Virtually Paul

Weddings, Pirates, Koreans and self-analysis

I’m back from a challenging week as a co-director on the bi-annual Junior Camp. Last week was my 8th Junior Camp in a row. The theme being “The Quest for Treasure Island”. We had a bit of a pirate thing happening, as I’ve previously mentioned.

I missed the first day thanks to my groomsmanly responsibilities in Nathan and Liz’s wedding. It was a great day. The ceremony was completely them and the reception was a great night too. I loved all of it. I was given the honour of making a speech which I thoroughly enjoyed preparing and delivering. But the best part of it all was watching my good friend Nathan, who I’ve journeyed with as a friend in life and faith for 5 years, including 2 and a half as housemates, make a commitment to a girl he loves to bits. We also both had a chance to talk to each other the night before and bring our era as housemates to a close in a really positive way. It was a really edifying experience as well as an extremely happy occasion. I drove up to camp on the Sunday morning.

The camp was very different this time for a number of reasons. For a start, the director who has run them for twice as long as I have been involved, resigned from involvement with the campsite some months back. That forced a few role changes for some of us. We had to take more of a hands on approach to running the camp program and all of the administrative stuff that comes with that. Additionally, our study leader pulled out less than a month before camp, prompting me to step up and take on that role as well.

That would have been fine in and of itself. What made the camp really difficult, for someone like me who likes to feel like they’re in control, was the presence of a visiting school group from South Korea. The kids spoke basic conversational English. One-on-one you could generally communicate with them well enough without knowing any Korean. Addressing the whole group or playing crowd controller was a different story though. The language barrier, for me, was quite frustrating. Fortunately, before camp I managed to track down a married couple who both speak Korean. They generously volunteered their time to come along to the camp (with their young family) and were instrumental in helping us with translation stuff. The guy who booked the school group into the camp seriously under-prepared us for all of the language and cultural issues that we had to deal with. All in all, I’d have to say the frustration nearly got the best of me.

That said, I think the leadership team did a superb job. There wasn’t a single leader on this camp who was just there to make up the numbers. Everyone who participated brought along a unique blend of gifts, talents and strengths to add to the overall team. I was incredibly impressed with everyone’s contribution. It was great to see some good friends (and also some new ones) really flourishing, rising to the occasion and coming into their own.

We finished up the week with a leaders’ retreat at a friend’s place. This was a great way to end the week. It made the camp feel a little bit more relaxed because no one felt as though they were having to try and force some social time into the scarce periods where there wasn’t anything happening. We were all pretty emotionally tired from a week of pouring ourselves into the camp program, so it was pretty easy to just kick back and soak up a very easy community atmosphere amongst the group. I pulled out the guitar at one stage and we all sang along to different songs, which was good fun. We all did a personality typing quiz thanks to a certain Myers-Briggs enthusiast who shall remain nameless. And I got to lay on a trampoline for a few happy minutes of solitude and silence and look at the stars in the country night sky.

I’ve mentioned before that coming back from camp is a curious experience. I’ve described this already but I’ll say it again. The whole regimented camp schedule is extremely predictable. Expectations are clear, activities are constantly scheduled, meals are a routine that happen without any real effort. When you finally do get a bit of downtime, you generally use it to rest up rather than reflect and evaluate things, because you know the next day is going to require the same amount of energy from a lowering set of reserves.

The effect is a total life reset. You don’t really have a choice. You have to put yourself and your usual rhythms on hold. So I’ve come back to earth and piece by piece I’m starting to pick up my life, examining each fragment as I go. I don’t really have much to say about all of that yet. I don’t know if I’m really ready for any major practical life changes. I’m going back to work on Wednesday. I’m kind of looking forward to that, having had a good rest and some distance from it for a few weeks. I suspect there will be a few attitudinal changes to make… but I haven’t quite come to grips with everything just for the moment.

Stay tuned.

Junior Camp Ahoy!

Seeing as Carris put in such a top research effort for her pirate post, I thought I’d use my new found burst of energy as I recover from being sick, to give my blog design a bit more of a pirate feel.

I’m leading on a kids camp this summer. The theme is “The Quest for Treasure Island”… What’s in the box with the locks? I’m co-directing the camp with two good friends, in Warren and Tash. There’s also Janelle, Carris, Bec and a bunch of other people that we’ve roped in from church and other places to be leaders.

The point of the camp is basically to form relationships with the kids, aged from Grade 4 to Year 7 and invest in them. We spend a bit of time on the camp talking about Bible stories and how those things can apply to our lives today… at the end of the day though, it’s up to the kids to make up their own minds about what they want to think and believe. I think that’s an incredibly healthy attitude… and it’s one of the reasons why in my high school days I got so much out of the teen camps that the same organisation runs. Mostly though, it’s fun, games and quality time.

I really enjoy spending time with kids. They have such an uncomplicated view of the world. I wish I’d gone on camps like this one when I was their age. I think I would have really liked them… so I’m really glad I can offer the privilege to my slightly smaller friends. I don’t think they’d appreciate being called ‘little’.

The blog theme will probably stay around until after camp, unless I get sick of it.
Camp runs from January 6-11, 2007, although I’ll be getting there a bit later because of my groomsman responsibilities in Nathan’s wedding.

My Attitude Problem

I’m currently working on an essay about “attitudes of young people towards the institutional church” and so far my head is awash with vague grabs at all of the ideas and issues.

So I figured I’d starting blogging on the subject and see where my thoughts take me.  Feel free to chuck me some comments for inspiration.  The essay topic seems to call for a pretty straight-forward approach.  Firstly, define young people in terms of their cultural setting and the needs that arise in them as a result of it.  Secondly, define the institutional church.  Somewhere in the gap between the two, you’d expect that I’d uncover the ‘attitudes’ that exist.  I think I’m going to need to touch on a number of issues to cover the topic properly.

Issue 1:  Societal Changes
There has been a shift in society and often it doesn’t seem like the church has caught up.  Maybe that’s just my attitude to the institutional church though.  The statistical studies I’ve been reading have talked a lot about the increasing number of ‘non-traditional family structures’.  More young people today than ever before live in home environments with single parents or step-parents.  So, how does that influence them?

Issue 2: Postmodernism
It’s a fancy word.  My understanding of what it means is this:
The ‘modern’ era was characterised by a collective belief in science and technology to solve all of the problems of humankind.  Something was valid if it could be explained.  Something could be accepted if there was cold, hard scientific evidence.  In amongst that, allegiance to an institution of some kind was a valued quality.  It all worked rather well for a generation of baby boomers in the suburban churches of the 1970s.

Enter the postmodern era.  These days, scientific rationalism isn’t irrelevant… but it isn’t the answer to everything either.  In the postmodern world, truth isn’t about proof.  Truth is about what works.  “Right” and “Wrong” are seen as relative labels.  Loyalty to an institution during bad times, makes you a sap who should have the backbone to improve their situation.  No one wants to listen to moral pronouncements of right and wrong from the church, from their parents, or from anywhere else.  Science doesn’t have all of the answers and spirituality is once again on the rise.  But in the postmodern era, what works for someone is ‘their truth’.  If you want to have your own religious beliefs, fine… but don’t push their moral framework on to those around you.

Issue 3: What’s the church?
The word ‘church’ has been misappropriated to so many different things, even just in the last 50 years, that its meaning within popular culture has been diluted into an array of stereotypes that range in their connotations, from confusing expressions of ancient religious liturgical practice, to a fundamentalist Christianist lobby group that attempts to influence Government policy for conservative ends.  Even within the ranks of those who regularly participate in the church, I’m not sure how many of them could tell you what it actually is.  If you asked ten different people what the church exists to do, you’d easily get answers that emphasised any number of different things:  community, evangelism, family values, charity, prayer.

Issue 4: Spirituality
Lots of people are interested in spirituality.  It’s just that not many of them want to ask the church about it because they think they already know what the church is going to say.

True Christian Community: The Real Building

It’s difficult to talk about buildings at my church without making reference to the one that’s being assembled under our noses.

But the metaphor for the church as a “building” in the New Testament, isn’t talking about the products of the construction industry. This is something that we often forget simply because of the way we use the word “church” in modern English.

“I’m going down to the church on Saturday to help with the working bee.”
“Which church is the wedding being held in?”
“That church over there looks very nice.”

The “building” described in the NT is not a physical one. When Paul (not me, the apostle) talks about the “church” he uses the Greek word ekklesia.
According to the commentary I looked at (see my Community Resources page) ekklesia refers to “an actual gathering of people” or “the group gathering for a regularly assembled meeting”.

Biblical commentators qualify the idea of ekklesia, proposing that Paul wasn’t referring to the church in an institutional sense either. The early church was most certainly linked in organic ways between the different gatherings. But here, Paul’s use of the word didn’t intend to carry an undertone of an earth-bound, organisational sense of federation, beyond their shared faith in Christ. When Paul wrote to the ekklesia in Corinth, or the ekklesia in Colossae, I don’t think he had the different gatherings listed on a database as member churches of the BURE (the Baptist Union of the Roman Empire). So, in my context at Essendon, I tried to imagine what it would be like, if we didn’t have our physical building.

I imagined what church would be like, if, at 5am every Sunday morning, Heath and Simon, our music guys, got up and put up a marquee made from about 80 sheets of blue tarp in Lincoln Park, just in case it rained… and we had church there every Sunday with musical instruments that don’t need electricity… Doug, who’s been worship leading for decades, whips out an old broom handle with bottle caps nailed on to it… the drum kit got stolen last week because someone forgot to pack it up… so Gary, my favourite drummer, is unloading a couple of upturned rubbish bins from the back of his car like that guy who busks in the city. Joan, everyone’s favourite little old lady, is getting into it with the tambourine. There’s no overhead projector. Just one of the tallest guys at church, Bruce, with a big whiteboard and a step ladder. When I picture that, the only things that are strikingly similar to the regular gathering I call church, are the smiling familiar faces.

Paul wasn’t writing to buildings, nor to organisations. He was writing to Christians who met together, living out real faith in a community. The community gathering is the building that Paul is referring to in Ephesians 2, as he writes to Gentile believers, extending to them the invitation for all believers, to enter into the church community.

Ephesians 2:19-22 (NRSV)
So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.

True Christian Community: An Introduction

Stained Glass Masquerade (popup window warning)

Those are the lyrics to a song by a band called Casting Crowns and for me they present a challenge. The song vividly depicts for us the false experience of community that many of us will experience at one time or another.

For me, the words remind me of my brokenness and my aloneness when I put up walls of self-protection that stop me from being real with other people. They bring to life for me the shallow, fake, empty reality that can exist for us in our approach to participating in the church community.

According to Wikipedia:

The word community comes from the Latin communis, meaning “common, public, shared by all or many.”^[1] The Latin term “communitatus” from which the English word “community” comes, is comprised of three elements, “Com-” - a Latin prefix meaning with or togther, “-Munis-” - ultimately Proto-Indo-European in origin, it has been suggested that it means “the changes or exchanges that link” (Both municipal and monetary take their meaning here), and “-tatus” a Latin suffix suggesting diminutive, small, intimate or local.

So, you could probably describe community as “Localised, intimate exchanges that link together”.

The community at my church is something that’s extremely important to me. My strongest memories of being a part of a real community, being cared about, being accepted, and being loved, are all intrinsically connected to Essendon Baptist Community Church. So I guess that makes me living proof that true Christian community can happen in amongst us those of us who chose to gather together on Sunday mornings.

My purpose in writing the upcoming content on this blog, is to examine some of what the bible has to say about the way Christians are to live in community with each other. On its own merits, our community at Essendon Bapts certainly isn’t perfect… but even just in our youth ministry, there are some great things going on. People are investing in each other in some really encouraging ways. We really do have something special. Hopefully, I’ve got a few ideas here that apply universally… things that we can all take onboard as we interact with others in our communities.

Community and Perception

After a thoroughly worthwhile chat with a good friend, I have some ideas that I’d like to share with you. I invite your feedback. Here it goes…

I’ve been part of the same church community for a long time. At one stage, about three years ago, it felt like the community was firing on all cylinders. I was growing spiritually. I was maturing personally. I was enjoying life. I felt as though I had meaning and purpose to life. At the cynical old age of 22, I have come to realise that feeling as though life is meaningful and purposeful is pretty emotionally driven.

At the time, what I craved and needed the most was probably what everybody craves and needs the most: to feel loved and accepted by a community. I can honesty say, that for a period of time, that need was met by my church community. I was lucky enough to be a part of a small group of guys, all around the same age, who hung out regularly and talked about issues of life, faith and future. We became great mates and I am privileged to be able to count those guys as close friends to this day.

We were also part of a broader social group of young adults, all connected through the church. There were always people who I knew well who I could hang around with. I’d walk into church on Sunday mornings and Sunday nights seeing a sea of familiar faces. People I knew. People I loved. People who encouraged me. The whole experience made me feel wonderful about myself.

In amongst this, our church was undergoing rapid change for a community organisation with about 200-250 members. We had moved to a temporary premises with a view to building on the site. We had a great pastor who was well liked, who spoke well and encouraged many of us in our faith. Simultaneously, the youth pastor who’d arrived at our church 3 years earlier was at the height of his ministry. We were running some great youth programs and we were kicking goals. People were growing in the knowledge that they are loved. The community was working. Ultimately, of course, the reason I felt this way was because my deepest need at the time - for friendship, encouragement, love and acceptance - was being met by the peer group around me on a continual basis.

I am whole-heartedly grateful for the positive things that I took away from these experiences. I believe that the fond memories forged during this time are the gift of a loving God.

Fast forward to now. Things have changed. They always do. While the friendships have endured the test of time, the group of mates that gave me the acceptance I was looking for is seldom together as a group. The church still hasn’t finished its building, although things are not far off. Both of the pastors have left. I don’t always feel accepted or understood by the peer group I have today. At least not in the way that I once did.

So what’s my deepest need now? I think I’ll keep that one to myself. What I will tell you is that it often doesn’t feel as though it’s being met. So what do I do with that? Experience subconsciously tells me that something isn’t right - that I should be lavished with the support of a loving community. I look at the activities that happen at my church and I don’t see the vibrant buzz of activity that I once felt was there. I don’t have long standing, cultivated relationships with the pastors. We don’t even have a youth pastor. That’s where I usually stop.

“The church is broken”, I complain.
“It has no direction”, I moan.
“The church should be doing more about the youth programs”, I proclaim.

But it’s more than that. Sure it’s easy to look on the surface level and see the glaring administrative problems and the gaping holes in the ideal of what I used to think the church was. That’s not the point though.
It’s about the community. It’s about the family. It’s about being a part of it all. It’s about acknowledging that I have some unfulfilled hopes and ideas that haven’t come to fruition. It’s about not feeling loved or understood sometimes. Whenever I’m in a situation where my deepest need isn’t being met, it is at this point when I need the community the most. Ironically, it’s when I’m not feeling great that I blame the community for not doing its job and start to withdraw.

Your thoughts please, insightful observers.

Cars, Trains and Server Problems

Well, my valued readers, I’m writing this to you on a train into the city and I’m not very impressed. My car decided that it didn’t like the hot day so I pulled in to the mechanic up the road from work who seems to think that my radiator is 50 percent blocked. I’ve pretty much already decided to bite the bullet and trade it in for something else. Not The best timing given my looming study deadlines and the sermon that I’m preaching in less than 3 weeks, but having a car with a working exterior driver’s door handle would probably be really nice and convenient now that I think about it.

Of course, on the one day that I am without a vehicle, the server at work decided to drop a RAID disk, leaving me running the database repair tool on the email database until 7pm before I could leave the office knowing that all of the happy staff will be able to open Outlook in the morning without having their routines disrupted by an uncooperative error message. Business professionals without email access are not unlike 16 year old girls that don’t have any battery left on their hot pink flip phone. They tend to panic that someone cool might be trying to contact them and would gladly trade a 6 month subscription to Dolly/The Fin. Review to have everything working again. Luckily, they pay me and I fix it. It’s somewhat of a symbiotic relationship.

*switches to outbound Broadmeadows train*

It did mean that I’ll arrive late for the church meeting that’s on tonight with no dinner, having missed the pre-meeting prayer time that I was originally supposed to be organising until I passed it off to Heath at the last minute. The meeting should be interesting. It’s been advertised as a ‘Church Family Forum’ (also known as a Baptist Opinions Convention). The headline topic is what to do about our lack of a Youth Pastor while we still don’t have a Senior Pastor. Suffice it to say that I’ll be intrigued to hear the ideas from across the group.

I could really go for a steak sandwich about now. At least I’ll be able to get a lift home from church from one of my housemates.

Book Review: Preaching to a Postmodern World - Graham Johnston

Graham Johnston does a wonderful job of communicating the framework for postmodern thinking to a target audience of Bible-believing preachers. The text effectively recontextualises the communication of the Gospel message into the ruins of the modern era, where many are no longer willing to believe in the scientific-rationalist independence from faith that was the hallmark of the baby-boomers. Johnston’s analysis of the resulting postmodern culture shows a way forward for Gospel communication, while warning preachers that their listeners will fail to hear the message if it is not communicated in a way that is sympathetic towards their worldview.

This book was a refreshing change in tone from some of the other reading that I’ve done this semester. I felt as though I indentified with the author moreso than in my encounters with the other texts. I could perhaps attribute this to a cultural bias, given that Johnston is a fellow Australian. However, I think this sense of identification was most enhanced by Johnston’s use of illustrations which richly and effectively illustrated his points.

I found another review which made me wonder whether the book will actually be able to challenge modern thinking in experienced preachers. I suspect that the reviewer, Sam Horn, is likely to be a greater authority on the subject than I, given the letters “Ph.D.” after his name. However, I couldn’t help but wonder if he’d completely missed the point, given that the conclusion of Horn’s review spent most of its time criticising Johnston for using an illustration containing homosexual practices.

“In fairness to Johnston, a careful reading does not reveal a pro-homosexual agenda or even acceptance. However, neither does he clearly state his stance against homosexuality and given the nature of the illustration, one would expect at least a caveat of disclaimer somewhere in the paragraph.”

Horn seemed to miss Johnston’s point about the postmodern objection to unequivocal moral pronouncements from the institutionalised church. Whether Johnston thinks homosexuality is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ is entirely beside the point. It’s about time that the church realised that people want our love first and our opinions on morality second (if at all).

Hopefully Johnston made a few preachers squirm ever so slightly in their reading chairs.

A Christian STD: Spiritually Transmitted Disease

For everyone who hadn’t already realised that the Christian message often isn’t communicated or modelled very well by churches. I can identify with a lot of things that this article has to say. That doesn’t mean “write-off” church. But I guess it is worth being aware that the message that (should be) spoken from the front doesn’t always reflect every participant’s (primary) motives for being there.

http://www.theooze.com/articles/article.cfm?id=1454

Link of the Week: How to resolve conflict in youth ministry