the launch of our kaleo order
I have been reading an interesting book by Jeffrey Jones - traveling together - a guide for disciple-forming congregations. On the first page stands this confronting quote from Rufus Jones:
“We stand in a crisis and we can be bearers of the torch or we can carefully husband a little flame and keep it going out a little longer”
The confronting nature of the quote for me, comes from the accurate depiction of the choice for the Western Church. As Jones goes on to describe -
“the crisis of the mainline church is evident.. Membership is declining. Finances are precariious. Denominational structures are downsizing and often consumed in controversy. Seminaries in many cases are struggling to survive… conflict is a common feature of many congregations.”
How churches respond to this is varied. Some “hunker down” and tried to survive in these lean times. Others have experimented with new ways of being church and as is our experience reoriented themselves around mission.
But to return to the original quote - it is not enough to discover new ways of being and doing church, as important as that is. But rather to be bearers of the torch we need to make sure we understand the nature of the flame. To allow ourselves to be warmed by the flame and for us, as well as others to see by the flame.
One of the ways we are experimenting at Northern Community in doing this is by the launch of our new kaleo misisonal order. The kaleo order is for people committed to the mission of Northern Community to assist in the ongoing process of allowing God to shape them to be a missionary people. It will involve regular engagement with scripture and prayer, and accountability around the spiritual disciplines.
As Rufus Jones says - we stand at a crisis. Let us not hunker down and hide the light but rather find ways that will nurture and resources us to shine the light in brighter ways. Let us take on our role as bearers of the torch for Jesus with a sense of commitment and purpose. I hope and pray that the kaleo missional order will help us do this as we move into the future.
You can see the kaleo order paper here and the order rhythm sample here
July 5th, 2006 at 12:36 pm
it is obviously a multifaceted problem the church is facing, and my opinion is focussing on certain areas only, but, i believe wholeheartedly that the area of apologetics and an overarching understanding of the biblical narrative or ‘worldview’ is are two areas where the church has not come to grips with the present day reality.
our pastors are trained to engage in a world that does not exist anymore, modernism is dead and postmodernism reigns…
so many pastors i have spoken to have no idea about what postmodernism even is… how can they reach or train their congregations to reach a society they don’t understand and can’t relate to. most of the time they are preaching to the converted in an effort to make them feel better as opposed to equipping them to engage the world in a manner that is going to be effective in the slightest…
ask these questions of your average church goer..
1. can you show me reasonable evidence for the existence of God.
2. how can you say you are right and i am wrong when truth is relative
3. what is the purpose of humanity
4. hasn’t evolution disproved the existence of God
5. whats the difference between believing in God and believing in Santa Claus
6. don’t all religions lead to God
now some here on signposts will give great answers i know but you average Christian will have no idea and i know many pastors that would give the most pathetic kindergarten answers to these questions…
we are fighting a battle in the nuclear age with bows and arrows
July 5th, 2006 at 5:36 pm
Those are interesting topics, we’ve talked about a few of them, it would be good to have some of the others as Tangent discussion points.
July 6th, 2006 at 12:19 pm
Duly noted, Laura.
July 8th, 2006 at 5:51 pm
You know Abtruth, I have a bit of a hunch you and I are dinosaurs in relation to your list above… ie that 99%? of “unChristianised” people don’t really engage with questions of truth and evidence in an intense way. It’s all a bit fuzzy and anything goes and we don’t want to be pinned down to anything but spirituality is sort of important but we don’t want to be judgmental and we do want to be open and we respect all religions etc. etc.
Well, the good news is that all it takes to convince others of the gospel is to live with complete passion for God and love and integrity and unselfishness… no argument is required. (and the work of the Holy Spirit of course!)
And the bad news is that all it takes to convince others of the gospel is to live with complete passion for God and love and integrity and unselfishness… which is a really, really big ask.
I’d really like to be wrong about this, as I’ve devoted so many years to what I could describe as an earnest search for truth… but I feel like I have all the answers to the questions no one’s asking. I very occasionally bump into a geniune, interested skeptic… but boy that’s a rare thing for me these days.
July 10th, 2006 at 12:26 pm
no offence intended Janet but what sort of crap is that… i have spent many years in close contact with the most postmodern of postmoderns arguing things like the very concept of truth is something that can be found and known, and have had good success in uni’s/pubs/parties etc ..
i have ‘witnessed’ (i really hate that word) to homosexuals bisexuals trisexuals metrosexuals pagans athiests agnostics new-agers goths e-pigs westies waxheads communists fascists moslems mormons jw’s bikers businessmen etc etc etc and had great success …
i have had the worst time with Chistians who think that all they need is their faith and God’ll do the rest. Now of couse i can’t argue someone into faith in God, all i have pretensions for is removing the barriers that people put up so that they can hide from the truth that they don’t want to face… the apostle Paul calls us to do as much…
i regularly hear the above list of people say things like ‘man, never thought of it that way before’ but when i have tried to educate Christians in some of the ways to talk to people about God without coming across as an absolute knucklehead……..?? i just get this glazed over look of someone who believes something but has no real idea what its really about, because they have not come to faith in Christ because they realise that they are in need of a redeemer and God is actually there…. but have joined a party and ‘God’ (whoever he is) is just great! and its so good because we have a vision and im a warrior princess and we’re all mega overcomers
the church doesn’t know who they are actually fighting in the battle for the souls of our nation… the moslems? ooooh their going to take over (it used to be the communists!) the homosexuals??? (there everywhere now! not like in my day those bloody poofters) the occult???? (don’t watch harry potter on your 50″ plasma) no we are fighting against the thing which has infiltrated our very lounge rooms - consumerism which lulls us into a comatised state of apathy where we are saved but do not care and the world that is not saved and does not care as long as they have some pathetic arguement to keep their conscience at bay and an ipod to drown everything else out…
it is up to us to shout out that the coming of the Lord is near (for every single one of us it is less than 90 years away!!!) … We are his representatives here on earth and he has a job for us to do - its called the great commission !! it does not say go into every nation and wait for the holy spirit to do all the work for you - thats just a cop out… we need to stand up for the truth and do it in such a way that we will be understood by others not ridiculed because we come up with new ways of showing our ignorance…
i could add to the list above a number of questions that all Christians should be able to answer or explain..
1. do you believe that truth exists?
2. how do we know that something is true?
3. what is the law of non-contradiction?
4. if the law of non contradiction is true then what are its consequences for my beliefs?
5. does right and wrong actually exist?
6. why is there evil in the world?
7. what was the world really meant to be like?? what went wrong?? and how do we go back to get it right?
you say
“I very occasionally bump into a geniune, interested skeptic… but boy that’s a rare thing for me these days.”
Janet - theeeerrrreeee eeeeeevery wheeere!
i would honestly say that not a week goes by when i haven’t spoken to at least 5 people about my faith in varying degrees…
you just have to know how to do it - how to bring up the topic in general conversation and what topics to bring up… i don’t hunt people down and say ‘do you know JC as your personal Lord and Saviour???’
sometimes i just ask people about what makes them tick and move the conversation from there into a more general conversation on the concept of meaning in life,
‘and you know this is something that i think a lot about - and have you thought about the fact that meaning is given to something by its creator? like a painting is given meaning by its painter… and that to have meaning in our own lives we cant create it for ourselves? (if we could and we lost the thing we created that would render us meaningless!) therefore we have to have a creator of our own to have meaning ourselves…. and therefore our meaning in life is to be found by finding what our creator had created us for ! (this is the shorthand version obviously)
i’m not a bible bashing fundamentalist .. i just know how to do it, most often my friends from church call me to speak to someone cause they don’t know how to themselves… i was in a pub when a friend of mine was there for a girls night out and one of her friends was saying that she had found on the internet proof that God does not exist, she couldn’t counter her arguements at all.. but walked over and asked me to join the conversation for a while and give my perspective ‘ so you say there is no right or wrong julie?? was Hitler right or wrong???’ and so it goes……
living with passion and integrity is essential but not proof that ‘I am the way the truth and the life, no one comes to the father except through me’ i know Christians who have no integrity whatsoever, Churches that have discrininated due to the colour of your skin and churches that were complicit in the holocaust, rawanda, crusades…
i also know of people with great passion and integrity who are mormons, jws, homosexuals, buddhists, moslems… passion is no proof of truth, you can have passion love and integrity and believe in the wrong thing - so what - you are still a sinner in need of Gods grace.. my passion and level of integrity is a recipe for personal pride.. and has nothing to do with a true witness that we are all hopelessly lost without Christ and we should lay down our lives before him, losing our lives for him that we would then gain our lives
July 10th, 2006 at 1:25 pm
I have to agree abtruth, I meet a lot of people like that too. I try to engage and avoid quoting verses at people. I know I’m better at it than I was a few years ago, but I still don’t think I’m very good at it. If you’re good at these kind of conversations- Do you want to share some tips? I often feel that I haven’t figured out sufficiently what I think about things to attempt to communicate an argument to someone else about them.
July 10th, 2006 at 4:59 pm
Well, I’m very, very glad to be thought wrong on this. Obviously my problem is I’m a social leper… if they’re not mums with young kids (or involved in ministry… ie at college or work) I don’t bump into them much. And my experience of the middle class mums set is… well, they’re just trying to raise their kids and get by for the most part. Maybe I just ask all the wrong questions.
“homosexuals bisexuals trisexuals metrosexuals pagans athiests agnostics new-agers goths e-pigs westies waxheads communists fascists moslems mormons jw’s bikers businessmen etc”… nup, I need to get out more. I certainly find far more chances to engage in faith questions with people on the fringes than the middle class, big mortgage 2.5 kids set… but I just don’t do it much.
OK… well Laura and I (and anyone else) will sit at your Signposts feet, so to speak.
July 10th, 2006 at 10:17 pm
i probably deserve your sarcasm janet but really the questions we all ask are the same…
who am i
what is my purpose
what went wrong
where do i go from here
these questions are answered by the Christian worldview in a complete and non contradictory way
and the thing is whether your a stay at home mum, dying of cancer in hospital, running the country or starving in africa .. we all have a lifelong quest to answer these questions… as Christians we believe that we have answered these questions… the problem the church faces is how do we get our answers across to our neighbours when (in one sense) they seem to be speaking another language?
if your like me Janet you were brought up in a Christian home where the concept of God, Jesus, Truth etc was assumed and you sort of became a Christian as a matter of course, by osmosis with no real out there salvation event that you could really point to…
i was like that and i found that when i tried to share my faith with others (did you know that Jesus died to save you?) they would look at me like i was an idiot and say things like ‘yeah! saved from what?’ and i’d say ‘weeelll … ahhh … hell?’ or they would say ‘what morals you have are for you alone’ ‘don’t force your opinions on me’ …. basically we would be speaking different languages although we were using english to speak.
i had to learn what language the other people i wanted to speak to understood and then speak on their terms… if they were a postmodernist i would talk about things like ‘are morals really relative’ using examples i would find in our general conversation or in the public eye at the time, or is it possible that truth is universal… this sounds very complicated and philosophical but if you use simple examples any one can join in…
you can’t force it of course, but when the opportunity arises, examples can be made to a postmodern that if morals are relative and agreed upon by the majority in a culture then we have no way of condeming the hutus for killing the tutsies in rawanda in 95… or Hitler for that matter…
so either hitler and the hutu’s were wrong and there are universal morals which depend upon a moral lawgiver or morals are relative and decided upon by a culture and Hitler and the hutu’s were morally neutral (one could even go so far as to say if that was the decision of the prevailing culture it would have been immoral to not kill a jew or tutsie!)
this is just one of exposing the faulty logic that postmodernism is built upon and gives the postmodernist a reason to rethink some of their most cherished fundamental beliefs…
the same can be done for any opposing belief system to Christianity … if it were not so it would mean that some opposing belief system was more logical or true and that there was some fault with Christianity and that we were the ones with faulty belief system that should change…
obviously your conversation with a modernist would be different along this topic so you have to figue out who you are talking to first… sometimes this can be done quickly in a relationship or may take time…
for the volvo driving soccer mum… (when you have the appropriate opportunity) there are conversations to be had which bring up the concept that what we experience with our children can be related to many parallels in the Christian faith…
we love our children with such intensity that only another parent can sympathise but we have to let them make decisions for themselves which can sometimes be the wrong decision and to set them free otherwise we don’t have truely loving children but automatons - an instant parallel for why God gave us freedom of choice….
as much as we love our children we can’t get our meaning in life from them otherwise (dare i suggest such a tragedy) if we lost them, we would be rendered meaningless (obviously false) as meaning comes from a creator (we don’t create children - we beget them, which is why Jesus is described in John 3.16 as begotten, and more specifically in the creeds as ‘begotten not created’)
or use current affairs… ‘did you hear about the murder of that 8yr old girl in the shopping mall? what a tragedy! you know i have gone to church all my life and at church we talk about the concept of ‘total depravity’ where we all have a disposition to do the wrong thing, but in our cushy rich society we have been able to ignore that for the large part, but then along comes something terrible like that and it brings home the fact that there is something fundamentaly wrong with the world when something like that can happen… we believe that the world and humanity was intended for something different than this………’
i havent meant to sound arrogant Janet but it is easy if you know how and you know how it all fits together in a coherent worldview
July 11th, 2006 at 7:39 am
Oh Abtruth, I wasn’t trying to be sarcastic in the least… if only print could relay “tone of voice”. But I do privately bemoan the relatively small number of people that appear to me to be interested in pursuing “truth” questions with any vigour… my vibe is that there is a greater hunger for love and belonging than truth. (Although I’m visiting one marvellous cynic on Wednesday: the partner of one of my friends. Love it!) So I’m geniunely heartened by your experience.
It is not my lack of a coherent Christian worldview or my ability to express it that’s the problem… I’ve worked my butt off over that, driven by a passion for truth. (But I agree this is sadly not the norm within the church)
Probably what I need to work on is asking different questions… and a stronger inner drive to reach people for Jesus.
I live in Croydon, not Camberwell… it’s mostly older second cars and Ozkick footy, not Volvos and soccer!!!! (Anyway, I’ll think about your remarks and get back to you.)
July 12th, 2006 at 10:58 am
yes… love and belonging but overarched by a sense of meaning/purpose for their existence… ‘people can handle any “what” when they know the “why”.’
without a ‘why’ people can’t make sense of suffering and lose hope…
its a common thing for Christians to say that it is only ‘with Christ’ that we can have meaning in life, but your average Christian can’t take that arguement any further as they are just repeating what our culture says to itself… it also means nothing to someone outside the Christian culture and can’t interpret Christianese…
that is why i talk on the lines of ‘meaning coming from above’ as the created gets its meaning from the creator (eg the painter and his painting) therefore if there is to be meaning to human existance there has to be a creator…
this of course begs the question of how does the creator (God) gain meaning for himself??? but this answer is very similar in concept to the cosmological arguement for the existence of God as cause and effect cannot go back in time infinitely and there must be a ‘first cause’ that is uncaused… so God in himself is sufficient for meaning to exist as an entity without superior….
the alternative is of course that we have no meaning at all… but then why would we as humans be looking for meaning if it didn’t exist… if we had no noses we wouldn’t have any concept of smell…
July 12th, 2006 at 11:09 am
Laura… if your still with us and havent been bored to death…
if you really want to give your ability to talk about this stuff to others a kick start you should read 4 books
Mere Christianity by CS Lewis
The Case for Christ
The Case for Faith
The Case for a Creator all by Lee Strobel
BUT - do not just read them once… esp Mere Christianity
it is one thing to have read someones brilliant arguement, it is another to be able to make these arguements yourself in your own way when put on the spot… when i first read Mere Christianity i loved it but knew that i couldn’t repeat it… so i decided to read and re-read until his words became my own, sounds boring?? not really when you get into it because the more you read it the more you can see the potential and the better you get…
some think that this is a little contrived to ‘practise’ an arguement but this is just an arguement to allow you to witness better- and should not be mistaken for your walk with God which is something you do every day as opposed to practice… think of a soldier with a rifle who practices everyday so that when the pressure is on he can do it without thinking, or a sportsperson who practices their backhand so that when the pressure is on they don’t have to think about it that much……
Janet - Croyden? sorry i didn’t realise i was talking to a pleb… i’ll pray for you… you should really start naming and claiming something
July 18th, 2006 at 2:43 pm
[…] So…what’s all this got to do with anything? I’ve been thinking lately about the benefits of Spiritual Disciplines (Prayer, Bible Reading etc) as well as religious orders such as Phil and Dan from Northern Community Church of Christ are forming with their Kaleo Order. They list their disciplinse as: […]
July 18th, 2006 at 8:21 pm
greg … i failed your cool test … can’t believe it … are you still keen for a coffee at terrigal?
July 18th, 2006 at 11:22 pm
[…] Sam’s post was most helpful in the light of the launch of our order in an established church setting. […]
July 19th, 2006 at 9:05 am
yeah let’s do it ab…don’t feel bad about the cool test, even I fail it and I keep on taking it in the hopes that it will change…but nope…still a dickhead!
Do you still have my email address?
greg(dot)colby(at)uchunter(dot)com(dot)au
August 22nd, 2006 at 12:22 pm
[…] Well the pilot of our kaleo order is now underway. The order comprises a daily rhythm, a weekly rhythm and a fortnightly rhythm. You can read more about the order here (pdf). I thought I would trial posting some of my personal reflections about the order and in particular the weekly readings on this site. […]
August 22nd, 2006 at 5:03 pm
I’ve been exploring the life of Brendan the Navigator (a saint from Ireland circa 480) http://gregtheexplorer.wordpress.com/2006/08/17/st-brendan-of-clonfert-launching-out-into-the-great-unkown/ and coordinated a service on the theme of his life and journeys - he is actually thought to have traveled to Newfoundland from Ireland in a small boat called a carruch made of animal hides and wood.
He started over 700 monastries and one attracted over 3000 monks. His life is a call to all of us to allow ourselves to take risks in the great adventure that is following Jesus.
Anyway I’m showing off cuase I got mentioned in Way Out West - MArk Berry’s blog http://markjberry.blogs.com/way_out_west/2006/08/brendan_continu.html#comment-21366135