Mark Tough - 10 October 2008 10:14 AM

Well, we do offer a Church Planting subject in most of our courses.

ahh - but to take advantage of the current enthusiasm, you need to call it a degree in “Entrepreneurial church planting for real men approved by Mark Driscoll”.  Or something like that.  :-)

Out of interest - is your Church Planting subject concerned with church planting in Australia? Overseas? Both?  What does it cover?

Mike

Mike Doyle - 10 October 2008 10:29 AM

Mark Tough - 10 October 2008 10:14 AM

Well, we do offer a Church Planting subject in most of our courses.

ahh - but to take advantage of the current enthusiasm, you need to call it a degree in “Entrepreneurial church planting for real men approved by Mark Driscoll”.  Or something like that.  :-)

Out of interest - is your Church Planting subject concerned with church planting in Australia? Overseas? Both?  What does it cover?

Mike

Hmmm, I don’t think that Driscoll’s recently received theological degree was named along these lines.

Re the church planting subject, below is the brief description of what’s in the subject:

This course aims to give the student a thorough understanding of the biblical teaching on church planting. The student will also learn the basic methodologies for effective evangelism, discipleship, Bible teaching and church leadership training in numerous cultural contexts.

Yours in Christ,
Mark

The Dean has just posted a really excellent piece on church planting in the diocese.

I think this is similar to what I was getting at before:

These legislative changes do not plant any churches. They make church planting acceptable and help new churches to integrate into the diocese. They just put out the welcome mat. We still need to invite visitors if anybody is going to come into our home.

That whilst current legislation is far from perfect, and I’m sure more can be done, at the end of the day, it’s not stopping people from planting churches.  People actually need to do it.  It’s a cultural change that’s needed (evangelism/mission) rather than a legislative change.

Mike

Yeah, I’d be inclined to agree with that now, though there are clearly some issues relating to training and ordination that need more clarity and reform.

Craig Schwarze - 10 October 2008 05:45 PM

Yeah, I’d be inclined to agree with that now, though there are clearly some issues relating to training and ordination that need more clarity and reform.

That’s the beuaty of being Anglican, quoting article 34 (or XXXIV if you prefer):

Of the Traditions of the Church

It is not necessary that Traditions and Ceremonies be in all places one, and utterly like; for at all times they have been divers, and may be changed according to the diversities of countries, times, and men’s manners, so that nothing be ordained against God’s Word....

...Every particular or national Church hath authority to ordain, change, and abolish, ceremonies or rites of the Church ordained only by man’s authority, so that all things be done to edifying.

Mike

Some more details on Acts 29 coming to Australia…

The Resurgance

Thanks for that link Jeff.

This sentence leapt out at me :

I learned a ton on this trip. Especially helpful was seeing the fruit of the work of the Jensen brothers, who are the two barrels of the gospel gun for Sydney Anglicanism.

Sounds more like we’re heading for a showdown at the ‘Connect 09 Corral’ ;)

Interesting comment from the AB in his presidential address -

I have always thought that part of the answer will include a dedicated evangelistic fellowship, a local missionary society. I have looked to create something like that without success. As we have prayed for our city and its region this year, there has been what seems like a remarkable spiritual movement summoning young men into church planting. Is this an answer to our prayers? I think that this could be exactly what it is. Something is happening and it may be of great significance. Our local churches need to be on top evangelistically. Connect 09 is part of that. But for whole areas of the city and whole tribes this is not going to be enough. I hope that when we meet again next year I will be able to describe the way in which a movement of the Spirit has begun.

Yes Craig,
v interesting and promising comment by the Archbishop on church planting.
Is he right? I hope so.

I think it is a great idea and hope churches will be able to accept and support people as missionaries even if they are just working down the road in a pioneering situation.

(I remember Phillip Jensen said something very similar at an MTS conference about 4 years ago so it is not a new idea.)

I thought this map of religious identity in Sydney in today’s SMH was quite interesting.

I think there’s competing interests at the heart of church growth which tend to hinder specific action.

On the one hand, the diocesan leadership has to lead for the whole diocese, has to be inclusive of all churches so no one feels ‘left out’, and launches initiatives based on those principles, so we have broad, all-encompassing ideas/campaigns like the 10% Mission and Connect09.

However, think about the presidential race in the US. Sure, you have an overall campaign, but you fight it out in the battleground areas where there are swing voters at stake.

In a sense I think a successful mission strategy has to take a targeted view, like generals with a map of the battleground, for want of a better analogy. You don’t just say “Oh we’re going to influence the whole area, win all the people, everyone’s going to chip in and it all work out”. You may as well rely on magic in that case.

Generals look at where their forces are, where they can move them to, where the fight is, where they should push on the offense, where they should hold and defend and where they can drop in forces for targeted missions.

Sydney, as the map in that link shows, is a place of considerable ethnic and religious diversity, and broad, good intentions aren’t going to get you very far.

On a deeper levels we have to decide if we’re about growth and numbers or not. We’re very ambivalent about it at the moment - we talk about growth and church planting, scrutinize the numbers, plan these big campaigns, but there’s also a strong vein of ‘Oh it’s all in God’s hands, numbers don’t mean anything, we should just pray and hope for the best’ which is essentially an argument for the status quo and not doing much.

So being caught between the idealistic (or, conversely, political) desire for broad gestures for all of Sydney, and what I would argue is the need for a more targeted, hard-headed approach to specific growth areas, and the ambivalence about the importance of growth/numbers at a deeper level, I think it will be difficult to make much headway.

(That said there may very well be targeted activities currently in action which I’m completely unaware of! :)

By the by, here’s an interesting (if slightly OT) question: how many new people (ie, pick a figure) should we expect to join the Anglican church in Sydney for the $1.5million spent on the campaign? Serious question - how many people? 100? 1000? 10,000? Who will be counting? What if it’s zero?

If you put $1.5mil into a big, single charro-style Syd Ang church how many new people do you think you could attract? Serious question again, it might be nil for all I know. Just interesting to think about.

Luke Stevens - 14 October 2008 12:47 AM

… what I would argue is the need for a more targeted, hard-headed approach to specific growth areas, and the ambivalence about the importance of growth/numbers at a deeper level, I think it will be difficult to make much headway.

Hi Luke

Do you have any suggestions on where these targets should be?

Ethnic groups?  Where Gospel growth has been great.
Lapsed Anglicans? Where a simple invite may get them back.
Young Men?  Where we can build an army of church planters? (perhaps)
Uni Ministries?  Where we can find lots of future Anglican ministers?
Atheist Areas? Islam areas?  Rich areas? Poor areas? Catholics? Pentecostals? Buddhists? Jews?  Areas that no-one else is targeting?

There are so many different options - and so hard to chose.  What areas do you think is the most strategic?

I note the “Half way” doc talks about putting money into strategic areas.

Mike

Nope. To some extent I don’t think it matters. The point is that you target a group - any group - that you have some hope of reaching, in a meaningful, appropriate way.

It’s marketing 101 stuff really. If you try and sell your product to anyone and everyone you risk reaching no one. You find your market and you pitch to them, and don’t waste your time & money on anything else.

The trick in Christian circles is that we have an ideological desire to reach ‘everyone’ (as if that was possible) when in reality, being “strategic” means saying no to a lot of people and a lot of groups - the vast majority of them, ideally. It’s very easy to start a discussion about being “strategic” as though that means something - a more interesting, but much harder discussion to have is something like ‘Ok, who *don’t* we want to try and reach? Of the 50 groups out there, let’s cross off 45...’.

Getting that kind of consensus around the idea of picking group/s more or less arbitrarily because it’s simply better than an all-things-to-all-men campaign is a tough sell, and in Anglican circles a particularly tough sell, I’d imagine :) So instead we get broad gesture, all-in, top-down, feel good campaigns.

Going back to political analogy though, it’s amazing to hear about the volunteer armies the respective campaigns mobilise for the grassroots ‘ground game’ in the US. Truly phenomenal.

Of course, people say ‘Well it would be nice if people were as interested in telling people about Jesus as they are about their political candidate of choice,’ which is somewhat true, but the flip side is ‘Well I wish you were as motivated & saavy as the politicians are in organising people and getting them out there’ :)

I can see where you are coming from Luke, but theologically I can not agree. The logic of your position is heartless - a spiritual form of ‘economic rationalism’. It affectively excludes some people from the gospel and having their spiritual needs met.

That said, you are right that no geographic-based parishes has the resources to be ‘strategic’ about reaching the micro-communities (such as the Tibetan Buddhists or the Iranian Zorastrians) in our midst.. and so we tend to skip past them. In my area 1 in 100 households will be Hindu and 1 in 100 will be Muslim. Is it worth specifically training all my congregation up to reach them? No that would be a waste of time - given the 98 other households.

Part of the problem is that we don’t see ourselves Diocese-wide as on the same team.

I am happy to leave ministry to the Chinese-speakers to the Chinese-speakers! (to cite just one example)

But in this regard:

1. we need to work together and share resources better… parish to parish.
2. The Diocese needs to be more strategic in identifying the lost tribes and then allocating human resources to reach them.