missional ywamer

the Blog has Moved

2007-12-03T09:13:00.000-08:00

Thanks for reading my blog. I have moved my missional musings to www.kiwiupover.com, I look forward to find you over there soon.

Dave Laird the kiwiupover

Friends and Über spiritual language.

2007-03-21T16:18:00.000-07:00

I have been wondering if christians who use an über spiritual language have any friends outside church. I mean friends that are involved in your life. I don't think they do. How could someone outside the church relate with that type of language.

I think back over my life and remember a few time people telling me I was to heavenly minded to be any earthly use. Also there were many years I didn't have friends outside of my christian world. Mate you should have heard my language back then too. I hope that I'm getting closer to a language that people around me could understand and connect with.

My friend Gea Gort is a journalist in Holland, writing for the best paper in town on spiritual subjects which were really well received in the very post christian culture. She says the reason why she can write this way is because she has deep friendships with non christians.

I think it is an important skill and way of life for a missional person. We need to be people who speak of spiritual things in an earthy everyday language.

Amazing Grace

2007-03-01T10:44:00.000-08:00

Last night I wept from the beginning to end of the film "Amazing Grace." William Wilberforce a member of English Parliament lived a life that allowed the Kingdom of God change his life and in turn saw God change his country and the world. This film tells the story of Wilberforce and his struggle for abolish the slave trade in England, which changed the world wide slave trade. I think the film makers did a great job showing the integration of his faith and his work.

Next week I'm hosting a discussion called "Working for God" to help empower people to see how their faith can be huge part of their work. Wilberforce was a man who integrated his faith into his daily life that has in turn changed the world. He help found the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) among other things. I think the way we have been taught to follow God has separated our spirituality and humanity. The integration of those two is where a missional life begins.

This year marks 200 years since the abolition of the slave trade in England however there are still a huge number of people trafficked and enslaved in horrible working environments around the world today. Stop the Traffik is one group of people working today to stop the underground slave trade. Also check out onevoicetoendslavery.com

Missional Living Podcast!

2007-02-26T17:16:00.000-08:00

I have been listing to this podcast by Machael Frost about missional living, stories from his life in Sydney Australia, and it has really encouraged me. Encouraged me to live out my thoughts and dreams of a missional life. I want to live a missional life with others, get together and talk about each others experiences and dreams. So to hear stories of these stories really helps and Michael Frost tells it in such a way that it compels me to move outside my lack of confidence. Here is the link to the podcast. There are 6 podcasts with this one being the last. I had to look around the site to the find the first but the others are easily downloadable. I would love to hear the 7th podcast of 7 but I can't find it, bummer.

Not the Same Newsletter

2006-08-11T16:17:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting in one of my favorite coffee shop these days. Cloud City Maple Leaf for Life Baby. Also trying to write a newsletter before we head out in two day to the Oregon Coast with the family for two Holiday.

As I think through the last few months what were have been doing and try to communicate that with our supports I'm having a hard time talking about the details. The details toady are so much about friendships, about people. I would be horrified if one of those people we are working with are seen as a project. They my friends, they are not projects. They are people that are being good friends to us as well. Involved in our lives caring for our kids and for Jen and I.

Our supporters are allowing us to think through this way of life we are trying to live and we are totally honoured to have them involved in our lives. We need them at this point of our lives we are going to figure out how to live better as followers of Christ in a Western context.

So if we are involved in our neighbors lives, in our friends lives, hanging out with people at the coffee shop we can't talk about those people. So our newsletters have to be about how we live, who we are, the way we are living. Not about people and projects.

Sustainability

2006-05-19T16:45:00.000-07:00

I was reading Patrick Dodson's blog about sustainability which sparked some of my own thoughts.

I have thought that this moving short term mentality, project based life that we have been taught, modeled in YWAM is not good for us. I was taught that privates in an army make decisions based on how they see the future a month or two ahead. However Generals make decisions based on they see the future 50 years from now. During my time on DTS staff I thought that I was a private only being able to think a few months ahead. When I finished staffing seven DTSs and went on to other things in YWAM I was shocked to find that I was thinking many years into the future.

I have been wondering for years now ""what are we teaching students when we set up outreaches to move to three or four different locations over the two months of their outreach." I think we teach students more by the way we do things than by what we say.

I heard a guy saying that we need to live in a way so that we live in a way. We have lived in a way in YWAM. That way has been program after program then on to the next school. Country after different country and then on to a zone. Relationship built, relationship long distance on to new relationship. The roots are not deep. I lived in LA for ten years and my roots there are not deep at all, I'm sad to say. However that was the way it was modeled to me.

I really want us to live in a way that new students join. They join our rhythm of life and not the other way around. When a child is born into a family that child joins the life of that family. I see a lot of families these days that the new child sets a new tone or new rhythm from day one. The new parents change totally the way they live because of the needs of the new baby. It seems that the new baby dictates the way the family lives. The rhythm is now around the demand feeding, the nappy changing of this one month old child.

I believe this is what happens with DTSs in a lot of cases. We go out into the streets because the students are here. We put on our outreach mindsets because we are on outreach with the DTS.

We are not long termers we are still short-termers we just happen to live here.

Bright Hope

2006-03-13T10:32:00.000-08:00

I was walking around San Francisco last week with a bounce in my step. No really even a skip or two. I'm really excited about the future. We were looking at some art in SF, the colors were full of hope, bright morning colors, yellows and bright reds. Hopeful and I think I'm catching it. We also walked past Crate and Barrel the home furnishing store, it was not the same, very tame muted colors, lots of white but sterile. It reminded me of the church how we often try to be relevant but end up being tame and sterile.

Anyways I'm looking forward with hope and excitement.

What do you think the future looks like?

Anti Excellence

2006-03-01T16:04:00.001-08:00

I have been thinking about excellence and our preoccupation with it in the church.

Here are a few quotes from a piece Mark Pierson wrote a number of years back.

I’m anti excellence. I’m anti excellence in church life and I’m particularly anti excellence in worship.

It’s not a popular opinion to express in some churches today. In fact excellence has become such an important value in these circles that they sponsor and attend expensive conferences devoted to the theme. I don’t know much about what happens at these junkets for pastors but I did come very close to attending one earlier this year. I even had my ticket, but when I looked at the programme and discovered that the creative-arts-in-worship track consisted entirely of an exhaustive treatment of every aspect of vocal technique and worship-band performance I decided that staying away would be my contribution to excellence that week.

I wonder if excellence is a cultural value rather than a biblical one? I’m sure someone will quote a First Testament verse referring to the excellence required of artisans working on the temple in King Solomon’s time, but I think they’d be hard pushed to squeeze one (even that tenuously linked) from the Second Testament. Particularly from the lips of Jesus. I don’t think excellence in worship is a goal that has any biblical support. Which isn’t to say that excellence in church life is always bad. It doesn’t have to be, but a preoccupation with it is never good - particularly when those promoting it have been reading books like In Search of Excellence and A Passion for Excellence.

Here’s what the latter of these widely read and revered books has to say about excellence. ‘Even a pocket of excellence can fill your life like a wall-to-wall-revolution. We have found that the majority of passionate activists who hammer away at the old boundaries have given up family vacation…birthday dinners, evenings, weekends and lunch hours, gardening, reading, movies and other pastimes. We have a number of friends whose marriages or partnerships crumbled under their devotion to a dream. There are more newly single parents than we expected among our colleagues.

We are frequently asked if it is possible to "have it all" – a full and satisfying personal life and a full and satisfying hard-working professional one. Our answer is: no. The price of excellence is time, energy, attention and focus. At the same time the energy, attention and focus could have gone toward enjoying your daughter’s soccer game.

Excellence is a high cost item’. That sounds like a description of some Christians I know, responding to the vision and expectations of their churches. It doesn’t sound much like a statement you’d find Jesus making to his followers.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not against excellence per se. Just it’s elevation to sainthood. In fact I’m really not so much anti excellence as pro participation. I reckon participation is what church life should be about. Participation rather than performance, and a pursuit of excellence always, always, ends up being about performance.

If excellence is a primary goal, then the weak, the timid, the depressed, the disabled, the unskilled, the sick, the introverted, overweight, the less attractive, the poor and the untalented aren’t going to get a look in. They’ll be relegated to being spectators for someone else’s worship performance.

From this perspective excellence doesn’t look so good. In fact it sounds quite unChrist-like, almost evil. How can a process and a value that excludes large sections of a worshipping community from active participation be named in any other way? Jesus had some pretty harsh words for those in his day who devised ways of making it tough for ordinary people to worship God. Something about them being as spiritually alive as painted up tombs, and not being able to see clearly because they had something in their eye.

It seems to me that basically church must be about supporting people in their following of Christ in the world. Everything else flows from that. We come together as followers of Jesus so we can share stories of the successes and failures of our life in the world, find encouragement and support in being with each other and in worshipping God together, and separate to follow Christ through another week. What we need to value most is community – our relationships with one another. That’s why I’m pro participation, regardless of how excellent or poor that participation might be. It’s only in being open to as much participation as possible that community can be built.

The prayer of confession I lead the church in may not be the best theology, it may not be the most polished performance, it may even offend some people with it’s awkward language, but it will reflect who I am and where my relationship with God is at and you’ll get to know me a little more than you did before, and maybe you’ll even get to make your confession. During the week the pastor or some one else may talk with me about how I did, and offer some encouragement and some other perspectives on the theology of forgiveness, and next time I’ll do an even better job. Our community will be strengthened, and most importantly, I’ll have taken a little more responsibility for my own spiritual maturity.

I’ve said I’m anti excellence in church life, but I’m pro excellence in my life and in the life of every person in our congregation. I want to be the best I can be at what I do and who I am. I want the same for everyone at Cityside Baptist where I worship. I want what we offer as worship to be as good as it can be, but I’ll take participation over excellence every time.

I hope our worship and wider life together at Cityside will produce confident, maturing followers of Jesus Christ who live creatively and courageously in the chaotic emerging culture. Maturing followers of Jesus Christ able to interpret their faith in the market place of life. If we produce excellence in some of our services along the way, that’s excellent, but it’s not our goal.

I think that if we are to embody the gospel we have to give room for the people in the community have a say in where that community is going. If we are to grow as followers of Christ we have to allow our selves to be seen for who we really are. Also allow the people around us to speak up out of the understanding they have. How else do we find out where each other is at on the journey of following Christ.

The YWAM World I Know

2006-02-20T17:27:00.000-08:00

My parents led DTS's when I was a kid from 5 till 11, we as a family were in YWAM. We were in Hawaii for a year and a half of that time the rest in New Zealand. I joined YWAM in Jan 92 doing my DTS in LA and going to Estonia for my outreach. I went back to Estonia a year later with the first DTS I staffed. That is where a huge question was raised for me.

On my DTS our team went from School to school doing our way cool drama's, preaching, tambourine dancing, and testimoning with lots of hands being raised at the end of each meeting. As a team we were totally stocked really it was amazing. But on my return the church hadn't grown at all. What the ... I was not allowed to question this or I was blown off with a very simple "it is in God's hands."

I was at a Mission Adventures network gig in 2001, Danny Lehmann spoke in the morning on evangelism and our need to be doing it, not it, but evangelism. We had a time of repentance following his talk but I just felt mad and frustrated. His talk pissed me off, I didn't understand why I was so mad. That evening Tony Jones of Emergant fame, talked on postmodernism and how the playing field had changed. Evangelism had to be different. It all may sense, I felt liberated. Someone had allowed me to ask questions. So the shift started for me.

As I started to question my YWAM world a lot more questions arose. Is doing evangelism the right question, where did discipleship fit in? Were we living in a way that help people become disciples of Christ? Why did we have such a division between the Christian world and the rest of the world? Discipleship is always relationship based that made relating amongst us as YWAMers of utmost importance, but why were we not very good friends? How could I change Mission Adventures outreaches fit in with the way God was asking me to live? Heaps of questions.

Missional YWAMers

2006-02-09T15:46:00.000-08:00

Last week I was hanging out with a few choice people in Orlando namely Will and Lori from YWAM PismoBeach, Kim from YWAM Winnipeg, William from YWAM Seattle, good connections happened. Also some of the YWAM big wigs were talking about young leaders again in the same old ways

I have been thinking for a while now, could I live out the life I'm being led into while being in YWAM. In these people I heard the language I use, I saw a desire to live out the YWAM life in similar ways I have been thinking about. While we were in Orlando the base there wanted to sell the 15 houses they own and buy a large campus so they could all live together. We said why would you do that? We want to live in the world not separated from them. We want to be neighbors and have neighbors.

During my time in YWAM New Zealand, I spent heaps of time rethinking my faith and allowing the questions God had put in my head reshape me and my thinking about the way we live in the YWAM context. I felt lost and alone as I deconstructed my YWAM experience, my wife worried, others left me alone as I got bitter and frustrated, one of my leaders tried to understand but didn't get it. During that time I had one ally, Thomas, a kiwi who had been living in Melbourne Australia working with YWAM and with Allan Hurst author of "the shaping of things to come." Anyway Thomas was a God send. As time passed Thomas was finding it harder and harder to work inside of YWAM and live the way he knew he should. Not long after, he left YWAM, making me think is there a place in YWAM for me. I believe there are a bunch of other people like myself going through the same situations in YWAM. Alot of them are young leaders wanting some help, strength, someone to understand.

I love this mission, I think we have an ethos that could be lived out in a beautiful way. I believe we have room in YWAM to do that also. I'm willing to leave YWAM behind to pursue this life I'm being lead into, if need be.