university days.
However, I also know of another Christian leader connected with a different Christian student group at the College …who played a pivotal role in being a positive influence on other students, and he now pastors an inner-city Melbourne congregation.
It takes all kinds, but I did see a lot of wankerism..connected with student university Christian life….and it’s dangerous….because people do look at people’s CV’s..and say ‘oh..you’ve been to university…you must automatically know what you’re talking about and doing.’…when all it may have been was mummy and daddy on the farm up at Cobram scraping together enough dough to send little Adam (but not Steve) down to university in Melbourne.
July 28th, 2005 at 5:22 pm
Well, interesting use of the word wanker as a synyonm for fundie or holier than thou people, in the US is usually used as a word for Fake and the british use it a slang term for one who masterbrates…maybe you are and i just don’t realize it. Most “wanker” symptoms about saying hello to your neighbor saying that love the sinner hate the sin are classic evg stuff….Cradle christians are not all that bad mind you, but God helps them.
* Anybody who thinks showing people where to park their car is a ‘ministry’, is a first-class industrial strength wanker. (make sure you wave to all the blue coats doing ‘ministry’ outside the MCG on Saturdays…remember they’re doing it for Jesus apparently)
So what About those who pass the plates? They can anointed to do ministry so how dare you make fun of parking lot ministry. Some one has the drive the lil golf carts around to get the people to the door.
My friend recently says when people challenge others world view or sacred belief people get upset…it works both ways….One has to try to be open to new things as difficult as that may be.
July 28th, 2005 at 5:42 pm
*site edit* moving url links down to avoid the sidebar overflowing
http://www.theooze.com/forums/discussions.cfm?forumid=43&topicid=206775, http://www.theooze.com/forums/discussions.cfm?forumid=43&topicid=202889 and
for you lance…….to let off steam…there is a link on this page for a discussion for “chessy christian things and other stuff that you wish wasn’t in church…
July 28th, 2005 at 6:21 pm
Luke, I think you and I went to the same uni!!
I went to one CU bible study. The guy leading it said he and his wife avoided going to pubs because they didn’t want to get tempted. I lived in college at the time, so I decided that CU probably wasn’t for me.
Oh, and I loved it when CU people ran around telling people from the Queer Collective that the Bible says that homosexuality is evil. I always wondered why no-one ever responded with “well, my journal says you’re a dickhead” (or a wanker, as the case may be)
July 28th, 2005 at 7:06 pm
LOL
No I’m not a salvo - I like a drink too much for that caper. It’s bells, smells and Papism for me. But if you’re going to be a prot, you might as well be a prot with a social conscience.
Bec, you’re right about CU. Run by people with no idea of the outside world, and no desire to get any. I don’t knock cradle christians - depending on your definition, I’m one myself - but I do thin that the cradle christians who make no effort to get outside their own paradigm, see the worlf, walk a mile in other’s shoes etc etc are just insular, frightened gits. And the ones that do that and then think they’re evangelism experts give me the shits. Whose opinion would you trust about the unchurched - someone who despised them and thought they were all evil folk waiting for an opportunity to tempt good Godly Folk (like your leader), or someone who loved them, knew them, sat where they sat…???
I wonder if you’re leader would have told Jesus to avoid the desert…on the grounds he might face temptation out there….????
Don;t know if you went Adelaide Uni, Bec…but wankers are the same the world over.
July 29th, 2005 at 12:40 am
well, the reason behind it is so you don’t fall into sin –don’t go to places that sin and bad things are likly to happen….stupid people, alcohol, and loud music are offen a bad combination…..but at the same time love all people…..