After returning to Perth Oz, I preached here in the Lifeworx community which I loved. I postponed a trip to Brisbane to be with our dear friends Leon and Sonja Bowles to later in the month, so that I can spend 2 weeks putting in the fundamental shape to my book: "Replanting: The mistakes I made".
On Sunday afternoon I had the joy of ministering with M and Tom and Una, being asked by Mark T to empower them as leaders as they prepare to move the church from the suburbs to the center of Perth. It was a very special time. With the chats came great prophetic Holy SPirit moments. Fabulous.
Here are the 10 mindset changes I suggested that need to make in order to make the move truly kingdom impacting. Here is the summary:
- From a 1 dream / 1 DNA story to a collage of dreams as they all add their dreams to a bigger dream but still with 1 DNA,
- From 1 family essence to many family points around the city,
- From 1 locality / facility to several catalytic points around the city,
- From 1 suburb to 1 city with many suburbs,
- From largely 1 ethnicity to a multi-cultural community,
- From 1 preacher to many missionaries to the city,
- From 1 worship team and style to many worship teams with many styles and emphases,
- From ministering to a few to ministering to the multitude / pastoring the city,
- From 1 gathering point of growth to many growth points and centers,
- From 'everyone does everything' to 'everyone does one thing'.
Each a larger story with a great convo required...
Point 5. Has been my greatest challenge in South Africa. Multicultural is one thing. Multi-class is a whole new ball game in our SA context. We were an inner city church. Apo guys told us to move to the suburbs where it's middle class and has more money - but what message would we have sent to the "poor" if we moved? The middle class eventually all left the church to join suburb churches. Eventually we led a church full of wonderful people we couldn't even connect with because our class and culture were too far apart. This is not academic / facetious; it hurt everybody when we eventually closed down.... Multisite may be the answer to keep the classes vaguely seperate but moving forward in God in their own way, but that sounds aweful. Your thoughts???
ReplyDeleteI am not sure the mulicultural journey is easy... but it is one that we must be committed to. Paul went to the synagogue whenever he arrived in a town, he went to his own first - Jesus went to his own... so to engage a similar culture as a point of departure is good but we cannot ignore the poor, the widows, the orphans, and / or any of the fringe who dwell in the inner city...I think there are creative ways to be catalytic to both contexts and form 'one community' through 'many families'. I am not sure that multi-siting is offensive IF we have one community, one leadership team, one finance pool [rich empowering the poor], one DNA, one family camp... whilst acknowledging regional, contextual, language realities...
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