Phil Goodacre reports on a Re:source conference in which Andrew Jones was sharing... Some great basics:
He (Andrew Jones, aka Tallskinikiwi) started off by reflecting on how the Kingdom of God is like yeast (Matthew 13:33). As yeast is worked throughout the dough the yeast cells divide, yet it's impact is what makes the bread rise and grow. This cell division is so small, microscopic, invisible to the human eye. For us, as members of God's church, must not our actions also be almost secret and meek rather than proud and showy, just as Jesus warns against in Matthew 16:6 - also talking about yeast.
He also talked about Luke 8, when Jesus was on His way to Jairus' house. Jesus was stopped by an 'unclean' woman on the way there. Yet Jesus stopped, and spent time with this woman, her faith having healed her. Who are we called to work with? The cool, important people, or the inclean, those that nobody else will even touch?
We then moved on to look at Luke 10, from which I noted down a number of things that grabbed me.
We are told to enter other people's houses, rather than us dragging them into ours. What does this say about the way we do mission, and the way we do church???
God HAS prepared a harvest. The harvest IS out there. We must learn to find where God's favour is.
The 72 were told to go out, eat, drink, heal etc etc. THEN tell people about the Kingdom of God. Is this the way we do it? Or are we often in a hurry to get all the 'God stuff' in right at the beginning. People need to experience the Kingdom of God before we start banging on about it verbally.
We must ask God - the Lord of the Harvest - to send out workers. But these workers might not include us.
In the afternoon we started off by looking at a bit of emergence theory. Now I have to be honest, this is an area about which I knew very little. But it was actually quite interesting (though probably simplified somewhat).
In Proverbs 6:6-6 we are told to go and look at the ants, and it is with ants that this emergence theory was explanined.
Ants don't have a leader or a queen ant or anything like that, but they still manage to accomplish a whole lot. Some characteristics of both ant colonies, and this whole emergence thing are:
1. low-level chaos leads to high-level sophistication without orders being given.
2. everyone communicates with everyone.
3. simple structures.
Link: philgoodacre.blogspot: reflections on "creating church in the emerging culture".