Signposts
In the first year of our new church there was a great deal of pressure to “give the answers” and provide the Church with a five year strategic plan. It was recognised at the time that we were not in a position to do so. We did not understand the new missional context we were in and where God was leading us to as a Church. Yet, we felt that God was revealing a number of things that we should explore as we developed our new Church. This paper explores these ’signposts’ that were pointing towards the direction we felt God wanted us to take.

Multi-congregational approach
This paper was distributed at Northern Community Church of Christ during 2001. It was discussed through a range of focus groups and at the three congregations we had at the time. The paper talks abou plans to plant a number of new congregations. This has now been done and we are dreaming of others, as well as having planted ones that we did not think of back then.

Spiritual Disciplines
These spiritual disciplines were originally developed by one of our café congregations who felt there were areas of what it meant to follow Jesus that could not be expressed in a café setting. The spiritual disciplines were adopted by the whole Church a year later in 2002. All of our congregations continue to preach, teach and discuss these disciplines in order to keep ourselves accountable for being followers of Jesus.

Lessons from an emerging church
This was written for the phuture.org online publication. It is hosted here as phuture.org no longer is in operation. It was originally developed as many people were asking what lessons we had learnt in developing different styles of congregations.

The journey so far
This was written at the later stages of 2002. It contains some reflections on the journey so far for Northern Community Church of Christ and was writen for the national publication of Churches of Christ in Australia - The Australian Christian.

Can an established denominational church be emerging?

Published in December 2005 edition of Zadok magazine devoted to the emerging church - a story of our experience with how the “emerging church” can inform the journey of an established denominational church.

mDNA - a series of essays on Alan Hirsch’s missional DNA model

In his book Primal Dreams, Alan Hirsch describes a model that endeavours to rediscover and look at ways to reactivate the latent potency of the apostolic genius. He argues that the apostolic genius was present in vibrant ways in the first three centuries of the early church, and can also be seen in the experience of the Church in China under persecution in the twentieth century. Alan uses a uses the biological concept of DNA as a metaphor to define aspects of the apostolic genius. The mDNA (indicating missional DNA) model proposes that there are five elements of the mDNA that captures the apostolic genius. These five elements are; missional incarnational impulse, apostolic environment, communitas not community, organic systems and disciple making. It is Alan’s thesis that these five elements are the catalyst for the missional church.