mountain masala

Five Marks of Mission for the 21st Century

The Church Missionary Society (CMS) in the UK has a new video and study series focusing on mission. I haven't seen it all yet but here's the video trailer...

Alive@5 March

Interactive Christmas 'Stations'

Here's the detail of what we did last Sunday with Interactive Christmas. The event was open 5-7pm, with people coming and going when they chose. Unlike Interactive Easter, this time we channelled everyone through the church. As they arrived they received a simple ' program' with map.(380kb PDF) This matched posters (33kb PDF) throughout the venue (icons from the excellent font Speed Bump from 3 Islands Press).

The First Angel - based on the angel coming to Zechariah. We had the text from Luke 1:5-23 (CEV) and a simple poem to introduce the journey. People made the angels that are described here. It was a good activity, but we only had two glue guns (which kids arent allowed to use themselves) and not enough helpers for the busy times. Next time I'd add a couple of face painters and have more helpers and equipment. The issue for us was that this area was a 'holding area' prior to the next activity, so people had to wait here until they were ushered into the next place.

Read on for more...

mission-shaped worship - Alive@5 - part 1

last Wednesday night i led a session at the Adelaide Mission-Shaped Ministry course. it was their second last night of about 14 weeks, my first time with the material, and I'd had limited time to prepare. they were very gracious! and as you do after running a training session for the first time, my brain has been going overtime about how I'd do it differently next time. not surprisingly, i had a bunch of stuff with me that i didnt even use.

i spoke a bit about our Alive@5 experiment and how that is evolving. there are some things that i didnt get around to saying, so i thought i'd give a bit of a summary of our journey here in case it's of interest to the participants or others.

a couple of years ago our church started playgroups, based on both evidence that 'young families' were moving into the area, and this need being expressed by people associated with our community. we took a 'leap of faith' and employed a new member of the congregation with great gifts in this area as a part time worker. i don't know the exact stats but our playgroup expanded from one day to two, and then a babies day, and we ended up with about 100 families connected. incredibly successful and meeting a need. i applaud our minister Phil and the church council in seeing this opportunity and running with it.

Vital Congregations Project

Luther Seminary in Minnesota, USA is running a Lily-Endowment funded Vibrant Congregations Project. Someone has identified six critical areas of vibrant congregational life and culture (no, not ten or five - six...). Congregations with these attributes will be studied.

The magic six are (drum roll...) - stewardship; vocation; Biblical fluency; children, youth & family; missional leadership; and Biblical preaching...

I'm not sure what some of these mean (esp 'fluency'), so it will be interesting to see what unfolds with the Project. Hopefully its not just the 1980s coming back, although, let's face it, we do like those big synth sounds and electronic drums...

The big question of course is what kind of thing they're hoping to learn. Is it about what they do, why they do what they do, what processes led to the latter, what enabled those processes to take place, and what they say about the 'identity' of the congregation....??

The Project blog is here.

So many questions....

conferences and papers

here are some links to a range of conference papers available online recently... just thought I'd compile them here. lots of excellent stuff.

Symposium on Children's Spirituality, Melbourne - papers here

Religious Education Association (US) - papers here

Australian Association of Mission Studies - papers here

tell show be

Here's the good news: LOVE. COMPASSION. FORGIVENESS. HOPE.

the methodist church in the UK has a new evangelism initiative called "tell show be", with an animation from kore front and centre. the animation focuses on evangelism as a message that we speak and act everyday.

the video would be an interesting discussion starter with a christian group in terms of (a) what it says about evangelism actually is, and (b) the effectiveness of the video as a tool to encourage evangelism.

it's been created in 5 langauges and on the site you're invited to submit your response to the clip
- who will you tell?
- how will you show it?
- where will you be it?

I wondered what four words I'd choose for good news?

love or compassion? yes. hope? yes. peace or forgiveness or reconciliation? yes. justice? yes.

i look forward to seeing what they do next.

Alive@5 - 5th June

Our next Alive@5 evening for families with under 12s is this Sunday 5 June, 5.00-6.30 pm at Rosefield UC, Carlton St, Highgate. Our theme is "Friends" and there'll be music, craft, puppets, food, and fun. If possible, please bring $2.50 per person towards food, which will be soup & bread & other stuff. We had a great time when we gathered last, and look forward to seeing some new faces.

Andrew Jones in Adelaide

Andrew Jones, aka 'tallskinnykiwi', will be in Adelaide for a day on April 28 talking about

• pioneering in mission
• social media as a fresh expression of mission
• social media and justice-making

He'll be hosted by Uniting College. A great opportunity to hear from a deep thinker who has been in all kinds of fringe mission contexts across the world.

Download a flyer here.

community development handbooks - free

I posted about these free guides a couple of years back, but they've moved on the WWW.

- Community Development Handbook
- Community Development Facilitator's Guide

Produced in Canada and available free here.

Worthwhile resources that we used in a year-long peer learning program called "Mustard Seeds of Mission".