A sort of prayer
4 June 2008 Jeff Gill
Floyd and Sally McClung are approaching retirement age. Not too long ago Floyd gave up the pastorate of a pretty swish church in Missouri, USA to go live in a crummy South African township and teach local people how to plant and lead house churches.
I would give up everything if I could know how to do that AND I could do it with my family in a way that flowed from and was swimming in grace.
It is not about location or travel. I’m perfectly happy to be in North Wales forever. It is about love for ‘the least’. It is about throwing a banquet and inviting the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind instead of worrying about how good my seat is at the party I’ve been invited to.
I can see that I am selfish, critical, lazy and scared of people. I’m scared to talk to people about Jesus when I’m not performing on stage. I want to be rich and famous. But what I would rather want is to not care at all about those things. I would rather want to spend my life connecting the people that society doesn’t value with the life and kingdom of God.
To me the greatest gift in the world would be to be full of the love of Jesus and to spend the rest of my life with my family sharing that love with people that ‘don’t matter’.
Otherwise what is the point of my continuing to be a Christian?
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If just one person was saved...
29 May 2008 Jeff Gill
…it was worth it was the way organisers of failed evangelical Outreach Events liked to comfort each other in my hometown Tucson, Arizona, the site of many failed evangelical Outreach Events. We planted some good seeds was also popular. But to use those platitudes someone has to show up at your event.
10 minutes before our neighbourhood craft event was supposed to start my son went round to his three friends’ houses to remind them like they asked him to the day before. None of them were home. Also not home were our new neighbours who told me the previous evening that they would probably come over.
I’m pretty sure this was the conversation in all four houses:
Mum: Hurry up and get your shoes on. You need to go.
Child: Is it time to go to the Gill’s carefully planned and super-fun neighbourhood craft event already?
Mum: No! You’re not going there. Didn’t you see the invitation? It had the name of a church on it. They’ll probably try to make you speak in tongues.
Child: So where am I going?
Mum: I don’t care. Why don’t you down to the park and look for discarded syringes and porn.
It was probably nothing like that. I’ve never come across any syringes or porn in our park. I know that reality is almost always more benign than what goes on in my head, but I’m nervous that our desire to share the life of God with our neighbours could turn us into the local freaks.
‘Darn the dang nerves!’ I say. We carry on. Maybe a barbecue next.
Or maybe I’ll just huddle at my laptop and write essays on Emerging Into a Theology to Support Missional Praxis in Postmodern Semi-Rural (Non)Community. That could be even more comforting than a platitude.
Finally,
Are you, or is anyone you know trying anything like this or sort of like this? How’s it going?
This is a great article on making friends with people rather than making projects of people.
The photos are by the brilliant Marya Figueroa aka emdot.
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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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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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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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Community
9 February 2007 Christine Gill
I was 6 during the miners’ strike of 1984. I lived in a small mining village
I guess the strike probably affected me differently than it did my friends, whose dads worked in the mines. My father had been unemployed my whole life anyway.
It was one of the happiest times of my childhood…
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