For centuries, the Advent/Christmas seasons have been a time for folks to automatically come into Church, perhaps for the only time in a year. However, in this post-Christendom, and some would argue post-Christian age, all bets are off. The days of expectation that people will naturally come into events in our churches simply because it is Christmas, are rapidly dwindling. This is not an urban, suburban, or rural issue.  This is not a church size or denominational issue. This is the new normal of every local church in our increasingly secularized age.

It is not a time for despair. In fact, it is an exciting season of opportunity and hope for those in Christian leadership who are willing to fully engage the challenges of our day. In Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of the magisterial Prologue in John’s gospel that is read every Christmas, we get a glimpse into the missional heart of the Incarnation:

The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood. We saw the glory with our own eyes, the one-of-a-kind glory, like Father, like Son, generous inside and out, true from start to finish. (Jn. 1:14, The Message by Eugene Peterson)

God moves into our neighbourhood. We have an opportunity to step back and re-think all we intend, practice and believe about our engagement with Advent/Christmas and with our culture. In whatever way your Church makes decisions, I am going to suggest that we gather, and consider six fundamentals of Advent/Christmas planning, before we look at some practical applications.

Ditch the complaining about the hyper-consumerism of our culture or the lack of religious practice in our society. We follow the One who not only is the Word made flesh, but also the One who breaks the back of death, evil and our sin by his atoning work on the Cross. Our world needs the good news of the Gospel as we share our hope that is grounded in the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ — the Gospel imperative.

Who needs to be part of this conversation? How can the conversation be expanded to include those not typically in the decision-making process? Engage those who only come at Christmas. Talk to those in your community who do not attend at all. Ask your youth and young adults about their expectations and experiences of what the Church can be and do at Christmastide.

Consider every aspect of your Advent and Christmas practices. Ask yourself the simple but exceptionally difficult question—why? Why do we do what we do during Advent and Christmas? Are these events aligned with the gospel imperatives of the Incarnation?

Consider what it will mean to engage your community this Christmas, versus expecting your community to engage your church events.

Think through when your Advent and Christmas events are held. Are attendance patterns changing? Do we need to change our event times to engage more people more effectively?

Where is the best expression of the Advent and Christmas season? Would it be more beneficial to change locales, to actually ‘move into the neighbourhood’ instead of offering events at our local church building?

These six elements of re-thinking and re-framing our understanding and practices of Advent/Christmas in our churches is the hard work of Christian leadership. You will find very quickly that “Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous patience.” (Hyman Rickover)

Historic methodologies and practices feel good to us, but do they connect the Gospel and our culture? If we have done our homework, and prayerfully thought through these six fundamentals, then we might be surprised by the need for the church’s historic gospel tradition, versus our own local traditionalism. In the context of your local community, remember theologian Jaroslav Pelikan’s famous dictum: “Traditionalism is the dead religion of the living. Tradition is the living religion of the dead.”

At St. Paul’s, as we have sought to consider these Advent/Christmas planning fundamentals, we have discovered some simple and effective things to engage and connect with the communities we serve. We are a work in progress, always trying to pray and think through what, why and how we are doing and being the Church.

Here are some things to think about for the Advent/Christmas seasons:

Advertise early and widely with the message that you want to engage with your community, not simply get them into church at this time of year.

Use social media to get the message out. Even if you have no experience or are personally wary – seek out those who regularly use Facebook or Twitter and learn. The cost of your usual advertising -—newspaper, flyers etc. – is increasing while their effectiveness is diminishing.

Undertake a prayer ministry to pray for your visitors, for your events, for gospel proclamation.

Ensure one clear theme in the music, preaching, and prayers so that your message is coherent, concise and consistent.

Through the Advent/Christmas seasons, place the incarnation in the context of the whole of salvation history. For example, a traditional Lessons and Carols service embodies the great sweep of Creation, Rebellion, Israel, Jesus, Still Being Written and The End.

In preaching, beware of the urge to bury people in scriptural volume. Do not overestimate the biblical literacy of our culture or our church communities.  Just because you know the implications of the incarnation, do not assume everyone does.

Beware of the urge to find new meaning in the old text. Allow the Gospel and the text to shape your preaching.

But do preach! Please do not offer a Christmas devotional or read someone else’ thoughts. This is a prime opportunity for you to connect the biblical story with your community in an authentic and meaningful way.

Offer an evangelistic, relationship-based program that people can sign up for immediately, on the spot that will begin right after Christmas. Use Alpha or Christianity Explored. We use Christianity 101 (C101), which for us starts first thing in the New Year.

Put your best foot forward with preaching, liturgy, music, and hospitality. Think of the famous title of Oswald Chamber’s daily devotional book—My Utmost for His Highest. To offer your best to the Lord Jesus is to do just that, offer your best. Whether we like it or not, people are used to high quality production values and they expect your practice to be aligned with our message that the Gospel is the most important good news in the world.

Consider giving your visitors a small and inexpensive gift that explains Christmas, such as Nicky Gumbel’s “Why Christmas?”

Work to reframe your understanding of Advent as much more than a liturgical season.  Be a community that truly seeks to reshape yourselves and society’s worldview from one of consumption to one of compassion. The Advent Conspiracy (adventconspiracy.org) is a brilliant resource to highlight, particularly at this time of year, that you are blessed solely to be a blessing to others.

Offer opportunities to serve at Christmastide. Perhaps you might offer a Christmas dinner to those who are alone at this time of year. You might encourage everyone in your church to offer one hour to your local food bank or one hour to visit a nursing home. Even the smallest churches will have an impact. To engage your community means to serve your community in some capacity, particularly at this time of year.

Throw a party. If you have a children’s or family service, build a festive venue with cupcakes and balloons. Visitors and their children relate to a birthday party for Jesus. For your Christmas services, provide opportunities to build relationships (not just a coffee hour), where your faith community can genuinely engage the community by not only serving, but also simply having fun.

 We live in a changing world and this time of year can be a season of challenge and over-extension. With Advent and Christmas—we have been given an opportunity to connect with our world. As Christopher Wright wrote in The Mission of God:

 It is not so much the case that God has a mission for his church in the world, as that God has a church for his mission in the world. Mission was not made for the church; the church was made for mission—God’s mission.

 As church, we are made for such a time as this.  We are made for God’s mission, which is to proclaim in word and deed the reality that “the Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighbourhood.

Barry Parker is rector of St.Paul’s Anglican Church, Bloor St., Toronto. Check out their website —and how St.Paul’s is presenting Christmas to their community— at www.stpaulsbloor.org

Bishop George Bruce

Bishop George Bruce of the Diocese of Ontario tells about a surprising visit to a unique expression of church in the Diocese of  South Western Brazil.

click here to view video.

Years ago, my best friend Janet and I travelled from Halifax to Vancouver and back again on a student Via-Rail pass. For 21 days we sat, slept and snickered in coach seats, eating peanut butter sandwiches and once an entire cream pie. We giggled through northern Ontario and cackled through the prairies, until, to our utter bewilderment, someone finally snapped.

Our fellow passenger shouted “Would you please stop that incessant giggling!” The rest of the car applauded. They weren’t clapping for us. Amazingly, they were clapping for the man who told us to shut up.

We were stunned to discover not everyone — not anyone, actually — thought we were the cat’s meow. And that’s how the church is to some people, in some neighbourhoods. The church has become irrelevant, and maybe even annoying!

This past year, I had the privilege to interview and write the stories of 13 Canadian churches — of various sizes, shapes and denominations — across Canada who have decided to get relevant, big-time. Going Missional: Conversations with 13 Canadian Churches who Have Embraced Missional Life is the book, borne of that research and co-written with Willard Metzger, then World Vision Canada’s director of church relations.

All across Canada, there are churches embracing missional life. They are moving out of their comfort zones into a more intentional local engagement and serving their own communities in remarkably creative ways — not to grow their churches — but to grow their obedience to Jesus’ teachings to deeply love the people and places that surround us.  And they are doing it in partnership with all kinds of people and community groups already active in their midst.

Partnerships was a huge part of many of the missional adventures I learned about. Ask, then listen, advised Judy Paulsen of Christ Church, Oshawa, an Anglican congregation profiled in the book. Going out to meet with community groups, asking how the church can serve them, then coming up with creative partnering possibilities is a staple of the missional life.

I shared this idea of partnerships with people in the community, who weren’t necessarily the least bit churchy at all, with our own church’s Mission and Outreach group. Inspired, we formed a team  to go visit the local schools and offer our church’s assistance for students in need. The result, after months of talking and re-visiting, is a bursary for social action at the high school, and a sizable donation to another school to build up their literacy program.

We feel certain we are on the right and very new track.

This immediate application of what I was learning happened again and again during the writing of Going Missional. Because our own congregation of the Ascension in Port Perry is well on its way to a renewed incarnation in our community, we were able to apply some of the missional lessons right away, which is the very point of the book.

We fellow travellers on the missional road – and many would argue there is no other road — can learn so much from each other. Simple things like dialoguing with the community to find out how we can help — and not presuming to already know.  Realizing that God is already at work in Port Perry and elsewhere, whether we are a part of it yet or not. And knowing that simply being a friend can be the greatest witness to Christ’s love. One church I spoke to built a homeless shelter right down the hall from their sanctuary; another offers fixed-up cars to the poor in their community, yet another asked surprised parishioners to donate their coats and boots (on a cold Saskatoon Sunday) to a homeless shelter downtown. A west-coast church volunteered in droves for an Aboriginal Olympics taking part in their hometown, and did more to build bridges in two weeks than in the decades previously.

I ended this project feeling like it was a good time to be a Christ-follower in Canada — and in my very own community. For the first time in a long time, I am excited about what is to come.

Going Even More Missional

I interviewed 46 people, from 13 diverse church communities from coast to coast, for Going Missional. Here are some more ways these congregations are living out Christ’s call in their communities.

1. Work with other churches: In almost every case, churches who are deeply engaged in their communities are open to collaboration with other — often very different — congregations.

2. Be prepared to help when the community needs you. A large Montreal congregation founds its missional feet during the ice storms of 1998. Their sanctuary became a shelter, and their reputation as a church the community can trust grew exponentially.

3. Know your community. The churches in the book spent time asking questions, hearing from community groups and even just travelling on city buses to hear and absorb what the needs of their communities really were.

4. Encourage lay people. Often, the best ideas for missional outreach come from parishioners who want to share their passion and their gifts. Sometimes, clergy are most effective as cheer leaders.

5. Move from writing cheques to being present. The churches in the book, especially Christ Church, Oshawa, have intentionally moved from mostly financially supporting needs in their communities to actually rolling up their sleeves and getting to work. Parishioners love the switch.

6. Preach and teach boldly. One church in Winnipeg tells members that if they aren’t willing to get to work in the community then they are just taking up a chair someone else could use. Ministry opportunities are presented on their website like job descriptions and everyone has a chance to participate.

7. Open your doors — for free. A large Saint John congregation opens its building (rent-free) for community meetings and events and has gained a reputation, starting with that simple act, as being on the side of the city.

8. Train people how to serve. A St. Catharine’s congregation that houses a homeless shelter makes sure its volunteers are well-trained and comfortable. They present varied “on-ramps” for engaging parishioners in missional activities.

9. Invite the community in — even on Sundays. A church in Duncan, B.C. invites community leaders to join them for a Sunday service and share what they do for their town, then the church offers to pray for their work, right there and then.

10. Do your programs well. A Saskatoon church took a load of their “Sunday best” clothing, in new boxes, to a homeless shelter and the shelter staff were moved to tears. Another church-run homeless shelter washes their visitors’ clothes and offers them fresh pyjamas to sleep in. Offer the world your best.

Going Missional: Conversations with 13 Canadian Churches who Have Embraced Missional Life is available through The Leadership Centre, Willow Creek Canada, at www.growingleadership.com

Karen Stiller

Behold! Something stirs in the English countryside

“Tanworth-in-Arden is a small rural parishbetween Birmingham and Redditch. Paul Cudby, vicar of St Mary Magdalene church, explains what they are doing to reach those who don’t ‘do’ church.” read more

Imagine yourself a cloned child created from the DNA of a wealthy person who wants to have your organs available for transplant, when he later needs them. The only life you know as a child is as one of a large number of other clones who are kept in the setting of an isolated English boarding school, Hailsham, where none of you has any contact with the outside world. Initially, you have no idea of your intended destiny, as an organ donor.

At age 18, you leave Hailsham for other supervised accommodation, where you will live until you become an organ “donor,” usually in a sequence of “retrieval operations,” finally being killed when an unpaired vital organ is taken.

In the film of Kazuo Ishiguro’s book, Never Let Me Go, which is playing in Canada, we watch this dystopic and unethical example of a rapidly developing field called “regenerative medicine” (which, used ethically, offers great hope), being played out against a tragic love story that involves three of these young people. Through this love story, we understand how fully human they are, in contrast to the immense dehumanization to which they are subjected.

Reviewers have commented that the film is unusual in being a science-fiction story set in the past, the 1950s and ’60s. But what makes it so spine-chilling is that we come to realize that our present world is the future Ishiguro describes. Many scenarios it portrays, such as organ transplantation, and genetic and reproductive technologies, which were unknown in the ’50s and ’60s, are now science-fact. The film delivers a powerful message that we need to become much more sensitive than we currently are to the ethics issues 21st-century technoscience raises.

Here are some of the lessons we can take from it.

The cloned children are regarded by the people who run their school as repositories of organs rather than as individual persons, as objects, not human subjects. This dehumanization is inflicted both through the way in which the children are treated and language.

They are constantly monitored with electronic bracelets, like animals are with computer chips. One supervisor, obviously meaning to be empathetic, remarks, “you poor creatures.” Creatures is a word we use to refer to animals, usually when we are differentiating them from humans. And someone queries whether they have a soul. What is clear is that in dehumanizing the children, these people dehumanize themselves more.

A major current example of dehumanization through language involves human embryos and fetuses. Human embryo research is justified by describing the embryos as “just a bunch of cells” and, in abortion, fetuses are characterized as “just unwanted tissue, part of the woman’s body, not a child.”

The physicians and nurses responsible for keeping the children healthy, so later their organs can be used, also dehumanize them. In medically examining them, they act as though they are mechanics making sure a car is in good running order, not health-care professionals caring for patients. Most horrific in this regard, is the scene showing surgeons undertaking a vital-organ-retrieval-operation that kills the “donor.” They carefully take the organ, then instantly “pull the plug” on both the life support technology and any engagement with the “patient,” simply walking out leaving the dead body on the operating table, bleeding, not even bothering to suture the wound. Even in death the person is not respected as human.

Who were these physicians and nurses? How could they be in involved in such evil, such appalling violation of medical ethics? That same question has often been asked by scholars in relation to the Nazi doctors in the death camps. Are comparable unethical operations taking place in some countries today, for instance, using prisoners as “donors”? Might some Canadians be recipients of these organs?

How could society allow this to happen? Why wasn’t it prohibited and severely punished? Or was society complicit in the evil by funding the technoscience that made it possible, without ensuring that technoscience was used only ethically?

Who were the scientists who made the clones and what ethical requirements should have governed them?

And where were society’s watchdogs, the medical and scientific bodies responsible for ensuring ethics in the professions? Or was it a situation where the legislated safeguards were inoperative.

It’s clear in the book that “farming” these children is a lucrative commercial industry. This brings to mind the “fertility industry” that markets assisted reproductive technologies, bringing in $3.3 billion annually, in the United States alone. It’s an area that needs very close ethical supervision, yet it’s common to hear it referred to as the “Wild West of human reproduction.” Note also the unethical international organ transplant industry that the recent Declaration of Istanbul seeks to eliminate.

Another warning comes from the intentional use of euphemistic or obfuscating language by those involved in the “cloning-transplant project.” Euphemisms can skew our perceptions about ethics, probably by suppressing moral intuitions that clear language would elicit and which would function as ethical red alerts.

The person cloned, is referred to simply as the clone’s “original.” The clones go looking for their “originals.” They describe sighting a person, who might be such, as seeing a “possible.” Especially in the book, Ishiguro captures, exactly as I’ve personally heard donor-conceived people express it, their anguish at not knowing, but longing to know, their biological antecedents.

The word “kill” is never used and even the word “death” is avoided, as is often true of pro-euthanasia advocates. Rather, the final fatal surgery is referred to as a “completion.” A nurse remarks that “some donors look forward to completion,” which is not surprising seeing the immensely debilitated state of the young people, who have already made multiple donations. Towards the end of the film, the former headmistress of Hailsham, now retired and in a wheelchair, remarks, philosophically, “that we all have to complete sometime.” That’s true, but how we “complete” is the critical ethical issue, as we can see in the present euthanasia debate.

That brings us to convergence, which refers to interventions that become possible only through the combination of separate technologies. Never Let Me Go is a story of the convergence of genetic and reproductive technologies — cloning, in vitro fertilization and surrogate motherhood — and organ transplant technologies.

Each technology, taken alone, raises serious ethical issues, but combined they raise ethical issues of a different order, as we see in Never Let Me Go. And such issues might be closer to us, than most of us realize.

Is it ethical for people who are euthanized, in countries where this is legal, to become organ donors? There have been recent reports of this at transplantation conferences and in the medical literature.

And here’s another presently possible scenario of convergence, the only element of which is illegal in Canada would be cloning the embryo, which advocates of human embryo research have argued should be allowed for “therapeutic purposes”: Create an in vitro embryo and take one cell, when all cells are still totipotential (can form another embryo) to make a second embryo. Transfer the first embryo to a woman’s uterus and freeze the second embryo. When, as a born child or adult, the first embryo needs an organ transplant, transfer the second embryo to a surrogate mother, abort the fetus at a late stage and use its organs.

Finally, a statement from the wheel-chair-bound ex-head mistress of Hailsham merits noting with respect to the philosophy and values on which we should base our ethics. It shows her exclusively rational approach to the horror of what she helped to inflict on the children in her charge.

Two of them, who are now adults and in love, come to her seeking a deferral of the “completion” organ retrieval surgery on the young man, so they can have some time together before he is killed. She tells them that is not possible and enquires, rhetorically, “Would you ask people to return to lung cancer, heart failure and other terrible diseases?”

Never Let Me Go is a searing lesson about the “ethics outcomes” that can result from pure utilitarianism and moral relativism, when they are used to govern the new technoscience by people without a moral conscience or moral intuition.

Margaret Somerville DCL, LL.D, is the founding director of the Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University.

Printed with permission of the author.

This article was first published in the Ottawa Citizen

Thomas Brauer

Ministry at the edges of Church and culture is a challenge, to say the least.  It is often hard to discern which particular edges should attract our limited mission attention (and budgets).  With challenges in finding both people and money for long-term mission projects, it is often helpful to find “one off” mission opportunities which can still work to build community, offer opportunities for discipleship,  even worship, and to build the skills and capacities of potential mission volunteers.  Many of our communities have just such mission opportunities, ready made and waiting, in the shape of festivals, fairs, and cultural events.

All the major cities of Canada, and many rural communities, have significant annual cultural events of some sort.  There are theatre festivals, Jazz, Blues, Folk and Rock festivals, fall fairs, rodeos, and agricultural exhibitions almost every week somewhere in the country.  Many of these events draw significant crowds and offer tremendous opportunities to serve many people at one go.  Yet these events are often neglected as mission and ministry opportunities for churches.

Where to start?

So, let’s say you have a passion for mission, and live in a community with a festival or cultural event coming up. Where do you begin to plan for mission to that festival’s community.

Step One is to find a group who might be interested in serving with you – this is your mission team.  They should be willing to give their time, and energy, and they should share your vision of service.

Step Two, is, gathering your team together, pray for God’s wisdom, and guidance as you ask yourselves the following questions:

1. Who is involved in the upcoming festival?

(think of patrons, artists/presenters/contestants, commercial supporters (food venders and such),  residents of the festival area, and anyone else you think might be impacted by the event).

1. How might those involved need to be served?

(go through the list of groups you think are involved one, by one, discerning how they might need/desire to be served.  If you don’t know – find someone involved in the festival to ask.  They’ll tell you.  Usually you won’t be able to serve them all, but you might well be able to serve a few.)

1. What are our capacities?

(spend time thinking about what resources you have – personnel, time, money, space, gifts and talents, etc.)

1. Knowing who is involved, how they might need to be served, and what we have to share, how can we best be of service to the people involved in this event?

(don’t be afraid to go small, perhaps focusing on one involved group and serving a minor need.  It doesn’t have to be big, it just needs to be done with love, and with the intent to serve.)

Step Three is to get the permissions you need.  Do you need a bishop’s approval, or parish or denominational approval?  Do you need municipal permission/licenses?  Do you need permission from festival staff/organizers?  Depending on what you have chosen to do, you might need permission from multiple sources.  If so, get them.  It will make your life much easier later.

Step Four is to make an implementation plan with your team.  Make sure you’re all on the same page, you all know what is going to happen, when, and where.  Also make sure you’re all on the same page about why you’re doing this.  There is always one person who thinks it’s about getting bums in pews.  It’s not.  It’s about serving out of the love of Christ for the sheer joy and purpose of serving.

Step Five is to get to it.  Let people know what you’re doing, that you have permission, and that you want to be a part of the festival fun by serving the festival itself, and get on with it.  Enjoy yourself, and pray often, giving thanks for the opportunity, seeking wisdom for all involved, and pursuing how your team might be of greatest service.

What might this look like?

Perhaps a concrete example or two would be helpful.  I’m involved in a mixed economy church setting in Edmonton.  I’m working to plant a Fresh Expression of Church called the Project, currently based out of Holy Trinity Anglican Church, Edmonton.  Holy Trinity is located within blocks of the Fringe Theatre Festival grounds, and for years has served as a venue for Fringe productions (the Edmonton Fringe Festival is the world’s 2^nd largest Fringe, and has a central festival location).

Two years ago, members of Holy Trinity and I began plotting how we might be of service to the Fringe.  I made the announcement on a Sunday morning that I would be leading a project to serve the festival, and would welcome as much input and support as possible from the congregation.  Together, we discerned who was involved in the festival – we used the language of ‘stake-holders’.  We knew there were artists (foreign and domestic), festival staff and volunteers, vendors, commercial service providers, neighbourhood residents, and patrons.  In all, this was several hundreds of thousands of people (the 2010 Fringe served well over 400,000 patrons, with another 1400 volunteers, several hundred performers and artists, and several dozen staff, not to mention the 20,000 people who live or work in the festival area).  It was clear that we couldn’t serve them all, but it was necessary to now discern the needs of the various stakeholders.  Through long discussion, and working through the questions above diligently, we settled on serving first the artists and patrons that would be coming to Holy Trinity as a venue.  We also thought we could manage serving festival patrons who might need a place of rest and peace between shows during the day, or who might just need a break from the activities of the festival itself.

In the end, we decided we had resources and opportunity enough to offer the artists volunteer support during shows, there by relieving them of the onerous task of finding their own volunteers for box office and ushering duties.  We also operated a concession stand at reasonable costs (most festival venues charge exorbitant rates for concessions as a cash grab).  We provided clean and comfortable green-room space for the artists (a green-room is a room for actors to relax in before and after a show) as well as food and drinks for them.  And we simply went out of our way to be as welcoming as possible to both artists and patrons.

Over and above show time support, we offered three other services during the days of the festival to create a space of rest for tired patrons.  Our biggest hit was the “Green Room Teahouse” where we served (in good Anglican fashion) tea and fresh scones (made to order with our own heavenly recipe served with clotted cream and jam).  We also set up “Father Tom’s Lemonade Stand”.  This was a wonderful way for me to meet people in the community and to talk to folks who were walking by the church building.  The third offering was ‘solace’.  ‘solace’ is a contemplative arts installation located in the nave and chancel of the church, and offers people a place of rest and peace, and an opportunity to (re)engage with Christian spirituality.  One of the most gratifying results of these activities was seeing how many people made one or more of our offerings a daily part of their life for the ten days of the Fringe.  This year, our second year, we saw almost all of last year’s folks come back, and they brought friends.  We ended up serving over 400 scones in 10 days.  A lot of work, but well worth it.

The combined impact of our activities of serving the Fringe resulted in many, many people commenting on how welcome they felt, and how Holy Trinity embraced the spirit of the Fringe in a unique and meaningful way.  From their perspective, we met them where they were, and valued what they valued, and offered a little bit of the peace, generosity and welcome of Christ to them during their festival.  Clearly this worked to build community, but it also created many discipleship/evangelism opportunities as people asked why were doing this, and what we as a Christian church were about.  And it was greatly appreciated by the more than 4000 patrons who made Holy Trinity part of their Fringe in 2009, and the 6,100 patrons did so in 2010.

Now, not everybody has access to the kind of support necessary to serve a festival as large as the Edmonton Fringe in as robust a fashion as we did (year one saw 50 volunteers put in 500 hours, and year two saw 66 volunteers put in 640 volunteer hours).  But there are other ways.

While traveling in the UK, I met a woman who leads missions into New Age Spirituality and psychic fairs and festivals.  These are events that are shunned by many Christians and churches, but she felt that they posed wonderful opportunities to meet people who were actively seeking a spiritual life.

Her process was this: she would rent a space at the fair, like any other vendor or service provider, then she would communicate with local churches to find mature, prayer centred Christians interested in mission to join her team.  Together, they would decorate their booth/table/tent in the classic purple and gold beloved by this community, and would post a sign reading simply “Healing Prayer”.  While most ‘healers’ at such events charge for their ministrations, the ministry team would not, and when someone came seeking prayer, they would explain that they were Christians, and that they were there to serve in love, and that the healing they were offering came not from themselves, but from God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Some people would walk away, but the vast majority were so taken aback that Christians would come to them and offer spiritual support and prayer, that they stayed and often asked many, many questions.  This is a very simple and direct approach to serving the spiritual needs of people in a distinct environment and culture.   It could easily be adapted for any kind of event.  Imagine a booth at a folk festival offering prayer, or one at a business convention, or even just setting up a table on Main Street at noon with a sign reading “willing to listen and pray for free.”

It is astonishing what opportunities for mission there are in festivals and cultural events.  I’ve discussed only two, but I know of several “rodeo churches” that follow the rodeo circuit in the west, and others who open prayer booths at folk festivals and such.  The options for mission are limited only by our imagination, and the gifts of the Spirit.  Which is to say that there are no limitations at all!  If you are looking for opportunities to engage in fresh mission in your community, but don’t have the resources for sustained programs, or ongoing ministry support, I’d encourage you to consider what festivals and cultural events are going on in your area, and how you and a few friends might be able to serve them in the name of Jesus Christ.

Note: for a far from comprehensive list of Canadian festivals, look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_festivals_in_Canada

Or here:

http://www.storytellersdirectory.ca/Pages/CultFest.html

or contact your municipal offices for a list of local events.

Canada is a significant destination for Diaspora Christians around the world, some fleeing persecution, others poverty and war, and some are on the move (I think) because they’ve been called by Christ to missionize the western world—like the Filipino church planter I met in North York who planted an intercultural church in Mississauga which then birthed another congregation in Etobicoke even before the Mississauga church secured their first pastor.

They are not reticent about their faith.  Like the Christians of the early Roman Empire serving the established classes, I am hearing anecdotal evidence of children demanding to go church because their nannies have told them about Jesus, personal caregivers leading seniors to faith in Christ, receptionists praying with clients in the waiting room, and other professionals I dare not name in print lest we jeopardize their timely unawareness of the need to compartmentalize faith so it cannot seep into the workplace.

Twenty years ago, I thought God had brought us the nations of the world so we could share Christ. Now I think I had it backward.  We are the ones who need to learn that faith is no less a passion than World Cup Football, and spiritual conversations are as natural as discussing the weather.  We are the ones who need to forget that our brand of Christianity had its capital in Europe—perhaps temporarily—and remember that the Church has always been the world’s most truly multi-national, multi-ethnic, inter-cultural corporations.  We are the ones who must adjust to the new reality beyond our cultural borders where it is more normal to purchase a theatre to turn it into a place of worship than to sell a church and turn it into condominiums—and that others are doing just that in our midst.

Soong-Chan Rah, a 1.5 generation Korean-American scholar in Chicago has it right when he says that the real wave of transformation in the North American church will not be ushered in by hip young white guys with goatees and book contracts with the Christian media juggernaut, but by intercultural ministries.  First generation immigrants often arrive with a vibrant faith, but with too many cultural barriers to communicate easily into other people groups. Their children, however, who arrive as young people but grow up with vibrant faith and a Canadian education and accent—these 1.5 generation immigrants are shaping up as a formidable force on the Canadian landscape.

Five years ago, I thought that perhaps 50% of church goers in the Greater Toronto area on any given Sunday morning were in black majority or immigrant churches.  No one knows how many unregistered churches there are, but I suspect the percentage of worshippers is much higher today.

Brenda Salter McNeil is a well known speaker who focused on racial reconciliation using Acts 1:8.  She described reconciliation in “Samaria”, when people are so different they say “God ought to do something about ‘those people’” can follw this cycle:

Two other lines: Church as a “radical third culture people that create a whole new reality”and, “when we engage difference, the differences we engage transform us.”

Shane Claiborne is a well known author and founder of the “Simple Way” community in Philadephia.  Transformation is:

• more than a doctrinal statement
  • we need a rule of life, too.
  • more than ideologies
    • Ideologies don’t demand much of us, but our practices do.
• more than good vision
  • Everybody here wants a revolution but no one wants to do the dishes
• takes a neighbourhood
  • • Stayers
    • Returners
    • Relocators
• takes imagination
  • One of my greatest temptations is to be a church planter

Our community doesn’t need more churches we need a church

• The mega-church is so 1980’s
• We can’t tell a kid to stop selling heroin if we don’t have another way to feed him
• re: Palm Sunday – “We’re just the asses that get to bring Jesus in.”

Dave Gibbons is lead pastor of Newsong, an international multi-campus church.

• Everything has changed
• I know when I was a kid, I got saved 100 times and they still counted me every time
• Maybe our metrics should be to have no foster kids in any city where Christians live.
• Don’t join a movement (he warned that the megachurch movement became the multi-campus movement and became the organic movement, then the missional movement) but instead join the movement of God.
• Walk the streets, the streets will speak to you.

The first was Reggie McNeal, of the Leadership Network.  He described the Missional Church this way:

1. The people of God (we are not planting an “it” but a “who”)
2. partnering with Him
3. in his redemptive mission
4. in the world

Some soundbites from Reggie.  I didn’t find he had much of value to say – mostly preaching to the choir in a humorous, but overly dramatic performance:

• Jesus didn’t say “I’ve come to give you church that you might have it abundantly”
• The point is they’re not coming!
• re: Build it and they will come – “When are we going to get over it?”
• Be the church where we’re already assigned
• Churches are like airports, they are not designed to be the destination
• Is the city better of because we’re here?
• “We had a good Sunday” – so what?  Is the quality of life better in our community?
• Why does any kid leave school reading at a grade 4 level when our churches are full of people who can?”
• Get off your donkey and do something
• We are here for life

The second part was an interview of Alan Hirsch and Ed Stetzer.  Hirsch is the founder of the Forge Missional Training network, and Stetzer is a well known writer and analyst of church life in America.  Stetzer mostly spoke about metrics beyond “nickels, noses and numbers” suggesting we measure metrics like how many friends people have outside the church, and whether leaders are modelling what they teach.  Hirsch spoke a great deal about risk, including these soundbites

• We have domesticated life and the idea of God
• I can’t find one book on the theology of adventure or risk as it pertains to God.  This affects us, makes us risk averse and safety obsessed.
• Jesus is wild and uncontrollable.
• Church should be like Jesus, and if not, something is fundamentally wrong: unchristlike, boring, insecure, and fearful of one another.
• Leaders must model risktaking.

The third part was Efrem Smith, who I described in an earlier post as the planter of a multi-ethnic church in Minnesota.  He was a very different speaker in plenary, he was clearly in “preaching mode” and drawing on his theatre background in what made for a very energetic sermon.  I appreciated a few things he said, but found he took a few exegetical liberties that left me looking for substance beneath the energy and hype.  Some of his soundbites from this talk:

• God desires to advance his Kingdom through our transformed and transforming lives and churches.
• Church Planters are bridesmaids for Christ & his church.
• Kingdom Urgency: Alert, Aware, Heart Open
• The day Jesus came, the NASDAQ of heaven went crazy.  God gave us Kingdom capital.
• Be a Star Trek church planter, go where no man has gone before.

• A core team is vital to multi-ethnic planting.
• It should equip and empower people serving with you around something that’s very important.
• Can’t separate being a multi-ethnic church from being compassionate.
• His dream was, God willing, a multi-ethnic church of 1000+ impacting the city.  Someone said, if you see 1000, you’d better get out of the city, because suburban middle class people will not go into the city.  Efrem’s church proves otherwise, that it is possible to be Christ centered, multiethnic, in the heart of the city with all its challenges, and see the Kingdom of God advance.
• Pour some principles and practical theology into core team.
• Kingdom labourers
• Three texts:
  • Acts 2
  • Matt 9
  • 1 Cor 12
• Their core group’s worship = potluck meal, one or two songs, low key, sat on stool with music stand as people sat around tables taking notes, bible studies.
• Pour in the core values
  • Evangelism & Outreach
  • Experience of Worship
• If I say my church is multi-ethnic, it can’t be all black
• Develop a group embodying these values
• How do you create an ethos, values, culture amongst your core team, so they practice amongst each other, what you want them to carry to the surrounding community?
• Recent college grads are looking for a post-black, post-white, post-brown church.
• They’re confused if we’re preaching making disciples of all nations but the church doesn’t live that.
• As we digest one another’s foods, we must be willing to digest one another’s stories.
• You want to weed out the people who are just there for the next cool church
• We weren’t going to try and do all kinds of music to reach all cultures.
• The core group was moving from being multi-ethnic to reconciled when they:
  • Started forming their own small groups
  • Started having dinner together
  • Moved beyond hyper-sensitivity to racial issues
• It’s best when people serve not where they want to serve but where they’re wired to serve
• We are all here to serve.

…what consolation have we in this human society, so replete with mistaken notions and distressing anxieties, except the unfeigned faith and mutual affections of genuine, loyal friends? ~ St. Augustine, City of God, XIX.8

St. Augustine knew that friendship was a gift from God—that true joy in life was not to be found without friends and the gift of their love and company.  In fact, for Augustine, God’s grace of salvation is not something that is had in isolation but only had in the chorus of friendship.

Adam Eliot, the Australian director behind the 2003 Oscar-winning animated short, Harvey Krumpet, has made his full-length debut with Mary & Max, a claymation tale about two archetypal ‘outsiders’ who strike up a rare and deep, although unlikely friendship.

Mary Daisy Dinkle (voiced by Toni Collette) is a lonely, friendless eight year old growing up in suburban Melbourne with an alcoholic mother and a taxidermy-obsessed and neglectful father in the late 1970’s who spends her days eating chocolate and drinking condensed milk.  In her youthful curiosity, she finds a name and an address in a New York phone book.  On the other end of that address we find Max Jerry Horowitz (voiced brilliantly by Philip Seymour Hoffman, doing his best New York Yiddish accent), an obese 44 year old Jewish man with undiagnosed Asperger’s whose only human contact is with his Overeater’s Anonymous group or his blind elderly Chinese neighbour.

Their improbable pen-pal friendship develops over a host of letters sent back and forth (letters which send Max into an anxiety attack each time he gets one).  The story follows their friendship over two decades as it expands and contracts with the joys of life (love, dreams, accomplishments) and with its sometimes dark realities (anxiety, broken relationships, depression, suicide).  As each of them try to struggle to feel their way to some sense of connection—to some sense of normalcy—their friendship grows and in fact, their salvation is found in their bond of mutual affection.  

The film is a visual treat as it beautifully breathes and moves in hues of browns and greys.  The handcrafted claymation, from the suburbs of Melbourne to the streets of New York, softens the depth to which this movie plunges the viewer (though animated, it is not for children).  In any other medium, the film would have failed to hold the viewer.  After watching the movie, if you’re like me, you’ll feel as if you’ve been given a gift, as if you’ve been allowed, for a few hours, to eavesdrop on the beauty of a friendship that knows not the boundaries of conventional relationships.  This is a movie about friendship at its most raw—deep, dark, and dazzling at once and it sticks to your ribs long after it’s over.

After Mary has wronged Max, he recognizes that true friendship includes forgiveness, so he writes to her:

The hurt felt like when I accidentally stapled my lips together. The reason I forgive you is because you are not perfect. You are imperfect, and so am I. All humans are imperfect, even the man outside my apartment who litters. When I was young I wanted to be anybody but myself. Dr. Benard Hazelhof said if I was on a desert island, then I would have to get used to my own company. Just me and the coconuts. He said I would have to accept myself, my warts and all. And that we don’t get to choose our warts, they are a part of us and we have to live with them. We can, however, choose our friends. And I am glad I have chosen you. Dr. Hazelhof also said that everyone’s lives are like a very long sidewalk. Some are well paved. Others, like mine, have cracks, banana skins and cigarette butts. Your sidewalk is like mine, but probably not as many cracks. Hopefully one day our sidewalks will meet and we can share a can of condensed milk. You are my best friend. You are my only friend.

I think I’d be hard pressed to find a better definition of the church than this (and St. Augustine, I think, would agree!): a community of friends whose sidewalks—cracks, banana peels, and cigarette butts—meet and share in the joy of God’s covenanted friendship with us, warts and all.

Well it’s got to be a chocolate Jesus

Make me feel good inside

Got to be a chocolate Jesus

Keep me satisfied…

When the weather gets rough

Its best to wrap your saviour

Up in cellophane

A sweet, user-friendly, emotionally sensitive Jesus, that’s what we want!  I had this song in mind as I watched the recent film, Henry Poole is Here.

It stars Luke Wilson as Henry Poole and a hodge-podge cast including George Lopez as Father Salazar, a Roman Catholic priest and Adrianna Barraza (of Babel fame where she played Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett’s Mexican nanny) as Esperanza, Mr. Poole’s nosy but well intentioned neighbour.

We meet Henry Poole as a miserable and disillusioned man who goes into hiding in the docile middleclass suburbs where he grew up, seeking anonymity and the bottom of many bottles.   He reluctantly buys a blue stucco house across the street from the home in which he was raised (reluctantly because as much as he wants to buy his old home, the family that now lives there won’t sell it to him).  And so, he’s consigned himself to a life of seclusion, resentment, and hostility in a house that he is entirely disconnected from.

His isolation is interrupted by Esperanza, his pious Roman Catholic neighbour, who drops by to find out just who it is who moved into the house next door.  During her initial visit, Esperanza discovers a water stain on Henry’s outside stucco wall in the likeness of the face of Christ.  This discovery quickly, and in some of the most moving scenes of the picture, beautifully and sublimely becomes saturated with claims of miraculous power.  This ironically leads to Henry’s eleventh-hour hideout turning into a community shrine.

Henry’s deep cynicism plays out in a series of efforts to rid the wall of the stain and to rid himself of his new ‘friends’ and their faith in this miracle.  In fact, for most of the film, Henry is at pains to rid himself of this stucco Jesus as this is a Jesus that Henry definitely doesn’t want.  This is not a do-it-yourself Jesus, or a sweet, sensitive, emotionally nurturing Chocolate Jesus but a persistent, relentless, and unyielding Stucco Jesus who completely maddens Henry with his presence.

I won’t give away anymore of the film, but I do want to underscore what this film gets.  It gets that God’s grace is often a messy and unexpected thing that interrupts our plans and transforms us in spite of ourselves, especially in spite of our cynicism.  The whole gospel message of death and resurrection, of repentance and forgiveness, and of transformation and reconciliation is all played out in this film in and through the face of Christ—which is a rarity indeed.

What else to look for: a stunning performance by one of the supporting cast, Rachel Seiferth as the dorky and inquisitive grocery clerk aptly named Patience.

I’m not a big video-gamer.  With that said, I need to make a confession: it’s not because I’m anti-video game but because my parents knew full well that my addictive personality would have attached itself to video games and would never have let go.  So, I was never allowed to own a game system growing up; although my brother and I were allowed to rent them over a weekend once in a while which would turn into sleep-starved days of video game binging that only served to underscore my parents’ point!

I went through university and graduate studies never owning one, but I was really too busy to notice.  Either that, or I was too poor to buy one, I’m not sure which.  Now, I’ve got my own family and life is much too hectic to even find the time to sit down and play video games.  This is all to say that video game culture has never become a part of my life, until now.

My father-in-law recently purchased a PS3 (that’s a “Sony PlayStation 3”, for those of you who are not down with the lingo) to go with his new High Definition TV.  We visited a few weeks ago and our four year old son was quickly introduced to this culture.  Watching him clutch the game controller was like watching a smuggler holding onto his cherished contraband as a smile of wild hilarity mixed with mischievousness gripped his face.   A racing game with intense graphics and pounding music promptly became his favourite.  I should admit, partly because my wife reads this column and partly because I’m honest, that I got hooked too (now, two in the morning isn’t that crazy a time to be sitting alone giddily driving a rally car across the desert is it?).

What really took me by surprise was how proficient my son became at this game.  After only a few tries, he was keeping his vehicle on course, passing other cars and making good time around the track.  Not only that, driving home down the highway he was giving me lessons from the back seat on exactly how to pass other cars at high rates of speed!

Regardless, what I took from this little foray into the alternative reality of “Video Game Land” was how quickly and thoroughly our children are shaped and formed by what we put in front of them.  Not only that, I’m amazed at how skilled and adept, at how well versed a four year old can become in the habits and skills of this culture.

While I’m aware and convinced of the potential dangers of video-game addiction and the abhorrent nature of some of these games that make Quentin Tarantino look like a younger, edgier Walt Disney, I’m not overly interested in weighing in on this.  What I am interested in is the simply fact that these ‘alternative’ realities so deeply and completely capture the imagination of our children and young people (and sometimes even a husband or two!).

Our imaginations, especially those of children, are apprehended and formed by what’s around us.  What the church often forgets and neglects is that it is in the imagination business, as deeply and completely as something like the video game industry is.  We don’t often think of the church in this way, but it’s imperative that we re-capture this sense of ecclesial imagination if we are to be, in any way, a witness to God’s action in our world.

At a very basic level, the church imagines a different world, not because it’s in the business of making stuff up, but because it follows Jesus who, in himself, brings God’s imagination to bear on all things.  When the church gathers as followers of this Jesus, it can’t help but imagine that everything is different because this Jesus showed up on the stage of history and imagined God’s very kingdom into existence.

Much as our imagination is trained and shaped by what we spend time with—be it videogames, movies, television, the internet, or the ever-beloved IPod (a word which, by the way, my spellchecker recognizes!)—the church’s imagination is shaped and trained in its worship and in its life together.  It’s in this life together, in our liturgy, where we learn to inhabit and act out this kingdom among us.  Our communal reading of Scripture, our prayers, our table fellowship, and our peace-sharing are some of the habits that shape us; they are some of the spiritual disciplines that form us and ought to form our children.

But our church has often failed children and young people at the fundamental level of capturing their imaginations and worlds with the amazing and exhilarating adventure of the kingdom of God.  We continually make the same mistake the disciples did—we assume that this kingdom of God stuff is grown-up and important business.

I’m fully conscious that it’s not easy for the church to keep the attention of children and young people these days.  Maybe it’s because we live in a world where there is so much sheer competition vying for the attention of our children that the church is fatally doomed from the start, or maybe, just maybe, it’s because we ourselves aren’t sufficiently hooked.

On Monday nights in Toronto’s Bloor West Village, the Yellow Griffin Pub’s upstairs room hosts “God at the Pub”.  A ministry of Runnymede Community Church for seven years, “God at the Pub” is the result of the church leadership’s fervent prayer and missional impulse to lower the “barriers to entry” posed by their traditional church building.  By bringing the Alpha course, and a homegrown curriculum called “Jesus Who?” to this non-traditional environment, the church and its pastor, Mike Wilkins, hoped to share the gospel with the unchurched in their community.  Has it worked?  Is this a fresh expression of church, of evangelism, or something else?

All the textbook prerequisites for reaching the unchurched seem to be present.  A welcoming, neutral venue, good food and community, and accessible, biblical content that presents the great news of Jesus Christ.  On opening night in September, there were 18 participants, 2 leaders, 3 visiting pastors (guilty as charged) and 1 bartender in attendance.  Drink orders were taken immediately, nametags distributed, and participants struggled in their first small group exercise, deciding among the pub’s vast selection of burgers.  The first night is free, but the $150 course fee, payable if you decide to stay for the ten week session, covers all the food and drink expenses.  Yes, people are paying and committing up front to learn about Jesus, and to enjoy some great food and drink!

After rushing to eat, Mike stood at the front of the room under a small projector screen to introduce the course.  “Jesus Who?” is an exploration of Jesus’ identity, what Mike described to me as a “Pre-Alpha” course, to introduce the “who” of salvation history before the theology of salvation covered in Alpha.  It’s designed to connect with those who are open to Jesus, but have little interest in organized religion.  The course begins with some of the most universally accepted ideas about Jesus, as a teacher, rabbi, guru, friend and revolutionary, before dealing with more challenging aspects, like Jesus as master, Christ, Saviour and Son of God.  The first week’s content was shorter than usual, and meant to get people thinking about how Jesus is portrayed in culture and media, and in their own minds.  Normally there would be a half hour talk, followed by a half hour of small group discussion, but not the first week.

Instead of small group discussion in the first week,  Mike asked each participant to introduce themselves, and tell the group why they’ve come.  Person after person introduced themselves, and nearly every person said they attended Runnymede Community Church, or were visiting from another church.  Many of them were new members, and could be described as “de-churched” people exploring their faith once again.  What was missing, however, was the demographic we could call “unchurched” – those with no past or present involvement in Christian faith and/or the church.

Is “God at the Pub” a fresh expression of church?  That is defined as “a form of church for our changing culture, established primarily for the benefit of people who are not yet members of any church.  It will come into being through principles of listening, service, incarnational mission and making disciples.   It will have the potential to become a mature expression of church shaped by the gospel and the enduring marks of the church and for its cultural context.”

The first part applies – it was established to reach those who are not yet members of any church.  However, those it was intended to reach (the unchurched) are no longer present.  Past sessions have included unchurched people, and hopefully future courses will also, but none were present this time.  Perhaps we can call “God at the Pub” a fresh expression of evangelism, since it explains the faith to new attendees at the church, and then feeds them back to the established congregation, with no intentional plan for a mature expression of church to arise in this context.

“God at the Pub” is a creative, fun way to teach Christian basics.  However, even with the barriers presented by traditional church buildings removed, it appears that there still exist other barriers to entry for the truly unchurched.  It’s possible that the content, explaining the identity of Jesus, is still too advanced for the truly unchurched, and that a more general introduction to the “unknown God” of Acts 17 is in order.  It’s possible that the icon of Christ used as the course’s logo and on posters turns people off, and they ignore the advertising.  Another possibility is that “God at the Pub” has even more barriers to remove to truly reach an unchurched audience.  It still relies on participants intentionally coming to a space set apart (the pub’s upstairs room), to commit to any pay for a complete session, and to join an unfamiliar group of people.  A truly incarnational approach to pub ministry might arise downstairs, in the pub itself, with Christians sharing the content of “Jesus Who?” one on one, where people truly gather.

The formative journey of fresh expressions describes a movement from loving service to community to discipleship to worship.  “God at the Pub” jumps right in with community and discipleship.  Loving service exists, but in the form of basic Christian education or discipleship, which likely meets the needs of those consciously wishing to explore Christianity.  They are tapping into the needs of church members, those on the fringes of church, but not the dechurched (those with a history of Christian faith, but who have drifted away) or even unchurched (those with no such history).  This reinforces the importance of “listening” to and knowing our communities before responding with any form of church, fresh or not, and that this listening must continue throughout the life of the ministry, as the community’s needs change and the church adapts its response.

My congratulations go to Runnymede Community Church, Mike Wilkins and God at the Pub.  This is a creative and fun extension of the church’s ministry, and has reached countless unchurched and dechurched people for Christ in the last seven years, and continues to engage and disciple newchurch members.  As with every church, their challenge is to keep the gospel and the principles of incarnational ministry before them, and to constantly proclaim the gospel afresh in a rapidly changing world.  “God at the Pub” is lightweight and nimble enough that I won’t be at all surprised to hear how God uses and adapts it transform lives for many years to come.

Link: This article from the local community paper from the same evening.

Let’s start with the first single “Get On Your Boots” (GOYB), released a month before the album No Line On The Horizon (NLOTH). While panned by some critics, GOYB served the role that U2 seems to look for in a first single—revealing the band’s new musical and thematic direction (and getting folks excited that “U2 is back!”). GOYB offers a different sound from previous albums, but the lyrics also deserve some attention. Bono singing of “love and community” how “the future needs a big kiss”, and not wanting “to talk about wars between nations” makes one thing clear—on this album U2 won’t be dealing with the familiar issue of social injustice (in concert is another story though). GOYB’s repeating phrase “let me in the sound” is also intriguing. Is it frivolous or does it have some meaning? We’ll return to that point shortly. What is clear is that something new is afoot for U2 on this album.

No Line on the Horizon, the album, begins in an unusual spot for U2. While the band’s past few albums start in a broken world but lead the listener to spiritual safety (see album-closing songs like “Grace” and “Yahweh”), NLOTH turns this approach upside down. The title track bursts open the album with a mix of heavy guitar, drums and Dr. Who-like sonic effects that conjure a sense of racing over a body of water—fitting, given the album’s cover art of merging sea and sky. Bono’s wavering vocals express how “infinity is a great place to start” and “time is irrelevant, not linear.” Bono has described “No Line on the Horizon” as that place where the earth meets the sky, and possibilities seem infinite. U2 drew near to this space in songs like “Gloria” (from the album October) and “Where the Streets Have No Name” (from The Joshua Tree), but here they’ve gone deeper, crossed a line (no pun intended) and reached an altogether different place.

Hints of that somewhere different can be found in Bono’s recent comparison of NLOTH to The Beatles’ White Album. With closer inspection, the comparison is fitting. While The Beatles went to India on pilgrimage to meet the Maharishi and write music for the White Album, U2 went to Fez, Morocco, to attend the World Festival of Sacred Music and work on NLOTH.  While there, members of U2 seem to have taken inspiration from the faith expression of Sufism, a sect of Islam found in North Africa, whose members seek ecstatic communion with God through physical, emotional, and vocal expression—a form of faith that three members of U2 are familiar with from their early days as members of a charismatic Christian group named “Shalom.” While The Beatles’ White Album was a double album, and “No Line on the Horizon” a single CD, U2 have recently mentioned a “companion disc.” Scheduled for release in late 2009 or early 2010, the new disc is to be named “Songs of Ascent” and is described by Bono as a “ghost album of hymns and Sufi singing . . . a kind of heartbreaker, a meditative, reflexive piece of work”.

One need not wait for the next album to ascend though. The heavenly direction of NLOTH continues with “Magnificent,” a song carried by a powerful drum rhythm that will no doubt shake stadium audiences and rally them to singing. Lyrics about making “a joyful noise,” being “justified until we die,” and “you and I will magnify, oh, the magnificent,” take the album deeper into the unusual territory of unbridled expression of faith and hope, unhindered by the earthly challenges previously encountered in U2′s music. What U2 has been reaching for throughout their career seems finally within reach here. Bono told Rolling Stone magazine that “The Magnificent” was inspired by “The Magnificat,” the gospel passage where Mary expresses joy at being chosen to be the mother of Jesus. By choosing the term “The Magnificent,” one of Islam’s 99 names of God, and shooting a creatively spiritual music video for the song in Fez, Morocco, U2 also extend an olive branch and find common ground with Muslims.

“Moment of Surrender” is a slow gospel tune that stands out with its moving vocals and evocative imagery. The line about “love believing in me” may ring a bit over the top for some, particularly Christians familiar with such language, but the lines, “I did not notice the passers-by, and they did not notice me,” and “a vision over visibility,” describe a scene of spiritual conversion or renewal at its most tender and intimate.

Opening with an exquisite “sunshine” harmony, “Unknown Caller” picks up the pace while carrying on the theme of renewal found in “Moment of Surrender.”  U2 guitarist The Edge described the song’s narrator as being “in an altered state, and his phone starts talking to him.” The lyrics “cease to speak, that I may speak” echo Psalm 46:10—“Be still and know that I am God.” While the language of entering passwords and rebooting yourself initially sound awkward, the power of `this song grows and will no doubt stir stadiums to sing along. Observant fans will note how “Unknown Caller” uses a reference to 3:33 on a clock, which U2 also used as an airport gate (J33-3) on the cover art of All That You Can’t Leave Behind. During press for that album, Bono told Rolling Stone that it refers to Jeremiah 33:3 (“Call to me and I will answer you”) and described it as “God’s phone number.

Bono speeds up his phrasing and applies his falsetto skills in “I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight.” While the lyrics in “Crazy” seem random at times, lines such as, “Is it true that perfect love drives out all fear” and “a change of heart comes slowly,” are intriguing, if not familiar. When added to others such as “it’s not a hill it’s a mountain” and “we’re going to make it, all the way to the light,” one can hear echoes of Martin Luther King’s famous “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech. It is tempting to wonder if Obama’s historic election inspired Bono to write this song, one of the album’s stronger tracks.

While the US reference may be subtle, there are Canadian connections to NLOTH worth mentioning. First, there is Daniel Lanois, the musician and producer who, along with English artist and producer Brian Eno, worked on this and many other U2 albums. Then there is Lori Anna Reid, a talented Canadian singer who receives a mention in the CD liner notes. Daniel Lanois explained to the National Post (March 11^th 2009) how U2 were looking for hymns to draw inspiration from while they attempted to create “future spirituals.” One of the ones Lori Anna suggested was “O Come, O Come Emanuel,” which U2 ended up working with when writing “White As Snow”. Finally, there is a connection to Canadian folk singer Bruce Cockburn. The line “shouting to the darkness, squeeze out sparks of light” from “I’ll Go Crazy” is a paraphrase of Cockburn’s lyrics on “Lovers in A Dangerous Time.” U2 referenced those lyrics more directly twenty years ago in the song “God Part II” from the album Rattle & Hum (“I heard a singer on the radio…say he’s gonna kick the darkness till it bleeds daylight”). “Cedars of Lebanon” also has a very Cockburn-style travel monologue that his fans will recognize and appreciate.

Let’s return now to that phrase “let me in the sound”. Bono sings it repeatedly in “Get On Your Boots”, and it echoes quietly at the start of “Fez Being Born”. It appears a third time on “Breathe” near the end of the album. Anything repeated on a U2 album is a concept with real currency. So what is this about? The answer may again lie in U2′s “pilgrimage” to Morocco. This repeating concept of entering the sound echoes the Sufi approach to finding union with God through music and dance. To this end we hear Bono calling out “meet me in the sound” in “Get On Your Boots”. Later in the song “Breathe,” Bono sings of being “people born of sound” and finding “grace inside a sound”. Who is being met here? U2 often leave much open to interpretation in their music, but the source of grace in this context rings most true when understood as God.

If the trajectory of recent U2 albums was an arc of challenge and adversity ending in hope, that journey is reversed on “No Line”. In fact Bono has said that you could call this album, “The Pilgrim and His Lack of Progress.” It bears true, for while U2 start out elevated, magnifying “The Magnificent,” they descend into the earth’s atmosphere from that place in the heavens. Along the way they teach over-sensitive Christians a thing or two on “Stand Up Comedy” (“Stop helping God across the road like a little old lady”) while rallying them to live their faith in a “dizzy world.” Midway through the album songs deal with rebirth, and by the end, it lands in the middle of life’s challenges with “Cedars of Lebanon”, where a war journalist struggles with a “shitty world” that “sometimes produces a rose.”

It is fair to say that U2 have been seeking “grace inside a sound” their entire career. Bruce Springsteen may have described U2 best when inducting them into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, calling them “a band that wanted to lay claim to not only this world, but had their eyes on the next one as well.” U2 prove Springsteen true on No Line on the Horizon. Grabbing hold of the sky right from the start, U2 refuse to let go, pulling the power of heaven down into the heart of earth’s challenges. Bridging divisions and erasing boundaries, whether between the stage and audience, between east and west, or between heaven and earth, is what U2 has been all about for some 30 years now. With this new tour, concertgoers have the chance to join them in that journey, and find grace inside a sound. Many will lose themselves for the evening in U2’s fantastic light and sound show. Some will be found in the sound as well.

Henry is also author of Faith, hope and U2: the language of love in the music of U2 a booklet in the Institute of Evangelism’s Dare series.

Donovan has come to prominence recently in North America through a discussion of his work in Brian McLaren’s Generous Orthodoxy (Zondervan 2004), and in Britain by being highlighted in the ground-breaking Church of England report, Mission-Shaped Church (Church House Publishing 2004).

What did Donovan do that has captured so many people’s imagination? When he got to Tanzania, missionaries had been engaged for decades in building hospitals and schools to serve the Maasai, but there were few Christian communities. He asked his bishop for permission to go and simply ask people in the Maasai villages whether they would be interested to talk with him about God. Their answer was two-fold: Who can refuse to talk about God? and Why did it take you so long to ask?

So, for a year he visited the villages each week, and they talked about God. In the process, Donovan realised how woefully inadequate his theological formation had been to deal with a front-line evangelistic situation like this. He also came to the conviction that he could not impose on the Maasai a western-style Catholic church, but that they would have to learn to “do church” in a way that authentically expressed their own culture.

You can see the attractiveness in such an approach for Western Christians trying to figure out authentic witness in a post-Christian society. Donovan addresses two of our main questions: How do we explain the Gospel to people who have no Christian background? and, What does church need to look like to serve those people in their culture? (For those of us in theological education, he raises a third question: How should we train people for pioneering ministries in this culture?)

In the past three years, I have been on something of a personal quest to find out what happened to the Maasai churches Donovan founded. (He himself died in 2000.) In the course of that quest, I have visited a priest in Tanzania who was trained by Donovan in the 1970’s and is still working among the Maasai; been with him to a mass in a remote Maasai church; visited other missionaries who worked with Donovan; and been entrusted by Donovan’s sister with the task of editing his letters home from Tanzania (due to be published by Wipf and Stock in the next year; Brian McLaren has agreed to write the foreword).

So what did happen to those churches? Briefly: things did not turn out as Donovan expected. There were three problems. For one thing, it turned out that the Maasai themselves (like many Africans) were very conservative and did not want to do church any other way than the way the missionaries themselves already did it.

As a result, the mass I went to was very traditional in form, except that it was all in Maasai. But there were touches of local culture: the priest wore black (the sacred colour of God), and had a stole embroidered with cowrie shells. He held grass, symbol of reconciliation, in his hand through the service, and blessed the people by sprinkling them with milk during the prayers. And the singing was haunting, and unlike anything else I have ever heard.

Secondly, very few Maasai have gone through the rigorous and extensive training required for Catholic ordination, and there is little provision for lay ministry except for the fine work of locally-trained itinerant Maasai catechists. This means that, once this generation of missionaries dies out (and for the most part they are now in their seventies), many of the scattered Maasai churches will likely die too.

The third problem was that the Catholic hierarchy in Tanzania had no interest in inculturation. Perhaps this is because they are still relatively new Catholics, and feel the need to prove themselves as “real” Catholics.

Thus an irony exists: that the white American missionaries have been pushing for things to be done in a Maasai way, while the Tanzanians themselves (both at the grassroots and among the hierarchy) prefer to do things in a European way.

Was Donovan’s work then simply an inspiring but naïve experiment, doomed to failure? “Failure” is a tricky word to use in the Christian life or in ministry. Just because things do not work out the way we expect does not mean that, in the economy of God, they have failed.

In the case of Donovan, the way his ideas are being picked up in North America and Britain are encouraging. In particular, the three obstacles he encountered are likely to be less in this part of the world.

• In the Fresh Expressions movement in Britain, there are certainly many non-traditional ways of being church which are attracting people with no Christian background. New people are not complaining that “this is not the way church ought to be.”
• In terms of theological education, Wycliffe College is following the lead of seminaries in Britain and moving towards training ordinands for specifically pioneering types of ordained ministry.
• And, as for bishops, my experience is that there is great openness among Canadian bishops to new forms of church and ministry. I spoke to one bishop after the Vital Church Planting conference in Februarys and asked him what he had learned. “That bishops have to be permission-givers,” he replied.

Not that Vincent Donovan is the be-all and end-all of missional ministry. He in turn was greatly affected by the writings of Anglican missiologist Roland Allen, such as Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours?(1912; Eerdmans 1990) And both of them found the example of Paul in the Book of Acts the most helpful model for what they were trying to do.

But, of course, Donovan and Allen—and Paul himself—were all inspired by the ultimate example of missional ministry: the Word of God who became flesh—and moved into the neighbourhood.

Great work!

We all know what Jesus did to the herd of swine in the gospel story when he allowed the demons who were harassing the demoniac to enter into the herd grazing nearby. Not a PETA poster moment, for sure.

Three weeks ago in Egypt, the government there began a pig slaughter on a slightly bigger scale: some 350,000 pigs were led to the slaughter for fear of the dreaded “swine” flu. Countries all over the world began to ban pork imports from North America and we saw news clips of well-intentioned people (usually in the grocery store, mid-shopping) telling the reporters that they were eliminating pork from their diet, “just in case.”

What these stories intimately share is the fact of possession, of being possessed. In the gospel story, the demonic possession of the pigs leads to their plunging death off the cliff. In our more recent dealings with swine (which extends far beyond Egypt’s rash reaction), it is us, as a culture that is possessed. We are a society that is possessed by fear and being possessed by fear always ends in death.

The days following the swine flu outbreak from Mexico were a newsmaker’s dream and an opportunity for our culture of fear to kick it into high gear. A new, hybrid flu that was unheard of with a catchy name, and an increasing death count—what more could the networks ask for? We were then all witnesses and participants in a quickly escalating panic.

Why did alarm spread so fast even though this flu turned out to be nowhere near as fatal as a regular seasonal flu? Why were we so quick to panic? I think Frank Furedi, in his book Culture of Fear, hints at why when he reminds us that “the risks that kill you are not necessarily the ones that provoke and frighten you.” What does he mean by that? He simply means that while we are afraid of what statistically usually kills us (cancer, heart disease, and stroke) we are, as a culture, more pointedly afraid of terrorism, school shootings, pedophiles, serial killers and these new killer viruses (which, statistically, come nowhere near to the risk of the big three above).

So, again, why did panic spread so quickly over a flu that we now know was overblown? I think the answer is that, as a culture, we’ve transformed fear, like everything else, into a commodity that is bought and sold and we’ve become proficient peddlers and consumers of fear. In other words, just like sex, fear sells. And just like selling sex, marketers, advertisers and producers hold a vested interest in shaping our collective imagination and influencing our desires to line up with what they’re selling—and we’re buying.

In his book, Following Jesus in a Culture of Fear, Scott-Bader Saye makes the observation that in Scripture when we meet an angel from God, they begin their message with “fear not”. Why is that? He says he always thought that it was because angels must be such imposing and frightening figures. But there’s more to it than that. He thinks the reason they tell us to not be afraid is that the quieting of fear is required in order to hear and do what God asks of us. And I think he’s right.

Thomas Aquinas taught, eons ago, that disordered fear is a result of disordered desire. Simply put, we fear in deformed and distorted ways because our imaginations, and consequently, our desires are screwed up—which is another way of saying that we are a sinful people who can’t imagine a world of quieted fear and so we act, think, and speak accordingly.

You see, this culture of fear is all about shaping our imaginations through the various rituals that make up this culture from the ways and forms our news is disseminated to the methods with which producers market their products as the ‘safe’ alternative to their competitor’s. This is an embodied cultural reality that is practiced over and over again in order to intentionally form us to be a certain kind of people—in this case, scared.

As followers of Jesus in this culture, we are called to be a living alternative to it. Jesus, like God’s angels, told his disciples over and over again, “fear not”. As the church, our liturgy is all about shaping our imaginations through the rituals that make up this alternative culture of the church. Nowhere is this more clearly, visibly and physically true than in our practice of the Eucharist.

The Eucharist is an embodied reality that is practiced over and over again in order to intentionally form us to be a certain kind of people. It is the act of the church whereby it remembers who she is as follower of a crucified and risen Lord. So, it is in the ritual practice of the Eucharist that we learn that death is not the worst thing that can happen to us—which puts us deeply at odds with this predominant culture of fear which feeds off this fear of death.

As Bader-Saye notes, this isn’t about telling ourselves not to fear. Our fears are primal, overwhelming and overpowering. We can’t just tell ourselves to feel less fear—that would be disingenuous. What we need is for our desires and our fears to be re-ordered, or rather, rightly ordered. In other words, our overwhelming fears need themselves to be overwhelmed by something bigger and better. That is what we recognize and practice in the Eucharist. In consuming Jesus we are consumed into the body of Christ; we are consumed into a wonderful adventure where our fears are rightly ordered because we know this story to be ultimately hopeful and not tragic.

So what, in the end, of the pigs? It is our task, as those people whose imaginations are shaped and formed in the Eucharist to embody that imagination in our world through practices that upend the culture of fear. Being a people that don’t buy into the consumerism of fear is a good first step and is part and parcel of our commission as followers of Jesus in our world. We ought to be God’s disciplined people in a scared world—a people who practice hospitality to strangers, who love enemies, who bring gentleness to violence, a people who, in our day to day lives, are dispossessed of the demons of fear and filled with God’s Spirit of peace.

IKEA North York presents…SENSTATIONAL SUNDAY MORNINGS!!

Sunday Mornings are a great time for family, big breakfasts and coming to IKEA! Starting on February 22nd and running on

March 1st, 8th and 15th. IKEA North York will have another great reason to come to IKEA. We will have 2 crazy offers on great products.

From 10am-12pm the Sales team will reduce 2 good products at 50% off!

There will also be a great reason to bring the kids…

From 10:30am to 11:30am kids can enjoy a fun activity in the restaurant!

This advertisement was flanked by a picture of a happy nuclear family full of joy, optimism and looking so über-cool with their new IKEA gear. So there it was: “Sunday mornings at IKEA”-what every family is looking for! Drop the kids off at the activity center, eat good, inexpensive food and funkify (please excuse my creative vocabulary) your life at unbeatable prices all in one Sunday morning!

Now the reason that IKEA (bless its soul for where else could I find a lint roller for that price?) represents a challenge to the church is because it’s out-narrating the church; it’s beating the church at its own game of narrating and embodying a story about what life is all about. It’s not IKEA alone that’s successful here but it’s a good representative of the whole culture of commerce and consumption and its ideals. In fact, the whole industry of advertising is based on successfully narrating a way of life-a way of life that you can’t help but want to be a part of.

Do you know why IKEA is so successful? I mean, we’re in the middle of a recession and the place was packed with people with their carts full of stuff (ours included). The reason IKEA is thriving is because it knows its story, it knows how to tell and embody its story of consumption at fair prices. It knows its end goal, its reason for being. In other words, IKEA knows how to do its IKEA thing, and it performs it well. In fact, walking the halls, you can read the narrative about how IKEA came into being. They sure know how to tell a story.

“Church” names a story, it names a people, it names a certain performance; simply put, it names a way of life. Being a part of the church means being a part of this performance, embodying this way of life. The church tells and lives out a story about what life is all about. In doing so, it narrates an alternative story to the one our culture, so effectively told by IKEA, does. What does this mean? It means, simply, that the church tells a different story than our world does. This ought not to come as a surprise, since the Jesus we follow embodied an immeasurably different story than did the world of his day.

But it’s when the church forgets who she is-when she forgets what her story is-that the church misses the whole point of this following Jesus thing. It’s then that the church starts to listen and buy into the stories that are told around it; stories like the myth of redemptive violence, or the story of unlimited consumption of resources, or the story of homeland safety and security at all costs, or the story of self-concern over the concern of those on the edge of society. Maybe it’s as simple as the story of “the best bang for your buck”-a story told without narrating anything about the condition of the production or the producers of our goods. The stories told around us are legion and often very attractive. When the church forgets to do its church thing, it loses its way.

Remember what happened to Israel when Israel forgot to do its Israel thing? Babylonian captivity, period. So, when we bemoan the state of the church, or when we contemplate the nature of cultural shifts and what role the church should play in them, we need, above all things, to remember that the malaise the church finds itself in (call it whatever you like, “ecclesial recession” is one of my favourites!) is first of all a loss of identity, which is a long way of saying that we find ourselves in our own Babylonian captivity.

Answers? Well, I get asked a lot, probably because I’m a young priest, about how the church is going to move forward into the future. And right now many Dioceses in our church are working with strategic plans as they look to that future. Let me add something that’s seemingly obvious but that gets lost ‘on the ground’ as it were: no amount of strategic planning, no number of core values, no measure of problem solving will secure the future of the Anglican Church in Canada if we are not willing to radically re-think what it means to be a church in a culture that has by-and-large forgotten about the church! Before we crunch the numbers, before we throw solutions at our problems, what this Babylonian captivity ought to engender and create is a penitential community-a community that can acknowledge our collective failure to embody the gospel call to live out the Kingdom of God in our world.

Answers?  I only have one.  Only God rescues. Only God takes unfaithful Israel back. Only God can rescue his people. I’m writing this on the tail end of Lent as we approach the celebration of resurrection. At Easter we tell and embody the story in our services, in our pageants, and in our choir choruses, of a God who rescues, and in the resurrection rescue of love that raised our Lord from the grave, rescues us as well. That’s good news; and, it’s incomparably better news-and a much better story!-than Sensational Sunday Mornings at IKEA.

With a powerful endorsement from the Archbishop of Canterbury, thousands of people across the U.K. have taken part in Vision Days, which are designed to create a forum for Christian communities to discover more about fresh expressions of church in their communities.  Having now caught the attention of church leaders in Canada, receiving nods from The Primate and our Bishop George Bruce, the movement is beginning to generate interest at the grassroots level right here at home.

The Ven. William A. Clarke, who attended the Vision Day, said he was impressed to see such a strong turnout from among the older, more established crowd of committed church people in the Diocese, “maybe they are here because of a ‘we’ve got to do something’ attitude, or perhaps they are seeing through the eyes of their children and grandchildren that the traditional model of church isn’t working for them, and asking themselves if there is a way to find something new that will get their attention and get them involved again.”

At its core, fresh expressions of church are about churches listening to who people are, and how they are, and creating forms of church that connect with their needs.  Officially, a fresh expression of church is “A fresh expression of church is a form of church for our changing culture, established primarily for the benefit of people who are not yet members of any church.  It will come into being through principles of listening, service, incarnational mission and making disciples.   It will have the potential to become a mature expression of church shaped by the gospel and the enduring marks of the church and for its cultural context.”  The Vision Day was an opportunity to learn how fresh expressions can empower churches to relate to contemporary culture, instead of railing against it.  Accidentally dressed alike in t-shirts and cargo pants, which they now jokingly call a fresh expressions “uniform”, the message from workshop leaders, The Rev. Ryan Sim (Parish of Kitley) and the Rev. Matthew Kydd (Parish of Oxford) was that we need to accept that the social landscape of Sunday has changed and that we can’t go back.  Ryan Sim says that fresh expressions of church “answer God’s call to ‘go and make disciples’ and respond to the deep spiritual hunger that exists in our society today.”

One of the key features of a Vision Day is a character discovery exercise.  Working in an interactive group setting, the exercise first challenges participants to identify a person or demographic whom they are not currently serving in their church community and then to imagine an identity for this individual – ranging from the simplest details like a name and what they might watch on TV, to more intimate details like where they might go on vacation and what they might do while away.  The Rev. Blair Peever, Incumbent of Christ Church Cataraqui and member of the Diocesan Evangelism Committee said the exercise is designed to get people out of their comfort zones and to challenge them on “how much they know and how much they don’t know about the groups and demographics that they are not currently serving through their churches.”

In the second part, the groups were asked to tap into their imaginative centres and create a church for their characters.  During the sharing portion of this exercise, participants were introduced to “Justin”, the skateboarder, who – sometime after his return from vacation in California – would attend a rather untraditional service right in the bowl of his local skateboard park.  They might gravitate towards use of the Old and New Testaments in full-colour comic-strip form from the Comic-Strip Bible series.  Another group developed a church for a homeless man named “George” who, together with his friends, would gather for communal acts of worship at mealtime in a soup kitchen.  Their worship music of choice would be the “oldies” with a blues vibe played on harmonica.  Because some of them might have literacy challenges, they might not use a written translation of the bible, but rather opt for the Gospel in a story-telling format.  These are just highlights of the kinds of fresh expressions that were imagined as people freed themselves to envision their church reaching out to a changing society.  The team’s hope is that parishes will conduct the same exercise, not with imaginary characters, but by getting to know those who actually live in their communities.

I was beginning to wonder if this level of “coolness” and Anglicanism could peacefully coexist in the real world, at which point Ryan Sim and Matt Kydd led us through a set of core values for fresh expressions that attempts to bring the “cool factor” in line with our theology and our traditions.  In a conversation during the lunch break with The Rev. Nick Trussell, another member of the Diocesan Evangelism Committee, shared that “when we look at the core values of a fresh expression of church we will recognize them as the values of the churches we’re already in.  Being mission-shaped, transformative, sacrificial – these are all marks of the church that we know and we can’t let those things go simply for the sake of fresh expressions.  Fresh expressions need to be more than something that is just engaging or ‘cool’, they need to truly present the Gospel of Christ.  We can get a community together around skateboarding, but we need to do it in a way that is done for the Glory of God”.

For more information about fresh expressions or to find out about an upcoming Vision Day please visit:  http://www.freshexpressions.ca/