One Heart National Consultation - Melbroune

One Heart National Consultation
March 2006



Monday, March 20, 2006
Day Two:

This morning we met with pastors from the Melbourne Pastors’ Network. Graeme Cann had written an email to a selected number of people outlining some of his concerns about the fact that the church had adopted a sectarian model for doing church in Australia for all of the time there has been a church in this nation and for more than two hundred years it hasn’t worked. Not one single generation has been reached with the gospel. The current generation is not being reached and we are still defending the sectarian model as if it were useful for something even after all this time.

He referred to the fact that the hard questions that were stalling all movements towards strategic oneness were in danger of not being addressed squarely.

On the strength of that, here are the tensions I see and in each case I believe that if we are not able to cross a line where certain things take priority over other things we will simply continue to move up to the mark and stall again and again:


Primary commitment to do what will promote the well being of my congregation
Vs
Primary commitment to what will promote the advance of the church in the city


Pastor the people in my congregation
Vs
Work together with others to pastor the people in the city


Give primary loyalty to denominational obligation
Vs
Give primary loyalty to what will promote the church in the city


Develop duplicate programs in different local churches that reach people in the city
Vs
Develop ministry that complements what other congregations are doing and reaches more spheres of the community


Allow other church pastors to fall or fail without getting involved
Vs
Do whatever is possible to heal the brokenness and prevent pastors from falling


Limit relationships to those few people who I like and can get on with
Vs.
Seek to maintain the highest level of relationship possible and to work together with other pastors to reach out to all the pastors of churches


Compete with other churches for the same gross number of churched people in the city
Vs
Compete with the prince of darkness for the lives of people who are lost from God


Continue to be satisfied with a few churches growing but no net increase to the kingdom of God
Vs
Only being satisfied with the advance of the kingdom of God


Limit the experience of oneness to building relationships between pastors
Vs
Lead the church into a lifestyle of growing oneness with the church in the city


This list is not exhaustive and probably needs to be refined, but I think this kind of checklist will measure the capacity of a pastor and congregation to embrace what God wants to do in the city

Graeme and Rob Isaacson were wanting this meeting to lay a foundation for a different kind of summit they will be holding in August where they are inviting pastors to come to a time away just to embrace the forward journey of seeing God build the experience of the church in the city. Ian spoke about the expression of the corporate Christ coming forth only as we embrace him and one another at the cross. He has a great statement about that: internal integrity produces external integration. What that means is the more you are together as an individual the more you want to form healthy relationships with others. The more dysfunctional you are as an individual the less capable you are of forming healthy relationships with others. It is the same for a church. The more a congregation is together internally it will be proportionally capable of relating will with other congregations.

Colin spoke about the experience in New Zealand of doing “Round Table” meetings and how it was building momentum there through the work of Vision Network.

The Melbourne guys shared some of their stuff. Mark Dury is an Anglican pastor from Caulfield (I think). He talked about doing some research into the history of the church in that area and found that when the church was founded there was a work on unity that started in 1878 and ended up producing the outpouring of 1901 that most people know about in Melbourne. I think it was called the Sunshine Revival because it started or was centred on Sunshine, a little town that was just on the western edge of Melbourne.

There were questions and some good discussion followed. I think the meeting was important, among other reasons, because it started out at the right spot and cut a lot of the wandering around that often goes on. I think we need to be even more pointed in seeing how people respond to the idea of the continuum issues like the ones I have referred to above. These are definitely crunch issues.