THURSDAY APRIL 6TH BRISBANE DAY ONE OF THE CROSSLINK CLUSTER MEETINGS IN SOUTH QUEENSLAND

Jenny Spivey called to pick us up to take us to the meetings at about 9:15 am. I had to do some radio programs before she came, so Graeme and Rob had to sit around listening to me going for it in the motel room. I was able to put six programs together with some minor and very humorous interruptions from the audience during the recording process. Even though I am modestly familiar with some technology it is a bit like flying. Every time I get in a plane of any size I marvel at the fact that a bit of metal can carry us through the air. Similarly I marvel that a funny little red sponge covered piece of metal connected to my computer can end up being broadcast around the Canberra region. After recording I was on the lookout for a broadband connection somewhere that would enable me to transfer the files to the ONE WAY FM hard drive in Fyshwick.

Jenny and Wayne Spivey are a great couple of people. They and their two kids provide pastoral leadership for a church that reaches street people and other marginalized people in the south bank part of Brisbane. They came out of the Seventh Day Adventist Church in West Brisbane and do a great job in very demanding circumstances. It has taken its toll on them and at times they have struggled to hold things together and to hold themselves together, but they are prevailing. I feel so much admiration for them and what they are doing. They live in Shailer Park, not far from where Natalie and Josh Shingles now have their house. I was hoping I might get to see Natalie and Josh before I go back to Canberra and we have a meeting to do with Wayne and Jenny on Saturday morning. They still have their church worship meeting on Saturday. It might have otherwise indicated a legacy from the legalistic side of the SDA church but that is so not the case with these guys. They are among the most un-legalistic people I know.

We found the Pathway Community Centre in Mango Hill. If you know Brisbane, this is among the northernmost suburbs of Brisbane. It is just east of the highway going to the Sunshine Coast from the airport (I think that would be the Bruce Highway). Mark Setch has a Crosslink church in the Redcliff area and Bruce Moore has planted a church in the North Lakes area. This is their territory. The community centre is a great place for what we wanted to do. It has meeting rooms of all shapes and sizes but is probably the most modern and technically advanced I have seen. For around $80 per day we have the use of a room that has every kind of audio, video or multi-media facility you could ever need. Rob was able to put up his excellent audio power point presentations on a large LCD screen on the wall with sound that any presenter would kill for. The fact that the centre is across the road from the Westfield Centre food court has a few advantages that will be obvious to anyone with an idea of what post modern culture values: lots of choices close at hand. Even those of us who have been dragged into the post modern world are able to cope with the pressure of such readily available choices: mainly good coffee close at hand.

There was once again a good gathering of Crosslink leaders. Herman Reuters was the only one down from Toowoomba. Wayne and Jane Dillon were there all the way from Cunnamulla. They had been in Toowoomba because of some treatment that Wayne had to receive so that was a blessing on the side for them and us. Mike Smith was there as well and it was great to see him after a long spell. Ian Campbell came with Mark Setch. Ian is the Director of the Natural Church Development research and consultant group in Australia and was able to bring us some very interesting statistical summaries about aspects of Christian ministry we were talking about, mainly in the leadership area. NCD is an amazing phenomenon. It was started many years ago by a German guy called Christian Schwartz. They have done something like 68 million individual Christian surveys of something like 44,000 (maybe wrong in numbers here) churches around the world. They try to measure the health of churches and base their ideas on the fact that healthy churches create healthy growth and unhealthy churches either don’t grow or grow in such a way that does not sustain growth. They build their data around eight characteristics that they believe are signs of health churches. I can’t remember them all but they cover things like: empowering leadership, loving relationships, need oriented evangelism, inspirational worship, life giving structures, something to do with small groups and….. (?).

Ian Shelton had talked with me about some of the results they had gleaned from across Australia and in Toowoomba. They work on a system of identifying the strongest and weakest areas and then providing tools to help churches lift their game in their weak areas. The assumption is that the weak areas are what limits growth rather than the idea that just keeping focused on strong areas. It is a good snapshot and we did a survey some years ago. Interestingly the factor which turns out to be the strongest in Australia (compared to other nations) is loving relationships (mateship). Just as interestingly, when Ian asked for the figures for all the churches in Toowoomba who had done the survey (only eight) the weakest link was loving relationships. It seems hard to reconcile that with what I know of Toowoomba where more than fifty of the more than eighty church pastors meet for prayer each Friday and where they have perhaps the strongest expression of unity in the whole of Australia. The other thing about Toowoomba is that they have the highest percentage of church going people in Australia (somewhere over 20% I think).

We began to share together and soon were engaged in good interaction about leadership and the functions that made leadership effective in keeping the church headed in the right direction. There was an interesting and engaging discussion as we talked around the issues raised by Ian and the question as to whether the NCD surveys were able to measure health by Biblical standards and success by Biblical standards. It was helpful not as a contest of ideas but as a way of clarifying just what it is that we are trying to do and where the co-ordinates are for churches in a network like Crosslink. Ian rightly observed that we are at a crossroads as a network and have not really found an identity.

One of the clear reasons for this has to do with my own approach to leadership in the network. It is a fact that I have formerly thought of Crosslink as something of a “parking lot.” It was simply a place where people could park their churches and receive some help getting patched up and helping them to get internally strong so that they could drive out onto whatever road they chose and do a good job. Some time during the past year I have become aware of the fact that Crosslink probably is a roadway for the constituent churches and ministries to travel along. It is probably a particular roadway, not any kind of roadway. It is probably not a narrow path that will exclude all but a few idiosyncratic misfits, but a roadway that has a set of coordinates designating where we are heading rather than a set of gutters indicating who is on or off the road. Maybe it is like a bunch of planes flying to a certain latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates. I don’t want to lose my way trying to tailor a bunch of analogies that only produce more confusion, but I think there are definite coordinates.

Among those coordinates are the challenge of seeing apostles and prophets raised up to give foundational leadership for churches. Whatever expression of church we may be involved in at a given time, there needs to be people who know from God what represents the greater measure of the fullness of Jesus Christ and there needs to be people who can oversee the implementation of that process. The first of those is the function of prophets and the second is the function of apostles. I think we will have to keep on saying that we are not talking about offices with the title on the door, or business cards with the title under the name. I am convinced that such a process is neither wise nor practical in Australia. I do think a deliberate attempt to walk before God and cry out to him for those ministries to be unashamedly established is vital.

Well, we had a great time pushing the boundaries. Everyone had a go at sharing their hearts and insights, some fears, other bad experiences but always with hope for something Biblical and something with credibility. There is more to do tomorrow, but we got on the road (not to push the analogy into tedium). We broke camp at around four o’clock.

We still didn’t have anywhere to stay, and I had to get to a hot spot McDonalds to upload some radio programs. Mike Smith was keen to hang out further and Herman wanted to talk with Rob a bit more, so Jenny drove us to the closest McD’s and we all did what we had to do. You can say what you like about the fat content of a big mac, but the opportunity for a traveler to connect to the internet makes the golden arches a welcome sign. While we were there Graeme received a phone call from his brother in law in Wayville Heights who offered us a bed for the night so Jenny drove us there on her way home. She lives in Shailer Park (Shingles territory if you’ve just joined the journey) so it was good of her to take the slow road home.

Mark (married to Karen Hush’s sister) is a great bloke. He is a bricklayer by trade, but has all kinds of talents and abilities. They have bought a large two storey home on the side of a hill looking toward the city. There was a beautiful sunset happening when we arrived so Rob was out with the digital pumping images onto his flash card. Mark is currently restoring the house which they will eventually rent as two flats. It was still a work in progress but there was new carpet and mattresses on the floor so we were well supplied. A Thai takeaway and a few hours of conversation later we ‘headed for the mattresses’ (to quote from the Godfather and You’ve Got Mail). Once again I was dead tired but very fulfilled because of the distance we had travelled and the way we had connected with the guys in the meeting today.