In today's Star Phoenix....

A couple of news stories in the Star Phoenix where I was quoted.  One is in regards to the Barry Hotel closure and what happened to the people that called it home (the good news is that all of them as far as I know have found new places) and the other one is in regards to a tragic apartment fire in which the Salvation Army was on the scene supporting fire crews and victims.  Sadly a women died due to smoke inhalation and five were hospitalized. 

Technorati Tags: Barry Hotel

The Beyond Magazine Shop is now open

I don't know how worried Wal-Mart is about this but I think it is pretty cool. Beyond Magazine's new shop is open. Speaking of Beyond, their blog has a new design and a new magazine is hitting the stands. Click around and check out the renovated digs.

Saskatchewan Wins the 95th Grey Cup

The Saskatchewan Roughriders just won the 95th Grey Cup by beating the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, 23-19 in a game that should not have been that close except for the Roughriders offense sputtered quite a bit.  My favorite was when Winnipeg's coach challenged a video replay decision.  Yes, he threw his challenge flag to challenge a ruling that had already been reviewed by the video replay official.  Brilliant.  This also means that we pass Sarnia on the all time Grey Cup wins list.

Technorati tags: Saskatchewan Roughriders, Winnipeg Blue Bombers, CFL, Grey Cup

What If?

Cultivate Missional Living [CML] is a six month training course for people who want to learn how to engage in mission in an urban community.

[CML] takes place in the Beasley neighbourhood in downtown Hamilton, Ontario - one of the poorest neighbourhoods in Canada - and is hosted by The Freeway.
[CML] is supported by Allelon, Resonate, and The Salvation Army.

For more information about [CML] or to receive an application form, please contact the [CML] director, Jordan Donald, by e-mail [jordan@frwy.ca] or by phone: 905-929-0890.

Technorati tags: CML, Cultivate Missional Living, Resonate, Allelon, Salvation Army, The Freeway, Hamilton, missional living, discipleship

Is Canada becoming a country of bigots?

Maclean's magazine wonders...

Claude Bazinet, a tall man with a wild wisp of white hair, stood on nervous legs and, to a packed room with television cameras rolling, spewed forth his feelings on the immigrants coming to his native Quebec. He spoke of Quebec's tiny Hasidic Jewish population who have "built houses on our land" and surrounded them with fences; he castigated those new arrivals who, because of their skin colour, were favoured by his former employer; he suggested the Muslim faith was endangering Christmas.

"We receive them here, we feed them, we house them, we give them an education, and they don't integrate at all," Bazinet said into the microphone. "What do they do to accommodate? Nothing." As he sat down, many in the audience winced. But many others clapped. Bazinet, a former Bell Canada employee who grew up in Montreal, is one of roughly 340 people who have spoken their mind so far at Quebec's hearings on "reasonable accommodations," a travelling commission chaired by two academics attempting to gauge the province's feelings on immigrants and Quebec society. Premier Jean Charest called it into action last February during an election campaign dominated by issues of immigration and Quebec identity, and in the wake of an embarrassing controversy over the town of Hérouxville's infamous bylaws, the early versions of which outlawed stoning and female circumcision. The commission has been dismissed, sometimes by those testifying before it, as a puff of political expediency. But it has proven to be more revealing, even disturbing than that.

The Globe and Mail has this op-ed as well.

The Parti Québécois is proposing to create two classes of Canadian citizens in Quebec: those who speak French up to a government-imposed standard, and those who do not. Those who do not meet the standard would be denied the right to run for political office, contribute to political parties or sign a petition to the province's National Assembly. Those who meet the standard would be so-called Quebec citizens, with full rights. (Anyone living in Quebec now or born in future to Quebec citizens would be counted as citizens.) The PQ's notion that Quebec has the power to disenfranchise Canadian citizens is ludicrous in a legal sense and repugnant in a moral one.

Consider a banker from Vancouver, either native-born or from abroad. She's a Canadian citizen. Her bank transfers her to Montreal. After three months (under the PQ's proposed "Quebec identity act"), she is eligible for Quebec citizenship. To obtain that citizenship, she needs to meet the provincial standard for speaking French and for knowledge of Quebec. If she's not up to standard, the PQ would bar her from contributing to, say, the Liberal Party of Canada if she so chose. If she wishes to express her objections to this law, she cannot sign a petition being put before the Quebec legislature. If she plans to stay, she cannot run for office, not even for a local school board.

One person, one vote is at the core of any democracy. The PQ would diminish the principle by chipping away the political rights that go with having a vote. The party claims to have constitutional advice that its proposal would be considered reasonable in a free and democratic society under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Nonsense. To carve up the core principle of a democracy would require proof of a devastating and imminent threat to that democracy's survival. And what is that threat?

What do you think? Are Canadians bigots? I know a lot of people who think like Claude Bazinet in Saskatchewan but there are some everywhere. I have blogged before about the "concern" people had when Mark was born, being that he was going to have a tougher time being from a "mixed" family.

I agree with the Globe that this is about sovereignty and while I don't know Quebec politics that well, a lot of Karl Rove lead GOP races over the years were won on wedge issues like this.

So what do you about it? Democracy isn't just majority rule, it is protecting minority rights as well and good people will have to stand up and challenge the words of people like Claude Bazinet.

Technorati tags: politics, Quebec, Parti Quebecois, Jean Charest

Emerging Church Documentary Tour

Nathan Colquhoun (whose blog I just bookmarked because I can never spell his last name correctly without looking it up) took some great photos of the recent emerging church documentary road trip.  The details of the recent road swing are here.

Technorati tags: Emerging Church Documentary, Nathan Colquhoun, Joe Manafo, Kim Reid, Resonate, photography

The War

I don't know if many of you have been watching Ken Burns' latest documentary The War but it has been absolutely amazing. When it is released on DVD, I would like to own it, not just for me but for Mark when he gets older as well. Jason Kottke has one of memorable lines in the series on his blog and it is a series of memorable stories, images, and tells a version of the Second World War that many of the Allies don't like being reminded of, especially atrocities committed by American and Allied troops (Ambrose's book, Band of Brothers has similar stories in it). I remember sitting down over breakfast with a friend of the family years ago and him explaining to me the fighting in Ortona and later Holland and how brutal the fighting was but especially the horrible choices that are made by a patrol leader in the middle of the night when one is out numbered. Despite have read a couple hundred books on the Second World War over the last two decades, The War seems to have made it more real which I guess is a good thing but a disconcerting thing at the same time.

 

Technorati tags: The War, Ken Burns, Band of Brothers, World War II, history

Getting Dirty

Pernell is talking about the Freeway and what ministry is like in one of Canada's poorest neighborhoods

Ours is not a "one-size-fits-all" neighbourhood [or church community]. On a daily basis we encounter folks who face all sorts of challenges in their lives: financial, emotional, physical, mental, spiritual, etc. Being part of The Freeway means that you are faced, first-hand, with what it means to live with and minister to people [and receive ministry from people] who:

• Crap their pants during church. Smell terrible. And haven't the sense to excuse themselves and go clean up.
• Have job interviews and come in looking for you because they need a pair of pants, because they don't have unsoiled pants to wear at the job interview you've helped them prepare for.
• Think that sex is the only way they can validate who they are, or make a living, or find love, or stay in the country. So they exploit others or are themselves exploited.
• Have to choose between baby formula and their next fix. They really don't know which would be the better choice for their family.
• Have been rejected by their family, friends and community because of their sexual orientation, or loss of work, or religious confusion, or a decision they made when they were a kid.
• Are desperate for God. But have been rejected by the church, or can't make their way through the religious mumbo jumbo, or don't know where to begin, or feel unworthy.
• Just need to eat a meal, or get a hug, or talk with another human being.

This was a hard post to read and describes work day in and day out.

Brian McLaren in Ottawa

The Ottawa Citizen's story on Brian McLaren speaking in Ottawa to the Anglican church.

Can Brian McLaren heal the fractured Anglican church with a new vision of Christianity for the 21st century? The balding, bespectacled baby boomer is one of the leading lights in a new Christian movement: church without speeches, rules, robes -- sometimes without churches. Ottawa's Anglicans have invited this leader of the "emerging church" movement to speak tomorrow and Saturday so that he might show them how to stay faithful -- and hopeful -- during a time when Anglicans are undergoing one of the most wrenching times in their church's history.

Talk about high expectations for a conference.

Joseph Moreau of Ecclesiax is mentioned as well.

In Ottawa, Ecclesiax on Monk Street has been identified with the emergent church movement, although one of its leaders, Joseph Moreau, is reluctant to be tagged with something so trendy. On a recent Sunday, a handful of faithful gathered in the Ecclesiax church, some with a few children. There were dreadlocks, and a sort of Mohawk "unplugged" -- no gel to keep the hair upright. Scripture was read, music played, prayers were said and bread and wine were offered with the understanding that whoever took the bread was undertaking to be a follower of Jesus. Later, though, Mr. Moreau hesitated about whether the methods of Ecclesiax could be grafted on to the older communities.

It doesn't look like the reporter thinks that Joseph can save the Anglican church though.

The Dusty Cover Used Bookstore

Jamie Arpin-Ricci and YWAM Winnipeg are launching The Dusty Cover Used Bookstore.

The Dusty Cover is a non-profit used bookstore started in October 2007 in Winnipeg's historic West End neighbourhood and is dedicated to serving and investing into our community. In addition to being a good source of used books at great prices, our comfortable lounge is an excellent place to enjoy a hot cup of coffee, tea or hot chocolate, all fair trade products.

I can't wait to check it out.

Have your lawyer call me...

Article on how divorces after 30 years together are getting more and more common.

Not long after the 30th wedding anniversary party, after the family photos had been thoroughly reviewed, the toasts and good wishes shared, the presents opened, the guests thanked, not long after the roses in the vase had wilted and sagged, he/she (you pick) left a note on the kitchen table that read in part: "Gone for good.… Get your lawyer to phone mine. Soon."

Wendy and I know a couple of couples who decided to end their marriage after 20+ years which strikes me as being really, really sad.

Wendy @ the Canada Remembers Air Show

Wendy posted her photos from the Canada Remembers Air Show and I have to admit, by and large, are better than mine.

Making Saskatoon Proud!

Soldiers on the HMCS Saskatoon say cocaine use was rampant.

Hern told the military court he found the ship's crew divided into two camps: the quiet ones who didn't use drugs and the others, described by Hern as the most senior members, that ran the ship.

Way to make your home city proud! Court martials are ongoing.

Canada Day Picnic

I posted about this before but I thought I would let you know that the Church of the Exiles is getting together for a picnic on Sunday at Kinsmen Park.  All of the details can be found here but here is the important stuff.

• Time: 4:00 p.m.
• Location: The plan is to meet at Kinsmen Park in the area that is in between City Hospital and the Kinsmen Park parking lot and is just west of the Mendel Art Gallery.
• What to bring: Lawn chairs, mosquito repellent, food for a picnic.  We will bring a propane powered stove (there are no BBQ's in the park).
• Activities: Water park, Frisbee, food, and reflecting on what Canada would be like if William Shatner becomes Prime Minister.

Technorati tags: Canada Day, Saskatoon, picnic, Kinsmen Park

Our Generations Legacy

Glen Murray has a thoughtful piece in the Toronto Star on the controversy over Toronto firefighters and police taking the yellow ribbons off their cars.

While ribbons and rubber wrist bands have been de rigueur fashion for the politically correct, most who wear them invest little more than a loonie or the risk of a pinprick as sacrifice to the colour-coded cause.

It is a little different when the city's first responders stick a ribbon decal on their vehicles. They live the same commitment as soldiers do to protect others. Police officers stand between us and harm. Firefighters walk into situations we are taught to flee, and few people are more engaged in dealing with unrelenting life-and-death crises than paramedics, who must possess a stamina I can't even imagine to do their jobs.

Police officers, firefighters, paramedics and, most of all, soldiers, represent the highest expression of citizenship and public service as they offer themselves as the price for its preservation.

We seem to take those freedoms for granted as we stumble out of bed each day and hop the subway to safe jobs in safe buildings without fearing a bomb will go off or a bullet will be fired at us.

The strength of a civil society, for which so many have given their lives, depends on the quality of its citizenship. Citizenship is about more than casting a vote or paying taxes. Citizens are more than passive consumers of events; they try to make a difference.

Elected officials are paid to pursue the public good on behalf of the citizens they represent, to advocate and speak out against injustice, and to mobilize the resources of their community to improve the quality of peoples' lives. All this in an effort to build a just society.

So little is asked of us today. We are the generation that inherited from our parents what is arguably the world's strongest economy and greatest democracy.

We are healthier and better educated; we live longer, enjoy more liberty and have at our fingertips greater technology and knowledge than any past generation.

This is our inheritance from a generation that faced war, depression, and who came to Canada fleeing genocide, oppression and holocaust to arrive on this young nation's soil in search of hope. From so little they left us so much. We should start to consider what our legacy will be.

Technorati tags: yellow ribbon, Afghanistan, Toronto

The Conservative Party NASCAR ad strategy

The Ottawa Citizen tries to make sense of the Conservative Party sponsoring a NASCAR car.

The Tories already have a relatively solid grip on the blue-collar, male demographic that comprises the core audience for stock car racing. And although NASCAR claims 75 million North American fans -- including about 5.8 million in Canada -- the small-time Canadian circuit, with shorter tracks and a shorter season, more typically attracts audiences of about 5,000 to 10,000 fans, according to Mr. Novotny.

"Our circuit is sort of like the minors in hockey. The junior system that feeds into the majors eventually," he explains.

Furthermore, while the "NASCAR dads" comprise a strong Republican party force in the U.S., that sort of narrowly segmented approach to the electorate is of dubious value in Canada.

"That sort of tight demographic focus works in the U.S. where there's very low voter turnout and you have to target who to motivate at the polls," says Peter Donolo, who was communications director for former prime minister Jean Chretien and is now with Strategic Counsel in Toronto. "Canadians are a lot more label-resistant. They tend to defy that type of facile characterization."

He notes the Tories are "preaching to the converted" in gender terms as well, since their support already skews heavily to men -- as do NASCAR events.

Even if the GOP did sponsor a NASCAR car, would it make you change your vote or even consider voting for another party?

Technorati tags: Canada, NASCAR, Conservative Party, marketing, politics, advertising, Pierre Bourque

The Emerging Church Documentary

Joe Manafo is blogging the creation of a documentary that is chronicling the emergence of the emerging church in Canada.  You can follow on the blog and see some of the footage as it is uploaded to YouTube.

Technorati tags: emerging church, documentary, church, Canada Day, video

The Power of Lobbying

via

Technorati tags: Canada, politics, MPAA, YouTube, piracy, copyright, lobbying, camcordering, Bev Oda, Stephen Harper

Not a Leader

I have never minded Stephen Harper that much as Prime Minister, he hasn't really inspired me to dream great dreams but he isn't as evil as some have said it is (he isn't a neo-conservative) but this kind of stuff really turns me off the Conservative Party. The blog by Kyoto seems especially juvenile. Sadly, more often then not, it works.

God Save the Queen

It's Victoria Day long weekend in Canada where we celebrate the Queen and everything she means to us. I have only seen the Queen once and that was when her motorcade was going north on Idylwyld Drive and we were headed south. It was just a brief second but I think we bonded. She as the bored monarch and me as the disinterested simple peasant.

Back in 1991 I was attended a dinner held in honor of Prince Andrew and his then wife, Princess Sarah. The dinner was fine but I realized that public speaking skills were not a prerequisite to being a part of the Royal Family.

While I have to work today, we got together for a fun barbecue at our house last night with some of the Church of the Exiles. The rain held off and we had enough propane for the grill so all was good. We did have some frightening conversations about music and the deep dark mp3s that all of us have hidden on our iPods. We should have had a confessional set up because someone said that she had actually seen Carmen in concert.

The Present Church

Below is a rather wordy article for my denomination's magazine to help get people thinking outside the box in how we see the local church. Not sure if it worked but people have been saying nice things about it to my face at least :-)



For Lent this year, I decided to give up politics. In the past I had given up caffeine, chocolate, television, and even NHL hockey playoffs but this year I decided to step back from following politics which is something I spend too much time thinking and reading about. Of course this meant trying to ignore the Quebec election of which I had some success in doing. On Monday, March 27th, I was agonizing over the final edits of this article, which was supposed to be about the future of the church. I decided to take a brief television break and was confronted with some really boring choices. While surfing channels, I found myself watching CTV Newsnet and seeing what the talking heads were saying about the Quebec election. Before I caught myself, I heard the panel chortling to themselves over the comment, "Who could have predicted that this result was going to happen to Jean Charest?" I remember the exact same comment being said during former Saskatchewan Premier Roy Romanow's final election when he was handed a minority. A couple of hours before that I remember a well known political commentator leading off his networks coverage with, “Is there anything that will stand between the NDP and another strong majority? No there isn’t”. Well the prognosticators were wrong that evening as well.

The phrase made me think about a book I had read a couple of years ago by Canadian political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon called The Ingenuity Gap. One of the books recurring themes is that we live in a world with a tremendous amount of variables which are overwhelming and make it very difficult to predict the outcome of our decisions. The book goes to show how complex our inter-connected world is and how poorly we understand how it works despite our proclamations to the opposite. From the food chain in the English Channel, to water planning in Las Vegas, to international markets during the Asian currency crisis; time and time again experts missed something that invalidated all of calculations for the future. Not only is it hard to know all of the variables that will influence our future, we are constantly hit by fads that while seem important, really aren't (like election news stories over which tie color resonates best with voters)

As I returned to edit my article for Mosaic, I realized that I was probably making the exact same mistake. There are too many variables, too many things that can change. If the all knowing pollsters and Mike Duffy can't forecast a 40 day election, how do we talk about the future of the church farther than that? All of the variables of culture plus the complexities of denomination and local church dynamics make it hard to predict any future.

So what can we talk about? Instead of talking about the future, it may be helpful to discuss the the factors that are happening now that will impact the future. To often organizations live in the past as it is easier to understand and don't have the needed conversations on what is happening the present that will shape their future.

Post-Christian Canada and the West

In a couple of books I have read in the last year, they have referenced some recent studies that point out by 2040, under 5% of people in England may be Christian (only 9.4% are attending church now) According to church statistics, the four main UK denominations, the Church of England, the Roman Catholic, the Methodist, and United Reformed Churches, are all suffering from a long-term decline in attendance figures. The good thing is that they realize this and are trying new ideas to reverse the decline. The Anglican and Methodist Churches have started their Fresh Expressions initiative which encourages new expressions of church like alternative worship, and even the Archbishop of Canterbury plans to be broadcasting his sermons on YouTube in an acknowledgment that more and more Anglicans just aren't in church on Sundays. While some of the initiatives talked about as other Fresh Initiatives seemed a little off the mark, it is encouraging that the Church of England the Methodist Church in England are acknowledging that something has to change.

In Australia, things aren't that much more encouraging but in a recent book called The Forgotten Ways, missiologist Alan Hirsch sees it this way

A combination of recent research in Australia indicates that about 10-15 percent of that population is attracted to what we call the contemporary church growth model. In other words, this model has significant "market appeal" to about 12 percent of our population. The more successful forms of this model tend to be large, highly professionalized, and overwhelmingly middle class, and express themselves culturally using contemporary, "seeker friendly" language and middle-of-the-road music forms. They structure themselves around "family ministry" and therefore offer multi-generational services. Demographically speaking, they tend to cater largely to what might be called the "family-values-segment"--good, solid, well-educated citizens who don't abuse their kids, who pay their taxes, and who live largely, what can be called a suburban lifestyle.

Not only is this type of church largely made up of Christian people who fit this profile, the research indicates that these churches can also be very effective in reaching non-Christian people fitting the same demographic description--the people within their cultural reach. That is, the church does not have to cross any significant cultural barriers in order to communicate the gospel to that cultural context. (pg 35)

In the United States, the number attracted to the idea of church may be as high as 35%. Canadian polls suggest that about 20 - 30% of Canadians may share values that would be open to going to church (approximately 20% of people say they attending church regularly but that number is often inflated by people exaggerating how often they attend church). That number is a both a blessing and a curse. It shows that at least about six to seven million Canadians are open to the values articulated by the church which do provide a large pool of Canadians for the church to draw from but even that is difficult as pollster George Barna sees the family values segment of the population to fall by half in approximately fifteen years.

While nothing is wrong with those within that segment, most of us as Free Methodists would be there and by in large, they are not that offensive of a people group. Six million Canadians is nothing to sneeze at and does provide a significant opportunity for the church but that is only part of the story.

Of course what is to make of the people outside of that family values segment? Depending on how one looks at the numbers, anywhere from 65% to 85% of Canadians are removed by various degrees from that category and from those values. They make up the vast bulk of Canadians that have to overcome some obstacles to come to our churches as the church is not even on their radar. According to what Alan Hirsch writes in The Forgotten Ways, in addition to not being on the radar for most people, a large percentage are at some level alienated by the church. From bad experiences, to strong preconceived ideas about Christianity or from a cultural context that is hostile to Christianity, it would be as hard for them to be a part of a church as it would be many Free Methodists to join a non-Christian religion. Doing “church” better; PowerPoint, better music, wittier or more theologically astute sermons probably won’t make any impact on those that are outside the church because they are unlikely to bother entering the doors in the first place.

The other factor in society is that there has been a breakdown in the mass markets. Where at one point a church used to pick a neighborhood and then put down it's roots and if church was "done right", it had a good chance to reach their area for Christ. Depending on the church, property values actually rose if you were closer to a church. A middle class neighborhood would have middle class people in it with middle class values. Today that is changing where traditional people groups have segmented and segmented again. The mass market is shrinking and those neighborhoods are made up of a variety of sub-groups.

What does that mean for the future of the church?

While it is popular to lament the loss of the Christian fabric in Canadian culture and condemn those that don't share our values, that probably won't do anything to reverse the change. Complaining that people don't go to church anymore won't change anything.

When Anglican Bishop nd missionary, Leslie Newbiggin came back to England at the age of 65 after spending most of his career in India, this is what he found.

Ministry in England, he discovered, "is much harder than anything I met in India. There is a cold contempt for the Gospel which is harder to face than opposition. . . . England is a pagan society and the development of a truly missionary encounter with this very tough form of paganism is the greatest intellectual and practical task facing the Church" (Unfinished Agenda).

It is hard, Newbigin knew, for a Hindu or a Muslim to come to worship Christ. For an Englishman, it would seem, it had become even harder.

Whats life for the church going to be like in a post-Christian Canada. A world in which we are seen more and more irrelevant? There isn't a definite roadmap or program to follow and I think the mass segmentation will force the church for the first time in a long time to chart their own paths as we enter into new territory. That being said, there are some that have been at this for a little longer and have adjusted to their own contexts.

The Freeway in downtown Hamilton is both a church community and coffee shop serving both those looking for coffee and a place to connect online as well as the urban poor.

Three Nails in Pittsburgh is an Episcopal church plant that has embedded itself into the community by meeting a need that I never would have thought of and that is making really good New York City style hot dogs. They helped open a restaurant that used to be called Hot Dogma but was sued over the name so now they are called Franktuary. Their motto in case you are wondering is And the meat shall inherit the earth.

Harambee in Pasadena, California Back in 1982, Navarro Avenue in Pasadena, California had the highest daytime crime rate in Southern California. Believing that the only way they could make a difference was to move into the neighborhood, Dr. John Perkins started a ministry on "blood corner" (named because of the drive by shootings). Twenty five years later it had largely changed the neighborhood and curbed the violence. Not only that but it has prepared two generations of church leaders as well on a campus that is essentially several small houses with a common backyard. It doesn't take much to change the world.

The same can be said about emerging congregations and church plants in the Free Methodist Church. Ecclesiax and ThirdSpace reach artists and creative types in different ways because their local contexts are different.

Some Anglican churches in London, England empowered and nurtured new faith communities who met in their own buildings. Most often with no staff or clergy, these communities formed what is now called alternative worship and is engaging a portion of England's population that would never enter into a traditional worship context. At the same time they give new life to traditional congregations.

Some churches in urban areas saw what a place called Paragraph NY did, which is create a place that is essentially a gym but instead is a place for writers and creative types to work. They looked at a lot of unused space, got a good coffee maker, and wireless Internet and opened up the doors... and people came in.

At the end of the day, the church is going to have to learn to reconnect with their community as opposed to rely on the community to come to them. Whether or not churches can do that will largely determine how long of a future they have.

The Future of Theological Education

I remember being a conference years ago when the comparison was made between the average income of baby boomers measured against things like education, mortgage, and transportation. Then they compared my generation. Everything was more expensive but especially education and at that moment I realized that the Freedom 55 commercials were not targeted at me. The presenter put it into what it meant for the church. To go to seminaries like Wheaton or Fuller, it meant that you either had to be older and saved up some money, come from a wealthy family, or willing to take on a large amount of student loan debt. This has affected even smaller Bible Colleges who are faced with an aging donor base and less contributions which has meant higher tuitions.

The costs associated with education keep many interested learners at arms length. A building costs money; faculty need to be paid and they expect certain privileges associated with their position. Beyond that, the physical space of education limits the number of students who can participate (those who can get to the location, those who can fit into the facilities). After a while the school's priorities shift toward the necessities of taking care of the building and faculty, and these begin to displace the original educational goals.

This starts to impact the wider church in a couple of ways as it also influences students. As I heard one seminary faculty member say it, whether the student or his family is footing the expensive cost of seminary education, it makes students less inclined or less able to enter the mission field or enter into a ministry context that does not pay a certain amount of money or safety.

The long term consequences of that happening to more church leaders is easy to see. Only wealthy churches have access to quality theological thinkers and the church may have to withdraw from areas that can not afford a certain level of compensation.

There has been others who have seen this happening and are working to create an alternative future. City Seminary of New York is a collaborative project of churches across New York City who brings in theologians and speakers to help church leaders in their local contexts. Fees are as low as $10 (to cover meals). The Alternative Seminary in Philadelphia is developing training materials and offering classes for those that can not afford it. Closer to home, in Kingston there is the Invisible College which tackles big issues from a Christian worldview. Topics like globalization and how technology impacts our lives have been past topics. Resonate has hosted several local discussions with theologians and thinkers over the last three years in Toronto and Hamilton all for free.

While seminaries and many local churches have been slower to adopt this model in favor of selling content, more and more universities are giving away their lectures, course work, and even tests for free over the Internet. M.I.T.'s OpenCourseWare allows you to tap into M.I.T.'s vast teaching resources as a teacher or self-learner for free. It doesn't grant you a degree or credits but it does share the wisdom. TED, a world leading conference of big thinkers has recently used Google Video to make their entire conference available for free online. While I questioned the Archbishop of Canterbury's use of YouTube when the idea was floated, almost 8000 people have watched his latest video in three weeks, far more than what would have heard him speaking in a church and that number will keep climbing.

While the Free Methodist Church in Canada's Foundational Courses and the Archbishop of Canterbury's efforts come from a denomination, many of the other alternative forms of theological education are coming from the grassroots of the church. Motivated local church leaders striving to make a difference in their communities. Whether that will be online or offline in churches and third spaces, in partnership with existing educational institutions or creating new ones, how it shapes up and we decide to view new forms of education will go a long way in shaping how we see church.

Discipleship

This is related to the discussion on theological education but we can't ignore the issue of discipleship or lack of it in local churches.

In his book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience, Ron Sider points out that evangelicals do a rather poor job of living out what we preach. In fact in some areas that evangelicals profess to care about, we tend to live worse then those we profess to want to "save". Robert Webber writes on this topic in his book, Ancient Future Evangelism where he suggests that discipleship is a forgotten practice in many churches, a theme which is echoed in Dallas Willard's book which is aptly named, The Great Omission. Duke University's, Stanley Hauerwas suggests that we have confused North American values with Christianity and reduced being a Christian to being a good neighbor and good American [or Canadian]. Eugene Peterson simply asks that how can we know so much and live so badly. Both Eugene Peterson and Dallas Willard talk about the church services.

Eugene Peterson says this,

The operating biblical metaphor regarding worship is sacrifice. We bring ourselves to the altar and let God do to us what God will. We bring ourselves to the eucharistic table, entering into that grand fourfold shape of the liturgy that shapes us: taking, blessing, breaking, giving—the life of Jesus taken and blessed, broken and distributed; and that eucharistic life now shapes our lives as we give ourselves, Christ in us, to be taken, blessed, broken and distributed in lives of witness and service, justice and healing.

But this is not the American way. The major American innovation in the congregation is to turn it into a consumer enterprise. Americans have developed a culture of acquisition, an economy that is dependent on wanting and requiring more. We have a huge advertising industry designed to stir up appetites we didn't even know we had. We are insatiable. It didn't take long for some of our colleagues to develop consumer congregations. If we have a nation of consumers, obviously the quickest and most effective way to get them into our churches is to identify what they want and offer it to them. Satisfy their fantasies, promise them the moon, recast the gospel into consumer terms—entertainment, satisfaction, excitement and adventure, problem-solving, whatever. We are the world's champion consumers, so why shouldn't we have state-of-the-art consumer churches?

Dallas Willard says something similar but in just three sentences,

We must flatly say that one of the greatest contemporary barriers to meaningful spiritual formation in Christlikeness is overconfidence in the spiritual efficacy of 'regular church services,' of whatever kind they may be. Though they are vital, they are not enough. It is that simple.

Even if we get every other aspect of church right and people do engage with us again. What do they get when they get here. An entire "discipleship industry" has formed within the church trying to sell me an answer to that question and there are a lot of different opinions.

As technology and culture change, it changes the world in which we learn in. What would have been considered deviant behaviour a generation ago isn't questioned today as being abnormal. I remember reading a book on how young Christians needed to act and it concentrated on issues like how long should your hair be and if sideburns are okay. It was as funny to read then as it is today but it does go a long ways in determining what we saw were important things back then. Today, things have changed. A friend showed me his high school son's instant messenger buddy list. Every single one of them was a sexual reference. While we were talking about that, a song came over by an underage artist talking about sex acts with her boyfriend. What does the church look like in a culture that is changing, materialistic, confused, and intolerant of how it sees the church being intolerant? While the much of the discussion centers on the forms we use for discipling, statements from many theologians suggest that we may have to rethink what a Christian is in today's world.

If there is good news in all of this, it is that many Free Methodists are having these kinds of discussions all over the place, both formally (like at last years Ecclesiology Study Commission) and informally. Many of those voices will go into papers and ideas to presented at the next General Conference and of course are being discussed in local churches. As I told a colleague not that long ago, some of us are too young to have experienced the "good old days" of the church but this is the time that God wanted us to be here for and there is something exciting about that.

Missional.ca is now live

At www.missional.ca where they are bringing Alan Roxburgh to the Peg.

10 Years Ago

It has been a decade since the 1997 Red River Flood which devastated Grand Forks, North Dakota and literally replaced the Red River with the "Red Sea".

Wendy and I were watching CBC News last night and we were amazed at the amount of water that just devastated southern Manitoba. To protect the city of Winnipeg, they created the Red River Floodway which has saved the city about 20 times since it was built and they had to move more earth then the Suez Canal. Even it was barely able to save Winnipeg in 1997 as the water came within inches of breaching the floodway.

It has been ten years and much of the rebuilding has been finished but the scars are still visible on the faces of the survivors. Interestingly enough the floodway has been deepened and widened enough to handle a once in 750 year flood now.

Related Links

• Archive of the CBC footage on the flood
  

Dissing Edmonton

British reporter's anti-Canadian rant likely caused by cold beer, jokes Klein Since I am from Calgary and have shared many disparaging opinions about our neighbors to the North but I have to agree with Ralph on this one.