James K Baxter, a mystic New Zealand poet, wrote this poem some time between 1969 and 1971….
My love came through the city
And they did not know him
With his beard and his eyes and his gentle hands
For he was a working man
My love stood on the lakeshore
And spoke to the people there
And the fish in the water forgot to swim
And the birds were quiet in the air.
‘Truth’ - he said, and - ‘Love’ - he said,
But his purest word was - ‘Mercy’ -
And the fishermen left their boats and came
To share his poverty.
My love was taken before the judge
And they nailed him on a tree
With his strong face and his long brown hair
And the whiteness of his body.
‘Truth’ - he said, and - ‘Love’ - he said,
But his purest word was - ‘Mercy’ -
And the blood ran down and the sun grew dark
For the lack of his company.
My love was only a working man
And now he is God on high;
I have left my books and my bed and my house,
To follow him till I die.
‘Truth’ - he said, and - ‘Love’ - he said,
But his purest word was - ‘Mercy’ -
Flowers and candles I bring to him
And no man is kinder than he.
Willow Creek USA has just released the speaker list for the Global Leadership Summit (GLS). This will be held in eight sites across Australia during October 2006. This just confirmed list includes:
Wayne Cordeiro - Senior Pastor, New Hope Christian Fellowship in Honolulu
Patrick Lencioni - Founder & President of The Table Group, Inc.
James Meeks - Senior Pastor, Salem Baptist Church in Chicago
Ashish Nanda - Associate Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School
Jim Collins - Management Expert and Best-Selling Author of ‘Good to Great’
Peg Neuhauser - President, PCN Associates
Andy Stanley - Senior Pastor, North Point Community Church in Atlanta
Bono - Lead Singer of the rock group U2 and TIME Magazine’s 2005 Person of the Year in an exclusive, video-taped interview with Bill Hybels
For more details on each speaker, or the GLS 2006 location closest to you, click on www.willowcreek.org.au and follow the links.
Jim Wallis, here in Australia to promote his book, “God’s Politics”, was interviewed on ABC Radio Brisbane this morning, in the conversation hour. Richard Fidler. The conversation is available on the ABC web site in ASX, RAM and MP3 formats.
Also in the conversation is Michael Franti, a musician with band Spearhead, who engages with issues such as media monopolisation, corporate globalisation and incarceration.
From the ABC summary of the interview:
Jim Wallis is a Christian leader campaigning for social change. Thirty years ago he founded ‘Sojourners’ - Christians for justice and peace - and he continues to serve as the editor for Sojourners magazine, covering faith, politics and culture. He’s also the best-selling author of God’s Politics: why the right gets it wrong and the left doesn’t get it.
Jim believes there a few different reasons the ‘religious right’ is ‘getting it wrong’. “I don’t think God is an American,” he says. “I know that’s a shock!… The right reduce everything to one or two hot social issues… I insist that fighting poverty, protecting the environment, the ethics of war are fundamental religious and moral issues as well.”
Other groups are starting to demand answers, however. “The monologue of the religious right is finally over,” says Jim. “A new discourse has become a moral discourse on politics that we all need, and we’re all needed for. A new generation want an agenda for the rest of their lives… We’re talking about taking back the faith - how did Jesus become pro-rich, pro-war and pro-American?”
Jim was part of a group of religious leaders who met with President Bush after he was elected, to talk about these issues. “We had a frank conversation. We said, ‘Surprise us - be a Republican who leads on the issue of poverty.’ He said, ‘I don’t get it. I haven’t been around poor people… How do I get it?’ I said ‘You’ve got to listen to poor people and those who work with poor people.’
“His inaugural address talked more about poverty than anyone for a long time - a good start - but then it turned the other way. Poverty has risen every year for the last five years.”
I spent most of Friday with a group of colleagues from the Salvation Army, Uniting, Catholic, Anglican and Lutheran churches, looking at the recently released South East Queensland Regional Plan, 2005-2026.
The regional plan, developed for the Queensland State Government, protects 80 per cent of all land in the SE corner from urban development. The strategy includes allocating appropriate land for housing the population growth, providing cost-effective infrastructure and services, developing compact urban development (rather than sprawl), protecting the natural environment, and supporting a viable and diverse economy.
The population for the region in 2001 was 2.46 million people. It’s expected to reach between 2.75 and 2.79 million this year. By 2016 we’re expected to hit between 3.17 and 3.37 million. By 2026 the figure is between 3.46 and 3.97 million. That’s a lot of people to be moving into the area. We’ll need an estimated 575,000 new buildings in the next 20 years.
We heard about the growing proportion of households with one or two members. We looked at the development of the Mt Lindsay/North Beaudesert Study Area. We examined the growth of new city-size suburbs such as Springfield, Ripley, Sippy Downs and Coomera. And we scratched our heads when we didn’t hear a lot about planned social infrastucture. It’s all there in the strategy but.
It was good to be working in collaboration with other churches. It was good to be talking with the government. What became clear though is that the Uniting Church has some homework to do, building a strategic partnership between Presbyteries, Synod and Uniting Care as we explore our response to growth and change in Queensland. As we plan the planting of new churches, the development of schools, hospitals and other social services, we have the opportunity to work with synergy.
Steve Austin, an ABC radio presenter in Brisbane, hosts a regular podcast review by Jo Leutton on his Thursday night show after 8.30 pm. Just recently the focus was on religion, philosophy and ethics. Jo reviewed six podcasts:
The reviews are online in a shortened form at ABC Brisbane, including XML feeds for the podcasts. It’s a pity the show wasn’t made available as a podcast!
For my birthday this year I was given a copy of David Vise’s book, “The Google Story”. The book was published in November 2005, which makes it a reasonably up-to-date coverage of the rise of Google from its early days at Stanford through to its float on the stock exchange.
David Vise, who apparently doesn’t work for Google, takes us through a journey with Sergey Brin and Larry Page as they hang out together at Stanford, attend Burning Man Festival, and of course develop their capacity to download the whole of the internet on to their computers.
There are chapters on Adsense, the hiring of a CEO, partnership with Ask Jeeves, Yahoo and AOL, Google News, Google Translation and country-specific portals, Google Earth and Google Moon, Froogle, click fraud, competition with Microsoft and entry into the Chinese market.
The book ends with some consideration of Google’s effect on Microsoft. I note that MSN Search was quicker to cache Duncan’s TV Adland when I moved it to its own domain. However something like 85 to 90 percent of searches for pages at my sites are done through Google.
The book finishes with 23 Google Search Tips, a Google Labs Aptitude Test, and the Google Financial Scorecard for the years 1999 to 2004.
On Saturday the Organic Church Planters’ Greenhouse focused on discipleship. One of Neil Cole’s key contributions to the emerging church would be the life transformation group. Life transformation groups are groups of two or three who meet once a week for approximately one hour. There is no curriculum, workbook or training involved. There is no leader needed in the group. The group is gender-specific.
Only three tasks are to be accomplished in an LTG:
1. Sin is confessed in mutual accountability
2. Scripture is read repetitively in context and in community
3. People are prayed for strategically, specifically and continuously.
Add one person to the Life Transformation Group of three and it becomes two groups of two people.
Neil has written up the LTG concept in his book, Cultivating a Life for God, published by ChurchSmart Resources in 1999.
My first look at the Life Transformation Group concept was in the context of Gateway Baptist Church in Melbourne, during a conference on leadership farms. GGG FM (Gateway Growth Groups For Maturity) are offered in four levels, each raising the bar of discipleship in terms of relationship. At the first level Christians are asked to read Every Day with Jesus for New Christians and/or one chapter of the Gospels each day. They gather to talk through eight questions:
What have you learned about faith in Jesus?
How have you celebrated life?
Who did you meet new at Gateway? What did you learn about them?
How did you deal with the challenges you are facing in life at the moment?
Who have you encouraged?
Has there been a sin that you have had trouble dealing with? (e.g. lust, jealousy, unforgiveness, pride, anger, fear, addiction, gossip)
What one point did you get from last Sunday’s message in church?
Did you finish the reading? Do you have any questions about it?
I spent three days at an ‘Organic Church Planters’ Greenhouse’ seminar last week. Neil Cole, from Los Angeles, was being hosted by Church Multiplication Associates, Australia to introduce church planters to the principles of organic church, simple church.
Rather than developing new churches around a meeting place, ‘organic church’ is developed in the marketplace. Churches are seeded, germinated and grown in the soil of relational networks. Because there is little expectation of employing staff or purchasing buildings the model is relatively inexpensive. Primary leadership is provided by an ‘apostolic team’ rather than by a pastoral teacher. The attraction to this approach to church is obvious life transformation rather than felt need programming.
What I found most helpful in the three day seminar was the inspiration of the stories of innovative, down-to-earth church plants that were based on the changed lives of new converts. It was tempting to dismiss them as stories that could never happen in Australia.
A key part of Neil’s approach is relational. I picked up the virus of focused intercessory prayer. I’ve now put appointments into my mobile phone in which I commit myself for praying for my family, for my relational network, and for the discovery and recruitment of people who will ‘work in the harvest’. Neil wasn’t afraid of talking. But he was also committed to listening.
I’ll put another couple of posts on the seminar up this week as I find the time.
Duncan Macleod posts on life, faith and culture in Australia, drawing from his involvement in the creative industry, the Uniting Church, the blogosphere, generational research, the emerging church and life on the Gold Coast.
My love came through the city
ABC summary of the interview:
Jim Wallis will be in Melbourne and Sydney from April 9 to 12 to launch an Australian edition of his New York Times best-selling book 
, which features a forward by World Vision Australia CEO Tim Costello.
On Saturday the Organic Church Planters’ Greenhouse focused on discipleship. One of Neil Cole’s key contributions to the emerging church would be the life transformation group. Life transformation groups are groups of two or three who meet once a week for approximately one hour. There is no curriculum, workbook or training involved. There is no leader needed in the group. The group is gender-specific.
Rather than developing new churches around a meeting place, ‘organic church’ is developed in the marketplace. Churches are seeded, germinated and grown in the soil of relational networks. Because there is little expectation of employing staff or purchasing buildings the model is relatively inexpensive. Primary leadership is provided by an ‘apostolic team’ rather than by a pastoral teacher. The attraction to this approach to church is obvious life transformation rather than felt need programming.
