In the last year, our church community has started a venture called The Money Clinic. It isn’t a debt counselling service, but rather a place for budget coaching and money education. An analogy that helped me when we setting this up was the difference between surgery or A&E (ER to my US friends) in a hospital or a GP practice. You have surgery or get rushed to A&E if you are in desperate need of immediate help, but people go to a GP when they are ill, need some help, but not in a life threatening situation.
So with money, people who are on the verge of bankruptcy, who are so heavily in debt need drastic action, and a debt advisor is the place to go. However, there are huge numbers of people, who aren’t in that desperate situation, but are in debt, who do need help in controlling their finances. That is where "The Money Clinic" comes in, through either meeting with the person individually, or providing some group training: we help people get in control of their finances.
Neil Duguid, who set up the Money Clinic, sent me this brilliant short video about Maria’s story, of how she got control of her finances using an envelope cash system, that will become clear as you watch the video …
It is 10 minutes long; I found it very moving, and really worth watching. This is how I would love to be helping people, with good money management principles, regardless of their connection with church or otherwise. I think it is the kind of thing that Jesus would be doing - freeing people from the tyranny of serving money.
Tags: Money
This has landed in my inbox from Brian Donaldson, and Neil has also posted it. But for completeness, here it is on this blog.
I found myself cringing, as I recognised how excruciating is can be for people who are not used to church culture, arriving in something that anyone who has been around church for more than a few years gets immune to!
I had an interesting experience, going to a 4 day coaching events for the business world, which is not a world I have any real experience of at all. There were about 15 of us in total, including some very high flyers from some very well known and large businesses and multinationals. As they described their work and world, they might as well have been talking Greek as far as I was concerned - I just didn’t understand the language. When they explained what they meant, I actually understood what they were talking about, but is very easy to feel that you are not part of the "in crowd" or to feel a bit stupid because you don’t understand what everyone else seems to. I wonder how often people feel like that when the come to church (any church, whatever your tradition!) for the first time?
I was invited to another such course, in a couple of weeks time. I felt that familiar tingle of anxiety, as I thought about being in such an unfamiliar environment. Maybe that is a regular feeling for people as they wake up on a Sunday morning and contemplate entering our unfamiliar environment of church?
What do you think? What was your reaction on watching this video?
Another post on Welcoming, as we are exploring what happens when someone comes to our church (community) for the first time. It is a daunting prospect, new people, new language … but how can we help people get drawn into our community. We’re following the story of a (fictional) person turning up at our Sunday gathering for the first time. Comments are welcome and appreciated, from members of our church or otherwise.
Well, your friend did eventually turn up, and you realised that, like any party, “start at ten” means come some time after ten. But, by the end of the event you had met some new people that seemed really interested in you … somehow they managed to make you feel that they were enjoying meeting you. You’d got two invitations back to other things that were happening, and while you weren’t sure quite what would happen there, you knew that you would not feel out of it … at least, not if these new friends had anything to do with it.
That was the first of a whole new journey which redefined what you thought about church, and … a bit later … Jesus. In fact, it was the start of a journey into finding your place in the church community. A month later, you feel that some of those initial friends were rather like doors … opening into a whole new community. One person seemed to lead to another, and now you are beginning to belong in this new circle of friends.
Why did it work? The Welcome Table at the back didn’t appear in this story, and neither did rotas or smiley badges. No new visitor form, to be followed up by a pastoral team. Just people, after a shakey start in this case, kicking in and drawing the new visitor in and befriending them.
What we are looking at is how to make the organic approach work better, and also to put a parallel system in place underneath this to try to ensure that new members are drawn in. Do you have any ideas about how this would work?
What about having a picture gallery of all of us, on a couple of the MDF boards? Perhaps also doing this for us grouped into cells? Or getting more pics into the online directory … or are we pressuring people too much? What about more weekends and social functions? Book a hostel and go to Loch Ossian, or Comrie, or New Lanark for the weekend? Or just leave it as it is?
Post written by Neil Duguid as part of this series. Other posts: Part 1, 2, & 3.
I am winding up for some down (holiday) time, so a distinct lack of blogging. But here is the next post of welcoming. We are thinking about how we can welcome new people into our community: this time looking at the first time you come to our church building. Comments welcome, even appreciated! Once again this post has been written by Neil Duguid.
OK. You’ve never been before, but your friend persuaded you … great music, doughnuts … and now you find yourself walking up the steps. Your friend is somewhere inside, and your only thought is to find that welcome face.
The steward gives you a sheet of paper (you wonder what that is, but the print is a bit small and grey) but didn’t actually break off from talking to someone else to make you welcome. Where do I go now? It’s like visiting an unfamiliar multiplex … which door do I go through to find my friend? But no one notices your uncertainty.
You wander through the door which most other people are using (always a good sign), and are in the main auditorium. But you can’t see your friend … can’t see the doughnuts … the band is still soundchecking … and after a few minutes you begin to wonder if the rest of the audience, who are mostly standing around and chatting, can’t see you either. Have you worn your invisibility cloak? You give your friend two minutes to find you, otherwise you’ll be offski.
Practical hint – if you are bringing someone new, arrange to meet them at a rendezvous point on their route and come in with them, it’s like being able to use that VIP channel at airport security. The one person that they already know is their passport to a whole new group of friends.
But the challenge is … why didn’t we notice that new person who had just arrived for the first time. And, equally, do we notice the established member who looked a bit out of it.
The way Rick Warren puts the challenge is - how can I start treating other people at church like my own family?
How can we help people make newcomers feel at home? Literally! Perhaps a simple listening skills course would help, aimed at working through the "Hi, I’m Tom" scenario, helping people to offer friendship and to open doors. How many of us have "the ability to build relationships"? What does it depend on?
Here’s Donald Miller from Blue like Jazz (Chapter 18):
Here is something very simple about relationships … : Nobody will listen to you unless they sense that you like them.
If a person senses that you do not like them, that you do not approve of their existence, then your religion and your political ideas will all seem wrong to them. If they sense that you like them, then they are open to what you have to say …
When I am talking to somebody there are always two conversations going on. The first is on the surface; it is about politics or music or whatever our mouths are saying. The other is beneath the surface, on the level of the heart, and my heart is either communicating that I like the person I am talking to or I don’t. God wants both conversations to be true. That is, we are supposed to speak truth in love … if you talk to somebody with your mouth, and your heart does not love them, you are like a person standing there smashing two cymbals together. You are only annoying everybody around you …
Now … when I go to meet somebody, I pray that God will help me feel His love for them. I ask God to make it so both conversations, the one from the mouth and the one from the heart, are true.
This was an aside and not the main point of the post that was written, but it highlights the desperate need to move away from what Colin Symes calls "decisionism"…
I became a follower of Jesus. I was always a Christian, by which I mean that I always trusted in Christ to avoid hell. But, in the years since I left politics, I have increasingly felt called to follow - to imitate, to learn from the teachings of, and to be shaped by the model of - Jesus. These means that I am seeking, each day, to be converted and to become more and more like Christ.
Reading this comes on the back of a conversation a few weeks ago about process or journey in faith. There was a general agreement that we have moved away from a decision (crisis) to journey (process). I actually think there is a place for crisis, but in the context of process. So our faith journey is punctuated by moment of crisis: are we going to follow and trust Jesus in this situation? My problem is when the only crisis is the moment of "conversion". Throughout our life, we will face many moments of crisis: perhaps at times of illness or bereavement or failure in some way. These are also the moments to trust and follow…
This is part 2 of a series on welcoming people into our church community. We are exploring what is working well, and what we can do to improve what we are doing. If you are part of our community, we would love your comments. If you aren’t part of our church, any comments that can help us would be appreciated too! These posts have been written collaboratively by Brian Donaldson, Neil Duguid and the team…
Jon Birch has a gift for seeing the church as others see us. His cartoons at asbojesus are witty, and probably sometimes upsetting to many in different parts of the church. But have you walked around Edinburgh looking at church noticeboards and wondering whether to go there on a Sunday? Most of them do not impress! The doors are shut, and when they are open on a Sunday, the lobby area is designed like a public toilet … so that you can’t see in from outside.
How do we present ourselves to others? Our usual answer is to say that we are the church, and we present it to out friends and community. So then we can make excuses about the other things, that they really don’t matter so much. Like:
- Our advertising … I was looking for cinema times and saw the Google Ad for one of our other city churches. Full marks to them.
- Our website … is it clear, informative and appealing?
- The outside of the building. What will go through the mind of the passenger on the bus stuck in the traffic outside? OK, we don’t have those inane Wayside Pulpit messages. Neither, although we are big on the bible, do we have a big bible text, probably looking rather condemning when taken out of context. But what do we have? Not a lot.
In other words, the whole issue of external communications fits here. Just because what is inside is what matters, do we ignore the outer face?
What would you like to see us do? And can you help us do it?
It has been a busy week or so. So no blogging. One of the reasons for being busy last week was a "vision day" we had at church on Sunday. I will blog about that in a day or two (hopefully!).
I intend to continue with my series on Lakeland and Toronto. But just for now I link to an interesting post by Peter Kirk, at Gentle Wisdom, with Rory & Wendy’s (from God TV) response to Lakeland. Here is a little of what they said:
we believe that the Lord instructed us to broadcast the Outpouring services at Lakeland with Todd Bentley.
It was not a mistake.
It was not by mistake.
We believe it was a clear instruction from the Lord.
I can’t comment on whether the Lord told them or not - maybe he did. But if He did, was it also his will to hype it so much? Would it also not be His will for them to learn from the episode and perhaps do things differently next time? But unfortunately no reflection, in their statement, about what they have learnt from the episode. Only that Todd was not fully surrendered to the Lord. Easy to the fault in others. Less easy to see in ourselves.
I am glad they have said something. I wish they had said more. And so I still stand by what I said in my previous post.
It is all too common for Christians to attempt to do justice to the scriptural narrative by listening to it, learning from it, and attempting to extract a way of viewing the world from it. But the narrative itself is asking us to approach it in a much more radical way. It is inviting us to wrestle with it, disagree with it, contend with it, and contest it-not as an end in itself, but as a means of approaching its life-transforming truth, a truth that dwells within and yet beyond the words.
Tags: Bible, Interpretation
This starts a series on welcoming people into our church community. We are exploring what is working well, and what we can do to improve what we are doing. If you are part of our community, we would love your comments. If you aren’t part of our church, any comments that can help us would be appreciated too! These posts have been written collaboratively by Brian Donaldson, Neil Duguid and the team…
![clip_image002[4]](http://rupertward.cce.uk.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/clip-image0024.jpg)
We have a small team in our church which has been looking at welcome and hospitality. The team’s role is to inspire all of the body parts to think welcome and hospitality, not to leave it to a number of people on a rota. This series of posts will highlight the different stages we go through as we approach any church community, and raise issues for discussion.
Do we need to look at how we appear and how we integrate new members? If you doubt this, then ask a couple of unchurched people to come along and check out our meeting, and tell you honestly what they think.
One person who did this was Jim Henderson, who hired a thinking atheist (Matt Casper) to join him to visit a number of very varied American churches – from the megachurch down to a house church, and across a spectrum from traditional to contemporary.
Sometimes, Matt is genuinely impressed by what he sees, but sometimes he ends up saying to Jim that he cannot square what he sees with what he understands of Christ’s teaching … especially in the connection between the words he hears and what he sees working out in the life of the church.
Another survey, closer home, was blogged by Simon Varwell in Glasgow in 2006. The end-of-round-one post makes interesting reading.
Some of the churches visited were, once perhaps they had got over their chagrin at being labelled unwelcoming, able to look at themselves constructively through Simon’s posts and able to become more welcoming as a result. That’s what we hope these posts will do too.
If you are part of our community: Do you think we are welcoming? Or does it depend on already knowing someone who will help you to find your way in?
If not: What is your community like in welcoming new people?
Following my last couple of posts (1 & 2), reflecting on the Lakeland Outpouring, and trying to learn some lessons by contrasting to the Toronto "blessing". This post I move on to the role of the media…
Media
Toronto, in the early 90’s, was pre-internet, and in the UK at least, pre-Christian TV. News spread of something that God seemed to be doing by word of mouth, and eventually Christian magazines. There were no blogs to read of people’s experience or questions. It wasn’t screened nightly into our living rooms from day 1. I don’t think I heard about anything until probably around May time in 1994, and the first meeting with Randy Clark in Toronto was Jan 20th that year. Even then reports were sketchy - something about a meeting at Holy Trinity Brompton, people lying on the floor for ages, people "drunk" in the Spirit. During a week of mission in August in our church, in the morning prayer times, the Holy Spirit moved powerfully amongst us. This wasn’t transferred, but broke out spontaneously.
This time allowed people to process what they were hearing over time, assess without being told by one source what to think of it. It was much more organic. It gave time for the leaders in the church in Toronto to learn, to have a little theology for what was going on, to get a little more wisdom on how to deflect criticism, steer a middle path between emotionalism and allowing God to move. Even then there were excesses and mistakes. My experience of Toronto was still too focused around the manifestations: even though it was said that wasn’t the deal, when people were "zapped in the Spirit" it was still celebrated, betraying what people really thought.
Lakeland, on the other hand, was virtually instantaneous, screened live by God TV and on the internet. In my opinion, God TV have a lot to answer for, as they effectively became the ones who proclaimed this from the rooftops: this is God - jump in. It didn’t allow time for people, or for questions, or for process. They were forcing people to make a choice: are you for this or not?
I can’t imagine the pressures that suddenly hit Todd Bentley and his Fresh Fire ministry. In the matter of a few days, he was catapulted from a somewhat known itinerant preacher to global superstar in the Christian world. Just look at these charts. The first one shows Google searches on "Todd Bentley" over the last few years, and you can clearly see two clear spikes: one when Lakeland was growing in prominence, the other when news hit about his moral failure. They show that searches were 14 times the average over the last 5 years.
This chart (on the left) shows the increase of blogs about Todd Bentley as recorded by Technorati. Again it is easy to see the huge spike in interest and attention in Todd.
In the end, the failing of Todd to live faithfully to his wife, has had a greater impact on the body of Christ due to the prominence he had ‘achieved’ over the last few months. If Lakeland hadn’t happened, I doubt it would have registered a hit on Christian radar.
For that, I think that GodTV do have real responsibility. Not for Todd choices. But for the pressure that he was put under. For not allowing Lakeland to grow slowly or fizzle out. For promoting something, and then not taking responsibility for the leadership they brought to the worldwide body of Christ.
What would have happened if Lakeland hadn’t been broadcast on the internet and TV’s? Is it possible that some help could have been brought to Todd without such a public failure? Could some of the theology been sorted? Might there have been a greater discernment about what God was doing, and what was excess?
We will never know. All I know is that wouldn’t want to have been put in the place that Todd found himself. And if I found myself in the midst of a move of God, I wouldn’t be getting in contact with GodTV. Unless my flesh had its own way…
Tags: God TV, lakeland, Todd Bentley, Toronto
