Here is the powerpoint and handout from my talk for St Albans Diocese on Pioneer Training – 25th November 2011
St Albans CME Pioneer Ministry Powerpoint
Pioneer Ministry St Albans Handout
Here is a recent article from Dave Male which appears on the SHARE THE GUIDE website at http://www.sharetheguide.org/
Church Unplugged or Pimp my church
‘Pimp my church’ was my first choice for the title of this book but MTV were not happy with me using it. (I did also wonder how I would explain that particular title to my mother and mother-in-law!)
For those unaware of the MTV programme ‘Pimp my Ride’ takes a conventional car and gives it a total makeover plus! There are very few limits so your boring family car could end up with a water fountain and a DJ’s sound system. The programme makers say, ‘we turn lemons into lemonade so that you can drive down the street with your head held high.’
Part of the attraction of the title for me was the tension between totally transforming something on the outside to every conceivable extreme but in terms of its engine, transmission etc it stays a conventional car. Everything changes and yet somehow nothing really changes, it’s still really a Skoda!
My worry sometimes with all that is happening under the banner of fresh expressions/church planting is the danger it can be simultaneously spectacular and superficial. I am by nature an optimist but I worry we are too easily entranced by what seems to be spectacular. Often people tell me about some amazing church plant that now has 300 people within a year but then when you start to ask some hard questions of how many of those are truly unchurched people who are now becoming disciples of Jesus the answers look far less convincing. The growth I am afraid is often the success of the market place, attracting Christians from other churches and the de-churched back. My plea is lets not just pimp the church but lets consider the greater work of what it might means for us to do the harder labour of working with the engine, the gear box, the brakes and the transmission! The danger is we are too easily wowed by the shining exterior and clever gadgets!
Maybe the title I was left with from another MTV programme was in the end more challenging. To do the hard work of taking what we are doing in this thing we call ‘church’ and to attempt to strip it back to first principles before proceeding to rebuild. That’s what happened with the writing of my book as I simply offer ten principles that need to be considered in engineering something new. The principles are nothing new but simply come out of seven years of experience of working with some amazing people to create a church that connected with unchurched people in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire.
As I say in the book one of the reasons I wrote the book is because ours is a very ordinary story in a very ordinary town in the North. It may not seem spectacular but it’s not superficial and I hope will play a small part in helping the church not just to work on the chassis but get under the bonnet!
Church Unplugged. Authentic Books 2008 ISBN-13: 978-1-85078-792-1 available from bookshops and online.
