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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tags: church,
design,
failure,
kingdom of god,
leadership
What if...
10 June 2008 Jeff Gill
- All the millions of dollars and hours spent over the last 35 years pointlessly trying to overturn Roe v. Wade had been spent on helping women who had or were at risk of having crisis pregnancies?
- All the millions of words used to attack and defend Todd Bentley had been offered up as prayers for people who don’t know Jesus or used in conversations with friends to share God’s love?
- The evening I frittered away reading arguments about Todd Bentley and looking at a clever new phone that I have no intention of buying had been spent doing something useful or interesting like finally watching Life on Mars or starting the project that I really want to do, but find intimidating?
- I didn’t do any frittering at all tomorrow?
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tags: humans,
kingdom of god
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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tags: community,
kingdom of god,
prayer
Justice
3 June 2008 Jeff Gill
And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth? —Luke 18:7-8, TNIV
What justice can I cry out for? What injustice do I see?
The insurance company that didn’t pay out for my claim?
The guy who jumped the queue at the petrol station?
The fact that Jesus hasn’t bought me an iPhone yet?
The greatest injustice that I can see in the world is a judgement that is not being enforced – God’s judgement that every person can experience his life because of Jesus’s death and resurrection.
It is unjust that I have a relationship with God, but my neighbours do not. It is unjust if I have found freedom from a life controlling problem through Christ and my friends have not. It is unjust if I am facing life enfolded in God’s grace while the people around me are living a lonely struggle. Anywhere that I am experiencing the life of God and someone else isn’t is deeply offensive to God and should be to me.
Let us cry out to God day and night that God would bring about this justice for us. Jesus says we will get justice, and quickly.
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tags: kingdom of god,
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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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tags: community,
humans,
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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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tags: children,
church,
community,
humans,
i61,
kingdom of god
Sunday evening reading
9 March 2008 Jeff Gill
Tia Lynn has started a very promising series on God’s design for women at Abandon Image. She starts here with good definitions of egalitarianism and complementarianism. Her second post speaks brilliantly about NOT glorifying the consequences of the curse of Genesis 3. And I love the fourth post about Deborah. It shows the things you can find in the bible when you are willing to put aside your grid and read what the text actually says.
Greg Boyd has written a very good (and long) review of Chuck Colson’s latest book God and Government: An Insider’s View on the Boundaries Between Faith and Politics.
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tags: blogging,
books,
greg boyd,
kingdom of god,
women