See you later alligator

Saturday night was Sombrero and Salsa night as we sent Caroline off to work with Food for the Hungry in Bolivia. Caroline is going to be the first overseas member of our community as she heads off to work with streetkids in Cochabamba you can find out more about what she's doing here. We're going to miss the passion and challenge that she brings to us, but hopefully through skype and flickr will keep up with what she's doing. Yesterday we said goodbye and I spoke about the challenges we face as we become a family community and it certainly felt like we were saying goodbye to a family member rather than a church member. I also highlighted that we're called to be a very different sort of church from the one we've come from, and was really encouraged by the response as we talked about creatively helping one couple from the community with their housing.

I saw this today

Simple/organic church people have got a cold shoulder from “church” leaders for a decade. Singularity frowns on modularity. They are considered a threat to the system. They are called “house church” but that doesn't really fit what they [we] are doing. Its not house church and its not “small groups” and its not rebellion against church. Its attempting to BE the church as God intended it. Even in the emerging church, finding people who understand that is not an easy task. Nor is it an attractive proposition - if you want to be a well known conference speaker or a local pastor with CLOUT in your denomination which measures success in the cold-war terms of size, weight and longevity (Friedman), then a shift to the emerging-missional-organic church is a VERY BAD CAREER MOVE. It may be great for the Kingdom, but it will NOT pimp your image or make you money or get you on the speaker list at conferences - Most conferences only invite speakers who RE-INFORCE their existing model which in most Christian circles, is the centralized ecclesial model with a tithing system, a set of buildings that need butt-filling and an army of M.Div Seminary graduates who need a position as pastor in the kind of church that theological education has trained them for. Not saying that system is bad, but I am saying it is DIFFERENT and difference is a threat that the promoters of that system do not want to deal with.

on tallskinnykiwi today and realised that my mother's hope of me becoming Archbishop has obviously been decimated by the decision to help set up ENC!

Still I quickly cheered myself up with this mindless but very amusing star wars spoof.

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