Epiphany is a strong word for something so obvious
19 June 2008 Jeff Gill
After two years of helping to run a church my brain has finally started working. I just remembered what I’m good at:
- Connecting with and being liked and trusted by the people who run things
- The hustle – talking to people, selling ideas, making things happen
- Design thinking – coming up with the right idea to meet the need
- Presentation, especially on stage in front of an audience
I used these four abilities to build a design studio from nothing to way-way-way-too-busy in four years. Then I joined the i61 church plant and forgot. For two years, I have been making a lot of pretty things, physically and spiritually, for i61. I have been using those four skills to some degree in the church, but hardly at all to connect the church with the community.
When I went to work full time for i61 18 months ago, I had the idea of approaching ministry as a design job. I wanted to bring the thinking and creative skills that I had developed in five years as a designer to a new arena. But my ideas about how to do it were not well formed. It was all too nebulous, and it didn’t work. I soon slipped back into the place that was the norm for me during Ministry Career 1 in America: in front of the computer, comfortably afraid of doing the Things That A Person In Ministry Should Be Doing. I knew that i61 couldn’t operate very well without me, but What Was I There For, Really?
Was I actually contributing to the advancement of the kingdom of God? I’ve had very real doubts about that. It wasn’t a lack of ideas – I always have a million of those. It was a lack of connection. I wasn’t connecting what I am good at with the work of building God’s kingdom. I was trying to fit myself into my idea of what A Person In Ministry ought to be doing without even being fully aware that I had such an idea.
When I started my design studio. I had the advantage of not knowing how to be a graphic designer or how to run a business. I needed to feed my family and pay bills, so I just got on with it. When I went to work for i61 I had a decade of ministry experience and a lot of new ideas telling me what I should do. Somehow those things didn’t connect with what I can do best, what makes me thrive.
Last night in the bath, the place where most good thoughts are thought, I remembered the things that make me thrive. And for the first time I connected them with the works of God. Bam. I felt like I retrieved piece of myself from the shelf, the feisty bit that likes people and makes things happen.
The catalyst for this connection was a meeting with a high school assistant head teacher. I was talking to her about an event we do called Hi, School! Just having a meeting with someone outside of the church world was a buzz. During the meeting she invited me to do some school assemblies. I came alive inside. Here was a chance to start something. Starting things makes me happy.
Then I felt guilty. Shouldn’t I be focussing on what I’m already doing? This doesn’t fit perfectly with some of my New Ideas Of How To Do Ministry. If I like it, it is probably because it is an old, and therefore ineffective, way of doing things.
Fortunately, I came to my senses and realised that I get thrilled standing up in front of a crowd of teenagers and talking about the kingdom of God because Jesus in me gets thrilled to talk to a crowd of teenagers about the kingdom of God. It is one of the things I’m built to do.
That excitement has been bouncing around in me for a week, and last night it bounced off all the right things at once and gave me this really obvious realisation: The things that I love to do and do well are the things that will make me most effective in getting the good news of the kingdom of God to my community.
Damn the theories. I’m finally ready for action.
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Too good
26 May 2008 Jeff Gill
Seth Godin wrote a couple days ago about the importance of letting the evidence of human involvement be visible sometimes.
I think the promotion of the kids thing we are doing Wednesday is a good example. I made some fun and pretty invitations and laser printed them on card.
Front:
Back:
As I was distributing them about the neighbourhood, they started seeming too good. They weren’t quite right. I would have felt a lot more comfortable giving out pieces of paper with the details hand-written on them. That would have been inviting. Somehow what I was doing felt more like selling.
It’s okay. The reason we are doing this now is to start learning how.
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Can we go back to theory, please?
26 May 2008 Jeff Gill
Our church has done a very good job of making a place that is easy for non-church people to come to – for starters, we meet in a pub – and people do come. About half of the people of i61 didn’t go to church before they came to i61 or else they had not gone for a very long time.
Easy to come to is good, but for a while Christine and I have been feeling that it is very important for us to go, to share the life of God with people where they already are. Since we are the children’s pastors, we decided to do something with kids. Since there is no time like the present, we decided to do something this half-term week. The obvious place to start is Someone Else’s Neighbourhood. Unfortunately, the Someone Elses had to work all week, so we are doing it in our neighbourhood at our house.
It’s surprisingly scary.
I printed up a little invitation, and yesterday I went out in the rain and passed a bunch of them around. People I don’t know got them through their letterboxes. People I do know or have spoken to a bit got me knocking on their door inviting them. The response was tepid at best. People seemed to think of it as a thinly disguised wheeze to get their kids into church.
The response at last house I went to completely took the wind out of my sails. Our village shopkeeper lives there. He always seemed like a nice guy. We chatted once about the woes having BT as an internet provider. His teenage daughter babysat our kids a few times. But yesterday he said, ‘No, not interested,’ before I could finish one sentence. When I stuttered something about it being just some games and crafts for the kids, he cut me off again.
Like I was selling double glazing!
Or I was a bleeding Jehovah’s Witness!
At that moment I acquired actual empathy with a friend from church who went out for a Christmas meal with a bunch of mums from her children’s school. She didn’t drink because when she’s indulging in extra calories she prefers to get them from food. The real reason doesn’t matter though. She’s a Christian. She didn’t drink, so obviously she’s judging their lifestyle. Now they don’t want to be her friends anymore.
Jerks.
Actually, they are just being people who are living in the culture we live in. That’s not an excuse for other people’s bad behaviour; it is a reminder that we kingdom of God people still have a lot of barriers to move out of the way when we go where the people are.
I’m pretty sure some of Callum’s neighbourhood friends are coming. I’ll let you know how it goes. I think it will be good.
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Jesus is NOT my boyfriend and I will not sing to Him as if He is.
25 May 2008 Jeff Gill
This is my favourite worship quote in a long time!
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How I succeed at barbecues
5 May 2008 Jeff Gill
Yesterday, the Gill family was at the first i61 barbecue of 2008. i61 barbecues are famous for immense quantities of fun and food. Friends who accept the invitation to come usually find that before too long they are part of us and inviting their friends to barbecues.
People often ask me two questions at i61 barbecues. The first is: Did you make these chocolate chip cookies yourself? I reply, Yes, with an appropriate amount of honesty. The second question is: Can I have the recipe? Today, for the first time ever, the answer is, with a complete lack of modesty, Yes, you can have what is probably the best chocolate chip recipe in the world.
The ingredients are listed in a mix of American and British measurements, so you might need to use this.
Get a big bowl, and put this stuff in it:
- 300 g butter
- 1 cup sugar
- 1 cup dark brown sugar
- 2 eggs
Mix them all up. Don’t taste it yet; it’s too slimy and gloopy.
Now add this stuff:
- 1 1/2 cups plain white flour
- 1 1/2 cups wholemeal flour. This is important.
- 1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
- a bit of salt
Mix again. Tasting is good to do now.
Chop up 300 g of really good chocolate, 2/3 milk chocolate and 1/3 70% cocoa plain chocolate. If you are living in North America and you are tempted to use chocolate chips or anything that has Hershey’s written on the label, resist. Put the chocolate in the bowl and mix one last time.
Grab some dough, make a ball and put it on an ungreased baking sheet. Repeat about 35 times. Bake all those little balls for about 9 minutes at 190°C.
Eat all that you can within a couple hours. Store the leftovers in an airtight container.
Your results may vary.
You’re welcome.
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Blogging will turn you into a self-righteous [insert naughty noun of your choice here]
2 May 2008 Jeff Gill
It’s easy. Just make sure your feed reader is stocked with a steady supply of bloggers you agree with. Make sure you cut out most of the non-Jesus blogs so that all your culture comes filtered and packaged like a carton of Tesco Value apple juice. When you are not online, try to be in your church office. It’s comfortable there. Read enough rants conversations about Mark Driscoll/John Piper/Bill Gothard/Some Other Reformed and/or Fundamentalist White Male to be at least strongly tempted to write something about him yourself – nevermind that he’s on a different continent and spends a big chunk of his life trying to connect people with Jesus. Once you’ve got all that in place, sit back and enjoy the slide into becoming exactly the same kind of [naughty noun] that only a few years ago made you think seriously about whether or not you actually could carry on being a Christian for much longer. Don’t think twice about any of this until your 15 year-old throws out a statement like, ‘You don’t like anything that’s different.’ Immediately deny it and try to ignore its truth by reminding yourself that you aren’t narrow like all those other people. You’re just right. You’re a pastor at the hottest church in [your region], for crying out loud. Carry on with some success until you start to prepare to talk to your teenagers about an area or two where they aren’t acting like Jesus. After you have been crushed by the weight of your hypocrisy, you might find repentance is the best tool for re-inflating your lungs.
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In praise of small churches
1 April 2008 Jeff Gill
There’s a lot of talk about the size of churches.
Some people go for massive – the more people in a mega-church, the more people that know Jesus, right?
Others think tiny house churches are best – how can you have community and reality in a giant battery farm of a church?
It seems like the cool way to be these days is multi-site with the pastor live in every location via satellite or speedy car trip across town.
There is probably nothing/a lot wrong with these ways of doing church. There’s always room for something different though
At our church we may have stumbled upon a Something Different. It’s new to me, at least.
The pub where we meet has room for about 125 people. On Sunday morning it’s full. We’ve done all the expanding we can without tearing the place down and starting over, so the only way to fit in more people was to add another meeting.
Hanging out together is a big part of what we do, so we weren’t interested in cramming another meeting into Sunday morning. Making time for family life is also a big part of what we do, so we didn’t want to add a Sunday night meeting. We decided to go with Saturday evening.
Two weeks in, it’s going very well.
One of the things we realised very quickly was that before too long i61 Saturday will develop its own personality. The meeting has different childrens’ workers and a different band. We’ve even talked about different speakers in the future.
In a year or so, there may be two i61 congregations of about 125 people meeting at the pub. Then what?
I think a strong case could be made for starting another main meeting on another day. 125 or thereabouts is a good number.
- It’s big enough to have life and energy.
- It’s big enough to feel like you are part of something.
- It’s small enough to know everyone. I read somewhere that people are able to know about 200 people. If 125 of them are at church, that leaves relationship space for a good number of people outside of your faith.
- It’s small enough to have a good ratio of leaders to people
- It’s small enough to allow a high proportion of people to be involved in ministering during the main meeting.
- It’s small enough to fit the scale of town and village life in North Wales
- It’s small enough to be easily replicable
- It’s small enough to be able to meet in almost any public venue.
Put enough Small Enoughs together and you can end up with something very big – a lot of people knowing Jesus.
I don’t think 125 is a magic number, but I think 100-200 is a good size for a human-sized (rather than institutional-sized) congregation.
I am really excited about where we are headed.
UPDATE Christine just said, ‘What about when we build our bigger building?’ (We have plans drawn up for one that will hold about 250-300 people, 500 with rows, but we don’t do rows – too formal.) I remember Doug Pagitt or one of those emerging guys saying that 300 was about the right size for their community. Get back to me in five years; I’ll probably write that 1,000 is the ideal size for a church like i61. [insert smiley]
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Dressing for church
24 March 2008 Jeff Gill
(entering shop) You’ve got to help me!
Madame, that is what I am here to do. I am Walter J Wolf, king of Christian Couture. In what way may I be of assistance?
My friend invited me to church and I said yes and I’ve never been to church before and I don’t know what to wear or what to say and I’m going to make a total fool of myself.
A common fear, but one that need not overwhelm you, not once you have set foot in this shop. First of all, let’s think about your clothing –
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Essential reading for youth ministers
17 March 2008 Jeff Gill
Design project deadlines and Easter deadlines are keeping me from writing the ten blog posts in my head and adding a new section to the site. Nevermind. In the meantime, all people who are involved with church and teenagers must read this blog: Once a Youth Pastor
Personal experience in youth ministry shows me that the #1 indicator of a teen’s spiritual longevity and commitment is the degree to which parents are involved in their kid’s spiritual development. The #2 indicator is the degree in which a teen connects with an older spiritual mentor outside the youth group.
Got it? #1 is parents. #2 is mentors. That’s the starting point for the reasoning that follows.
Now, what do most churches with “effective” youth ministries do? They hire a youth pastor.
I’ve come to believe that this is one of the biggest barriers to #1 and #2 happening! That’s right. In most places, the presence of a youth pastor is the biggest barrier to overcome.
Also related are these two articles that Christine and I wrote about a year ago: Community and Youth ministry is broken, but should we fix it?
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What's Your Condition?
25 February 2008 Jeff Gill
My favourite wife has despression. She’s also a happy person. She’s also a brilliant speaker. She told the story of her journey into happiness at our church on Sunday. It is a story worth hearing. I promise I’m not saying that just because I am married to her. Have a listen (23 minutes)
Also, you might enjoy checking out Christine’s related project on Flickr, Room 37
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Grids
13 February 2008 Jeff Gill
In which I neatly jump from graphic designers’ grid systems to the internet’s most famous archdruid to the historian Arnold Toynbee to a church in North Carolina to the bible to you.
Image borrowed from Mark Boulton’s grid systems design tutorial
Graphic designers use grids…
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john michael greer,
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Even more shame on you
10 February 2008 Jeff Gill
There are many, many churches and Christians in the world who have no interest in piling shame on anyone. But we still don’t see the masses rushing to talk to them about their lust and their gluttony and their failures and their griefs. Our minds tell us that those are secret and private. Our culture is in agreement: Hide it away! And we get no arguments from our own pride and shame.
The kingdom of God – and all the healing and life that come with it – doesn’t work well with a lot of secrets. 1 John has a lot to say about living in the light and bringing things into the open – stuff that goes against natural human inclination.
So when we are trying to move people away from shame and ‘into the light’, we need to be aware that we are not just overcoming church culture, but also the broader culture and human tendencies. And that leads us back to thinking about the questions I asked in part one of this little series.
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More shame on you
10 February 2008 Jeff Gill
The thing about shame is that it is easy to apply and often gives good immediate results. But it has no power to effect long-term change, and it stands completely in opposition to the ways of God.
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Shame on you! And while I'm at it, let me give you some condemnation and rejection as well
10 February 2008 Jeff Gill
In my experience, there are a number of life issues and sins-that-so-easily-beset-us that the evangelical church really stinks at addressing. We’re good at inspirational messages about How To Succeed and How To Get Over It (and those are often useful and necessary). We are very good at shock and shame and savagery when people Don’t Succeed and Don’t Get Over It. But we are not so good at teaching people How To Fail, nor are we very good at coming alongside the failures among us and walking with them into success. We are really bad at understanding Getting Over It and what an ordeal that actually is.
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tags: church,
failure,
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You are such an asset to the body
30 January 2008 Jeff Gill
—on a greeting card to Christine from a church* member who is obviously much more pure of thought than we are.
*From our former church in Tucson, Arizona, USA, not i61.
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Eight subversions of Christianity
17 January 2008 Jeff Gill
Greg Boyd, my favourite pastor that I don’t know, wrote in his blog earlier this week about a book he read called The Subversion of Christianity by Jacques Ellul.
In his review Greg writes that the church has been subverted by success, money, morality, religion, pragmatism, violence, politics, power.
Every one of these things is realised in the kingdom of God, just not in the way or the timing that we humans necessarily want it to be. That’s what makes us so susceptible to temptation. We are so easily like Abraham with Ishmael, Saul with the pre-battle sacrifice. But we can be like Jesus when satan offered him easy shortcuts to everything God was giving him.
Have a read of Greg’s post, then come back here for a quick look at the good things that are subverted by each of these eight things and what implications they have for a life of following Jesus in our time.
Success God’s dream for the world has always been for the whole world – from Adam (fill the earth) to Abraham (all the nations of the world will be blessed in you) to Jesus (my house shall be a house of prayer for all nations; go into all the world…) to the apostles (God desires all people to be saved). The temptation is to try and make it happen by dumbing down the good news: Say a prayer, buy a T-shirt, you’re in the club. Salvation is transformation and that rarely happens while being swept along in the emotion of a giant crowd. The good news is for the whole world, one real connection with God at a time.
Money The bible talks so much about money. It is full of promises about our needs being met, about us having an abundance. But ‘all these things’ are added as a side-effect of seeking God’s kingdom, and we freely receive so that we may freely give. The temptation is to make the side-effect the goal.
Morality Living a moral life is not the aim. Living a life abandoned to God is the aim. The Kingdom of God is a return to eating from the tree of life. Goodness is a by-product of God’s kind of life. The temptation to base life on ethics and morality looks so good. It is so safe and easy. But it has no power to enable us to live a life that is truly good. The rules are a wall that separate us from really knowing the source of goodness. That brings us neatly to…
Religion Paul writes about people holding on to a form of godliness but denying its power. That’s a good definition of religion. There is this urge in people to be like God. That makes sense; we are made in his image. Religion gives us a set of boxes to tick in order to be like God. It gives us a feeling of accomplishment. Except that it doesn’t in the long run. Religion grows and looks for more and more behaviours to control. Look at God’s original terms of covenant with Israel – three chapters in Exodus. Look at what it turned into by the time Israel got to their land – Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. Religion’s promise of making us like God or pleasing to God is a false one. Jesus said once that the one necessary thing was sitting and being with him. Fact is, it is a lot easier to try and define life with rules.
Pragmatism God has been at work to fix the world ever since sin came into it. We humans have a natural desire to join him in it. The problem is that we stink at fixing the world. The thing that fixes the world is the spread of the kingdom of God. That doesn’t make sense to our natural minds though. What makes sense is: I see a problem; I’ll try to fix it. And then it gets more broken, giving us more to fix and so on, leaving us completely distracted from the real answer. Living and spreading the Kingdom of God causes the world to be fixed without all our clever efforts
Violence See my upcoming post Hooray for violence.
Politics It’s religion, it’s fixing the world, it’s being willing to be bought (even though we’ve already been bought by God for an infinite price), it’s playing by the rules of this world’s system (which guarantees we lose*), it is ultimately a quest for…
Power Jesus says, you shall receive power. Paul writes about God’s power working mightily within us. People want power. It’s one of those built-in things that goes with our God-given mandate to take care of the earth. Once again, the temptation is to try to seize power. But the power that God promises is the power to be his witnesses, the power to lay down our lives for others. It’s funny how unpopular that kind of power is. Nevermind that it is the same power that Jesus had, the only power powerful enough to reach the world, to remove the fear of lack, to make us good like God, to connect us with God, to fix the world, and to defeat evil.
We Christians, if we are willing to let God change our minds about almost everything, could actually be the kind of humans God designed us to be.
—
*for an example of how to win by not playing by the rules, look at David fighting Goliath.
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Halloween: the Christian's second most important holiday
19 October 2007 Jeff Gill
Easter is, of course, the winner. Without the death and resurrection of Jesus there would be no Christianity. That is important to celebrate.
I am relegating Christmas to the number three spot because it is owned by commerce. Yes, Christmas is a wonderful family holiday. Yes, we Christians celebrate the incarnation of God (even though Jesus never said we should). Yes, I love Christmas. But frankly, we Christians just don’t own it anymore. The shops do.
We don’t own Halloween either, but we could.
I grew up hearing about the evils of Halloween – satan worship, demons, razor blades in apples – not from my parents, but from the Christian culture I lived in. I grew up going to Halloween alternative events, having lots of fun in my bible character costume, knowing that I was safe from all the devil-worshiping psychos that were certain to get me if I dared to risk knocking at the doors of the heathens in my neighbourhood.
Then one year I tried it, and I didn’t die.
As soon as my son was old enough (3) I introduced him to the joys of trick-or-treating. That was when I started realising that Halloween is the second most important holiday for Christians.
Jesus said there are two commands that matter: love God and love your neighbour. The Easter holiday is all about the first command. Halloween is all about the second.
What other day of the year can you put on funny clothes and be welcomed at your neighbour’s house? In my neighbourhood Halloween is the only day of the year that that people actually get out of their houses and chat with the neighbours that they don’t know. It is a night of celebrating community.
In the neighbourhood behind our church they throw a party at the shop and lots of people come out and have a great time. That’s where we went trick-or-treating last year.
On Halloween people let down their guard and come out of their houses. And unlike Christmas, it is not fraught with expectations and busy-ness. So here is my plan of how Christians are going to take over Halloween:
Full disclosure: I will be on holiday over Halloween this year, so for me this is more of a memo for 2008.
1. Ignore the demons and the occultists. (Almost) no one else in your neighbourhood cares in the least about that stuff. They are interested in costumes and sweets. Paul tells us to overcome evil with good, not with huddled prayer meetings in the church basement. If you want a prayer meeting, do it on the 30th. If you want to do some real spiritual warfare, put on some silly clothes and go hang out with your neighbours.
2. Cancel your anti- and alternative events. In the words of Disney’s little mermaid, ‘I want to be where the people are.’ Hint: they live around you in those house-shaped things. Stay home, put some pumpkins in the window, hand out a bunch of sweets (not tracts!) and have a nice chat with all the witches and axe-murderers that come by. Even better, go outside and meet the little ghouls’ parents lurking at the bottom of the drive.
3. Be positive and proactive. Find out in advance where the nervous old people live. Let them know that there will be adults out and about and that you will keep an eye on their house. Have some extra glowsticks to give to kids who need to be more visible. Find good places to hide so you can jump out and scare the trick-or-treaters. If you are feeling really ambitious, have an open house/garden with games and hot chocolate and snacks.
4. Check your motivation. You are doing this because God commands us to love people, not because you are trying to score crowns in heaven by getting converts. People can smell a rat a mile away.
5. Make Halloween the starting place. Probably sometime over the course of the evening you will meet somebody and there will be a bit of a connection. Go with it. Invite them to join you for bonfire night. Have their kid over to play with yours. Give the relationship opportunity to grow. And remember it is about loving people, not converting them. That is the Holy Spirit’s job.
Doesn’t that sound like a lot more fun (and useful) than anything else you could be doing Halloween night?
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Youth Ministry is broken, but should we fix it?
13 February 2007 Jeff Gill
Youth ministry as it is practiced today (in North America and the UK, at least) is a failed experiment. I’m not the first person to say this. Mike Yaconelli, who was a major youth ministry guru in the USA, said it back in 2003. A lot of other people have been saying it too…
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tags: church,
youth
Shout it from the rooftops
8 February 2007 Jeff Gill
Photo: Bailbrook Mission Church, Bailbrook, Bath, © Alasdair Ogilvie
This will get them flocking in on a Sunday.
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