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Category: Mission

The Positive Priest Movement

Dear reader, please bear with me for a moment as I take you on a flight of fantasy into the annals of my mind.  Imagine for a moment that we are in the board room of Coca-cola looking at the strategy for the future.  Around the table is a much smaller group of executives than a decade ago looking at their new advertising campaign.

“Coke, it just doesn’t taste like it used to.”

I spend a large portion of my life trying to marry up the experiences I am having with those around me.  Within “The Church” I predominantly hear negative voices decrying the end of “The Church”.  I remember being asked 7 years ago if I “knew what I was getting myself into” offering for ordination in the Church of England in my early twenties.  What with “these guys over here” or “those guys over there”.  Then of course there is “the institution” and “the structures”.  “Do you really know what you are getting yourself into”?  Certainly this is the predominant narrative that everyone seems to be currently telling.

Within this domineering public narrative I guess I must be doing it wrong.  I became a follower of the way as an adult 15 years ago.  I was introduced to this guy who spent a few years in The Middle East walking from town to town declaring the coming Kingdom of God.  He said that lives could be changed!  There is something better than this!  We don’t have to accept the way the world does things.  We can be different.  I was told that if you follow this guy, communities will spring up that transform the lives of the places in which they live.  Communities that are gifts to the towns, estates, villages and cities in which they live, work and play.

I didn’t become an Anglican by accident.  I wasn’t born into a family who worship with the Church of England.  I didn’t even begin my Christian journey within it.  I chose to join my local Anglican church after university because I passionately believe in the local church and The Church of England.  We’re not a large gathered people but a people who are spread out far and wide in small pockets within every community in the land.  A place with room to explore theology with a range of different people of differing viewpoints as we strive to discover more of the mysteries of God through wrestling with scripture, tradition and reason (and often one another).

Over a glass of wine in a mildly moist marquee the other night I was talking with a colleague.  We were both rather passionately espousing about what we do, the people we do it with and the places where we do it.  During the course of the conversation he turned to me placed his hand on his chest and said,

“I’m sorry, I’m a positive priest”.

With a sharp blow from with a 4 pound lump hammer he hammered the square stake into the round ventricle.  We have spent so much time huddled together saying “Coke:  It just doesn’t taste like it used to” that we’re asking why everyone is now drinking Pepsi.  I implore you, dear reader to remember what we’re here for.  Remember those words of the revolutionary guy you all inspired me to follow 15 years ago.  Look for the Kingdom he is inviting us to declare in the communities in which we live.  Go and be the good news in the communities in which you live.

It is amazing life that we lead as Christians.  We follow an amazing guy and it is a great privilege to be invited into his mission.

It is time for a Positive Priest Movement.

All I Want for Christmas: The Advent Conspiracy

It can’t be a year can it?  Really?!?  We find ourselves once again in the middle of Advent making that almost inevitable journey towards Christmas.  Some of us have time-honoured traditions that we follow each year.  You will probably recognise these as part of your yearly routine as you prepare for the feast of Christmas.  Advent is a time of prayer and fasting in preparation for the twelve days of the Christmas season.

What do you mean this doesn’t sound familiar?

It seems there is an increasing disparity between the Christmas the church historic celebrates and the winter festival upon our TV screens and high streets.  At the heart of the two thousand year tradition was the tale of a child.  Christ’s birth tells of the incredible love that God has for the world.  As God stepped into His creation he began an earthly life in inauspicious surroundings placed by His teenage mother into a manger.  He joined a world marred by inequality, poverty and violence.  The Divine Christ Child came bringing a promise of hope, and a message of revolutionary love.

So how did we get from the Christ Child to 2011 and how has the world been changed by this message of hope?  Within the last few generations society’s structure has changed and we now live in a consumerist culture that drives us with a constant pressure to buy, to use and replace the things we have in our life.  As we look to the world around us we see an explosion of winter spending that is focussed upon this word Christmas.  What was once a time to celebrate the birth of a saviour has somehow turned into a season of stress, traffic jams, crowded streets and shopping lists. 

When it’s all over what are we left with?  Many of us return to those same shops to exchange the gifts we didn’t want.  We live in fear of the post coming through the door and the looming debt that will take months to pay off.  As we move through January is there an empty feeling inside of missed purpose? Is this what we really want out of Christmas?

What if Christmas became a world-changing event again?

This isn’t about being Scrooge and saying “humbug”.  In fact it is the polar opposite of that.  Scrooge wanted to get as much as he could out of the world and store it up for himself at the expense of those around him.  Christmas is much more significant than that.  God’s gift to us through Christ is a relationship built on love.  With this in mind, it is easy to see that Christmas would become the time when we seek ways to show our family and friends how much we love them.  What if we took that incarnational gift of love God gave us in the Christ Child as inspiration for the gifts we give this Christmas?  What if Christmas became 12 days dedicated to the significant people in our lives.  As children take time from their studies at school and people take time off from work, time becomes the real gift that Christmas gives us.

No matter how hard we look around the shops, we won’t find this gift of time:

“Time to make a gift that turns into the next family heirloom. Time to write mum a letter. Time to take the kids sledging. Time to bake some really good cookies and sing really bad Christmas carols. Time to make love visible through relational giving. Sounds a lot better than getting a sweater two sizes too big, right?”Advent Conspiracy

As the world looks to the issues of wealth and poverty I encourage you to get together and give a gift that is meaningful.  Why not give a gift that is significant?  Why not have a look at Christian Aid’s wishlist at http://www.presentaid.org/ ?

A gift like this will transform someone’s life!  Surely this is the real meaning of Christmas? 

So…….   If you like me a little, why not buy me a goat.  If you like me more why not buy me 24 ducks?  If you like me a lot, I’ve always wanted to be a herdsman…..

And if you’ve already bought something, don’t stress about it – that would be self defeating.  And if you do buy me a goat, don’t do what my mate Tim did one year and panic after buying goats for his family and buy “proper presents” at the last minute.  This is a “proper present”.  This will make me happy.  I will genuinely enjoy opening them and seeing what is inside!

Why not give a gift that is inspired by God who cared so much about humanity he took the risk of taking human flesh and living amongst us.  He came bearing a message of hope that can still change the world for the better even two thousand years later!

Becoming a People Movement

You may remember that I blogged about Living distinctively a couple of months ago.  One of the main parts of the study is a DVD interviewing Christians who are working at the top of their field.  One of the people interviewed was Patrick Dixon, “Futurist”.  He was inspiring so I decided to follow him.  He just uploaded this to YouTube:

There are some fascinating statistics quoted here as he uses them to illustrate how we move from “hierarchical leadership” to “people movement”.  The Church ™ is currently struggling to integrate a hierarchical management structure within newly formed teams that are created to work together.  The “people movement” that Patrick describes is surely the perfect description of the calling Jesus made upon each of us.  A transformative, missional community.

So how do we encourage people to work effectively together?  How do we enable “teams” to create real relationships within them?  How do we foster our communities to become more than institutions but people movements that spread from place to place?