As Andy mentioned on a recent blog post, he and I had the privilege of being at a church planting conference two weeks ago in Ottawa. If I could sum up the conference in a word, it would be encouraging. It was really encouraging to hear a number of the people at the conference talk a lot about largely the same vision and values that we felt the Spirit directing us towards these past 2 years. Andy and I were joking that we should have written a book before these guys, because they stole all our material! But seriously, it is really affirming to see that the Spirit is moving people in a similar direction as us.

Here’s a couple of things that came up specifically:

There was a general consensus amongst the speakers and conference organizers that the church in the West needs to undergo a significant shift. Alan Hirsch, one of the speakers who hales from Australia, summed it up by paraphrasing Albert Einstein: "More of the same will not produce different results". It's pretty clear that the church has become very marginalized in our country, in our society, and in the minds of our friends. Having Hirsch point this out was refreshing as it mimicked what we heard during the year of prayer before we started our simple churches. It also was an encouragement to stick with our value of being creatively flexible—we want to hear from the Spirit and each other as to what works in our churches and what doesn’t. At the same time, Hirsch noted that in the midst of this identity crisis, it is absolutely necessary to look to our central figure to regain our identity: Jesus. This is cool because this is exactly what we have stated that our vision is all about: our vision is Jesus.

Another thing that a few people talked about at the conference is the fact that God is a sending God—God’s mission is that he always reaching out to us, his creation. And, of course, Jesus is the perfect example of this. He was sent out from God to live with us; he moved into the neighbourhood. As his bride then, the Church needs to reflect this sending nature; the church needs to be “missional.” It's cool to see that this is exactly where the Spirit has been taking us with our emphasis on mission towards the marginalized.

During the conference, the strength of consumerism as a religious force was reinforced to me: it very clearly is a god and marketers are using its religious nature to further drive it home as THE North American religion. Making generosity one of our key values is exactly the antidote to this caustic religion. It's even more encouraging to see us begin to take the tangible steps in the last weeks to live this out.

So, was there anything new that I received out of this? Well, yes, but I don't want to understate how encouraging it was to hear that we're on the right track. I think that this is very important message for us to hear because we're still young, we're small, and we haven't been experiencing significant numerical growth. However, as was reinforced at the conference, success is so much more than just counting bums in a chair. Success in God's terms is always defined in terms of faithfulness.

Still, there were a couple of new things. Here are two key questions that I came out of the conference with.

1) What is the mission of God for our simple church?

As Andy and I were reflecting back over the past year, it's pretty clear that this past year has been more disorienting than perhaps we fully anticipated, switching from programmed church to simple church. To borrow the words from a recent prophecy, some of us are still stumbling towards the starting line. And that's OK. Yet, in our stumbling, I think that we be begin to stumble in the direction of the start line by beginning to, as individual simple churches, ask this question of the Spirit and together discern his answer. I have no doubt that he'll be leading us into the answer to this. Besides, we've all got a chunk of cash to spend and why not spend it in the area where the Spirit is directing each church's unique mission.

2) How is our church doing at reflecting the ethnicities and cultures of our neighbourhoods in the location where we're meeting?

We had the privilege of hearing from Sam Owusu who pastors a church in New Westminster that currently has about 65 nations meeting in it. Sam really challenged us to think of the church as the place where the nations should meet, because this is the biblical picture of the church, both now and in eternity. As such, we need to be reaching into our communities to engage the nations who are among us. This is not going to be a simple task, but I think that it’s one we should begin thinking and praying about.

OK, I think that this is enough for one blog!

Grace and peace,
-Jonathan