Wild at Heart

In the Autumn of last year I read a book called "Wild at Heart" by John Eldredge. It was a bit over the top at first, but I found my spirit witnessing that God has indeed made men for adventure. As a man with Apostolic gifting it is stifling to spend all one's time and energy maintaining an institution.

I found myself remembering a conversation I had with God a year or so earlier as I struggled through a period of depression. I was trying to understand why I was not happy with my work. I concluded that I was bored and needed a fresh challenge. I need adventure.

Over the past 18 months I have been most energized when thinking about developing "Fresh Expressions" of church. I like to pioneer. I want to work on the frontier, starting up new things.

To be fair, this pioneering spirit is not a new development for me. In my work in banking I was a "swaps" pioneer doing interest rate swaps in the capital markets for 5 years in the days when they were a new financial instrument. I had to invent the accounting system and persuade the accountants that it was correct!!

When I went to work on the Racecourse Estate in Sale as curate in charge of the church plant I tried to start a Base Community. I heard about these radical expressions of Church by reading a book called "the Church in the Home" by David Prior (who had been my Vicar in Oxford). Leonardo Boff's book "Ecclesiogenesis" then blew me away - who would have believed that a Roman Catholic Liberation Theologian could be so biblical and so radical? With the help of Peter Price (now Bishop of Bath and Wells) I found out how to be church in this new way (New Way of Being Church).

The main problem with Base Communities was that they did not have a built in strategy for multiplication and they seemed to need a huge investment of time and energy from a "pastoral agent". If you want to know more leave me a comment and I can send you a copy of my Masters Dissertation on the subject.

So when I came to Bredbury we tried Cell Church. Again, radical and pioneering we started this in 1998 when it was the latest thing. However, from the outset we knew that this was not just another band-wagon. Cell church encapsulates all the values that we believe are important for church.

John Eldredge asserts that women sometimes try to tame men, even emasculate them!! Cell Groups are meant to be dynamic missional communities that reach out, grow and multiply as they advance the Kingdom of God. It is too easy for these groups to become cosy fellowship groups where we avoid the scary stuff like evangelism, prophecy, etc. No wonder I have been frustrated at times.

So where next?

The main weakness in all my efforts over the years has been in the area of making disciples. This is where we are now focussing our attention and energies. I will post a blog soon to explain what we are doing to learn how to make disciples.