Having moved house at the end of last year, one of the tasks I’ve recently completed is the reconfiguration of our book storage system. Previously we had bookcases of various sizes and hues scattered around the house, wherever there was a spare wall. In the new place we’ve really only got one room with walls suitable - so it’s become a library and entertainment area (for the family) and study (for me). And a lounge for the family pets…
To make this happen we’ve invested in a Billy shelving system from IKEA. Good things about the system: capacity to work in a modular fashion, attach shelves to walls and each other, and the capacity to fit them right against the wall (space allowed for skirting boards). There’s special shelves for CDs and DVDs, as well as the options of doors and glass shelves.
Some lessons learnt in the process of assembling fifteen units:
1. It’s worth it to get large loads delivered.
2. Allow plenty of time and space for assembly.
3. Get help with moving the flatpack boxes around (to avoid putting your back out and damaging walls)
4. Think carefully about what faces to the top, the bottom, back and front. Check before tacking the back on.
5. IKEA are generally very good about exchanging and returning goods.
We’ve just entered the housing market again - putting our home on the market. We signed up with the real estate agent on Tuesday morning, had the photographer through on Wednesday lunch time, and the first viewers last night. Today is the day for the 360 degree photography tour.
Take a look at the first online ad for the house here at realestate.com.au.
This photograph is from 5 years ago but it’s still a good indication of what the front of the house looks like.
We decided to move because our property (1400 square metres) is just too much for us. When we first moved here it was great to have the space, the mango, guava, lemon and star fruit trees. There’s something real about having free range chickens. However over time we’ve come to realise that the only time we spend out the back is when we’re mowing lawns, pruning trees and hedges. We don’t have enough water to really garden. And, being a family of geeks, we don’t have the commitment to use every weekend keeping the property looking good. So we’re looking for a smaller property.
I mentioned in my review of the Forge Conference that Wolfgang Simson was a hyperbolic metaphoric passionate speaker. Well what do you know, he’s also a very approachable correspondent. I’ve had some very useful email conversation with Wolfgang in response, exploring the context and meaning of my remarks and his.
The ‘hyperbolic’ is tied up with the large number of house churches planted by the people Wolfgang met in India, Indonesia and Bangladesh. I got the impression he was being given numbers by church planters that couldn’t be corroborated. No doubt there had been a large number of groups started throughout these countries. But to give the numbers (was it 20,000?) was, I inferred, an example of hyperbole. Not lies. Maybe exaggeration. We got the point - that developing a reproducing theme at the heart of a church planting movement is so important.
Wolfgang responded by explaining that he had came from a background of healthy cynicism in which he set out to test claims of church growth, first in Europe and later in Asia. He provides some background to the people working and researching in India, Egypt, Indonesia and Bangladesh. It was good to hear Wolfgang’s life context and story.
When someone mentioned to me during the conference that they were having difficulty coping with the incredible stories of rapid church multiplication, I shared a story from my life in NZ. It was September 15, 2001. I was at a ministers gathering in Tokoroa, New Zealand, hearing from the AOG pastor who had just returned from India. He told us about incredible responses to the gospel from crowds of people there. He did acknowledge that a response at a revival meeting was not the same as a life-long response of world-changing action. He shared about the miracles, including people being brought back to life. We talked about the different environments, wondering if the Indian people were more open to anything happening.
When I returned home I discovered an ambulance at the front and a crowd gathered around. My wife was standing by the pavement distraught. On the road was my 18 month old daughter who had been hit by a car. She’d died on impact. A neighbour was administering CPR but it wasn’t working. I prayed to God with every bit of earnestness possible. I rushed into the house and rang the church where there was a worship service about to start, to ask for the prayers of the congregation. But Kristen didn’t come back to life. She would have turned 16 yesterday.
So how did I feel about those stories of resuscitation from India? How did the AOG pastor feel about this tragedy? We didn’t have much to say to one another. Neither event made the other impossible. As you can imagine, my wife and I felt dampened in our faith. We already knew that prayer is not magic. We knew that God suffers with us in difficulty. But mustering up the courage and grace to pray for God to intervene was hard for a while. We winced when we heard the story of a young man being revived through prayer at a crash scene not far away. Why didn’t God intervene at our crash scene? But it wasn’t long before we found ourselves plunged into God’s merciful intervention in the world again. It was the faith of our three year old daughter that led to praying for the healing of a friend’s broken arm, with amazing results.
The stories of amazing effectiveness go together with the stories of incredible struggle. And visa versa.
It’s my birthday today! I turn 45, making me either a very young baby boomer or a very old Gen Xer. I share my birthday in 1962 with Steve Irwin, Ethan Wayne, Rob Van Daal and Miguel de León. George Washington was born on February 22, 1732. To all people born on February 22, Happy Birthday!
It’s been two weeks now that I’ve been battling the effects of pulled muscles in my lower back. I’m not sure but the condition was probably the result of intense blogging on a laptop over four hours. It was worsened by an hour at the gym and driving into work (an hour’s trip each way) for a week.
Once I worked out what was going on I went out and bought myself a new office chair to use at home. But too late. It took me a while to realise that nothing short of rest was going to fix the problem. So… a visit to the doctor, anti-inflammatories, and a week off work, a day at a time.
Despite taking each day off to be at home I found myself constantly battling workaholism. I hired a pile of DVDs to reward myself for lying the couch for hours at a time and wean myself off blogging etc.
I’m getting back into the swing of things now. I can now put a pair of socks on in less than a minute.
Recently I purchased Singstar Party for the birthday of one of my daughters. That was to supplement Singstar Pop that she’d bought for her brother’s birthday! It’s been a noisy weekend here as we’ve had a pre-teen girl’s get together, supplemented by late teenagers and adults trying out for the karaoke high scores. I must admit I’m not that crash hot at the Playstation game. Perhaps with a bit of practice…
Playstation News came through today with the announcement of Singstar Rocks! - coming out in April.
The thirty songs include material by Blur, Bowling for Soup, The Cardigans, The Church, Coldplay, Deep Purple, Dragon, End of Fashion, The Exponents, Franz Ferdinand, GANGgajang, Grinspoon, Gwen Stefani, Hole, INXS, Jet, The Killers, Killing Heidi, Men At Work, Nirvana, The Offspring, Powderfinger, Rolling Stones, Scorpions, The Screaming Jets, Stereophonics, The Swingers, Thin Lizzy, and The Veronicas.
I’m sorting through old papers to make room for a new boarder and am discarding stuff left right and centre. Out goes the 1984 Encylopaedia Britannica. Along with a swag of Biblical commentaries and Church history books.
One of the finds of the day was a collection of “Reach Out”, a quirky youth magazine published in New Zealand in the 1970s. The mag was the precursor to Grapevine, which is now delivered to the public throughout New Zealand. Reach Out was New Zealand’s hybrid combination of Wittenburg Door, Campus Life, Mad and Alive Now.
Anyone remember the fictional characters, Ernst and Freda Steigelbauer? Or the Therismos posters? Stillpoint - the poetry section, and Stained Glass, the theology section? And the Youthwork Workbook Book?
This magazine gave me access to life-shaping writers in my formative years. For that I send my thanks to John Cooney (still with Grapevine), Mal Green, Ross Inglis, Mary Stynman, Graeme Page, Merle Bishop, Adrian Berthelsen, Alan Knox, Roger Mackay, Anne Marie Bowden, Lianne Sloan, Diane Brown and Ernst Steiglebauer wherever you all are. Thanks to George Anderson for the Stained Glass sections.
So I have in my possession for a limited time a pile of 1970s magazines. What to do with them? Biff em? Scan em into pdfs? Give them back to the silverfish?
Here’s what’s here:
July 1976 Boredom, Ho Hum
August 1976 - TV, or not TV
In 1977 the staff realised that taking the date off the front cover would remove some of the pressure to produce the magazine in a certain month. That was fine with us emerging postmodern types who like a bit of uncertainty!
Morsel 22 A Peep At Pornography
Morsel 27 You Must Be Joking
Morsel 28 A World of Nobodies - Breakthrough… Breakfree!
Morsel 30 Breakthrough… Breakfree!
Morsel 33 Politics
Morsel 34 Do I Have to be Me?
Morsel 35 In Love with the Needle
Morsel 36 Tickling a Fancy
Morsel 37 On Hurting and Dying
Morsel 38 Rhapsody on the Rocks
Morsel 39 UFOs and Things that Go Bump in the Night
Morsel 40 Myths, Fairy Tales and Marsh-Wiggles
Morsel 41 Human (Like Me)
Morsel 42 Adolescence… Controlled by Your Jeans
Morsel 43 Pairs
(Sex and Homosexuality)
Morsel 44 Reach Out Corners the Media
Morsel 46 Picking Daisies -
Easing up with a little poetry
Morsel 51 The Fantastic Art of Storytelling
Morsel 52 The 80’s Are Upon Us
Morsel 55 More Than Our Share…
Morsel 56 Humanism
“We can cope Mate”
Morsel 57 Reach Out Takes a Peek at the Movies
Morsel 58 Reach Out Goes to Church ( a slightly irreverent issue but not necessarily boring)
Morsel 59 A Blast From the Past (Never to be repeated repeats)
Today was my first day as the Vision for Mission Advocate for the Queensland Synod, Uniting Church in Australia. I’ve moved out of the role of general mission consultant to take on a three year process of resourcing new missional communities.
I’ve developed a web site dedicated to the Vision for Mission, at www.visionformission.org.au. There’s a nice little article on my new position in Journey which can be read as a pdf file.
Today was spent catching up on some work for the Seeds of Hope missional church network, which has been somewhat neglected recently. I met with the Synod Leadership Team after lunch to talk about how I’ll start the new role. We focused mainly on how the Seeds of Hope network will tie in with the Vision for Mission. I had coffee this afternoon with Terry Ayling, ‘creative director’ of Spirited Communities.
The ‘Vision for Mission’ is clearly about investing in missional church at a local level. The good thing is that there’s a budget of one million dollars a year set aside to resource that. I don’t get a pay rise unfortunately! But I do get to work with a facilitation team who can allocate funding to help missional communities get off the ground in their initiatives.
From the ‘Vision for Mission’:
We commit ourselves as a church to the establishment, development and nurture of new ventures in ministry and mission that clearly demonstrate a commitment to the values and objectives of the Vision, with particular regard to:
developing initiatives in ministry and mission with a focus on cultural or common-purpose groups
using relational approaches to evangelism that equip people to actively share their faith in Christ in appropriate and intentional ways
providing opportunities specifically designed to help people grow in their faith and become active disciples of Christ
making significant connections, and intentionally building relationships, with individuals and groups in the wider community in a variety of settings
establishing new congregations or faith communities and supporting them in whatever ways are necessary to ensure their continuing growth and effectiveness
encouraging and supporting new and innovative approaches to ministry and mission, particularly where these are undertaken collaboratively, ecumenically, or by groups and teams of people
maximising the use of owned properties, including shared use by congregations/faith communities, other agencies of the church, community groups and other Christian denominations.
exploring the potential advantages of renting property. considering creative alternatives to the employment of fulltime persons.
continuing to develop and support initiatives in community service that pursue justice for, and enhance the quality of life of, the aged, the poor, the homeless, the refugee, those with a disability, and other disadvantaged people in our society.
offering continuing training, formation and support for those evidencing the personal qualities, skills, maturity and spiritual gifts for leadership that are essential for the realisation of the Vision.
attending to generational differences and allowing for youth and early adults to embrace, and participate in the realisation of, the Vision in ways appropriate to their experience, giftedness, and preferences for the manner in which things are done.
Some random thoughts on the occasion of a birthday…
This time 44 years ago I was coming to terms with breathing. Didn’t take too long to work out.
Despite years of practice, my body is not always in control. As I was making a fresh plunger of coffee this morning the handle of the plunger came off. Managed to fix it temporarily - long enough to tip the glass part of the plunger into the sink and break it. Not good. However when I took the broken plunger round to the kitchen manager he smiled at me cheerily and assured me it had been his favourite plunger! “Never mind”, he said, as he threw out the broken pieces and retrieved the potentially useful ‘unbroken parts’.
I can’t be everywhere at once. I’m currently in Melbourne, in between conferences. Family’s back on the Gold Coast. Text messages, mobile phone calls, Messenger conversations make up for some of the distance. But there’s still the physical gulf.
I’ve had birthday wishes today from family, colleagues and from complete strangers like the Suncorp banking consultant assuring me my mortgage payment had been sorted out after all.
I was reflecting with Graham Beattie, my colleague, over dinner tonight at an Indian restaurant at Eastland, in Ringwood. Reflecting on why I write on so many blogs. Some of it’s to do with my need to be known. Not famous. Not infamous. Just known for who I am. It’s a strength and a liability. A strength when it comes to blogging. A liability when it comes to keeping a life balanced.
Over the school holidays Ennis, my wife, has been working away at a novel based in Australia and New Zealand. It’s a fantasy kind of novel. A bit like Stephen Lawhead’s Song of Albion Series meets Stephen Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant Series meets 16-year-old students who disocver connections between their town in Victoria, Australia and Paradise.
Ennis is researching and writing it up on her Novel Blog. So far she’s up to Chapter 16. She’d be interested in any comments.
Duncan Macleod posts on life, faith and culture in Australia, drawing from his involvement in the creative industry, the Uniting Church, the blogosphere, generational research, the emerging church and life on the Gold Coast.
This magazine gave me access to life-shaping writers in my formative years. For that I send my thanks to John Cooney (still with Grapevine), Mal Green, Ross Inglis, Mary Stynman, Graeme Page, Merle Bishop, Adrian Berthelsen, Alan Knox, Roger Mackay, Anne Marie Bowden, Lianne Sloan, Diane Brown and Ernst Steiglebauer wherever you all are. Thanks to George Anderson for the Stained Glass sections.
Morsel 27 You Must Be Joking
Morsel 43 Pairs
