Contributors will include Andrei Petrine (pastor of Дом Жизни), John Ciobanu (Дом Жизни's head of youth ministry), William Norris and Dimitri Budak.

The event will be in Russian with English translation.

Venue: Pushkin's House, 5a, Bloomsbury Square, London W1A 2TA
Date: Friday 25th June
Time: 19.00
Cost: Free

Refreshments provided. 

So if you are around London, UK during that weekend, you're welcome to pay us a visit! For more details: John Ciobanu on 07702 236458 or Andrei Petrine on pater@me.com Or visit our website.

We look forward to seeing you!

Please contact us to find out more if you or your church would like to help. 

Thanks so much!

Radstock's partner ministry Seedtime, based in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia is hard at work training up local Christians in business development.  Last month 17 ‘students’ completed their micro-enterprise training.  Some were already in business. But many were not. Some wanted to know how they could do their business better. Some wanted to find out what business ideas God had wired them for - and duly did so!

A pastor with an obvious shepherd’s love of his church of about 50 (most of whom have no employment or training) joined the course to find out how he could train his flock - and pick up some ideas himself.

We’re actively encouraging those who are doing well with their businesses to think about training others.

Quick prayer points:

 * 17 folks who have gone through Seedtime's micro-enterprise training this year here in Ulaanbaatar, as they develop their businesses or start up for the first time.

* 7 more have just started their training, again, here in the city.

* Plans for further micro-enterprise training with the churches of South Gobi in the summer

* The winter weather crisis has left many of the livestock that much of the economy depends on dead.  Pray for the people in poverty who have been pushed even further into the corner.

Aung’s wife and two young children had gone to visit her family in the countryside for the first time in three years.  “It costs $50 for the bus, so we had to wait for the money.”  How many times have I blown $50 on a movie and dinner?   All the evangelical marriage books say it has to be a priority to keep my marriage strong, after all.   I could hear his pig snorting through the cracks in the floorboards.  Funny thing, Audrey’s never complained that we don’t have a pig snorting through the floor and walls of our kitchen.  Note to self:  don’t send Western evangelical how-to books on marriage to Aung. 

We went outside and I noticed a small ten foot by ten foot traditional structure of wood, bamboo, and thatch.  I assumed it was a guard’s post, as we were on church property. 

“It was the house we first lived in when I came here to plant the church”, he said. 

“You mean, you lived there by yourself? Single, I mean.”

“No, my wife and I, but we only had one child then.” 

I’ve seen lots of poor people, but perhaps because we were talking “church leader to church leader” or “missionary to missionary”, this grabbed me.  I was speechless for a few moments.  All that stuff about many rooms and Jesus preparing a place in the Father’s house suddenly gets very real when you don’t have carpet, any furniture except a reed mat, or even a window to close.

“Jesus is going to have a better house than this for you one day”, I stated rather clumsily. 

“Yes.” Enough said.

Concern:  Will this damage career prospects?  Response:  Quite possibly, just like Peter and Andrew probably lost a boatload (pun intended) of cash when they left their nets to follow Jesus.

Concern:  Are the road conditions dangerous?  Response: Absolutely, but Jesus suggested narrow roads make for good route planning.

Concern:  What are the hospitals like?  Response:  Dirty, under-equipped and maybe even corrupt, but Jesus said you find your life when you lose it.

Concern:  Can I come home for my friend’s wedding?  Response:  What did Jesus mean when He said you should hate your father and mother for his sake?

I’m all for lucrative careers (some of my friends who have them generously support me), great roads, good hospitals and celebrating with friends, but some of the people I’ve met here in Myanmar see life very differently. More tomorrow on them. But in the meantime, is it any wonder that Asians, Latin Americans and Africans are taking over global mission?   They’re willing to pay a price for their calling that I’ve never come close to paying.  It is humbling. In 100 years the mission historians may look at us with amusement or dismay for how we carried our culture with us. (Think iPhone or internet in a world where 40% of us live on less than $2 per).  When I think of my own self(ishly?)-defined “minimum standards” I start to get very uncomfortable – it feels even worse than wearing jacket and tie in the Burmese sun.

I knew the driver simply as the ‘Bear Man’ and he was driving the horses and sledge way too fast. We were in North East Romania visiting a campsite that was about a metre deep in snow and it was freezing. If it was -30C then I dreaded to think what the wind chill was. Our church in Leicester, UK partnered with another church in the UK and several other churches in this region of Romania. It had been almost ten years since we’d started working together. At first a couple of us flew over and preached. Then we started to send mission teams who would do some children’s work in the local, very Russian looking, estate. Then Beni, the Romanian pastor, said why don’t we take some of the children out of the towns into the countryside. Why don’t we run some English style camps? That was the beginning of a joint work that had become two weeks of fun, games and gospel work. Now here I was visiting the site out of season. The ‘Bear Man’ was a local Christian who farmed and looked after the woods for the government and yes, you guessed it, the bears. ‘You really don’t want to see them at the moment’, he said, ‘they’re all hibernating, they’d be rather grumpy.’ I took his word for it. He was a great worker using his land to help the work of the gospel. He’d put up toilets and now I was viewing his latest building project, a house that acted as a dormitory.

Yet it wasn’t all easy. There was a suspicion in his church that he was getting rich out of the camps being held on his land and people were getting jealous. Work in this part of Romania is scarce, up to a fifth of the workforce live abroad to earn enough money for their family. And then some of the Christian parents were very uncomfortable about sending their children on a camp where they might have to sleep next to a gypsy. ‘They don’t wash’ they pointed out. The language and cultural differences between Romania and Britain weren’t altogether easy either. The women on our team needed to be dressed right in order to avoid offending their hosts.

Slowly however these obstacles were being overcome and our partnership in the gospel was developing into a fruitful one. The Romanian churches have grown, their youth work is thriving. For us in the UK it has proved fruitful as well. Our faith has been increased and our eyes opened. We were able to fly Pastor Beni and his wife Ioanna over to Britain to visit the two churches. He preached and somehow it cemented the relationship between us. The ‘Bear Man’ was keen to go, it was getting dark but surely it couldn’t get any colder?

The heartbeat of mission is dependence on God. Think of the disciples sent out without any provisions, or Hudson Taylor and George Mueller.

The order of the Lord’s Prayer is important.

• We remind ourselves that God is our father; that his name is holy and we live for his kingdom. We seek his kingdom first.
• Then we ask for our bread and our needs.

Three petitions of a dependent people:

• Dependent for bread – so ask God for all your needs.
  
  • Daily bread is a reminder of manna, when the people only received enough for each day, but they always received enough for each day.
  • We’re not dependent on the provision, but on the Provider. And the Provider often surprises us in the way he gives us what we need.
  • Our bread is bread that is to be shared (Luke 6:38).
  • Things to remember:

• God is the good giver of good gifts. He’s not made in our image. We’re selfish and stingy, he’s not (Matthew 7:7ff).
• I am proud. I don’t want to acknowledge that I need help.
  • How can we avoid attitudes and lifestyles that weaken our dependence?
  • How can we grow to become more dependent?

• Dependent for forgiveness – so confess you sins to God.
  • Confession means owning up to sin. No excuses.
  • Confession means focusing on God. Your sin is an offense towards God (Psalm 51). It’s not really about you; you have offended an eternally holy God.
  • Confession means relying on grace. Confession requires us to trust Christ and his forgiveness, not to simply try harder. Confession is not resolving to reform, it is gambling on grace. But we need not worry whether Jesus willforgive us.

• Dependent for forgiving others – so know God’s grace and mercy.
  • How do we forgive others? Matthew 18 – the king forgives a huge debt, but the debtor won’t forgive the man who owes him a small debt.

• Matthew 18:35 tell us: So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.
• Matthew 6:14 tells us: For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.

•  
  • If you won’t forgive others, you don’t understand the gospel. You haven’t grasped what God has done for me in Jesus Christ. When you get it, you have the fuel to forgive others.

We’re dependent on him for our provision, for our forgiveness, and for the power to forgive others. But when we depend on him, we’re a very powerful people.

What does the Bible say about Jesus as a missionary?

• It would be odd if we only look to the apostles for an example of missions.
• Jesus is the founder of our mission, the catalyst of our mission, and the content of our message.

Peter’s confession “You are the Christ, the son of God” is the only thing we have to offer people.

• Not our money, our personality, our persuasiveness.
• Merely “Jesus is Lord”… that’s our foundation.

Several principles that Jesus used that will help us practically in our day-to-day work as missionaries:

• Your entire life is mission. Jesus was one sent by the Father… his missionary activity began at the manger in Bethlehem. Wherever you are, you are one sent by God to that place. Your missionary assignment is over when you die or the Lord returns (whichever comes first).
• We must live out the message. Jesus didn’t just teach and preach, but he lived out the truth. He did righteousness and mercy. His life commended his proclamation.
• We must raise up others to spread the message. Jesus never went to Spain. He recruited and trained people who could cover more ground than he could alone.
• We must be on mission with the end in mind. There must be a holy dissatisfaction and a passion for more fruit. We want to see the nations know Christ in our lifetime.

Strategies for missions:

• Start at home, with family, friends, and neighbors. The gospel grows constantly, not always rapidly. It grows in our own lives even as we extend it in the world around us.
• Experience grace yourself. Thomas and Peter were great missionaries after they doubted and denied. They knew how the gospel transformed them, and that gave them missionary boldness.
• Eat with sinners. Jesus entered into the mess of our world and lived among us. We must get into the world of the people we’re trying to reach.

The goal of Jesus’ mission was not merely a few converts, but a whole new world. He accomplished his mission, and we have the privilege of living out that mission until Jesus comes and makes all things new.

Introduction: No one finds prayer easy. Some have learned to delight in it and enjoy it. But it’s never easy. Why?

One reason is that we don’t believe that it works. Other things seem more immediately productive.

Yet Jesus tells us to pray for the coming of God’s kingdom and the doing of his will.

The question for us is: do you believe God hears and answers that prayer?

Suggestion: Print out the Lord’s Prayer on a sheet of A4 and annotate it as you pray.

What is God’s kingdom?

-This is a major theme (think: John the Baptist in Matthew 3, the sending of the disciples in Matthew 10)

Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel is puffed up with his own glory. He is humbled until he realizes that “heaven rules”.

That’s the kingdom, heaven ruling. The kingdom comes near in the person of Jesus.

Three ways to pray for the kingdom to come:

Look forward – praying with the return of Christ in mind.

• Pray with the future in mind.
• Isaiah 6
• Uzziah looked like a promising leader, but had fallen into pride.
• Isaiah is despairing, but then he sees a vision of God that binds together the next 37 chapters of the book.
• That’s what we need… to look to the Lord Jesus. To pray that he would come back and transform the world.

Look around – praying with the world in mind.

• Matthew 11 – Jesus tells the disciples to tell John what they’ve seen (healing, proclaiming, freeing)
• The kingdom coming near is both proclamation and a lifting of the curse… an inbreaking of heaven.
• How are you seeing the kingdom come in your context?

Look in – pray for yourself.

• Luther called this “fearful prayer”, because it takes the control out of our own hands and hands it over to God.
• Think of Jacob wrestling with God in Genesis 32. God gave him the gift of seeing his face, but it cost Jacob a lot. When we pray “your kingdom come”, it’s dangerous. We’re saying “All I want is you. I’ll give up everything in order to see your kingdom come.”

I am going to be checking in with reports from the main sessions of the 2010 Radstock Conference, Pursuing God… Transforming the World. The conference combines Bible teaching, prayer, singing, and updates on the work of God in churches around the network.

There are a lot of awesome missions groups out there, but here are five reasons I particularly enjoy being involved in the Radstock network:

Check back for posts summarizing the main talks.  Audio of the conference will be available after March 2nd. 

The Haiti earthquake reminded us once more of the devastating impact of natural disasters on the world’s poor. Here, well beyond the world’s headlines, a multiple natural disaster is bearing down on the people of Mongolia. 

Around 1.7 million-head of herded animals have frozen to death in one of the harshest winters Mongolia has seen for decades. Piles of dead animals can be seen by the roads in many places. The disaster began last summer, and we reported on the vulnerability of our businesses in South Gobi to this possibility in September. That possibility has come to pass. 

A severe drought in South Gobi and elsewhere meant that there was not enough vegetation for the animals to eat, meaning that they did not have the fat reserves to survive the harsh winter that has followed. Provincial children who were grounded in dormitories because of the A/H1N1 swine flu outbreak are now in critical need, due to lack of adequate heating and food, according to the UB Post. Unusually heavy snows in many places have left families cut off from essential supplies. An estimated 180,000 herding families are in critical need of help, but I've not seen any human casualty figures yet. The economic fall-out from the severe weather is likely to continue long after the immediate crisis has passed. 

There is the real likelihood of accelerated population drift to Ulaanbaatar, where the infrastructure is already to unable to support the current population of 1.1 million. This is a compound and significant natural disaster, no doubt. But it has been made worse by a combination of political graft and mismanagement of natural resources, a deeply corrosive process that if left unchecked could have unknown consequences. 

Our churches and businesses are right there in the thick of it, seeking to be salt and light in the most desperate situations. I have a trip to South Gobi scheduled for March, when the weather improves, to see what is happening on the ground out there. Within Seedtime we are considering how we can respond with the churches and others, with the resources God has given us. 

But maybe this is first and foremost a situation to send us to our knees, and lift up our hands to the Father of Lights, that His Light will shine in this present darkness...

Please pray and ask your church to pray too. Thanks so much!

Evangelicals keep flirting with the temptation to put gospel proclamation and social action on equal footing, as if we can do one and not the other. I think that's wrong. The gospel is the horse that pulls the cart of social action and mercy ministry. The gospel is the steam engine that empowers and inspires our action. Where mercy is missing from a church, the gospel hasn't been understood. But mercy ministry without the gospel is insufficient.

Here is one way that this plays out in our local congregation:

We have recently started a food pantry in our church's basement. It's nothing earth shattering: right now we can only manage one giveaway a month, though we're hoping to increase the frequency as time goes by. Something like twenty-two families were served during our first giveaway.

But we don't view the food pantry as merely an exercise in social action. For us, it is a gospel opportunity. We want to leverage everything that we have (money, people, shelving, basements) in order to show people the love of Christ AND tell them about the love of Christ. So we have English and Spanish speakers on hand to build relationships with the people who come. We follow up with the people, visiting their homes and offering to study the Bible with them.

We don't view the food as a bribe to make people listen to the gospel. We see it as an expression of God-given mercy for our neighbors in need. But it would be unloving and unmerciful if we only gave them food that would perish while withholding the bread of life (John 6:27).

You can check out our food pantry blog here.

Here are some highlights to whet your appetite …

1. The church forgets who we are and what we are for … When we forget that we are the community of disciples for declaring God’s greatness and making disciples, mission quickly becomes just one among many activities rather than the defining vision of who we are as a community.

2. The majority of believers are no longer thrilled with the Lord and what he is doing in their lives. When questions like ‘What is God doing with you at the moment?’ cease to be common currency, it is a sure sign of creeping spiritual mediocrity.

3. … In my view, the single biggest cause of stalled churches in the UK is the belief that material comfort can be normative for Christians. It is the opposite of radical commitment to Christ.

4. When [Christians]  see church as one among many leisure activities, usually low down the priority list. They are unlikely to see the Christian community as God’s great hope for the world and unlikely to put commitment above self-interest.

5. … Where people take no personal responsibility for their own spiritual growth a stalled church becomes more likely.

6. … When preaching, teaching and Bible study become ends in themselves rather than means to an end, something is badly wrong.

7. A church becomes afraid to ask radical questions … The danger is that people start to equate serving the church with living out the gospel. Few churches regularly evaluate every aspect of church life against their core vision.

8. Confusing Christian activities with discipleship …

9. Not understanding how to release and encourage everyone in the church to use their spiritual gifts for the building up of the church … There are two types of DNA in churches. One type of church says ‘we exist to have our personal spiritual needs met’, the other ‘we exist to impact our locality and the world with the gospel of the grace of God in Christ’. The first type is a stalled church.

10. … No church was stalled at the point that it was founded. At the beginning all churches were adventures in faith and daring risk for God. No one actively decided for comfort over risk, but at some point the mindset shifted from uncomfortable faith and daring passion for the Lord to comfortable mediocrity … The mantra of the maintenance mindset is ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’. But just like buying shoes for growing children, if structures don’t take account of future growth then fellowships end up stunted and deformed.

Marcus leads Living Leadership and is the author of 

• Finding Joy    
• Meltdown   

This entry first appeared on Tim Chester's blog here.

There have been a few challenges that have made it difficult for our church to reach out to these groups of people:

1. Langauge -- Most of the people in our congregation are only fluent in English. Many of the people we are trying to reach speak little or no English.

2. Culture -- There are some basic cultural differences that we keep bumping into. Many Latinos here work more than two jobs in order send money to their families at home. They aren't here to find God, they are here to make money. In addition, it can be difficult to plan a time to meet up (to someone from America, a 6:00 PM meeting begins at 6:00 PM... for someone from El Salvador it starts sometime before 7:30 PM). There are different customs and expectations on all sides.

3. Tensions and Suspicions -- As you might imagine, the immigration wave has created tensions in our community. As a result, many of the people that we are trying to reach assume that Americans hate them.

But despite those challenges, we have seen the gospel grow. A few things have been particularly fruitful:

1. Partnerships -- We have located Spanish speaking church planters that we can send out and support. We have partnered with an Asian Indian church planter to see a church started for speakers of Hindi. We may not be able to speak the language of the people that they are reaching, but we can provide prayer, facilities, financial support and "muscle".

2. Providential people -- The Lord has placed people in our church who are perfectly placed to help with these ministries. There's a 75 year old Pakistani polyglot with a heart to help a huge Bengali family that just moved in down the street from the church. There's a Venezuelan man who owns a painting company and wants to see his employees come to Christ. These people have served as bridges between English speakers and the people in the neighborhoods.

3. Hospitality -- As members of the English speaking church have "caught the vision" for this kind of ministry, they have been more courageous in showing hospitality to folks who don't speak English.

Praise God for the opportunities to reach the nations in our own neighborhoods!

The Fall brought about relational brokenness between mankind, God and creation through man’s attempt to put a non-Trinitarian being (i.e. self) at the centre of the universe and crush difference. Post-Fall Adam wanted the death penalty to fall on Eve, removing the different one from the Garden, blaming God for creating her. The construction of the tower of Babel around the exaltation of man threatened to exchange God’s plan to fill the world with fruitful people for a monocultural existence. The key problem the gospel must over-come is not transcendence but every attempt mankind makes to define himself and the world by something other than relationship with the Trinitarian God. An incarnational approach does not address this problem. It simply wants to bring God down to earth. Having read Gunton, a truly relational approach to creation and redemption means we need the whole gospel to mobilise us and remake us as truly human and not just incarnational.

The incarnational approach has helped us to critique the mission of the church where we stay in our own cosy subculture. But it simply operates at the level of example. The Son of God became one of us so we become one of ‘them’. At this point we strategise our way into culture. Examples, devoid of life changing truth and grace in the end become sticks to beat people with. The incarnational approach alone fails to help people to missionally live out their identity in Christ.

Someone committed to incarnational theology might reply at this point that the incarnation enabled us to become truly human since God became man. Or they might say that the church is the body of Christ, therefore incarnation is a principle that directs our mission. But I want to suggest that this is category confusion. It is not the incarnation that makes us the body of Christ or that makes us truly human. Incarnation is the miracle of God taking on human flesh. What makes us truly human is putting on Christ and being remade in his image through baptism into his death and resurrection. Putting on Christ, being found in him at the right hand of the Father, and being remade in his image are not summarised by incarnation. Incarnation is not the correct term for this. Regeneration is the correct term.

Genesis 1 and 2 show that being in the image of God means being a community in fruitful, cultural engagement with creation. This, as we have seen, leads to a relational and Trinitarian view of being which the gospel affirms and enables. Therefore the basis for mobilising a culturally engaged church that takes particularity, diversity and creativity seriously is the call to become image bearers. This means we need to be reconciled to God through the whole Jesus story as he takes up humanity, kills us, resurrects us and brings us into the presence of the Father to receive the gift of the Spirit.  We don’t become image bearers through our own incarnational efforts. This is category confusion.  We become image bearers by being remade through death and resurrection into the image of God (e.g. Colossians 3:9).

Pastorally, I find it much more empowering to encourage Christians to live missionally by calling them to the death and resurrection of Jesus for them and to live in light of their new identity in Christ. It is helpful for a student entering the home of an alcoholic where many drug addicted and dangerous people hang out, to know that Jesus entered these kinds of places as well. But what really enables him to do it is the knowledge that he has died with Christ and now his life is hidden with the ascended Christ. Now his life is not found in the comfort and safety of socially acceptable company, he has died to these idols and he has been given new life in Christ.

It seems to me that relationship with the incarnate, resurrected and ascended Christ for our renewal in his image is the correct and most fruitful basis for missional contextualised theology. This relational approach reflects the mobilising categories of Scripture: in him, reconciled to God, adopted etc. It requires all moments of the gospel story to shape practice.

Without the incarnation there would be no true human to take humanity into the presence of God. Without the death of the true human, creation and humanity could not be brought through death to be renewed. Without the resurrection a new humanity would not be possible. Without the ascension renewed humanity would not be represented in the presence of God. We were made to live in the world in the presence of the Father. That was the Genesis 1 and 2 foundation for cultural engagement and now, through the Son, the new humanity again lives in the presence of the Father through Jesus’ ascension. If the ascension had not happened, the Spirit would not have been sent to begin the work of recalibrating the creation around the throne of Jesus. In other words, creation and culture are affirmed and renewed by every moment of the gospel story which brings us back into relationship with the Father, each other and creation.

We need the whole gospel to mobilise us for mission and to inform our missional practice. I want to suggest that to truly engage with culture, the missional church needs to become increasingly relational rather than incarnational. This will mean that the missional church needs to recover a robust Trinitarian and Biblical theology. For some, much of what they have packed into the incarnational category can be kept but it needs to be recategorized if we are to be able to let the biblical categories inform practice. We need to live in the whole Jesus story and not just one aspect of it if we truly want to engage culture for Christ and avoid worldly engagement with a Christian veneer.

Click here to or here to purchase Gunton's The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity.

While embodiment is central to Gunton’s theology he shows that it is the wrong solution to the tension between the one and the many. This is because transcendence is not the enemy of the local and the particular. Gunton argues that the problem is a non-Trinitarian and non-relational conception of the ‘oneness’ of the transcendent God. This non-relational view of God and his will presents God as anti-diversity.

Following on from the first blog, I want to unpack the idea that the Christian doctrine of the transcendent becoming embodied – the incarnation – can not help us critique and engage with modern and post-modern culture on its own. Too often, the incarnation becomes our key principle without setting it within a framework of the Trinitarian story of redemption. When this happens we are in danger of simply attempting modernist embodiment with a Christian veneer to overcome a misdiagnosed problem with culture.

Foundations for Particularity: Unitary or Relational Will

Gunton’s argument is complex and nuanced. It is presented here in outline only. Gunton contrasts two models or paradigms of the relationship between creation and the will of God. These contrasting models shape a different view of God’s will and the nature of will in general. These differing views of God’s will, in turn, lead to differing understandings of the place of the particular. 

Unitary Will

The first model is seen in Augustine’s theology. Gunton argues that Augustine’s theology begins a tradition that obscures the relationship between particularity in creation and the will of God. God’s interaction with creation was conceived in distinctly non Trinitarian terms. God was understood to be one who willed creation into being without reference to Son and Spirit. The world was held together by a divine rational, unitary will. In time, universal principles (like platonic forms) came to be seen as the underlying, organising principles of creation in place of the role of the Son and the Spirit in sustaining the world. Son and Spirit were consigned to God’s agenda for redemption only, whilst God’s agenda and design for creation was founded on universal principles similar to those found in Greek philosophy. In other words, God’s creative agenda was separated from his redemptive agenda. Gunton argues, following Irenaeus, that if you leave Son and Sprit out of the equation the identity of the creator God is reduced to a unitary, arbitrary will. His will for creation follows universal principles of rationality and unity. The divine will comes to be seen as a force for bringing things to unity and sameness. Particularity and diversity run counter to the underlying principles that govern creation. Only moments of unity and force of will in creation reflect the creator. Diversity in creation has no direct origin in the nature of God’s will or his identity. It can not tell us anything about Him.

Relational Will

The alternative paradigm favoured by Gunton is found in Irenaeus’ Trinitarian theology. In Irenaeus’ theology God’s will toward creation is mediated by His Trinitarian nature. It is a relational, creative will which includes the work of the Spirit and Son as well as the Father. In Augustinian theology, creation is treated separately from redemption. The roles of the Spirit and the Son are seen as primarily active post-fall, bound up with God’s redemptive programme. Relationship in the Trinity is left out of an account of creation. In Gunton’s theology creation begins with the Trinity and only makes sense in terms of relationship with the Trinitarian God.

Pre-fall God had a plan for creation that was mediated through his Trinitarian nature. In the Genesis account we see shadows that find their definition and light in Jesus. Creation was always made for God’s image to rule over and to be developed in relationship with God through the Spirit. In Genesis chapters 1 and 2, we see God creating by adding order, complexity and diversity through his Spirit hovering over the waters. We see God establishing his image as a community (male and female) to rule over creation. They are to increase the diversity, creating culture, ordering, filling and subduing as they live out their image bearing nature under God’s word. For Irenaeus and Gunton, the creation was always meant to progress and develop through the relational work of Father, Son and Spirit. It is in these terms that the creation has its meaning.

Redemption is not a second project. It is about restoring creation to its Trinitarian purpose. The Father sends the Son, the true image bearer, to redeem a community for himself which will then be filled with the Spirit and restored to image bearing. Being restored to image bearing means being restored to fruitful interaction with creation to fill and subdue it. To be fully human means being culture creators, filled with the creation perfecting Spirit, in the image of the Son, in the presence of the Father. This is the Trinitarian design for creation in Genesis 1 and 2. The gospel restores this design.

Jesus’ incarnation made him the true image of God. Jesus’ death brought an end to the old humanity who failed to be image bearers. Jesus’ resurrection makes a new humanity who are being remade in his image and who are indwelt by the Spirit who hovered over the waters creating by diversifying and ordering. Jesus’ ascension brings us into the presence of the Father and sends the Spirit. This is what remakes humanity into the image of the second Adam. Creation can again look forward to the Image of God ruling over creation, developing it by the Spirit for the glory of the Father. Creation finds its meaning and purpose through redemption. In a mysterious sense it always had its meaning through God’s plan of redemption.

When we include the Son and the Spirit in the account of creation and the being of God, the creative and sustaining will of God is mediated through the salvation plan of God. Creation finds its meaning through redemption, as the Trinitarian God reconciles us to himself through his spirit and his son. Therefore instead of universal principles sustaining creation, the Father sustains creation through the work of the Son and the Spirit. This has two implications. Firstly, this means that creation is relationally rather than rationally organised, and secondly, that creation is undergoing change in terms of the relationship it has to the will of the Trinitarian God.

God is relational in his being. He is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Gunton talks of perichoretic union to describe how the Trinity is relationally constituted. The three persons of the Trinity are unique because of their relationships with each other. Unity does not overcome diversity. The Father is one with the Son but their oneness does not collapse Father and Son into each other. Through their oneness or relational unity they have their being as Father and Son. Gunton describes the Trinity as otherness-in-relationship. The creation is also organised on these principles. God’s creative will is to produce otherness (as creation is not part of God) in relationship to himself (as creation is not independent of God). This makes sense of image bearing. The image of God is otherness in relationships; male and female in community image God. Adam’s very being is not found in universal principles of rationalism and will residing in a body. Adam’s being is as other in and through relationships with entities that are different to him: God, other people and creation.

Unlike the dominant Augustinian view that God’s will leads to unity over diversity, a Trinitarian, relational understanding of being shows God’s will to be a particularising will. He creates to make otherness-in-relationship; diversity through unity. This brings us to the other key principle underlying creation; redemptive history. Through the Son and the Spirit the Father brings creation back into relationship with himself in order that creation might flourish in its diversity and particularity.

The Son reconciles the creation to the Father through his birth, death, resurrection and ascension. The Spirit comes, as a result of the ascension and completed work of the Son, to perfect the creation. He does this by starting with the transformation of the hearts of believers. The Spirit, right from the beginning was the perfector of creation. But perfecting does not mean bringing the universal forms into unity. The Spirit hovered over the waters as God created by differentiating light from dark, land from water and sky etc. Father, Son and Holy Spirit together make it possible for creation to be readmitted into relationship with its creator for its flourishing into the particular and diverse.

In Gunton’s thought we cannot have particularity without relationality. Otherness requires relationship. When we try to find principles for the underlying organisation of creation outside of the Trinitarian program of redemption we end up trying to establish particularity on a universal, non-relational principle of rational will rather than on relationship. A non-relational will can only exert itself against otherness. It cannot create otherness. This is the paradox of modernity. It manages to raise particularity to a new form of oneness, destroying the possibility of diversity. In Gunton’s analysis this is the root cause of modernity’s failure to deliver true identity to people.

Embodiment and Identity

Modernity thought the enemy of particularity was the transcendence of the unitary will above the many and so God was replaced by the many, embodied, human, unitary wills. Here is modernity’s moment of celebrating the triumph of the many over the one. But this embodiment of rational wills in human form undermines diversity and identity in two ways.

Firstly, society becomes a competition of wills, a battle ground for radical individualism. Therefore difference is extinguished as one will wins over another will. Non-relational will exerts itself to destroy otherness, conforming otherness to its agenda. Secondly, relationship is no longer seen as constitutive of being human because we are independent rational wills. The paradox here is that while an affirmation of independently constituted rational wills looks like a move toward particularity its actual ends lies in identity through being part of the herd or mass.

Gunton shows how since William of Ockham, being has been determined through possessing universal characteristics, most notably will and rational mind. Difference between people is ultimately removed from an account of being. We are who we are by conformity to a new set of universal ‘forms.’ We are all reduced to mathematical equivalents; an alignment of universal characteristics. Any apparent difference is an illusion and not part of our fundamental being. This is can be seen in modernity’s attempt to reduce all humanity to a genetic code and then to work out difference from a different arrangement of the same basic universal categories.

Individuality is worked out in terms of ‘herd’ characteristics rather than being a unique set of relationships with God, people and creation. Instead of my ‘being’ and uniqueness rooted and defined by being a child of God, father, son, husband, colleague etc., I am understood as a rational, psychological system with gender, age, personality traits etc. Of course I do have these characteristics but my ‘being’ is more than the sum of their parts. If I describe myself as a 33 year old rational, thinking male with extrovert tendencies, I could have described a thousand other 33 year males.  This is a non-relational view of my otherness or identity. It tries to make difference and particularity out of a non-relational, mathematical unity. A relational framework reworks unity in relational terms. Through my relational unity with friends, family, God and creation, I find my otherness. I am not someone else because I inhabit a different set of relationships. Relational unity feeds otherness. The one and the many find their proper relationship.

But modernity has retained the non relational unity of antiquity. Thinking that transcendence was the problem it kept non relational will and rationality as the categories of being and embedded them in human experience. The transcendent one was embedded in the embodied many and the result has been new forms of radical individualism or collectivism. Neither delivers true being or identity.

The logic of this is that when the one is replaced by the many, the displacement happens in two ways: either the many become an aggregate of ones, each attempting to dominate the world, the outcome being those regimes now labeled fascist, in which the strongest survives and dominates; or the many become homogenized, contrary to their true being into the mass. (33)

Embodiment in order to overcome transcendence simply leads to radical individualism on the one hand or to society conceived as a collective or aggregate of ones rather than as a community. But both individualism and collectivism are devoid of relationship. Far from solving the tension, modernity introduces a new form of the old problem. Politically modern societies swing between the individual (the one) and the collective (the many).

Incarnation and Transcendence

Embodiment is not the solution to rightly relating the one and the many. In the missional church movement we have become suspicious of transcendence in much the same way as the modernists and postmodernists. We worry that an emphasis on the transcendence of God will lead to a kind of cultural imperialism which fails to take culture seriously. The incarnation seems like the answer to the problem. But if by incarnation we mean the divine arbitrary, non relational will becoming human in order to affirm creation and cultural diversity, then we too have only made a modernist move with a Christian veneer. Even if we talk in detail about the life of Christ as the model for us all we may have simply collapsed God as arbitrary divine will into humanity by making him man. It appears that God in his Son came to affirm the aggregate of ones attempting to dominate the world. One symptom of such a view is that the gospel simply becomes about God becoming man so that we can reach our own individual or collective potential in our cultural setting. Another symptom is the lack of chapters in missional theology books on the Trinity and the Ascension.

If we follow Gunton’s argument then it becomes clear that the otherness and the transcendence of God are not a threat to culture. The problem is a non Trinitarian approach to creation and redemption. When we try to hang a theology of cultural engagement on the incarnation alone we join in with modernity’s misdiagnosis of the problem of cultural diversity.

Gunton’s solution requires a paradigm shift in the way we understand the problem of cultural diversity. His Trinitarian approach reveals relationality as key to being and particularity. Modernity saw the problem of diversity as transcendent unity competing with otherness. The solution to this problem was incarnation. Incarnation for many in the missional movement has become the good news of the gospel and the primary move of God to allow creation to flourish. Christians are then asked to become ‘incarnational’. But if Gunton is correct this solution adds to the problem. If we make incarnation the key moment that underpins cultural diversity, we inadvertently change the Biblical understanding of God’s relationship to creation. We switch from a Trinitarian theology to a new form of Greek dualism which favours the many over the transcendent one. If, on the other hand, we rediscover that the problem of modernity is a denial of the relational basis of being by insisting on non-relational particularity, then God’s primary solution to the problem is relational not incarnational. For Gunton the trinity as otherness-in-relationship provides the mediating principle between the one and the many. Embodiment fails to come to terms with otherness in relationship and tries to collapse the one into the many. It seems to me that relationality rather than the incarnation shapes the good news categories of the gospel. They include reconciliation, union with Christ, adoption, community etc. This means that reconciliation between God and creation through the whole Jesus story is God’s primary move to re-establish the purpose, direction and cultural diversity of culture. Incarnation is one important moment in the process of reconciliation, but it is not the whole show.

Click here to or here to purchase Gunton's The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity

To recalibrate its activities around mission, the church has had to come to terms with cultural pluralism; the idea that here are many varied local cultures for the gospel to engage with. In the missional church literature there has been helpful analysis and enthusiasm for understanding the local and the particular in mission. Writers like Alan Hirsch and Michael Frost have helped us to find ways to enter cultures, listen for local stories, affirm local cultural difference, and avoid imposing models of church. They have challenged us to look for organic models of church that give the gospel expression through local culture.  The incarnation has been the mediating principle for much of this helpful insight. In the incarnation we see God affirming locality and difference by entering a culture. The gospel emerges in the world through a local culture and spreads as God’s people enter other cultures.

In his book, The One, The Three and the Many, Colin Gunton brings a robust Trinitarian theology to bear on the culture of modernity. Modernity has tried to take the local and particular seriously. It has opted for radical embodiment as its organising principle. This is the idea that meaning in the universe comes from the stuff of everyday life; bodies, language and culture, rather than transcendent universal principles. To some degree, modernity has its own ‘incarnational’ approach to local culture.

Gunton argues, however,  that modernity is built on paradox. Far from celebrating cultural diversity or providing a foundation for difference and particularity, modernity has in fact created new forms of homogeneous culture, often more oppressive than the ideologies it tried to throw off.

In this series of three blogs I want to suggest that Gunton’s critique of modernity’s approach to local culture might reveal some correctives for our incarnational approach.

Gunton argues that the worldview of antiquity was seen by modernists and postmodernists as privileging the ‘one’ above the ‘many.’ From Plato’s universal forms to Augustine’s God as a divine rational will, antiquity squashed cultural diversity under the weight of single unifying principles. Particularity, difference and materiality were not seen as fundamental to the nature of creation. Instead they were seen as departures from the purity of the unity of the divine one or universal forms. In such a worldview difference is bad. Modernity attempted to distinguish itself from antiquity by attempting to privilege the ‘many’, the local and diverse, above a transcendent ‘one’.

Modernity achieved this by emphasising the particular through displacing the divine ‘one’. Embodiment is essential to this displacement. This happened through William of Ockham and modernity’s obsession with materiality. William of Ockham, the champion of the particular, rejected the idea of a unifying will of God or transcendent universal principles as the foundation for meaning and coherence. Instead he made the rational will of humans the starting point of coherence and meaning-making. This paved the way for modernity’s move to embodiment because it made human experience the organising principle of the universe. Modernity’s emphasis on materiality supplied a number of theories for the mechanisms of human experience. Marxism, socio-biology and early psychology made economics, evolution, biology and neurology the basis of human experience. The concepts of mind and will, which were once considered transcendent and non-bodily entities, were now cemented to economics, biology and neurology.

So the transcendent one or divine will was replaced by many embodied wills as the organising principle of creation. This move to locate the organising principles of the universe in human embodied experience could be described as a modernist, secular incarnational move. It promised to make cultural diversity and the particular the starting place for accounts of being. Along with this shift, the idea that the cosmos held meaning was replaced by a view that time, space and materiality are meaningless. Truth and meaning are locally generated by the activities and sense-making of people as embodied wills. In order to enter truth one has to enter a local culture or worldview.

On a surface reading, modernity looks like the triumph of the many over the one in which the local and particular are celebrated. Gunton stresses that of all cultures modernity has achieved the most for the cause of cultural diversity. But modernity has also created the herding culture of consumerism, communism and fascism along with the attendant bloodshed, addiction and misery. Paradoxically, in each case, the many have been forced into forms of identity that are shaped by a new, all powerful one. Consumerism transforms us into the image of the market. Identity is worked out through the consumption of mass-produced products and logos, creating as much homogeneity as individuality. Communism erected the state as the transcendent one in the name of giving ownership of life and work back to the masses. Fascism similarly attempts to serve the many, but does so by making the many conform to the will and image of the head of state. Gunton’s point is that modernity has not escaped antiquity. It has repeated the same mistake; erecting a new one over the many. The only difference is that modernity has replaced transcendent oneness with more immanent and earthly forms: market, self, state, race.

These ‘false transcendentals’ are demonic, says Gunton. They are idols or God replacements. Like all idols they undermine our humanity and identity by drafting us into the service of their image, crushing God’s design for community and individuality. Modernity thought that the enemy of diversity was a transcendent one. But, by bringing the transcendent down to earth and making it immanent and human, modernity has not served the many. It has created new forms of homogeneity that undermine identity and that compete with each other (e.g. consumerism verses socialism). The move to embodiment and the down-playing of transcendence has failed to create both diversity and unity. Embodiment is not a mediating category that can successfully manage the relationship between the one and the many. If this is true, then maybe also ‘embodiment’ in a Christian guise as ‘incarnation’ cannot on its own be the basis for a theology of cultural diversity and engagement. In the next two blog reflections on Gunton I want to unpack this argument.

Click here to or here to purchase Gunton's The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity.

'We had Christmas concert for children in our church today. They were told about the birth of Jesus. All the children were given gifts, adults were given books. We invited the children to our Sunday school, and their parents to our Sunday service. Here are some some pictures.

We are all in gratitude for your prayers for our church. Please go on on praying for our Sunday school and for the 'Mums in Touch' groups which we are starting for those ladies who don't attend the church.

God bless you!

У нас был сегодня Рождество концерт для детей в церкви. Мы сказали им о дне рождения Иисуса. Мы подали им подарки, и родители получили книги. Мы пригласили дети на воскресением школе и родители на воскресением собрании. Вот фотографии:

Большое спасибо за молитвы за церкви. Пожалуйста продолжайся помолить за воскресением школу и за группые "мумии в касании" которые мы начинаем для женщин которые не сейчас в церкви.

Спасибо!

This entry first appeared on Anthony Adams' blog here.

What we meant by this was the situation where a people see themselves as culturally associated with a particular religion, often quite strongly, and yet their commitment to it as a faith is very nominal.  

So they see their religion and their ethnicity as so closely intertwined as to be almost inseparable - to be of nationality 'X' is to be of religion 'Y' - but since there is little real engagement with that faith in terms of devotion, or even true belief, discussion about it has severe limits.

They do not read their holy books, attend places of worship, or spend any time praying or even seeking to understand the religion in question - they just are of that religion. This is a cunning way of blinding people is it not? They are locked into a worldview they have never even seriously engaged with, so you cannot discuss it since they don't actually believe it in any meaningful way...! It is a real stronghold. And it is a real reminder that spiritual change is not brought about by our clever arguments and ability to deconstruct someone else's beliefs. It is brought about by the power of God.

Of course sometimes God will work through good apologetics, but situations where our 'normal' approach will not work, remind us that it is not down to us. God is the one who opens eyes and changes hearts. That's why we need to pray because that is calling on God to work on people from the inside out. He is the only one who can do that. He will often use us in that process, but we need him to act and so must call on him to do that. Then, of course, he gets the glory.

It is humbling to be in a situation where we feel helpless, and it is good for us. Remember, to spend some quality time praying for the power of God in a situation is never wasted, especially for those of us who are activists who would rather be 'out and about'. Time in prayer is never wasted and sometimes it is the most important thing we can be doing because God will act in response to prayer and do things that we can never bring about by our own clever arguments. By his power and grace he can change even the most traditional religious secularist.

This entry first appeared on Anthony Adams' blog here.

There is a summary of the gospel message which runs like this: ‘God made you to know him, but your sin cuts you off from God. God sent his Son to die in your place and reconcile you to God. Now you can know God and look forward to being with him after death.’ It is the story of an individual out of relationship with God brought back into relationship with God. This version of the story is true. But it is not the whole truth. At the heart of the Bible story is the story of a community. The foundation of missional church is an understanding of the Bible story. The Bible is the story of God saving not individuals, but a people, a community, a new humanity. The Christian community is not an add-on. It is integral to the gospel.

Creation We are made in the image of the communal God as relational beings to live in community. (Genesis 1:26-27)

Fall Our rebellion creates conflict both between us and God and between one another.

Abraham The promise to Abraham is ‘the gospel announced in advance’ (Galatians 3:8), setting the agenda for the while Bible story and at its heart is God’s promise of a people (Genesis 12:1-3).

Exodus Because of his promise to Abraham, God sets his people free to know him. Through Moses he says: ‘I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God’ (Exodus 6:7). God lives among his people (the pillars of cloud and fire and the tabernacle), but the people keep their distance and offers sacrifices because of their sin and God’s holiness.

Israel ‘The people of Judah and Israel were as numerous as the sand on the seashore; they ate, they drank and they were happy’ (1 Kings 4:20; see Genesis 22:17; 32:12). But the people turn from God and the nation divides.

Prophecy God promises a new people: ‘I will be their God, and they will be my people’ (Jeremiah 31:31). He promises a faithful remnant (Zechariah 13:7-9).

Jesus Jesus is God with us (Matthew 1:23; John 1:18; Colossians 2:9-10). But he is also the faithful people of God, the true vine who bears fruit for God (Isaiah 5:1-7; John 15:1).

The Church In Christ we are God’s faithful people and the true children of Abraham (Galatians 3:7, 27). The cross reconciles us to God (Mark 15:38) and to one another (Ephesians 2:11-3:13). Christ did not die for ad hoc individuals, but for his people, his bride (Ephesians 5:25-27).

New Creation ‘Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God …’ (Revelation 21:1-4)

The individualistic version of the gospel makes the church a useful help to individual Christians, but not an identity. But community is central to the Bible story. People are invited to not simply to an individual relationship with God (though that is one implication), but to become part of the new people of God, the bride of Christ. You become a Christian when by faith you become part of the people for whom Christ died.

This post can be found on Tim's blog here.

Aged 12 he walked through the snow across the mountains to Greece to earn money. There he got a job carrying stone in a quarry (21 tonnes a day) and lived in a tool shed. After a while a family took him in and cared for him. But he felt God calling him back to Albania to his group. So aged 15 he was a church planter.

At 21 he married an English missionary called Esther. They have two twin daughters aged 6, Naomi and Matilda. Gjergje and Esther live in a village which (unusually) is a mixed Roma and Albanian village. Their home is where the church meets and also functions as a kind of community centre. But the church is small with around 10 people. With so many people leaving the villages to find work overseas, you have to keep on moving forwards simply to stand still.

Later the same day we visited a project in the villages around a town called Korçe in the heart of Albania – more in the mountains. We met a team doing ‘community health evangelism’ – a programme that combines health education with evangelism. It was very impressive. Simple stuff: health education courses combined with discussion of spiritual topics plus helping the community make changes for itself.

We spent the afternoon visiting families. At each family we were served more raki (a kind  of Albanian moonshine) and fruit. It was all very relational. You could seriously get drunk doing this work! The villages are much poorer than the towns. They survive mostly on money sent back from relatives working overseas. Yet everyone we visited was very hospitable and welcoming. They kept giving us grapes from their vines. We got more from each family we visited!

If you would like to get involved in partnering with local churches to reach the Balkans then contact Brian Jose.

1. Paul is sent by a local church
Paul is sent by a local church and reports back to a local church (Acts 13:1-3; 14:27-28). He’s not sent by a mission agency, nor does he report to anyone other than his local church. Of course not, there were no mission agencies! Mission agencies only came into being because local churches stopped doing their job of sending people. I’m convinced mission agencies today have a role as specialist advisers, but mission belongs to the local church.

2. Paul goes as with a team to model church
Paul always takes team members: Barnabas, Silas, Timothy, Titus, Luke. He wants support and he wants co-workers. And he wants a team that will demonstrate Christian community so unbelievers can see the gospel in action and new believers have a model to follow.

3. Paul’s aim is to plant churches
Everywhere he goes Paul’s wants to leave behind a church. Yes, he proclaimed the gospel. Yes, he helped the poor. But his goal was to start a church – so that the church could continue to proclaim the gospel and help the poor after Paul had left.

4. Paul establishes churches by leaving
Paul moves on. So churches can develop without him. So new leaders can emerge. So they don’t become dependent on him. (See Partners in Mission #2.)

5. Paul creates mission partnerships between churches
Paul refuses to let one church come under the authority of another (1:11-24; 2:6-9). He doesn’t want a church to be dependent on others churches. But at the same time he pursues relationships between churches (2:1-3 and the Jerusalem collection). He doesn’t want churches to be independent. He wants partnership in mission. (See Partners in Mission #1.)

Let me tell you about G. G was the pastor of  a church in Durres, Albania. Now he is leading a small church planting team in a city in Macedonia. It’s city of 70,000 people and the team are the only Christians in the city. As we were praying around the city, the mosque was overflowing with people praying halfway up the path outside. We had lunch in a café which the team call the Happy Man Restaurant because the owner is always smiling. What’s interesting about this is that in a city of 70,000 a smiling man is noteworthy enough to get his restaurant named after him.

Sending their pastor was a massive decision for the small church in Durres. For three years they sent small teams to the city three times a year so everyone got the vision. Then a team of eight stayed for three months researching the culture and make-up of the city. G described how making the decision involved lots of coffee, talking to people so they felt part of what was happening. This church planting team in this unreached city is the result of one, small church taking responsibility for mission.

G and his wife are planting with a married couple from a church in Luton. The husband used to be a postman. Their church was praying for people to work with G and his wife. Brian asked if anyone felt God suggesting a name. The postman's wife said, 'Yes, mine.' When she told Damien he hit the roof. But now there they are with their three young children working under the leadership of G. This church planting team in this unreached city is a partnership of local churches.

This conviction that the local church at the heart of mission is The Crowded House has a close association with Radstock. Radstock was founded by Steve Timmis and many TCH people have been involved in its leadership and its ministry.

But what about 2:2? ‘I went there [to Jerusalem] because God revealed to me that I should go. While I was there I met privately with those considered to be leaders of the church and shared with them the message I had been preaching to the Gentiles. I wanted to make sure that we were in agreement, for fear that all my efforts had been wasted and I was running the race for nothing.

At first sight, this looks like Paul does want the approval of the church in Jerusalem.

To understand what’s happening we need to remember Paul’s special calling. Four times in Ephesians 3 Paul says he was called by God to take the gospel to the Gentiles (Ephesians 3:2, 7, 8, 9). Why? Paul says: ‘This is God’s plan: Both Gentiles and Jews who believe the Good News … are part of the same body.’ (3:6) Paul’s great purpose in life is to preach the gospel to the Gentiles to create one united church. Jews and Gentiles together, as a testimony of God’s grace and God’s victory (3:10).

But what happens if Jews won’t accept Gentile believers? Then you get two churches. And Paul’s great life purpose is wrecked. As he puts in Galatians 2:2, he has wasted his effort; he has run his race for nothing. That’s the issue when he takes Titus to Jerusalem (see Galatians 2:1-3). The issue is not will they approve of Paul’s message, but will they accept Paul’s converts. He doesn’t need their approval of his message – he knows his message is right because it’s from God (1:11-12, 15-16). What he wants is their acceptance of his converts. He wants one united church as a testimony of God’s victory.

So Paul doesn’t want the Gentile churches to be dependent on Jerusalem. But neither does he want them to be independent. He wants unity, relationship, partnership: partnership instead of dependence and partnership instead of independence.

That’s why he organises the collection of money from the Gentiles for the poor Christians in Jerusalem (see 2:10) – as an expression of that unity.

It explains why Paul seems concerned that the Jerusalem church will accept this gift and so why he urges the church in Rome to pray that it will be well received (Romans 15:30-31). Why pray for destitute people to accept help? Because there really is a possibility that Jewish Christians might not accept this gift from uncircumcised Gentiles. Paul prays that the collection will be accepted because he intends it to be a sign of the reconciliation of Jew and Gentile in one church.

Equal partners. Partnering in mission.

He asks them, ‘Would you let an Albanian take over your meeting or programme if they turned up out of the blue?’ And they always say ‘No’. But they can’t see that’s what just they’re doing! They assume they know best or that the Balkan church ought to be grateful for their help.

We visited a church started by a well known mission agency. In time local leaders were put in place. All well and good. But the agency still owns the building and so still controls the church. The missionaries themselves are not under the authority of the church. They act independently.

Albanian churches are expected to listen to Westerners. They are not quite trusted. There is still a sort maternal relationship. They are treated as children. They are not true partners in mission.

We find similar issues being address in the letter to the Galatians. Some people in Galatia are teaching a message that, Paul says, ‘pretends to be the Good News, but is not the Good News at all’ (1:6-7). They are saying Gentiles who have put their faith in Jesus also need to be circumcised. Paul’s response is this:‘If you are counting on circumcision to make you right with God, then Christ will be of no benefit to you.’ (5:2) That’s pretty clear.

But there’s another thing going on. There’s an underlying assumption in what the false teachers say. It’s this: ‘You Gentile Christians ought to listen to us Jewish Christians. You ought to do what we say. After all, our church in Jerusalem is larger, stronger, older, better resourced, more established. We have a long history stretching back to Abraham. The Good News came from us. We’re your mother church. We’re just being maternal. We want to look after our children.’

Think how that might sound today. ‘You Albanian Christians or Kurdish Christians or Afghan Christians ought to listen to us British Christians. You ought to do what we say. After all, our church in Britain is larger, stronger, older, better resourced, more established. We have a long history stretching back to the Reformation. The Good News came from us. We’re your mother church. We’re just being maternal. We want to look after our converts.’ No-one quite says it like that, but that’s the subtext of a lot of mission activity.

But Paul rejects this. He wants a partnership of equals; partnership not dependence.

That’s why he says what he says in 1:12: ‘I received my message from no human source, and no one taught me. Instead, I received it by direct revelation from Jesus Christ.’ The gospel message is not from Jerusalem. It’s not the property of the Jerusalem church. Nor the British church. The gospel did not originate with us.

This puts Paul in a dilemma because, as it happens, the apostles in Jerusalem agree with Paul’s position on circumcision. It would have been so easy for Paul to say, ‘The big guns in Jerusalem are on my side so listen to me.

But if he had done that then he might have won ‘the circumcision argument’, but he would have lost ‘the equal partners argument’. He would have conceded that Gentiles churches were under the authority of the Jerusalem church. And he won’t do that.

And so we get this strange narrative in chapters 1 and 2: ‘I met the apostles – but not straight away (1:15-17). I met the apostles – but only a few of them (1:18-19). They agreed with me – but their opinion doesn’t really matter (2:6, 9).’

In 4:25-26 Paul says ‘Sarah, represents the heavenly Jerusalem. She is the free woman, and she is our mother.’ Where is our mother church? Where is the church who gave us birth? Where is the church to whom we are accountable? Not in Jerusalem. It’s not a church in Sheffield. It’s not the headquarters of mission agency. Our mother church is in heaven. Our mother church is the congregation of people gathered around the throne of Jesus.

The church in Galatia is not even under the authority of Paul. Look at 1:8: ‘Let God’s curse fall on anyone, including us or even an angel from heaven, who preaches a different kind of Good News than the one we preached to you.’ The church in Galatia is under the authority and headship of Christ – not the church in Jerusalem, not even Paul. And the church is led by the Spirit through the word – not by messengers from Jerusalem and not even by letters from Paul. This letter is a letter of persuasion, not of dictate. And the same is true for Albanian churches and Pakistani churches and Kurdish churches. They are not under the authority of mission agencies or Western churches. They are under the authority of Christ, led by the Spirit, owing allegiance to the heavenly church.

So if we want to work with churches in Albania or Pakistan or Kurdistan then we need to work as equal partners.

In the Balkans we met a church planter called Arvid. Brian told us how a Westerner came through Albania and was telling Arvid all the things he wanted to do. Arvid got quite agitated because the guy was expecting them to get on board with his agenda. And in his outburst Arvid mentioned Brian’s name. ‘Oh, you’ll listen to Brian,’ the guy said in frustration. Arvid replied: ‘Brian influences us because he listens to us.’ A partnership of equals.

It’s not that the Western church has nothing to contribute. Of course it has. We have a history, resources, understanding. But we must work with others churches as equal partners. They, too, have a history, resources, understanding. Indeed, it comes to their context, they will usually have a better understanding. There are many things we can teach them. But there are also many things we can learn. As we work with churches around the world we must work together as equal partners.

‘But what about when there is no church? How can you work with a local church when there isn’t one or they’re all very new Christians?’ Let me respond with another question: Where is Paul when he writes to the Galatians? We don’t know for sure. But we do know that, wherever he is, he’s not in Galatia! He planted the church and then moved on.

And that was his habit. Sometimes he stayed for a few years, sometimes a few weeks. But he always moved on to let the church develop without him. He was still involved – that’s why he’s writing this letter. But he allowed local leaders to take responsibility for the church. His goal was a partnership of equals. And he did that by moving on. That might sound risky to us, but Paul entrusted them to the Holy Spirit.

In one town we visited in Albania there was a church started by a missionary from the UK. Twenty years later he is still there. He will not hand on the work. So the church remains dependent on him. It is causing a lot of frustration.

Paul’s goal is a partnership of equals. Partnership not dependence.

Do you know that Christmas Eve feeling? The weariness of having rushed around trying to get everything ready and the anticipation of tomorrow being a day of rest. I had that feeling last night. We worked hard yesterday to get our chores done, working hard so we could switch off and just enjoy the holidays. Today is the first day of Cejin Qorban; the Feast of Sacrifice. Today was definitely a day off for everyone; people wore their best suits, drove courteously and took life a little slower. We had fun.

The Feast remembers the story of Abraham and his choice to sacrifice his son. Our Muslim friends render the story differently; for one the son at the centre of the story is Ishmael and not Isaac. More significantly the story is told as a picture of obedience, Abraham’s willingness to obey God whatever he would ask. One of the central tenets of Islam, indeed the meaning of the word ‘Islam’ is submission to God. Abraham provides a vivid picture of that. Whilst many Christians may think of the story in these terms I consider the more central point to be God’s provision of the ram so Abraham’s son could be spared. It might sound like semantics but it fundamentally sets the tone for each faith.

For many of our friends The Feast is a time for visiting. Usually when you visit a friend in Kurdish culture you can expect to stay for at least an hour, possibly two. At Cejin the protocol is to stay just between 20-45 minutes. In visiting someone you communicate to them you consider them a close friend; particularly if you visit on the first day. Keeping the visits to a shorter time means that you can visit your closest set of friends in one day. When I asked what the Mullah had taught in the Friday prayers, the message was one of friendship, of keeping the tradition of visiting so that the society remains strong. We certainly witnessed first-hand the warmth and strength of relationships here and felt very much at home today.

I donned by Kurdish clothes today; knowing that what we chose to wear would communicate our respect and view of the friends we visited. My wife dressed smartly and looked the epitome of Kurdish chic. There were many exclamations and declarations that we were indeed Kurdish; such comments reinforcing our sense of belonging.

We managed 6 visits today; all very different. In one home we sat and listened to the father share how depressed he was at his life here in Kurdistan. Uncharacteristically frank and honest he spoke of the burden of working as a high-ranking official in the government, being the oldest brother in his family, the father of six sons and looking after a dying mother-in-law and mentally disabled aunt. The sons look on and wonder at the root of their father’s sorrow; seemingly unable to offer him hope.  Cejin was not a happy time for them. When I asked how many guests they had received the answer was only a few. We were their main guests and they were genuinely delighted to have us visit.

Another home saw my wife and I separated even before we entered. The home of an Arga,chief of a tribe in north-eastern Iraq. Their home serves as a commune for his tribe and he has spiritual and political responsibility for hundreds of people. As I enter the reception hall, his cousin is giving a message to an audience of 30+ men. I give my greetings and take my allotted seat, reflecting my standing in the community. Every 10 minutes new guests arrive and everyone respectfully stands up, greets the new arrivals and sits down. I asked my friend, the son of Hussein how many guests they have had today; his reply more than 500 and it was only 2pm. I was introduced to the assembly as the ‘English teacher who knows Kurdish and is going to learn Kurdish before his students learnEnglish’. I left wondering how many times Arga would have to stand up and sit down over the next few days.

So we now sit with that Christmas Night feeling; feeling tired not from work but from hospitality. Considering all the people we met, their stories, their lives. For some The Feast was a time for reflection, others a time for visiting and for some just a time to endure. For us it has been a treat to be in our friends’ homes at a time when they are resting and sharing from their hearts the things that animate them both the joys and the sorrows. And with 3 more days to go I’ve got that Christmas Eve feeling all over again.

How to begin? Four weeks in and we began to hit a communication barrier. As each day went by we quickly realised that it was impossible to convey what we wanted… not to our friends here but to all our loved ones back in the UK. Early on we began to trim our expectations of phone calls and correspondence, realising how disparate our frame of reference was becoming from life back home. The act of conveying daily routines would leave us fumbling for words; if the resolve was there we might be able to explain a ‘moment’ but the amount of energy it required left us a little defeated. And with energy being at a premium, needed for other more demanding acts like grocery shopping or driving the car, we found ourselves just answering, “Well, it’s just so very different here”.

Not that anyone will have noticed because of the assumption; the assumption that life here is just life there but with a few eccentricities. So the conversation becomes about dress codes, strange cuisine and witty anecdotes but bubbling underneath the surface is that nagging thought that our experiences are now no longer understood, simply because they’re no longer shared.

The frailty felt when you’re unable to communicate even one day of this new life only reinforces the sense of dislocation and being far from home. I’ve avoided writing about experiences because it promises to be too great a challenge. It’s uncomfortable to think that we might have changed and that the change might prove irreversible. It first occurred to me back in the UK, during our last fortnight there. The experience of leaving family and friends was so unlike any other I’d had that, whilst the impulse to share it was there, I didn’t know how. Even for the most empathetic of listeners, it just seemed like an impossible ‘ask’ to expect someone to understand. So not only is something different about you, but people have to work harder to spot the difference.

Mostly unaware that these changes are taking place, you notice them only in that life is getting easier. You start to feel more settled. Routines have now become not just daily, weekly but monthly. A challenge on Day 50 has the experience of the 49 previous days to draw from, which couldn’t have been said of Day 5. We’re becoming rooted in life here; something we welcome, enjoy and long for in increasing measure. But as each shoot pushes further into Kurdish soil it has to mean, for a time at least, that we’re uprooted from the UK. As your faces come up on our computer screen, with kitchens, studies and lounges we once knew too well serving as a backdrop, the reality hits us ‘we’re different’.

I want to suggest that holidays work differently; from the outset you’re tooling yourself to be able to share the experience when you re-enter your home environment. Postcards, holiday snaps and a return ticket are the visible reminders that you’re not staying and that you’re going make sense of this new environment and these strange people… back home. Even as you enjoy your travels you anticipate speaking of your holiday in the third person, past tense, “It was such a lovely time”.

I have the hotel receipt from our first night in Turkey sat, as some irrelevant icon to the journey we took, in the top drawer of my desk. It’s there next to some 10ps and a £5 note. Two years is a long time, too long to use a framework from a life we left behind in order to make sense of the ‘now’. Too many experiences have taken placed now for us to ever try and process them using our old categories; to think we could put them in storage and unpack them on our return is even more absurd.

So what we’re left with are the awkward moments when people sign off knowing there were a 101 questions they could have asked but didn’t and a month-long case of writer’s block. I think someone, somewhere put a label on it and to this day it’s been called culture shock.

I certainly find myself asking the question of churches that have been planted here in Mongolia in the last 20 years by foreign missionaries. To what extent are these churches culturally Mongolian as opposed to imports from the 'culture' of the missionaries? 

A couple of years ago at the Radstock International Conference, one of our Russian leaders said, 'The biggest problem in mission in Russia in the 1990's, was that a large number of missionaries came in and planted American churches.' Apologies to North American readers, this is not directed at you, as you'll see! About a year ago, I was asked (in all seriousness) what I was doing to spread Anglicanism* in Russia, and by extension now Mongolia. I said, 'Nothing,' to which the reply was less than dignified! The reason for my approach was, and is, very simple. The Gospel and church tradition are not equivalent, however expressive particular church traditions are (or are not) of the Gospel. 

For me, as an observer and practitioner, it's a question of what cultural baggage mission and church planting teams take with them to the work they do. To go back to our Russian colleague, he was referring to church plants, structures and even buildings that were inappropriate to the cultural context - sometimes worse than that. I've seen a number myself. What were we teaching these guys? Early post-Soviet Russian leaders learned foreign models of 'successful' churches and tried to apply them in their own context, often with great disappointment, both to them and their expectant congregations.

At its worst extreme was the inrush into Russia and the former Soviet Union of prosperity gospel, which is really no gospel at all. In fact, heresy is not too strong a word for this teaching, and heretics not too strong a description for those who peddle it. The teaching drew on the high expectations of the first generation in the former Soviet Union to emerge from communism. Thousands were sucked in, and many dropped out at the other end, disillusioned. Prosperity teachers completely failed to decouple their teaching from the cultural baggage they brought with it - which I guess was almost inevitable given the focus of the teaching. 

Not being one of these preachers myself, however, I still find myself asking:

• Do we know how to decouple our kerygma (proclamation) from the cultural and church traditions we think are so important?
• Do we know how to listen faithfully to the culture(s) we serve, and the messages they give us, while remaining true to the kerygma that sends us? 
• Do we really know how to 'morph' the Gospel, like a piece of plasticine, which can be changed into any shape to suit, while keeping its substance the same?
• What message do our words and actions really convey? Is it the same as the intended message, or is it completely different?

For me, answering these questions has to start with the incarnation. This is not a voyage into theologies that major on this, but dispense with the need for redemption and repentance. Rather it is an appreciation of the model that the incarnation gives us for effective missional engagement. I plan to explore this further in part 2.

*My theological stable is the evangelical branch of the Anglican Church in England.

The other day I heard about the plight of a community in Hovd Province, in the far west of Mongolia. Their story is typical of that faced by so many in this vast, poverty-stricken country in the Central Asian steppe:

Schools have been shut here following the arrival of A/H1N1 swine flu. But in this particular community, there have been no recorded cases of the virus.

Yet the schools have been shut.

Many children there are dependent on the schools, not just for education, but for meals (hence nutrition), which they would otherwise go without. Closed schools means these children are at real risk of severe malnutrition or worse. It’s that stark. Factor in night-time temperatures down to -30C (no kidding), and I'll leave you to imagine how these folks are struggling to cope. And their situation is likely not unique. Hence a small risk of a very big problem (swine flu) has been translated into a very big risk of something that is ordinarily preventable. This is an irony. Yet it is the poor who are paying the price of this irony. 

Micro-Enterprise Development, or MED as we refer to it in Radstock, is key to what we see as churches leading their communities out of poverty. Yet MED in this culture faces a number of challenges, challenges not dissimilar to those faced by Gospel work more generally in this struggling country:

Firstly, Mongols have grown used to being given things, and have come to view this as their way of relating to the wider world. Soviet-era development came from outside (the Soviet Union). And there was a lot of this development: the capital, where I live, is essentially a Russian city, inhabited mostly by Mongols. Virtually nothing remains of the Ulaanbaatar of a hundred years ago. But the USSR had no strategic interest in Mongolia being anything other than a grateful recipient of Moscow's largesse. Several generations came under this cultural 'footprint.' 20 years after the fall of communism here, this cultural dependence - or helplessness - continues, almost unabated. For incisive comment from a contemporary Mongolian economist, click here.

Secondly, many Mongols struggle with the idea that they can change their situations for the better. Things are as they are, 'because that is how it is,' is the mentality. This is rooted in the communist era here, with its apex set-up whereby a very few at the top called the shots, and the rest followed orders - or at least gave the appearance of doing so. But this fatalism is not just the fault of communism. The religious architecture here is heavily shaped by Buddhism and shamanism, which in their own ways, enforce the mentality of things being as they are, because that is how the spirits have arranged things. ‘Fate’ sits heavily on the culture. Even Christians struggle with this background mentality.

Thirdly, Mongolia is culturally nomadic, even though only around 600,000 out of a population of 2.7 million are directly involved in herding animals across the vast steppe and desert here. People's general response to adversity tends towards just picking up and moving on to the next thing, rather than sitting down to identify and solve the issues that caused the difficulties. You can imagine what that does in all kinds of situations, including for those trying to start businesses.

Lastly, Mongols tend to trust foreigners rather than each other - another throwback to the Soviet era. Without their secret police, the authorities could never know whether someone was being ‘faithful to the cause’ or just acting to please. And similarly, those outside the establishment often could not know who they were really talking to, since their neighbour in the next ger could be a secret police informer. Such mistrust persists, although it has morphed slightly in the new Mongolia.

There are other cultural challenges here too, which space does not allow us to explore here. But in micro-enterprise terms, all the above points to a real need, not just for teams to come in from outside and do small business training, which is great in itself. This need is for people to actually commit to living here, to inculcate Gospel business values into the culture, and develop further programmes as necessary, on the hoof. (In fact, there is no shortage of hooves here!I:-)) Seriously, there needs to be an incarnational approach, to complement teams coming from outside. Mongols place a high value on 'presence,' in other words, being here over the long term. 

This is extremely sacrificial, but nowhere near as great as the sacrifice that caused Jesus to leave his Father's side and become incarnate among us and die for us. But it is incarnational nonetheless, and this is what will really effect change here, including unravelling vicious ironies like the one above.

For this reason, we would love to see a micro-enterprise specialist based with Radstock’s network churches in South Gobi. This is where we ran the initial MED module, using materials freely produced by Reconxile. Such a person or couple could help take forward the training, mentor the new business owners, and help cascade the training to others. We can't promise great material comfort, though you'll get some. But we can promise you the time of your life! If that sounds like you, do get in touch. If it sounds like someone else, do pass this on!

*To get a snapshot of what is happening with these businesses, click here.

This blog entry was first posted on Paul's blog over @ criesofaSeagull.net

Tim Chester Session 1 | Lead 09 from Atmosphere Church on Vimeo.

Tim Chester Session 4 | Lead09 from Atmosphere Church on Vimeo.

Tim was our keynote speaker at the Radstock International Conference 2009. Click here for booking details for next year's conference!

As an organisation that believes that the local church is to be at the heart of mission, Radstock always wants to emphasise the importance of working not to serve the agenda of those who are passing through, but working alongside, and even taking a lead from, those who live in the area 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Think for a moment how you would feel if someone arrived on your church’s doorstep telling you how they thought your work should be done and what you needed, and then offered to do it for a week before disappearing until maybe another 12 months had passed. I think we would be underwhelmed by such an offer!

We need to respect the local believers and allow them to shape our activities as we spend time with them. We had a specific example of this when there was an event we had run last year which we were very keen to run again this year. As we put this idea on the table some weeks ago, we received a cool response and as we pursued it they kept suggesting something different. When we talked face to face, it became clear why they had reservations about the event, as it had some potentially unhelpful ramifications for their ongoing work. It's so important to respect the local leadership.

Of course sometimes those outside of a situation will have insights and wisdom to offer – all of us in church leadership have benefited from that at one time or another – but it is not good when we become presumptuous in telling another church what is best for it. Respect the local leadership.

I have talked with church leaders in other countries who have spoken of the frustration of overseas pastors coming in and presuming what is needed, without really consulting them for their opinions. On one occasion I remember sitting with a pastor who, along with other pastors in his country, had been offered a large amount of money from a western nation to buy some land and build a conference centre that could be used by the churches for retreats and training etc. Very generous we might think. Well, maybe. The problem was that the pastors did not actually want a fancy new conference centre. And when they knew how much the people were spending to make this happen, they became even more frustrated, as that money could have funded numerous initiatives that the local pastors really did want to see happen.

Respect the local leadership.

(originally posted at Anthony's 'going global' blog: anthonyadams.wordpress.com)

I recently read Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Tipping Point”.  Gladwell explores (very entertainingly) factors that trigger the emergence of epidemics (i.e. ideas, trends or diseases that rapidly emerge in a population to massive effect). 

As a Christian, it immediately had me thinking about revivals.  By Gladwell’s definition, revivals could be thought of as a ‘gospel epidemic’ - a sudden and dramatic response to a message that had been prevalent in the population before.  It made me wonder, “Humanly speaking, what might contribute to the “tipping point” for a revival?”  Was there anything about how epidemics spread that might raise useful questions for our approach to evangelism and church planting? 

Gladwell describes an epidemic as having three characteristics: 

(1)  Something contagious (a disease, an idea, a fashion)

(2)  A small change in input causing a disproportionately large change in results

(3)  Sudden and dramatic rises and falls

This framework would fit many revivals. 

Gladwell goes on to discuss three factors that he sees as contributing to the 'tipping point'.  I was struck by their obvious parallels in mission and church planting:

You need a powerful message:  For a social epidemic you need a message or idea that is 'sticky' (i.e. memorable / with a strong personal impact) and which leads to transformed living. 
We have that in the gospel - the power of God for the salvation of all who believe (Rom 1v16)! Perhaps there is a challenge to contextualise our proclamation of the gospel to be more memorable and impacting ('sticky').

You need a supportive context:  Tipping Point talks a lot about how even the smallest details of a context can affect our receptiveness to learning. 
It highlights the need to be deliberate in the life of our Christian communities.  I found it encouraging to remember that surely the life of the church is intended by God to be the perfect context for the gospel: a community loving one another as Christ loved them (John 13v34) and living out the wisdom of life in the Kingdom (Deut 4v6-7). Again, perhaps there is a challenge to commend the gospel through the relational quality of life in our churches, and to engage with defeater beliefs as part of preparing the soil for the gospel seed.

Motivated messengers:  Gladwell gives examples of where a tiny fraction of the population can have a disproportionate impact in introducing trends and ideas that go on to have a massive and far-reaching effect. 

 In connection with my post on being missional and relational, I was particularly struck by this last group.  The opening chapters of the book describe three different types of messenger:

(1)  People experts:  People who establish friendships easily, have a vast number of social acquaintances and are well known.  They are the “glue” that holds together their social circle.

(2)  Knowledge experts:  People who introduce new ideas to their social circles.  Gladwell talks about guys who research where to buy a cheap TV, or what car to drive and then delight in sharing that knowledge with you.  Knowledge experts aren’t just information geeks, they are socially motivated – looking to serve others by sharing their knowledge.

(3)  Persuasion experts:  These are folks who establish rapport quickly and impress upon others the need to act in response to a social trend, idea…

A church planting team is typically heavy on types (2) and (3).  Pastor-teachers fit the mould of the “knowledge expert” (2).  The evangelists on the team are the persuasion experts (3).

But what about the people experts?  My guess is we think of them as less core to a church planting team.  Even if we have a number of extroverts on the team, those connections are often developed over years.  It takes time to develop the same roots and networks in a new church planting context.  Gladwell talks about a particular kind of people who rapidly (almost effortlessly) develop and go on to maintain weak social connections with loads of people.  These are the people who know everyone, but who everyone would like to know better than they do.

What is the challenge here?  Perhaps to think more strategically about recruiting “people experts” to a church planting team.  An alternative approach might be intentionally to build relationships with “people experts” who are social hubs connecting with the community we are looking to reach.  Who is someone 'everybody' knows?  Is it worth devoting time and prayer to getting to know, and sharing the gospel with, that person?

Gladwell’s writing is entertaining and raises some challenges. His description of the anatomy of social epidemics may simply describe what a deliberate church-planting-based approach to mission does already - but even if & where that is the case, it’s encouraging to read something that implies “keep doing what you are doing”!

The challenge we are faced with is to build a mission-minded Christian community with deep and wide-ranging relational connections. We want everyone to end up in area C.  In discipling the church, we want to create a steady movement up and to the right on the graph. 

But how to do that?

Two brief suggestions: 

1) Get locals and planters engaged in mission in the community alongside one another:  Our experience suggests that deliberately bringing together people from each cluster accelerates the process.  Locals are able to act as 'door openers' into a wide range of subcultures and groups that would otherwise be closed to the new arrivals.  They help them to build friendships more quickly than would otherwise be possible.  Meanwhile, planters help model missional priorities as they seek to gently and appropriately evangelise their (now common) friends.

2) Build relationships of trust between locals and planters:  The above necessitates strong relationships of trust within the church.  The planters will need to learn from the locals about what is culturally appropriate.  Trust will be required as local people have a great deal more relational capital at risk (they risk offending friends they’ve known for years with the gospel rather than acquaintances they’ve known for weeks).  The locals may need to be challenged about their responsibility for mission and what it means to truly love their friends.

For us it’s early days!  I think it was inevitable that we have started with these two clusters from the way our church came about.  We continue to pray that we’ll increasingly move together towards the missional 'sweet spot':  a mission-minded Christian community with deep and wide-ranging relational connections.

Since planting a church on a social housing development in central London 3 years ago, by God’s grace, we have grown in two ways.  Firstly, a small but growing group of mission-minded Christians have moved into the area from outside to play a part in reaching the local community for Christ.  And secondly, local people have joined the church community through a variety of means (Sunday meetings, midweek meals and Bible studies, socials…  In time we hope young men will join us through the free weights sessions we run, but that is proving slower).

As I reflect back on recent years, we have experienced a twofold challenge:

• For church planters to build relational connections in the community and
• For local Christians to capture a vision for mission to their friends and neighbours  

Here’s why…

In these early days, the church community is clustered into two main groups:

1) Planters - mission-minded, but relationally unconnected:  

These guys are Christians who have moved into the area for the sake of mission through our local church.   They have born the cost of leaving prior church families, and intentionally made mission a priority in making work, financial and housing decisions!  They are highly committed to mission. 

However, in almost every case, (having moved in for the purposes of the plant) they have no prior friendships or connections to the community we seek to reach.  These guys are “starting from square one” relationally and inevitably take some time to understand and adapt to the local culture. ('Cluster A' on the graph below).

2) Locals - relationally connected, but less mission-minded:

These are members of the local community who have joined us.  In many cases they are longstanding residents with strong connections to the area through extended family and friends they have grown up with. They have years of shared history having lived through the defining highs and lows of their neighbours’ lives.  They instinctively “get” the local culture.  

However, generally these guys are less mission-minded, either because they have taken on some of their culture's pluralism, or because they lack a clear grasp of the gospel (many in our church community would rightly not identify themselves as Christians).  ('Cluster B' on the graph).

to be continued...

I’ve asked the question whether establishing a church meeting is always the best strategy for building church community, or whether there are contexts where other approaches are more appropriate. 

To make the point I’ve suggested two “extremes” of church planting strategies:  A meeting-led plant (whose immediate focus is to establish a public meeting) and a community-led plant (whose immediate focus is to build relationships with the local community). 

The two extremes are somewhat articificial - for a church plant in practice, these twin foci will always be present to a greater or lesser extent. But the early days of a church plant are hard - time and other resources are short - so I think it’s worth asking the question:  Where should a particular church plant sit between these two extremes?

Here are some brief thoughts as to when each might be more appropriate.  For me, the defining question is: how wide is the cultural gap between the planting team and each of (i) the local churched culture, and (ii) the local unchurched culture.

a) Where the context favours a community-led plant

The cultural gap is significant. The watching world is largely unchurched and it will take time to address their misunderstandings and stereotypes through the sharing of lives (1 Thess 2v8-9).  Public church meetings are not initially a fruitful pathway into church community.  Time is required to contextualise the communication of the gospel and the church’s practices, which will then shape the public meetings when they are established.

b) Where the context favours a meeting-led plant

The cultural gap to either the local churched or unchurched cultures is not great.  Church is an appropriate pathway for some in the wider community, allowing the church plant to expand quickly (initially through isolated Christians joining the church or through some transfer). 

Where the cultural gap is significant, the church will need to listen to the local joiners and be critiqued by them.  The perennial question will be:  “What differences are because of and for the sake of the gospel and what are not?” The challenge is not to conform local people to the likeness of the church planters, but that both groups would be conformed to the likeness of Christ!

Where the cultural gap between the planted community and the wider community is not great, it may be appropriate to duplicate many of the practices of the planting church.  I would suggest these practices still need to be held with an open hand, and intentionally reviewed to overcome cultural inertia.

(Aside:  The benefits of “rent-a-crowd”

There may be contexts where a public church meeting is appropriate, but where the size of the planting team makes such a meeting practically difficult or simply odd.  (e.g. if the pastor is preaching to his wife and two others, the atmosphere is somewhat intense/intimate for anyone joining off the street and expecting a “church service”!)

We faced this difficulty on a central London social housing development.  The issue was addressed through the support of our wider church network.  Our sending congregation encouraged some of its members to attend our public meeting and to support its practical running.  These volunteers were essentially “rent-a-crowd”.  The meeting became less intense (because it was 12-15 people not 3!) and local people joining experienced something more like “church” as they were used to it.  The outside support meant the church planters who had moved to the area were freed up (from practical aspects) to chat to visitors and build relationships. 

The “rent-a-crowd” joined on the understanding that they remained committed to another congregation as “their church”  (i.e. barriers to commitment were much lower than those for the core planting team).  As the church grew, they were able to reduce their time commitment.  After three years, some of the original “crowd” have made the plant “their church”, the majority no longer join us on a Sunday.  We are however massively thankful to God for all they did to help us establish a public meeting early on which proved to be a suitable pathway into Christian community for many in the local area).  

COMMUNITY-LED CHURCH PLANTS:

Under this approach, the church-planting team focus on community formation through strengthening relationships within the team, and building new connections with the community they seek to reach.  Their concern is to commend the depth and quality of Christian relationships to the watching world, and to listen to the new culture before (if ever) establishing a public meeting. 

Again, this approach has a number of immediate positives:

• Creates a strong & immediate emphasis on relationship-building The church plant is established with a culture that is all about mission through relationships (as opposed to a “hold a meeting and they will come” approach).  The business of mission is more likely to be understood as a deliberate pattern of life rather than a something limited to certain times in the week. 
• Energies are devoted to relationships which then act as a pathway into Christian community In the early days (when resources are limited) energies can be given over to spending time with other Christians (e.g. house church, team bible study and prayer…).
• Builds a strong awareness of local culture before committing to forms/styles of public meeting and teaching.  Waiting to set up a regular public meeting delays the first impression until it can be tailored to the context.

However, this approach also has potential limitations:

• Delays creating a potentially important pathway into Christian community  In many (sub)cultures, a church meeting remains an normal/acceptable thing to do, and an easy, low-commitment way to “check out” a new church.  Likewise, this model can delay finding Christians in the community the planters seek to reach.
• The danger of intensity A small group of people who know each other well, and share important common features (e.g. a lifestyle shaped by the gospel, middle class accents, everyone employed…) can be intimidating for newcomers.  A public meeting provides a degree of distance and freedom to opt in or opt out.  A private gathering does not.

These portraits of meeting-led and community-led plants are simplistic (even caricatured) to emphasise the contrasts.  I hope they serve to highlight some of the strengths and weaknesses of the two extremes.

The question then is:  How do you establish a right balance in a particular context?

See blogposts to follow...

What should be the focus in planting a new local church?  Is establishing a church meeting the best strategy?  Or are there contexts where a church-planting team would be wise to focus on building the church community in other ways? 

In a way, it’s a “chicken and egg” kind of question.  A meeting helps establish community (as people gather together).  A community will inevitably meet (to sit together under God’s word and share lives).  So it might seem strange to ask “what should a church plant focus on?”  But at a time when resources are often stretched, a team’s focus needs to be clear and deliberate.  Where is prayer and energy best devoted?

I would suggest that the “culture gap” between the church planters and the community into which they plant is the key factor in whether to focus on a meeting or community-building.

To help make the point, here are two (intentionally polarised and slightly caricatured) examples:

MEETING-LED CHURCH PLANTS:

With an undergirding of prayer, this church plant’s immediate focus is to establish a church meeting (which then gives the scope of the church community).  In all likelihood the “sent church” closely resembles its sending church in the way that it meets.

This approach has a number of immediate positives…

• The public meeting creates an immediate pathway into the new Christian community  Local people familiar with the new church's meeting (or with an independently awakened spiritual interest) can simply walk into the meeting and encounter Christian community from day one!
• The public meeting may bring in relationally-connected Christians  Advertising may bring in like-minded Christians from the area who were unknown to the team, and who might join the church!  Local Christians bring deeper, more long-standing relationships with local people than the planting team may possess.
• A public meeting can be quick to establish  Since new meetings are often based upon the forms and practices of the sending church, they are often quick to establish, and the “sent” planting team is immediately familiar with what’s going on.

However, meeting-led church plants are not without potential limitations… 

• The danger of focusing on the meeting to the exclusion of other priorities  The planting team typically lack the resources of the larger sending church.  Valuable time and energy can be drawn away from friendships and (pre)-evangelism to meet the practical requirements of a public meeting. 
• The difficulty of contextualising the meeting  You only get one chance to make a first impression.  Setting up a meeting after little contact with the local community means it can be hard to contextualise to the new setting.  Subsequent review and change by the team has to do battle with inertia and habit (on the part of the church planters).  In the worst case, the first locals to experience the new meeting may go away thinking the church doesn’t 'get' people like them, share that impression with others putting them off, and be slow to give the church a second chance 6 months later when the church has changed to be better contextualised.
• The risk of being job-led rather than gift-led  A desire to reflect sending churches' practices can mean that less attention is paid to team members’ God-given gifts and more to “we think this job needs to be done, so someone will have to do it”.

More on this theme in blog-posts to follow...

Please pray for churches in Georgia wrestling with the ongoing refugee crisis following last year’s conflict between Georgia and Russia. Next generation ministries have been put on hold while resources are diverted to the care of those who lost homes, loved ones and livelihoods as a result of the war and subsequent displacement. Please pray that new resources would be found for churches to take forward their work with the next generation, while caring for those in urgent need now.

Look out for opportunities for churches to connect with the work of churches on the ground in Georgia in the coming months...

Getting treatment for your sick animals, your hair cut, utensils for your home, a café breakfast, new home fabrics from old clothing, bread in the shops, milk products, fresh vegetables on your table, winter clothes for your children, and trees planted to help avert desertification - all these got a little easier in the Gobi Desert after a series of small business seminars given last year by members of St Mary’s Old Harlow, UK.

Taking part in the seminars were leaders and members of 25 new churches headed by Pastor Natsagdorj (right), in South Gobi Province, Mongolia. These businesses were begun or (in some cases) enhanced following the training which used materials first developed by Mike Clargo of Reconxile for use in Africa. The materials were translated and our ‘students’ now have the Mongolian version for reference and sharing with others. Some of the trainees have already employed or trained others with the skills they learned.

These are early days, and the businesses have faced the twin pressures of the global economic downturn and climate change - not an easy call, especially when you rank among the poorest people in the world. But in a culture where giving up is endemic, it was very encouraging to see how many of those trained 18 months ago had doggedly hung on to the tails of their business ideas, or tried new ones. Of the 20 or so businesses I surveyed across the vastly scattered communities of South Gobi, few have, on their own, lifted their owners above the state poverty line, defined here as the inability to afford a basic basket of food and non-food items, or roughly $1.25 a day.

But already there are some ‘success stories.’

One of the church planters, a 22-year old named Gantsetseg, used the materials to train a woman called Ayush who for a while has made a living with dairy products from her camel herd. As a result, Ayush went on to become local dairy business champion 2 years running, and hopes to compete nationally soon! In return for the dairy business’s increased success, Gantsetseg got a new ger (Mongol tent home) to house the church!

Others spoke of how the seminars had taught them how to manage their finances. This is a big issue in a culture where many fail to make the crucial distinction between business and personal income and costs, a mistake that can often lead to a business shutting its doors. That I had to revisit this several times during the tour illustrates the extent of the problem here. 

Batu, who runs a car repair workshop in Dalanzadgad (the provincial capital), told how the seminars had helped him attract and retain customers. Oyunbaysgalan, a pharmacist, remarked that the seminars had taught her that as a Christian she needed to do more to support her employees, and take an interest in their lives outside of work. Soon after the seminars, they received a 30% pay rise! Meanwhile, a vet testified how the training had helped her, in her words, ‘to get organised.’ Just as well - she has 40,000 animals to look after! That number probably includes those pictured below.

But in general, it has been a hard first year for the businesses, particularly the new ones, partly because there are so few models of good business practice here for people to learn from, and partly because the economic crisis has meant that credit for start-ups and expansion has been so hard to get hold of. It is ironic that while people in the ‘developed’ world were receiving huge bonuses in effect for creating negative value, people desperate to create value in their communities here in the developing world are being starved of the very finance that could help them do just that. If one needed more evidence of the injustice of the world’s financial architecture, it can easily be found among the scattered communities of the Gobi Desert.

Meanwhile, another challenge has focused the minds of many here: there has been no rain in South Gobi all summer. This means that the local economy, which depends directly or indirectly on herding animals, is in a fragile state. Vast areas of pasture land are bone dry, when they should be producing vegetation for the animals to eat. Unless the rain comes soon, many will not have the fat levels they need to survive the harsh winter, and scenes like the one below could be repeated hundreds, if not thousands of times over. The consequences could ripple through the economy, bringing a new challenge to our sapling businesses.

But the overall picture is one of hope amidst the challenges. For me, the most important aspect of what is going on is that local churches are at the forefront of efforts to lift individuals and communities out of poverty in one of the world’s last great wildernesses: local churches taking responsibility for mission and context-sensitive development. There’s a long way to go. But in a land where for historical and religious reasons, people have tended to accept their lot because ‘that’s how it is,’ churches are emerging as principal agents of change. 

Several churches identified the need for a bakery in their area, but did not know how to take that idea forward. However, we identified a successful bakery business on our travels, and plans are now in hand to get these folks together to pool expertise and experience, and so to put more bread on the tables in South Gobi. 

And Dawa (Natsagdorj’s wife) is thinking through how she can extend the basic business training to others in Dalanzadgad. 

Getting people together, as both these initiatives require, is often difficult in South Gobi. Please pray that these meetings actually happen!

But as the churches step up to the challenge of change, so the resources they need also go up a gear. For instance, there is a great need for alternative sources of small start-up capital while the credit drought continues, as many of the new businesses have difficulty obtaining finance, either to start, or to grow. We now have a small venture capital fund in place in Dalanzadgad, but more may be needed in time. 

And as with any new enterprise, people are important. Mongolian culture places a high value on presence and lived, observable examples. Also, for historical reasons, foreigners tend to be trusted more than locals. And with these things in mind, we agreed to pray about the possibility of a micro-enterprise specialist to be based in Dalanzadgad for an initial period of one year as part of the church there. The purpose would be to train and mentor those already in business or just starting out, and to help others to identify business opportunities and develop them. If this opportunity sounds like you, please contact us. 

• For a slideshow of photos of this trip (including those above and many more) on Paul Williams' website, click here. 
• For interesting comment on the place of Christianity in the development of Mongolia from the BBC news website, click here.
• And for more information on all this work, contact Paul.

http://www.9marks.org/CC/article/0,,PTID314526|CHID598016|CIID2482424,00.html

Jesus tells us to be careful how we hear (Luke 8:18). Yet many Christians approach the Sunday sermon with little to no game-plan for listening well.

To address that problem, Christopher Ash has written an outstanding booklet: Listen Up! A Practical Guide to Listening to Sermons.

The booklet is very accessible. It is short (only 31 pages), well designed, and written in an informal, catchy style. And the content is pure gold.

It is broken into several section. The first and longest part is devoted to seven ingredients for healthy sermon listening. They are:

Expect God to speak.

Admit God knows better than you.

Check the preacher says what the passage says.

Hear the sermon in church (as opposed to solely listening to sermons on the internet).

Be there week by week.

Do what the Bible says.

Do what the Bible says today -- and rejoice!

Each of these "ingredients" comes with practical examples and a list of "practical steps to take" at the end.

The second section deal with listening to "bad" sermons, particularly dull sermons, biblically inadequate sermons, and heretical sermons.

The final section reminds us that congregations often get the kind of preaching they tolerate and encourage, and then provides seven suggestions for encouraging good preaching,

I found this booklet very, very helpful. If you are a preacher who wants to train your people to listen well to God's Word, this is the booklet you want to use. If you are a regular hearer of God's Word, this booklet will give you a great perspective and a ton of practical strategies for improvement.

Have you ever felt your heart swell on news of what God is doing in other places? I had one of those experiences recently, when, on a fleeting visit, I heard a snippet of what God is doing in Inner Mongolia: new churches being planted, young leaders being raised up. 

Of course, we can't go into much detail on what's happening there, because Inner Mongolia, unlike its 'outer' neighbour (where I live) is a province of China.

Do pray for these churches and young leaders as they reach up and step out in mission in this vast field in northern China. If you would like to have more information for prayer, do let me know: paul@radstock.org

picture from wikimedia

quiet far suburb of Washington DC. Now, to hear some people say it,

it is over-run with illegal immigrants. Every morning the parking lot

of McDonald's and the adjacent convenience store are flooded with men

looking for a day's work. If you walk down the main street, three out

of four people on the sidewalk will be Spanish speakers.

A few years back the town built a facility where day-laborers could

gather safely to wait for work. In the ensuing elections the mayor

and all of the city council members who had voted for the facility

were thrown out of office. Rhetoric and tensions have run high.

Crime rates have increased.

All of which is great for the gospel. The worse the surrounding

culture is, the more obvious the differences between the church and

the world become! Our congregation, which is English speaking, has

been given a wonderful opportunity to show counter-cultural love to

Spanish speakers through hospitality, mercy ministry, and church

planting. We share our home with a Christian couple from El Salvador

and some families in our church make a point of inviting Spanish-

speakers into their homes for meals (usually with another bi-lingual

family to serve as a translator).

And the immigrants in Herndon notice the difference. One man leaving

our house after dinner said with tears in his eyes that this had been

the first time he had ever been in an American's home except to paint

it. More than once I have been asked (through a translator, I don't

speak Spanish!) why we are trying to help them. The answer is

simple: God has reconciled us to himself through Christ and given us a

ministry of reconciliation (II Corinthians 5:18). Since God has

pursued us in Christ, we are now ambassadors of God's love to those

who are different from us.

What an awesome privilege!

Mike McKinley is pastor of Guilford Baptist Church in Sterling, VA and a trustee of Radstock.

Our church helps an Indian church plant and just last week launched our second church plant for Spanish speakers. It's been wonderful for us to be able to get our hands dirty in the work of cross-cultural missions 5 minutes from our homes.

Here are some pictures from last week. English speakers and Spanish speakers gathered together to go out in the streets and invite people to the new gathering for Spanish speakers. I'll post more thoughts later in the week!

Mike McKinley is pastor of Guilford Baptist Church in Sterling, VA and a trustee of Radstock. 

Details of the programme & speakers will be in the Autumn issue of Rapport, and on the website in September.  

Meanwhile, block out the dates in your diary, tell others in your church to do the same, and click here to see what you missed (or what you loved) from the last conference!

Schoolgirl error (as we say in the UK).

All mission is local (as we say in Radstock).

And sure enough, I've recently been re-envisioned for our local 'front line' (Chelsea, London, UK), not least by spending a week apparently some way back from the front line - helping to lead a team of Christian university students doing the behind-the-scenes tasks of a new summer kids' camp.  

Others have reflected thoughtfully on summer camps (like here for example), and on the bigger 'front line' question (like here and here) so check those out

One thing I particularly liked about camp was that there were a few key local churches at the heart of it - with other churches already planning to recruit kids, students, leaders and cooks for next summer.  It helped to make it crystal clear that this was still very much a frontline of mission - away from home perhaps, and with gospel and relational opportunities you only find when people are let loose with a full week, a boarding school and grounds and a lot of creativity - but all building on and feeding into the ongoing life and mission of those church families.     

The Lord is kind & wise. "...and he determined the times set for [us] and the exact places where [we] should live. 27God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him..."

I'm back home - on my & my church's frontline.  How are you doing on yours?     

In December the 2020 network will be gathering leaders from each of the states in Uttar Pradesh to pray and talk and be equipped. There is a huge need for bibles everywhere. When we met around 10 house church leaders, they were each given about 5-10 Hindi bibles each to take away. Alok said they could easily have given them several times that and they could have used them. The literacy level in the villages is around 50% so someone in a family can normally access it.

At the December conference there will be almost 1000 church leaders gathered. We're thinking it would be great to simply give each of them 10 bibles to take back with them to distribute. That would be 10,000 bibles going out across the state. Another advantage of connecting this to the conference would be avoiding the costs that would be otherwise incurred of getting them to all these districts, whether by post or car. One Hindi bible costs 120 Rupees. This is about £1.50. So for 10,000 we are talking £15,000. Is that something we can do? Let me know if you are interested!

Gifts could be processed through Radstock and the gift aid (UK only) claimed to make it go further. Also, if your church/housegroup would like to partner to pray for a church here, let me know, and I will see what we can set up. And if anyone would like to talk more beyond that, in serious partnership terms, email me at anthony@radstock.org.  Thanks.

Often when people in the villages become followers of Jesus Christ, they are persecuted for their new-found faith, and one of the forms this takes is their being barred from using the local well. Since starting this project earlier this year, three wells with hand pumps have been bored, and the believers are excited to be able to have their own well. This is something that they can both use themselves, and which can be an act of love to others in the village as they share it.

Watch a video clip, interviewing one of the local church leaders, and the well-borer.

You can also see the videos at the Radstock youtube page.

Especially have a look at the one I've entitled "Is it all about the healings?" to hear one of the pastors talk passionately about the believers' faith, and a lovely elderly lady express her understanding of the gospel.

We are pressing on in the battle. Inner and outer challenges of pioneer church - planting are drawing us ever closer to Jesus. God’s word has been a daily source of encouragement and confidence in the journey. In the face of discouragement, stress, depression, resentment, opposition, the call from heaven urges us to follow God wholeheartedly. Indeed, His grace is sufficient and His power made perfect in our weaknesses. God said to Gideon: ‘Go in the strength you have.’... Therefore we rejoice in our God and his calling to bring the Gospel to the nations, beginning with the dear people of Kosovo. After being here two years, we feel that the battle has just begun and we ahve so much to learn. In a land where people are bound by the fear and bondage of religion and tradition, and a completely distorted picture of Jesus by their ‘enemies,’ our task remains: living out the good news, loving unconditionally, being the hands and feet of the one who died for them. The journey ahead remains a journey of obedience and surrender and we continue to pray that the Lord of the harvest will bring a plentiful harvest in Kosovo.

One of the towns we work in has 80,000 people. On average there are around 50 people that go to church on Sundays. If we look at these numbers we get very discouraged. However, if we look at where we‘ve come from, there is room for a lot of praise. If we consider that there were no believers there at all 6 years ago, there is a lot to be thankful for. Yet, when we see the crowds that are lost without Jesus here have the burning question of how to reach them.

Jesus had compassion on the crowds and he sent the disciples to preach the good news to them. We are praying and asking God to give us His insight and strategy on how to reach this town.

We are trying a number of new forms of outreaches this summer including sports, music, drama, youth events, language learning, distributing literature. Everyone on the team feels that we need to be bolder in going out to preach the gospel. So, we are going to try different froms of evangelism. We would appreciate your prayers. Would you stand in the gap with us during this summer and pray that the Lord will give us a great harvest for His Kingdom here? One of the other things that we feel very strong about in the team is to empower the Kosovar believers to witness to their own people. We would like as much as possible to release the Kosovars into ministry and leadership from the beginning. We see that this will be the best and fastest way to see the believers grow and the work of evangelism spread. May the Lord grant us grace to raise disciples with a passion for Jesus and a zeal to reach their own people with the gospel! 

Contact Geni Begu to find out how you and your church can connect to bring the love of Jesus to this tortured land.

Today I came across this quote from 1465 from a French Knight called Jean de Brueil. It’s cited in Michael Frost’s book Exiles: Living Missionally in a Post-Christian Culture (Hendrickson/Strand, 2006, 117-118 ). De Brueil wrote:

Battle is a joyous thing. We love each other so much in battle. If we see that our cause is just and our kinsmen fight boldly, tears come to our eyes. A sweet joy rises in our hearts, in the feeling of our honest loyalty to each other; and seeing our friend so bravely exposing his body to danger in order to fulfil the commandment of our Creator, we resolve to go forward and die or live with him on account of love. This brings such delight that anyone who has not felt it cannot say how wonderful it is. Do you think someone who feels this is afraid of death? Not in the least! He is so strengthened, so delighted, that he does not know where he is. Truly, he fears nothing in the world.

I think this represents an important dynamic that we need to capture in the church if we are to evangelise and disciple men – a sense of comradeship, of common purpose of battling together.

Click here or here to purchase your copy of 'Exiles...' on Amazon.

Одна нашем церквям в Татарстане недавно прославила крещение. Девять людей были крестились. Много людей в церкви из мулульманский происхождении, где принятие Христа как Своего Господа и Спасителя и более крещение равносильно предательству.

Татарский народ ест самая большая группа в Татарстане (население 3.4 мн). Большинство Татарям ест муслимов. 

Пожалуйста молитесь за новых верущей, пока они начают жизнь в Христе и за церковь в Татарстане. Узнаете больше об этом работе. Напишите к Павлу Виллямс здесь. Мы ждём услышать от вас!

One of our network churches in Tatarstan, western Russia, celebrated the baptisms of nine new believers recently. Many church members were raised in traditional Muslim families, where accepting Christ as personal Saviour and moreover, baptism is a betrayal. 

The majority of the population of Tatarstan of about 3.4 million, are ethnic Tatars, a Turkic group related to the Mongols. Islam is the majority religion among the Tatar people. 

Please pray for these new believers, as they set out on their adventure of faith in, and with, Christ, and for their church as it supports them.

Find out more about Radstock's connections here (which go back a number of years) by contacting Paul Williams, Radstock's Eurasia Network Developer here.

The school was in a village in Sultanpur. It was started by Alok's grandfather in 1957, but over the years closed down and fell into disrepair. The families from the surrounding villages cannot easily access decent education and so now reopened and partially rebuilt, this school is aiming to do that.  It is partly Christian run, and part government-aided. I found myself draughted in to help with interviews for the post of English lecturer!

The baptisms in Allahabad were something else. 284 people baptised, from churches around and about, all gathered in the grounds of a Christian College where there is a big baptistry that held 4, 5 or 6 of us at various points, all baptising at once. Following a 2 hour meeting of testimonies, singing and teaching from me and others, the stream of people into the tank began. One after another after another. Wonderful to have so many new brothers and sisters.

more to come...

The hunger of the people for spiritual nourishment is striking. Only yesterday when I was feeling ill and supposed to be speaking to a group of many new believers, my host said – don’t worry, just do a short one, maybe only an hour! People want to be fed.

Schools – I visited a school which my friend is managing. It is part Christian Junior School, and part Government-Aided Senior school. We interviewed for the position of an English teacher for the senior school, hence my involvement, since it is rumoured I can speak the language.

Having been involved in interviewing for teaching posts many times in the UK, this was something of a learning curve. First of all, of the four interviewed, only one had enough English to have a conversation with me, even of the most basic kind. And that was with a thick accent. One of them even admitted that he could not speak English but would like to learn it. Secondly, having established who was the best candidate, the Principal and I had an odd conversation where he seemed ambivalent about appointing him. It became apparent that the school had almost no money and would not be able to afford him. The school Principal was only in a position to offer 1500 Rupees a month, and he said he would need 6000 as he lives a distance away. He was hardly being greedy. Rs. 1500 is about £20 a month. His request for Rs. 6000 was only asking for £80 a month. Hence the Principal explained that he knew he was the best, but he would just have to appoint a bogus English teacher (his words) because this man would not be likely to accept the salary offered. This is a school in a very poor area, where the people often cannot access higher level education, and this will only be compounded if he is forced to appoint people who cannot actually teach! Makes you think. What do I earn again?

Next we were out to a remote village and met with a group of house church leaders, many of whom have only come to faith in the last 3-4 years. 10 years ago there was nothing in these villages and now there are new churches springing up all over the place. I spent the time I had encouraging them to be faithful shepherds who both feed the flock and guard the flock.

Next we were off to Allahabad, where a number of churches from across the region had gathered to have a joint baptism service. 284 believers were baptised. I have never seen anything quite like it. At one point 6 of us were in the large baptism pool, as the new believers just came in a constant flow down the steps and one of us would baptise them and then another and another and another. Much more rough and ready than your traditional baptism. Grab the believer and dunk them. One very large Punjabi man who was baptising was grabbing them and dunking them before they almost had a chance to catch a breath. So many new brothers and sisters.

Whenever I have had the opportunity to speak to new believers like these, I have tried to encourage them that they are part of God’s great plan for the world. You are kingdom people now, part of the family of God, living out the characteristics of Matt 5 1-12, and as you do, you are the salt of the earth and the light of the world. God is changing the world through you. Communities of light all over the planet, in towns and cities and villages across India, and England, and Pakistan, and Cambodia, and Russia, and everywhere else. This is how God’s kingdom is growing. The local church is the hope of the world. We feel weak and unknown but we are the means through which God will advance his kingdom. God’s strength is made perfect in our weakness.

It is a privilege to be a small part of it.

Find out more, and connect with this work by contacting Radstock's Anthony Adams. We're looking forward to hearing from you!

Thank you so much for your prayers towards us finding a house in Macedonia. With great pleasure and thankfulness to the Lord that we can announce that last week we signed a contract. We praise God after many visits and coffees!  

When we were talking with the owners, the wife said that she had been 'reading' her turkish coffee pot with a lady who knows how to read these things (an Islamic custom for knowing the future), and she told her that they would make an arrangement with people who would come from outside. Her conclusion was that the lady knew how to read the future.

There we were listening to this story and in the background the Imam had started the call to prayer which comes from at least  13 mosques around this city of 50,000 or more people. We said we don’t believe in such things but that God is in control of our lives.

Deep in our hearts we knew that this is the time to move in Macedonia and have a Christian presence in this town where there is no church, no evangelical believers and no missionaries (until the 1st of August!)
 
Thank you again for standing with us in prayer. We value you very much!

Please now pray for all the practical things of moving to Macedonia, packing 9 years of our lives, saying goodbye to a church where we served for 9 years, also trying to find cheap furniture as we don’t have anything in the house except the kitchen.

God has been very good to us and we believe He is going to be each day. 

'A couple of months ago Anthony met a guy called 'Geoff' on the street. It was quickly clear that he'd had a few too many to drink that night. Ant helped him home and over the next few days and weeks became friends with him. Ant has been able to help 'Geoff' out in various ways such as lifts to the hospital and other bits and bobs. There have been several 'chance' encounters with him as Ant was walking through our community. Currently 'Geoff' has gone into rehab. As a community we're praying that God would be at work in his life and that when he returns from rehab he might spend some time with us be introduced to Jesus. 

The guys at Urban Life have been spending some of their evenings at a Kurdish cafe on the local high street. Over the last few months many a cup of coffee has been consumed as we watched the football with them and hung out. More recently a table tennis table has been purchased which has provided many an entertaining game. Over this time we have been learning names and getting to know some of the guys quite well, but be feel strongly that we need to be spending more time with these young men. 

We've had the amazing priviledge since we began last year, of seeing God powerfully at work. We see him answer prayer after prayer in regard to people moving house, children moving schools, jobs and bringing us into contact with lots of diffferent people in our community. God is definitely at work and I look forward to bringing you more stories in the near future.

Get connected!

• Head over to our 'Pray With Us' Blog for current prayer information for Urban Life. 
• Contact Andy Thomson or Anthony Adams to find out more about this pioneering work in the heart of a city in the heart of the UK.

Click here or on the picture to the left to visit the site.

The site is in Russian (an English version should be be available soon), but you can translate it using Yahoo!'s free translation service here.

Is our goal a multicultural church where we are all brothers and sisters together? Sounds good but in practice I think it reflects an imperialistic desire that they should join our model. But if we chose a distinctly Kurdish model, where is the unity in Christ? There is no place in the scriptures where there is a requirement that the local gathered community of believers reflect the complete cultural diversity that is around us; it’s just not possible. Firstly culture is difficult to define; My wife and I are both British, white, middle-class, rural-suburban but we are culturally so different in our personalities and family upbringing that we often joke about having a cross-cultural marriage.

It is impossible to define any individual culturally as if we can put each person into a box and say the church must have one person from that box, one from another box and then another from that box to truly reflect unity in Christ. People, communities and culture are much too complex for this to be the answer.

Secondly assuming we could define different cultures what does it mean to express cultural diversity within the gathered community? Simply to have people from different countries as members of the church surely doesn’t express cultural diversity… it has to be more than that? Some communities work hard at celebrating cultural diversity by having different styles of worship, different languages spoken, different ways of meeting.

This is commendable but even this seems to reduce the expression of culture to something very tokenistic. It doesn’t fit well with my understanding of being God’s people.

Church is more than just meetings in which we celebrate something (although it is at times that); it has to be the relationships we have with one another. So you could have a very diverse church in terms of those who attend, you could have a very diverse church in terms of how things are run, but for all that culturally-diverse believers don’t share genuine fellowship with one another and believers don’t celebrate their cultural differences as they relate.

I feel very passionate about the uniting power of the Gospel… Ephesians 3 vv7-12 is the scripture I have chosen to put on my blog expressing what motivates my wife and I. But I believe people misuse the passages in Ephesians and make the unity we have in the Gospel simplistic. There are those who use it as an excuse to be imperialistic, as expressed in the question, insisting that people essentially become like us to express unity. This is often used by those in the majority culture in a given location. So what is the kind of unity that Paul is talking about? 

Paul is explaining how the gospel is now for the Gentiles and not just for the Jews; that the new humanity that God is creating will come from all nations and where once the promise was confined to the people of Abraham now it is for those who were seemingly outsiders. We now have a new ethic; an ethic of reconciliation and we’re called to find ways of demonstrating reconciliation within this hew humanity. We are to be a defiant sign, a rallying call against the divisive and destructive work of Satan. Wherever humanity’s sin has caused division, wherever there has been a wall whether it the apartheid of South Africa, the castes of India, or the class system still operating in Britain today, the church is called to defy it. 

This calling is much greater and more expansive than simply having every language spoken or different songs sung (although this might be part of it) in a church service. This is a call to see God’s people being in every corner of our cities, in every corner of our country and in every corner of this Earth. Church planting is my commitment, our community’s commitment to this great call for unity across diversity. And in doing this we will make choices for mission that accommodate and preference some cultural norms over another because to do this is not to deny unity over diversity but rather to uphold it… it is to pursue it. 

Our preferring some cultural norms will never be the thing over which we unite, we will be careful to not let this happen. It is the gospel over which we will unite and the call to be missional. We will present to Kurdish believers the call to love their neighbour and to offer the gospel to those different to themselves. They will also be invited to participate in mission to their neighbours; Arabs, Turks, Persians and Brits. We fully expect that in the years to come Kurdish believers will band together with believers from other cultural backgrounds to form believing communities that operate in Arabic, or which preference Somali culture or indeed seek to reach the British. We will also look at ways of relating to and working with other believing communities; this is possible in The Crowded House as we are part of a larger network and we come together periodically to celebrate the fact that we are all one in Christ.

The reaction to apartheid in South Africa is not to insist that every church in South Africa represents black and white. The response surely should be to teach each believer of the equality we all have in the gospel, the value that God places on each culture and to equip one another to love our brother of a different colour in all our dealings with them and never, never to exclude them from fellowshipping with us.

The Kurds themselves come from 4 different nations, they speak 2 different languages and they are living in the UK. The political lines in Kurdish culture are deeply entrenched and the allegiance to family and tribe is as strong as any other country I have been to. There are dividing walls abounding in the Kurdish community; for God to bring together Kurds in a believing community will be a demonstration of the power of the cross. I don’t feel any anxiety that we will somehow be too mono-cultural or lack opportunities to express unity across diversity.

Is it possible to find salvation in Jesus and remain within a culturally Islamic setting, possibly even a religiously Islamic setting, or must the whole of Islam be renounced? 

The simple answer to the question is ‘Yes’ in as much as it is possible to be a follow of Jesus within a culturally British setting. It is important to have a biblical framework in which to view any culture. We tend to think of Islamic culture as different to British culture, thinking that Islamic culture is somehow more at odds with God and his people. The only distinction the bible makes is between God’s people and the World. The World has beliefs and practices that exchange God’s truth for a lie. Everyday the World is acting in a religious manner; the World is worshipping ’self’ in all its different guises.

In Islam those beliefs and practices are more clearly articulated and more corporately owned. However In British culture the worship of image, money, comfort and fame pervades all aspects of our lives. The Muslim has his mosque, but the Brit has his shopping mall. Visit any of the out-of-town shopping centres in the UK and you will find the architectural design full of religious motifs. Every person in the World worships; the question is what do they worship? There’s no benefit in making a distinction between cultural Islam and religious Islam because to do so would be to minimise the fact that in every community in the World whether overtly religious or not there is an act of worship taking place. Understanding this allows us to view all cultures as both potentially neutral and potentially antagonistic towards God’s people.

As soon as an individual chooses to follow Jesus they place themselves at odds with the World. Whatever culture we are in we will have to stand against the beliefs and practices of our old community. We no longer ‘remain’ in the World; we’re now refugees with a home that is not on the Earth. Any Muslim who chooses to follow Jesus, any Brit who chooses to follow Jesus will find they no longer belong in the World. They will be different because their actions and words will reflect a worship of the one true God; their acts of kindness, their message of grace will rile those around them. They will no longer participate in the systems of worship that their community undertakes. 

But this separation from the old community is not a physical separation it is a spiritual separation. Christ asked the Father to keep this new community within the World but not of the World. As such God’s people are like specks of light in the darkness. We don’t all clump together and come out of the darkness, instead we expose the darkness and we transform the darkness. For the Muslim I think that means they can still dress, eat, sing and act as a Muslim in so far as it doesn’t constitute an act of worship or identification with the World. We should be seeing Muslim churches. 

Working out what constitutes an act of worship or identification is not easy but it is something that we should all be grappling with for the rest of our time on Earth. As an aside, the British church is lazy when it comes to this question and is increasingly conforming to the practices and beliefs of the World. Even as it thinks of itself as standing for moral purity I think we have lost sight of all the other ways in which we worship alongside the World; rampant individualism, seeking special privileges, not identifying with the poor and failing to have a prophetic voice against injustice and oppression. Paul grappled with the question throughout his ministry and it led him to make choices in which he had one believer circumcised as an act of staying within the World, and another believer not circumcised as an act of not being of the World. Both choices were correct and both choices reflected a view that culture and religion are both neutral and antagonistic towards the worship of the one true God.

Those who follow Jesus need to identify themselves as such. I therefore don’t fully agree or perhaps understand the case for the ‘insider-movement’ in which Muslim-background believers do not publicly ‘come out’ as Christians. I fear the reasons for this have more to do with avoiding persecution than a missiological choice to stay within the World, but not of the World. That said you do hear and see of believing communities within Muslim countries who look nothing like their neighbours, looking more like those from the West. This is something I would work hard to avoid and something I would want to teach and disciple Kurdish believers about in the UK.

Continuing our series on ministry among Kurds in the UK and Kurdistan, our correspondent looks at the impact of the Gospel on one man, and considers its wider implications.

Life is becoming saturated with poignant moments. Standing with people at the crossroads of their lives, inviting them to choose a different path from the one they’re on. It is a significant thing to be with people when they are asked to consider where they’re headed. Somehow with our Kurdish friends it seems more poignant as their paths are full of pain, honour, sacrifice, loyalty and death. We met a Kurd the other week who was about to give his life to join what he would claim are ‘freedom fighters’ in eastern Turkey; the British and US governments consider the Kurds to be terrorists in this part of the world.

Whilst he was originally from Iran he would never be able to return there, as he was a marked man for his speaking out for the plight of the Kurds. Having spent some time in the UK he could no longer justify being here whilst his countrymen were out fighting for the liberation of Kurdistan. He had a month to go before going to the hardships and dangers of the Qandil Mountains (pictured above, courtesy of Getty Images) for a cause that would most likely ask him his life.

So what do you say?

It was the first time I had met this man. He had come as a guest of another Kurdish friend for a BBQ being hosted by our Kurdish team. There was an uneasiness about him. His emotions lay very close to the surface, his eyes wide with thoughts about life and death and the suffering of the Kurds. My immediate reaction was to somehow reach into his heart and apply the hope of Jesus… to somehow speak with great clarity that there is one who both understands the injustices that have overcome his homeland and has done something to remedy the pain. But how to express such truths in a way that he might understand?

I asked him what he was thinking about as he seemed lost in his own thoughts. His answer surprised me as he mentioned that he had never seen such people before. He was referring to my brothers and sisters… their kindness, laughter and hospitality had struck a chord with him.

It was later in the garden with Andy that he began to share his plans to go and fight. He said in a resigned tone that he didn’t want to fight but he knew no other way. This was our opportunity. We posed the question about what true freedom looked like. If it were possible to liberate the Kurds from their oppressors… what next? The record of northern Iraq, the corruption and abuses of power by Kurds themselves goes to show that what people need is freedom from their own hearts.

As we spoke about Jesus our friend mentioned that he knew about Jesus. He had a Kurdish New Testament and had read it, even to the point that his father had rebuked him with the words ‘khafer’ down the phone. He spoke as if he had left Islam a long time ago and had come to respect Jesus. We told him that there was another army to join, another fight, another type of weapon, another cause… and that is the gospel.

It was moving to invite him to our cause… capturing my imagination that Andy and I were subversively recruiting people for Jesus’ work. It was wonderfully captivating to think that Andy and I are in the same army and in much the same way as this friend of our was prepared to give up the comforts of the UK we in the very least should be prepared to do the same.

“We are committed to seeing the liberation of the Kurds. We have given our lives to their liberation. It’s just a different way to the one you are choosing. Come and join us.”

After much discussion we ended by playing him an MP3 gospel tract in his own language. As I pressed play on my mobile his eyes became fixed. He was thrilled to hear his language being used… but then it was the words that began to capture him. At one of the pauses he mentioned with a seriousness that matched his decision to go to the Qandil Mountains that now he had become a Christian.

Andy and I looked at each other not knowing whether to believe what we were hearing. As the message continued to play my heart and thoughts went to Jesus the great liberator. I wondered at the significance of this moment if not for this Kurdish friend then for me, standing at another crossroad I chose again to go Jesus’ way.

It has been 20 years since the Berlin Wall, symbolizing the Iron Curtain and
the separation of West and East, came down.  This event marked the beginning
of the collapse of the oppressive Soviet regime, which repressed freedom and
every form of missionary activity in the enormous territory encompassing the
countries of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.  The fall of the
Iron Curtain also symbolized the opening of the door for unbelievable
freedoms for ministries, and opportunities that brought the gospel to
millions and millions of people in the countries of Eastern Europe and the
former Soviet Union.  Many of us dedicated our lives, resources and talents
to missions because of those unprecedented opportunities.

However, global economic and political changes that have taken place in the
last several years, especially in Russia and the former Soviet Union, have
significantly impacted missions, strategic ministry planning, church growth,
partnerships, etc.  Despite this, there are still many opportunities to
continue equipping and empowering the Next Generation in the former Soviet
Union—the grandchildren of the Cold War—for new and effective ministries.

For this reason, Russian Ministries/Association for Spiritual Renewal and
International Bible Society-STL-Europe are joining forces to mark the 20th
anniversary of the fall of the Iron Curtain by creating an opportunity for
mission leaders, mission strategists, and churches that have been involved
in ministries in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe to come together
for an evangelical Missions Forum that is scheduled to take place in Central
London on October 29-30, 2009.

The goals of this Forum are to analyze the last 20 years of ministry in the
former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, in light of the current global
economic and political situation, and to discuss new strategies that will
refocus and re-energize the evangelical church there for more strategic,
effective and progressive ministries through new partnerships and projects
in Russia and the other countries of the former Soviet Union.

Please see the linked invitation to the London Missions Forum that
includes a tentative agenda as well as a list of planned speakers who are
prominent ministry leaders and advocates for new and progressive strategies
in missions.  

We believe that this will be a great opportunity to re-ignite interest in
effective and progressive ministries in the former Soviet Union and Eastern
Europe. We also hope that this event will help prevent the building of a new
wall that would divide the evangelical world and would separate the
evangelical church in the former Soviet Union from the resources
(international Christian fellowship and missionary resources) that it needs
more now than ever before in order to grow and change their nations for
Christ.

Our friend had first suggested that we did ‘church’ in our house little knowing that we had ambitions for the same. When I asked him what it would like for Kurds to do church he explained that we would have a simple meal sat on the floor, then over black tea we could listen to and discuss the bible. Quickly accepting his advice we invited him to our home. Since then this Kurdish friend has faithfully come each week with a hunger to hear the truth. Quiet and unassuming, with a gentle nobility about him our friend is taking his quest for truth very seriously. He listens to every word of the stories we share, soaking in the details, retelling the story, giving the crucial points the emphasis they demand.

More and more he is identifying with us as a community, taking ownership over our time together and even sharing what he has learnt with other Kurdish friends who come along. In this way he may well be the ultimate seeker. 

On the advice of some church planters out in Kurdistan and influenced by churches in the US who work in disadvantaged communities we have chosen to use an ‘orality’ approach to sharing the good news. Unlike a traditional bible study we only have one bible and that is only used to reinforce the fact that the stories we tell are from God’s word and not of our imagination. With the bible in hand one of us will tell the story we have learnt from memory. Prior to learning the story we will have done some work on translating the story into a more oral form; not changing the events or facts but simply some of the wording. We have found this approach engaging and challenging.

The first time we met as a group we shared the story of the Road to Emmaus. The story brought us all under its influence. The grieving women at the tomb challenged by the angels to remember what Jesus had said would happen. The confused followers who meet the stranger on the road who called them fools for not remembering what all God’s prophets had said would happen. The frightened crowd of friends who saw Jesus return to them and who again had the scriptures explained so they understood what had to happen. We find ourselves in the story, so rather than a debate around facts and doctrine which can tend to characterise Christian-Muslim dialogue, we find ourselves having to explain the different character’s reactions. Ultimately the story forces us to meet Jesus.

We now have five Kurdish friends attending this weekly group. Our first friend who suggested that we did church together is still very much engaged and he will often read ahead in the bible he has at home. Questions are asked, answers given and they’re digested and then believed. As each week goes by we begin to understand more of what must have happened to Jesus, and in that we find a remedy to our ills. This friend has welled up with tears as we’ve talked about his experiences in the past, the suffering he has known is not often spoken of but you see it; you see it as he holds a friend’s newborn and his mind clearly drifts off to the family members he has left behind. You see it when hiking through the countryside with him he wistfully describes the landscape of home and his sentences trail off left incomplete. He like all the Kurds who come to our group has a heart full of sorrow but they are all finding a remedy in the stories they hear.

Like the friends walking on the road to Emmaus, our Kurdish friends are encountering the risen Jesus as the scriptures are explained. As our Kurdish friend explained to Andy, “It’s like my heart is about to burst out of my body. It’s like my heart is about to burst.” When hearing this he is not the only one who is thrilled by the power of God’s word.

Brian Jose, Radstock's Executive Director, opens the hatch on a common tension in churches today between 'local' and 'global' mission, and issues a challenge to us to all 'get out there,' whether it's among the lost, the poor, the 'uber-cool,' and the broken, wherever we find them, with the transforming message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And to forget the artificial distinction between 'local' and 'global' mission.'

I confess. I'm tired of people suggesting to me that I'm too committed to global mission. "What about local mission?" they ask me, as if this is some original thought. I like to say that 'all mission is local -- it merely depends upon where you are at the time'. Last month, though I was in the USA with two Albanian leaders and I was reminded again why all those "local heroes" (people who see global mission as some sort of enemy of local mission) really ought to get out more. 

Arvid and Aget, my two Albanian friends were, of course, excited to visit San Francisco, undoubtedly one of the world's most beautiful and influential cities. We rode the cable car from the bay to Market Street, San Francisco's shopping heart, and a hive of street performers, beggars and homeless -- all of whom seem to be experts at playing cat-and-mouse with San Francisco's men (and women) in blue. I stood back and watched as Arvid and Aget, each of whom is well travelled in Europe and Asia, had their sensory circuits overloaded by this cultural melange of races and lifestyles. Arvid, an ex-Muslim coming from a nation where 0.5% are evangelical believers, had this verdict on "Christian America": "These people really need God." Who could argue, as you looked on at people sleeping in in doorways or clearly strung out on some substance, while uber-cool made their way past to the designer shops? 

Then I saw him -- David (pictured left), carrying his sign: "Jesus Christ Loves You". I went over for a chat. David agrees with Arvid. These people really need God. He'd been "getting the message out" for about seven years, six days per week, about 8 hours per day on Market Street. David said he rarely talks to anyone, but he remains committed to his work.

I'm in awe at his faithfulness, and in despair at what appears to be a contextually inappropriate methodology. The uber-cool were as oblivious to him as they were to the junkies hanging out on the corner. The message was true. Jesus Christ really does love you and me. But it was missing the mark because of it was delivered in a culturally irrelevant manner to most, if not all, of the people walking within a few steps of David.

A UK newspaper survey a few years ago of those who had given up on church found that most people thought their local minister should get out of the pulpit and onto the street, serving people in need. It was a call to relevant mission. Ever since Hudson Taylor went to China in 1853, global mission workers have been thinking about gospel and culture. Local heroes need to listen and learn -- and get out more themselves.

[Editor's note: Scripture never envisages a distinction between 'local' and 'global' mission (Acts 1:8), just that we be faithful witnesses wherever we are in the world. We need, as Brian suggests, to recognise the local nature of mission, the world over. And also, we need to ask what would it have meant for the growth of the early church, if the folks at Antioch had not taken advantage of the peaceful passage afforded by the Roman Empire, to send Paul's team to seed the Gospel in other localities and cultures round about (Acts 13). How would the Book of Acts read today if the church at Antioch had said to themselves, 'We just work on our own patch?']

This discussion is a live issue in many churches today. And in other churches where it is not an issue, it probably should be. We always welcome feedback on our blog entries, so if you would like to comment here, please do so using the form below, or contact us.

David Brainerd, Hudson Taylor, CT Studd and Jim Elliot quickly became heroes to me at university. In the early years of my Christian life I devoured their stories, gripped by their daring faith and their trust in a God that I was just starting to know, I found myself wanting to follow in their footsteps. 

Yet despite their influence I have become increasingly nervous about recommending them. Why? Missionary biographies may well be useful for discipleship but they fail as a ‘missions’ textbook.

Stories capture our imaginations and whilst biographies may never intend to be a textbook they do teach the reader. Whether it was ever their intention or not missionary biographies communicate implicit messages about what Christians’ involvement in mission looks like. Brainerd and Taylor become our models for mission.  The danger is not so much the specifics of these men’s lives or outlook but that the medium of biography places one individual at the centre of the story, albeit an individual under God’s good hand and direction. I have become persuaded of a model of mission which places the church at the heart of mission, not merely at a pragmatic level but at a theological level. What I am now looking for is a Church biography.  

Our church’s continuing involvement in serving Kurds has begun to re-define my personal role in mission. Whilst I became convinced in principle through the scriptures, it was our circumstances which confirmed that it is the church together that should be doing mission and not just me.  

As our mission field was local I was never in a situation where I made a career choice to become a missionary. As our mission field offered very real opportunities I didn’t need to look wistfully overseas for other challenges. As our mission field was among Kurds it became more obvious that those best placed to be the ‘missionary’ would be them and not me. As our mission field was among a people group who globally had only a few churches I realised it could not just be them it had to be us together in mission. God conspired to move me from an individualistic, romantic view of mission to a corporate, realistic view of mission.  

One expression of this shift in my thinking is the statement that summarises our church’s commitment to reaching Kurds: 

“We want to see a Kurdish church established in our city. A church led by Kurds, which is reaching Kurds both in our city, the UK, Europe and in Kurdistan. A church which partners with other churches worldwide to enable church planting amongst Kurds both here in our city and throughout the world. A church which also sees its responsibility to mission beyond that of reaching Kurds, in particular those nations and people groups which surround Kurdistan.”

In future blog entries you can read some examples of how this statement is worked out in practice for us as a Church. Let me dare to suggest that it will be a far more compelling read to hear of men and women, drawn from different contexts and cultures, serving together for the sake of mission. It will be far more convincing because if it is a story about the Church then it will be a story about Christ. 

Замечательная возможность научиться служить Христу больше, с меньшими ресурсами появилась у Соломенской Пресвитерианской церкви г.Киева. В виду недостатка финансовых средств мы решили сосредоточиться на том, как мы можем эффективно продолжить нашу работу с теми ресурасами, которые у нас есть. И после этого, наша работа в реабилитационном центре "Троицкий" стала ещё большим благословением, чем раньше. Вместе с обучением неверующих зависимых прямо в центре, мы сформировали нашу собственную группу поддержки с изучением Библии для тех, кто только что покинул программу в центре. Зависимость от накротиков - очень опасная болезнь, но "те кому много прощается, много любит" и мы смогли в этом убедиться в этом году. Этой заметкой, мы хотели бы начать серию заметок о нашем служении в реаб.центре для зависимых и служении нашей церкви.

...По-началу, мы думали, что мы уже потерляи Женю, когда, после 1го года членства в церкви, мы вдруг узнали, что Женя снова употребляет наркотики вот уже 2 месяца. Он занимал много денег у людей в церкви, пользуясь их наивностью и доверием. Он собирался продать музыкальный интсрумент, который пренадлежал церкви. После всего этого он отправился в НЕ-христианский реаб.центр вместо нашего и когда мы снова с ним увиделись, он сказал нам, что весь этот год в церкви он лишь претворялся, что он христианин и что он больше не верит во все эти "странные идеи". Наш Совет церкви уже был готов отлучить его от церкви, когда пастор попросил Совет подождать 3 месяца и попросил Женю подумать ещё. Всё казалось уже бесполезным после таких заявлений Жени, но Совет согласился. Через 2 месяца, Женя вернулся и сказал, что он был безумцем, когда он осмелился говорить такие ужасные вещи о Боге и что он наконец-то это понял тогда, когда попросил Бога показать Себя ему и когда получил от Бога ответ. 

Какая замечательная история! Какая замечтаельная история ещё одного "блудного сына" Божьего!!! Женя вернулся и восстановился в церкви полностью. Он зарабатывает в метро тем, что поёт и играет на гитаре - так он пытается вернуть долги людям в церкви, хотя многие ему их простили. Вскоре, он соберается пресоединиться к группе прославления в нашей церкви.

Иногда нам нужно действовать очень быстро, когда мы видим опасность для церкви; иногда, нам нужно просто подождать, точно так же, как Бог порой ждёт нашего раскаяния в наших грехах. Иногда, нам нужен кризис в наших церквях и в жизнях, чтобы понять, что у нас есть больше, чем мы думаем. И порой, очень жаль, что нам для этого нужен кризис.

Теперь, мы думаем, что настало время для нас молиться за наш собственный 100% христианский реабилитационный центр.

Узнаете больше об этом работе: напишите Антонию Адамс или Максиму Тихонов. Получите информацию молитвы на нашем блоге Помолите с Нами здесь. Спасибо!

When a church steps out in mission, things get dirty. But then, as Max Tikhonoff, pastor of Solomensky Reformed Church in Kiev notes below, 'God gives more grace.'

A great opportunity to learn how to work more with less has appeared for Solomensky church in Kiev. Lacking the needed funds we have decided to concentrate on how we can continue to serve with just what we have. And our work in Troicky Rehabilitation Center (pictured above) has seen even more blessing than previously. Along with teaching non-believers right there, we have formed our own Bible study support group for those who just left the rehab program. Drug addiction is acunning illness, but as Scripture says, "Those who are forgiven more, love more" as we can see this year. By this entry, we would like to start a series of stories about our ministry in the Rehabilitation Center.

We thought we had lost Zhenya (left) when after 1 year of being a church member we found out that he was secretly back on drugs for about 2 months. He borrowed a lot of money from many people in the church using their naivity and trust. He took the church's musical instruments and was about to sell. He went to the non-Christian rehab instead of ours and when we saw him back he told us that all that year in the church he was pretending to be a Christian and he doesn't believe "all those weird ideas".

Our Session was about to excommunicate him from the church, but our pastor asked them to wait for 3 more months and asked Zhenya to think once again. It all seemed useless after talks like that, but the Session has agreed.

In 2 months, Zhenya came back and said that he was foolish when he dared to say such terrible things about God and that he had undertsood that, when he asked God to show Himself to him again and he got the answer. What an amazing story of being a prodigal son of God!!! Zhenya is back and he makes his living by singing in a subway to pay his debts back to people in the church, though, some forgave him all the debts he had. He is about to join our worship team in the church. 

Sometimes we need to act quickly when there is a danger to the church, sometimes we have to wait like God waits on our sins. Sometimes we need a crisis in our churches and in our lives to understand that we have more, than we think. And it is a pity, that sometimes we need a crisis for that.

We think, that it is time for us to begin to pray about our own 100% Christian rehabilitation center!

Get connected with this work. Contact Radstock's Anthony Adams or Max Tikhonoff, to find out more... For prayer pointers on this ministry, head over to our 'Pray with Us' Blog here. 

Kurdish men kiss. Greeting each other they offer a firm handshake followed by a cheek-to-cheek greeting; once, twice, three times depending on the friendship. It was 5 years ago that I crossed this cultural gap and this choice to accommodate to Kurdish greetings has led to other decisions that my church family and I have made so that Kurds might hear about Christ. 

My wife and I are part of a Church family in a northern city in the UK. Government policy has meant that many thousands of asylum seekers have been liberally placed in our city, even though it is far from their initial point of entry. The city prides itself on being a City of Sanctuary and local churches and community groups often partner together to provide vital services to the asylum seeker community. Kurds are the fourth largest immigrant population here, but with their restaurants, supermarkets and barbershops they have a much larger presence than the actual numbers would suggest.

Kurdistan is a nation that won’t be found on any map but is a reality for every Kurd you meet; they are a country waiting to be born. Coming from Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran the Kurds are from a Muslim background and as such have had few opportunities to hear about Christ. They are becoming increasingly secular, having no meaningful faith in Islam, due in part to the oppression they’ve experienced under their Muslim neighbours. Some have fled harsh conditions seeking refuge in the UK, whilst others would admit they are simply here to make a better life for themselves. That said life here is difficult for them; many asylum seekers are placed in areas of the city marked by crime, violence and deprivation but they have learnt to navigate British culture and these social problems.

Only now can I see the significance of accepting a Kurdish friend’s invitation to share some kebabs back in 2004. Naïve to God’s purposes for myself and our church family I took lunch with one of my English students; this first taste of Kurdish cuisine led to a habit of spending an afternoon a week in the room above the restaurant. It was great fun to be the only Brit in that upper room, its walls stained from cigarette smoke and tables sticky from hot, sweet tea. Being on their turf, on their terms was the first step in a journey that now involves my church and other churches that are working together to give Kurds the opportunity to hear about Christ.

But it was there in the most unassuming of places, tucked away among Kurdish friends that I learnt to play backgammon, to appreciate their desire for freedom, to speak of the hope that Christ offers…

… and how to kiss.

You can find out more about one church’s journey in their mission to Kurds over the next few weeks here on the Radstock blog. If you would like to connect with this church family then please email Katy Jones Parry at kjp@radstock.org 

Знакомтесь: Руслан и Светлана Андрейченко и их семья. Руслан и Светлана постоянно проживают в Монголии вот уже 14 лет. Стойкость и постоянство – особенности их служения, которое имело и имеет много трудностей и радостей. Руслан и Светлана несут служение «Свет Миру» в Эрденете, городе, расположенном между холмами северной Монголии. Недавно я побывал у них, чтобы узнать как у них дела.

Руслан и Светлана – первопроходцы. Они являются одними из первых русских миссионеров, служащих в других странах. И как это обычно бывает с начинающими служениями, их миссия часто трудится в одиночку. Нередко причина одиночества миссии кроется в непонимании на родине. Многие русские Церкви еще не видят себя в служении за пределами своей страны.

Руслан и Светлана также являются замечательным примером выносливости среди невзгод в стране, где люди легко поддаются искушению все бросить, когда становится тяжело. Регулярные посетители нашего сайта наверное заметили, что Руслан и Светлана не единственные соработники, служащие за границей, которые находятся в контакте с миссией Радсток. Для меня было большой радостью познакомить их с Андреем Петриным, который ведет служение «Дом Жизни». Это служение также имеет связь с миссией Радсток, и его целью является достичь Евангелием русскоговорящих в Лондоне, Великобритания. «Дом Жизни» и обеспечил русскую версию этой статьи.

«Свет Миру» - это Монгольская Церковь, которую Руслан и Светлана начали 7 лет назад и которая является маленьким семечком для большого видения. Не все видение может быть напечатано на общедоступном сайте как этот, но вот чем мы можем поделиться:

Корни – Основание церкви – обеспечить бытовую обстановку, в которой люди могли бы принимать участие в жизни Церкви через мероприятия, проводимые в церковном здании, например, ежедневные обеды для нуждающихся детей, или через евангелизационные мероприятия, например, посещение тюрем и людей преклонного возраста. Многое из вышеупомянутого уже практикуется в служении.

Ростки – Взращивание учеников, что включает отправку миссионеров для насаждения новых церквей в округе. Одной из нужд здесь является воспитание и формирование новых Монгольский служителей из самой церкви.

Отрасли – Воспитывать и посылать миссионеров за границу служить в других частях Восточной и Южной Азии, где живут люди, не слышавшие Евангелие. (Географическое расположение Монголии как раз стратегически правильно для этого видения.)

Видение, описанное выше, включает много нужд, но самая срочная это завершение постройки здания (серое одноэтажное строение слева на фото), которое стало бы центром церковной деятельности и служений.

Очень важно достроить здание именно сейчас, потому что церковь расположена на хорошем участке земли, и власти велели завершить стройку скорее или часть земли будет конфискована.

Молитва: за Руслана, Светлану и их семью, за работу Церкви «Свет Миру».

Группы: может ли ваша Церковь послать группу для помощи в строительстве или евангелизации?

Финансы: мы не стыдимся сказать, что это нужно и скорее, для того чтобы купить строительные материалы и нанять рабочих. Пожалуйста, рассмотрите финансовую поддержку. Линки для пожертвования и контактов находятся в английской версии статьи. 

Спасибо!

НОВОСТИ! Посетите из новый интернет сайт здесь!

Mark Greene, writing in the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity magazine EG, tells the story of a church who started talking about everyone’s ‘frontline’. ‘Everyone had a frontline – a place, a context where they felt that God was calling them to minister, so everyone could be involved.’

The church leader, Paul Pease, says:

'A saying we frequently use here at Hook is ’surviving and thriving on the frontline (and the frontline is where we are most of the time).’ We are still totally convinced that the action is on our frontline, and we retreat twice a week behind the frontline for fellowship so as to encourage one another to get back out to the frontline once again to win people for Christ. I am really passionate about this and am convinced this is the purpose of the church and the best way to reach people with the glorious gospel.

Mark Greene comments: “The team here at LICC now uses the word ‘frontline’ in all our teaching on mission. It’s a term that honours every context and binds people together in shared endeavour, even if that endeavour is pursued in different places.”

[Editor's Note: And of course, the title of this blog is 'Radstock Reports From The Frontline,' for exactly the same reason. True, we've been reporting recently from India, Zambia, Mongolia, Russia and Kosovo, but we've also reported from Southampton and London, UK. And look out for an upcoming update on a church plant in the Radstock network in Derby. The front line, as the article makes clear, is whatever God has called us do in the world, wherever he has called be in the world.]

For the full article in this issue of EG, click here. 

Below is a very helpful post, courtesy of our friends @ Desiring God, on the continuing need for Western churches to send mission partners in today's multipolar world mission context... 

While Ryan and his family prepared for long-term missions, he graciously gave his time as a volunteer for Desiring God International Outreach. He brought tremendous skill and integrity to his work which bore wonderful fruit including the following: 

'As our family prepares to move overseas, we sometimes encounter this question in one form or another: Is the Western missionary model* still legitimate?” 

The question stems from a variety of concerns and perspectives, but our basic answer must be “yes.”  Even with the high cost of sending and recent shifts in the global Church, it is still strategic and fitting for Western missionaries to cross geographical and linguistic boundaries in the pursuit of new worshipers of Jesus. 

Here is why I think so:

Though missiologists in the past couple of decades have rightly emphasized the importance of unreached people groups ("nations") as the focus of the Great Commission, there are a number of texts which seem to require a geographic and not exclusively an ethnic focus (e.g.Malachi 1:11). 

The Great Commission cannot be fulfilled by only reaching the unreached who migrate to America, or Christ doesn’t receive the glory he deserves.

Many Unreached peoples are unrepresented in reached cities. In these cases, someone is going to have to cross cultural and geographic boundaries to deliver the message in the flesh.

God has blessed this nation with an abundance of resources, yet a staggeringly low percentage of Christian spending is channeled toward missions, especially missions to the unreached. 

When God’s people here in America are biblically calibrated, there are plenty of resources both to continue sending workers from the West, and to support indigenous pastors and church planters.

With a long history of Christian thought, abundant resources, and relative lack of persecution, the Western Church can often make a contribution in places where the Church is younger and less grounded. 

Just as it would be arrogant to think that we know it all and have no need of the global Church, it would be arrogant to sit on our wealth of resources, history, and doctrinal development rather than make it accessible to the world.

When Christians from more privileged and dominant-language cultures (such as America), set aside their comforts, rights, and security in order to identify with and minister to people of lesser-privileged cultures and more obscure languages, something powerful and gospel-adorning is communicated. 

It is the purpose of God that the incarnational activities of going and identifying illustrate and glorify the gospel (1 Thess. 2:1-8).

(*Editor's note: Some western missionary thinking operated on the assumption that the West was 'Christian' and the rest were not, an unhelpful model from which most Western missionary thinking has now departed. So, yes it is right to continue sending and going within the parameters set out above.)

Кафе Церковь в лесу растёт, с болшьшем детей в церкви. Мы недавно получили эти фотографии о служении для детей и молодые люди. Насладитесь! А помолите за церковь, пока они комят люди с хлебом - физический и духовный! 

Узнаете больше об этом работе. Напишите к Павлу Виллямс. И помолите за церковь в лесу. Спасибо!

For up-to-date prayer updates, head over to our new Pray With Us blog, right here on the Radstock website. To find out more about the work, contact Brad Byrd, or visit visit his ministry blog here.

It's all growth at the Cafe Church in the forest (see above), as more and more children are finding their way into the life of the church. Recently, we received some pictures of the growing children's and youth ministry there. Enjoy - and please keep praying for this church as they seek to share their bread with the physically and spiritually hungry.

Later in the summer, we hope to have two students on placement alongside the Cafe Church team. Find out more about, and connect with, this work, by contacting Paul Williams, Radstock's Eurasia Network Developer, at paul@radstock.org

United Bible Fellowship: this is the name of a new Mongolian fellowship meeting in a home, here in the capital, under the leadership of my co-worker Damdin Bold. Already, new folks are being drawn in, several of whom are now looking forward to their baptism in the main river here this Sunday.

This is a little group with a big vision. Already they are in a 40-day period of seeking the Lord with prayer and fasting, seeking to bless each other's walk with God, and their service for him. They are also praying for a united witness across the churches of the city. 

Please pray for them as they pray, share, study God's Word and witness together. And pray too for those preparing for their baptisms this Sunday. Click here for the latest news.

Find out more about this work by contacting Paul Williams, Radstock's Eurasia Network Developer, at paul@radstock.org

Global mission is... fulfilling the great commission to be His witnesses in all Judaea, Samaria, and to the end of the earth, making disicples of all nations in the process. (Acts 1:8; Matthew 28:19)

This is the last in our mini-series of global mission 'shorts.' We trust you have found them helpful in the great task that God has set before us all...

Global mission is... regularly interceding in prayer for missionaries and nationals working on the front lines around the world.

Click here for the next global mission 'short.'

Global mission is... acting with a Gospel mindset next time you take that business trip to Beijing or Dubai... or go to the shops.

Click here for the next global mission 'short.'

Global mission is... tilling the hard soil church planting from Heathen, USA (or wherever you are) to Harare, Zimbabwe.

Click here for the next global mission 'short.'

Global mission is... responding to the call to take a short term trip to share the gospel truth you know.

Click here for the next global mission 'short.'

Global mission is... being a good neighbour as Christ exhorts in Luke 10:25-37.

Click here for the next global mission 'short.'

Global mission is... the privilege and responsibility of all who call on the Name of Christ.

Click here for the next global mission short.

photo courtesy of Outfitters for Adventure

Meet Ruslan and Svetlana Andreichnko and their family. Ruslan and Svetlana have been in Mongolia continuously for 14 years. Persistence and perseverance has marked a ministry that has had many difficulties - and joys - during this time. Ruslan and Svetlana lead 'Light of the World' Church in Erdenet, a city in the hills of north Mongolia. Recently I called on them to catch the story and find out how the ministry is going.

Ruslan and Svetlana are pioneers. They are among the very few Russian mission partners serving in other countries, and as with any pioneering ministry, theirs is often a lonely one, not least because of the amount of misunderstanding in their home country. Many Russian churches have still to catch the vision for service beyond Russia's borders.

Ruslan and Svetlana are also a tremendous example of perseverance in adversity, in a country where people are easily tempted to give up when the going gets tough. And regular visitors to our site will note that Ruslan and Svetlana are not the only Russian partners serving overseas with whom Radstock is in contact. So it was a great pleasure to me to put them in contact with Andrei Petrine, who leads Дом Жизни (or House of Life), a church in the Radstock network reaching out to the thousands of Russian-speakers in London UK. Дом Жизни will be providing the Russian translation of this blog entry. This should be available shortly.

'Light of the World' is a Mongolian church, started by Ruslan and Svetlana seven years ago, and it is the seed for a big vision. Not all this vision can be shared on a public website such as this, but here's what we can say: 

• Roots - Foundations, for the church to provide a social context within which people can interact with the life of the church, either through events in the facility itself, such as daily meals for needy children, or through its outreaches, for instance to prisons and to the elderly. Much of this work is already in progress.

• Shoots - Growing Disciples, which includes sending missionaries to plant new churches elsewhere in the district. One of the needs here is for training and mentoring emerging Mongolian leaders within the church. 

• Branches - Sending out - training and sending out mission partners abroad to serve in other parts of East and South East Asia, where many of the world's unreached people-groups live. (Geographically, Mongolia is strategically-placed to serve this kind of vision.)

The vision described above involves many needs, but the most immediate is for the completion of the building (the grey single-storey structure, centre-left in the picture), so that it may become a resource centre for those ministries.

This need is particularly important right now, because the church is situated on a prime piece of land, and the city authorities have told them to complete the work soon or face confiscation of some of the land.

• Prayer: for Ruslan, Svetlana and the family, and the work of Light of the World church.
• Teams: Can your church send a team to help with the building work, or with some of the other outreach activities?
• Finances: We are not ashamed to say these are needed, and soon, so that materials can be bought and labour contracted for the work. Please consider giving financially. Click here for giving options. Please assign your gift to 'Mongolia Erdenet Building Project.'
• Contact Larry to find out how the missions team in one church in the United States is already partnering with this work, and the mutual benefits that can come from this. 

NEW! Visit their new website here! We hope to have an English version soon.

To find out more about all these opportunities, and to get connected with the work of Light of the World church, contact Paul Williams, Radstock's Eurasia Network Developer at paul@radstock.org. Looking forward to hearing from you!

Global mission is... catching the same vision for the nations as God has.

More global mission 'shorts' coming soon.

[Editor's note: Gregor is a church planter and one of our network leaders in Kosovo. Here he shares - by kind permission - a recent celebration in the life of his church.]

Last week we had a baptism service at the lake. It was a very special day, for us as a family as well, and for me as a dad. Jozef and Benjamin got baptized as well as 3 other people from church.

I never asked them about it, but they approached me and asked about it. Can a believer in Jesus afford to not be baptized - was their question. I had to say no. All believers need to be baptized. We had 2 bible studies together going more in depths and they felt ready for the great day. It was a blessed day for me to be able to baptize them.

The funny part was when they wanted to share their testimony. Unlike the others, they could not remember when they had received Jesus, and could not talk about a life without Him. They kind of felt bad about it but to me was precious What a start they have in life. I had wasted 23 years of my life before finding Christ. 

Children of our generation of parents in the Albanian lands are the first to be born and raised around Jesus. And still they are very few of them. Still this sobering reality makes days like these even more precious. Of spiritual significance to us was that one of the young man was baptized by the local believers. It might look slowly but we are entering new spiritual era in these regions. We thank God for these signs of His great Faithfulness. And we thank God for you that keep us in your prayers and are part of our "unseen" team. 

Because of Jesus,

Gregor and family.

Contact us to find out more about this work in a most needy land...

Just before breakfast Ezzie discovered, during her early morning goat check, a sick one in the herd. This poor creature had an infection in her skull and lost an eye. Upon telling one of the shepherds, he cut his milking short and was off to get some medicine or so she thought. When the other brother arrived with the butcher I knew they would be exacting medicine of a different kind. So as we sat enjoying our breakfast on the patio, one of Ezzie's charges was shedding her blood, skin and a whole lot more only yards away. 

As I reflected on it later in the morning I was reminded of another slaughter come sacrifice 2000 years ago. See it was a sheep not a goat that was sacrificed for my spiritual health.

Due to the sin in my life (i.e spiritual blindness and infection) I deserved the same fate, to be cut off from the herd. But in God's mercy he sent a physician not a butcher to rescue me. In the place of my sinful punishment the Lamb of God was slain and I was healed, spiritually speaking that is. How privileged I am to have this starkly clear reminder of what Jesus did for me on the cross 2000 years ago.

Global mission is... frightening, costly and risky.

Click here for the next global mission 'short.'

I just finished Mack & Leeann's Guide to Short Term Missions by Mack and Leeann Stiles, IVP while here in Peje, Kosova. I would highly recommend it to any one going on a short term mission or church leaders who are sending short term teams whether locally or across the globe. (See below for purchase options.)

Mack and Leeann address a host of issues from church partnerships to cultural sensitivity, contextualized evangelism to culture shock.  He also addresses the issue of risk in missions, one that seems to be the forefront of most church leaders minds when considering a short term location.

How many times have those of us on the field heard from a potential sending church,"can you give us a risk assessment?" Mack quotes from Frank Furedi's book, Culture of Fear, "When safety is worshipped and risks are seen as intrinsically bad, society is making a clear statement about the values that ought to guide life."  Mack adds his own sentiment when saying, "How true. I, for one, do not want to worship safety over God."  I have to say that I would be in agreement.  I don't know how many times I have heard from friends, family and others when I returned home from an overseas trip to a perceived risky location, "We are glad your back safe.  We have been praying for your safety."  

I am grateful for the prayer, I am disappointed by its focus, my safety! why haven't you been praying about my witness, my opportunities to share Christ, the lost souls of those I was spending time with?!!!  Don't get me wrong, I don't go looking for risks or relish in putting my family in harms way, but had we not risked and gone on our first family short term trip to Kosova roughly 5 years ago, they would not have the rich spiritual heritage they have at so young an age and perhaps the kingdom impact would be slightly less than it is today.

Food for thought indeed...[ed]. You can purchase your copy here or here.

Global mission is... daring, uncompromising and biblical.

More global mission 'shorts' coming soon.

Over the next few days, courtesy of Brad Byrd, Radstock's US director, we will be publishing a series of 'shorts' on global mission, beginning with the words, 'Global mission is...' to stir our grey matter, and galvanise our hearts... Click here for more!

Abi and I were out to dinner the other night sans the 3 older kids, we had Jems in tow. They were enjoying the hospitality of good friends we spent time with when we lived here in the Balkans doing similar work to us. 

Our dinner was with Ahmet and Eliona (far left and second from left). Eliona is a sharp lady who has seen the Lord work in her life in amazing ways, and yet sadly she is not yet one of His own. She attributes most all of the good things in her life to Him and even cries out to Him for the things that are hard and frightening. As we talked about the investment they had received from us and the role we have played in their life, Eliona said, "We thank God for you". But yet she hasn't been able to make the jump to a personal relationship with Him yet. 

We made a loan to Eliona 2 years ago to start a jewellry store in the local supermarket. There are store fronts within the supermarket and her store is one of those. At the time she and I talked about the wisdom of this location but she was convinced that it would be a good decision. I was not sure, thinking other locations in the city might be more strategic, but gave her the benefit of the doubt. Two years later she has repaid her loan in full, a month early. It is truly a success story. Not only that, but she has also loaned others money to start their own jewellry businesses too. She was absolutely right about the location of her store and she has a good eye to see the kinds of jewellry that are appealing and a little different to people here. Last night we celebrated with her that her loan is now paid in full. What a wonderful feeling. We pray too that the gospel opportunities we have had these past two years with her would come to fruition.

For more from the field in Kosovo, contact Radstock's Brad Byrd at brad@radstock.org. Thanks!

Back in April, our Zambia network partners, Lordsway Ministries, held their 3rd Easter conference. Easter is the time we have set for all of our churches to come together, and in previous years we have had wonderful times, but nothing to compare with what happened this year. We took the faith step of not restricting the numbers that could come, and as we received feedback from the churches we realised that we were going to be seriously challenged in space, accommodation and finance! We wondered what would happen as the first singing bus arrived from out of town!

However by the grace of God we managed it – well over a hundred people were accommodated in the homes of local members. We were able to provide food parcels for the hosts, a snack lunch for every single delegate every day, and assistance with transport to get home!

In the end we had approximately 450 people in a building that normally holds 200 (this is Africa!) – but everything was orderly and well managed – if a little hot. We are used to 9:00am services starting at 10.30, but somehow this was different, people were there ahead of time, there was a great sense of expectation and faith.

We had preaching from our local pastors as well as from those who had come from our branch churches, and a special guest, our friend Hendie Bwalya who preached with great power and authority. The presence of God was there and there was great celebration as the gospel was preached and taught.

At the beginning of the conference we officially had 6 churches – on Sunday morning we had a long but wonderful time of recounting how the ministry had grown over the last 12 months. We ordained the elder from our church in Mansa as a pastor, we appointed our National Women’s Coordinator, we received more churches into fellowship, and commissioned a new church plant – by the end we were 10 churches, with more in the pipeline!

We shared communion (all 450 of us) which was a fitting way to express the spirit of oneness, of family, that had pervaded the whole event. The whole thing was finished off with a palm waving celebration – it was a landmark event, a faith enhancing celebration preparing us for the next step in a great adventure!

To find out more - and to connect with - the work of Lordsway Ministries in Zambia, visit their website, or contact their network leaders, Nick and Erica Lugg here. We look forward to hearing more of their work as this rapidly-growing ministry develops. Keep tuned!

Greetings from one of the new churches in Uttar Pradesh (pictured above), who had just celebrated the dedication of their church building in May 2009. The vision of the 2020 Network of Uttar Pradesh is to see the Christian population grow from 1% to 20% by the year 2020. To see this vision come, our team is travelling throughout the state, holding one-day vision meetings in each district. Pictured below is a group of pastors, evangelists and church planters gathered around, and laying hands on the map to ask God to give the land. We are seeing tremendous excitement and fruit from these meetings.

The Power of the Gospel
Church growth is accompanied by persecution in many parts of India. The caste system is one of the major barriers to the advancement of the Gospel. But the power of the good news of Jesus Christ is reaching into the hearts of many Brahmins and others who consider themselves to be high caste. The man next to me (right) in the picture below is a Brahmin, and he now proclaims that salvation is found only in Jesus' Name.

Building Churches
Back to the church at the top of the page... I remember way back in 1996 when I visited this area for the first time where there were no believers at all. We, along with an Operation Mobilisation team did a massive distribution of gospel packs and the Jesus video in Hindi. We used to visit the villages once every two or three months. God heard our prayers and after three years of continuous prayer a high-caste Hindu man who had built a temple to a Hindu god in his home gave his live to Christ. After a few months, he faced huge persecution from fanatical Hindus in the local community. We thought no one will ever keep faith in Christ at least in this area, but we should never underestimate the power of the Gospel. Now, after 10 years or so, we have more than 30 small gatherings in different villages across the district! 

Get connected for mission with Alok and his teams working across Uttar Pradesh. Contact Radstock's Anthony Adams at anthony@radstock.org or Alok at alok@tellasia.org to find out more! 

[Editor's note: Alok was with us at the Radstock Conference 2009. Click here for his reflections on the conference and impact of church partnerships for mission in Uttar Pradesh and beyond.]

Q: What does a church planting network in Uttar Pradesh, India, have in common with the work of a church in Southampton, England, apart from each being part of the Radstock network? And what does it mean to the folks in Southampton to be part of the Radstock network, other than having the grave of Lord Radstock in their graveyard?! (See photo)

A: Holy Trinity Church, Southampton, under its leader, Richard Burningham, is involved in a strategic partnership with Alok Srivastava of Tell Asia Ministries, equipping church planters to seed and grow new churches among Uttar Pradesh's population of 190 million where today only 1% of the population professes Christ.

The challenge is huge: the workers are few, and the harvest is great. But throughout the Radstock network, workers are rising to the challenge. Following this year's Radstock Conference, Alok visited Richard's church in Southampton, and he wrote this of his time there:

'Richard took me to see the grave of Lord Radstock, who is buried there. It was a very overwhelming moment for me because I had just come back from the Radstock Conference where I met with so many people around the world carrying his vision. As we stood to pose for the picture by his grave, we thanked God for Lord Radstock's life and dedication which is still alive today. I thank God for the connections and partnership that are being formed and I look forward to many exciting things happening as a result of this network.'

Click here for further news of the work in Uttar Pradesh. We also hope to have an update from Richard in Southampton on the impact of this partnership there.

Find out more about how you and your church can get connected for mission with the workers in Uttar Pradesh by contacting Radstock's UK Director, Anthony Adams at anthony@radstock.org, or Alok at alok@tellasia.org.

6. What would you suggest to the many small local churches interested in mission, who are firstly, financially unable to structure an effective foreign missions programme on their own, but secondly, don’t wish to align themselves with para-church organizations for fear of losing the centrality of the local church in mission?

I’d say, give me a call and lets talk! That’s one of the key elements in Radstock’s thinking - that we can do more through being a network of churches, than operating on our own. Sometimes people ask why a church should even consider connecting into the Radstock network, when they are already connecting with other churches in other places, and our answer is that you should be willing to share your expertise and know-how with others. And probably discover some stuff you didn’t know in the process. ‘Share what you know, learn what you don’t’. Big churches can often be very self-sufficient in this way, but how much better if they were able to share in a network of churches where smaller churches who could never send a big team somewhere, can join in some of your projects, even if they only have two people and limited know-how. For myself, I am looking at having another mission trip from our church in a few months time, and I would love to invite some people from another church to join us, who may not otherwise be able to do something like this. Church-twinning is something that people are increasingly familiar with, but church-networking brings additional benefits, especially for churches who are smaller but would like to directly get involved and take up the privilege and responsibility of mission for themselves.

5. With regard to missions agencies, how much oversight of these agencies should belong to local churches?

Hmmmmm – hard to say since I think that agencies that don’t have the church at their core are missing a trick. In that sense, just giving the oversight to churches is not the point so much as having the church at the heart of the methodology.

4. Do you think there is place for organizations which don’t place the local church at the center of mission?

Well – it can rarely be wrong for any Christian/group of Christians to go and tell someone about Jesus, or help someone out in their need. But I do think that where organizations sideline the local church, or merely look to it as the place to recruit people and money, that is a mistake. There are a number of groups who were formed because of some specialist issue, that local churches could struggle to do – bible translation is one obvious one. The aeroplane ministry of MAF would be another. Others could be things like student work, where access to campuses is limited to those who are not students. But I would hope that the local church would not be sidelined even in these organizations. One mission leader, some time ago, announced to a gathering of mission leaders that he had realized that he had been remiss in neglecting the local church as he had pursued his mission agenda over the years, but others continue on without reference to local churches and I think it’s very sad. I heard how over the Easter weekend in one city, a classic example of churchless mission work happened. My friend writes:

‘On Easter Sunday here there were about 5 or 7 kids in church. On the next day, a school holiday, an international children's ministry had 120 kids at a "rally". The rally does a great job with kids. There are not plans for following up parents. No plans to integrate the kids into a church, etc. What's going on? I don't get it. Many of the staff attend the church I was at on Easter, but that church has no Sunday children's work, and nobody is training them how to do kids work. Hello?????’

There is a lack of joined-up thinking there, and certainly a lack of biblical thinking.

UNSEEN WORLD

Missions, church planting, would have been much easier if it was just us and the people. But the Bible says to us that we battle not against flesh and blood.. There is a real enemy that opposes us and what we do, every step of the way, in anyway he can.  It seems there is always some sort of heated conflict to resolve in the last month, among individuals in the church, or people in the team, sometimes within the families. Miscommunications  misunderstandings, and unhappiness from someone about something have happen strangely often . While these things can create a great opportunity for growth if dwelt correctly and in a Godly manner,  at the same time can drain your strength, and if you are not careful make you loose your focus. We see this time as one needed to be spend on hour knees more then just traing to solve puzzles. And we do need your support in intercesion for these things.

3. You work with an organization that puts a lot of emphasis on the local church. How central do you see the local church to mission and especially foreign mission?

I think it is very central. It’s not that I think there is no other way to do it, but there are reasons why I think that church-based mission is normally better. The main reason is because of my understanding of church, from the bible. I don’t believe church is a social convenience. Often, subconsciously, most of us think it is. In an individualistic western culture especially, we think that what is important is ‘me living my Christian life day by day’, and that the church is there to help me do that; to equip me to live out my faith. Now church is not less than that, but it is so much more than that! Community is key in biblical thought, as is shown by words like ‘city’ and ‘family’. Other images like the ‘body’ include the idea of many parts. And God himself is in community in his very being. Church (a gathering!) is meant to be the same, and as such communicates something by its very existence. God is building a new community; a new humanity, and part of our witness to others is that new community seen in the life of a local congregation of believers, living out their lives in a gospel-centred, counter-cultural way. That’s why Jesus says ‘this is how all men will know that you are my disciples, by the love you have for one another’. That statement was less about organizational unity (beloved of ‘Churches Together’ type groups) and more about the visible expression of God-at-work in our lives as a rag-tag and bob-tail group of different people who are, implausibly, united by ties of deep love, rooted in the gospel. So my point? When church community is seen in a locality, in a long-term relational way, that is hugely significant. Mission at its best is not a quick in-and-out event from a visiting team, but an ongoing process where people live amongst those they are seeking to reach. Visiting teams from other countries are important for lots of reasons, and providing they work with local churches, or are seeking to plant churches, they are still working ‘with the grain’ of the local church community witness. It is sometimes said that any group of Christians getting together to reach out could be called ‘church’, but though that could be argued, it is church devoid of elders and the accountability and the discipline that is supposed to bring. Sometimes churches are a pain in the neck, and so visionaries especially, can think it is easier to just by-pass them, apart from for the purposes of recruitment, but I do believe that something is lost when that happens – the ongoing witness of a local Christian community that people can observe, and point to and say ‘see how they love one another’. Its also worth saying, that many of the issues of ‘expertise’ are resolved if the local church is engaged. We can be criticized for saying local churches should do it because it is said ‘they don’t have the expertise’, but who better to go and link to then, than the local church pastor who lives out there. I suspect he knows his own set-up better than the expert in Britain or wherever….

2. Much has been made in missions circles about the shift of the Christian centre from the west to the majority world. How do you think this will or should affect Western mission work in the Majority World?

It will mean that we need to get out of any patterns of thinking ‘west is best’, and discourage those in the majority world from thinking that way too. Too often the flow of resources and personnel has been from the west, but disciples of Jesus Christ in every country need to grasp the importance of global mission and be involved in some way, becoming senders as well as receivers. I think western mission work should be concerned with helping to develop the vision of the majority world church (if they need help!) to go global. If this all leads to less dependence on the west, so be it. Who says the west should be central anyway? There are great strengths in developing mission work from all directions. Different cultures bring different things to the table. One example: church leaders in Albania have been developing a real passion for church planting mission work in Cambodia. Some Brits have been co-operating with them in this, but one of the striking things they found was how much more easily the Albanians could relate to the Cambodians as those from a country that had become poor and downtrodden beneath an oppressive regime. Thinking further – who’s going to reach the Arab world with the gospel? I suspect most Americans and Brits are not going to find it too easy to be accepted to live in the Muslim world in the current climate… post-Saddam and post-9/11. Other believers may well be better equipped. Churches from whatever country, need to co-operate internationally, and develop strategies for reaching out to the world.

1. How would you define mission/missions/missional? Do you see distinction between these terms or are they one and they same thing?

The trouble is, these are not biblical words, so I don’t believe it is worth getting too hung about them. ‘Missions’ seems to be an American way of saying the same thing as ‘mission’. People don’t tend to talk about ‘missions’ in the UK. I know some missiologists like Bosch define them differently, but I tend to use tem interchangeably and don’t see a problem with that. On the other hand ‘missional’ is a word that is sometimes controversial. It often seems be used in contrast to ‘attractional’ or ‘evangelistic’, where such approaches are described as those where people are called into events/meetings etc, whereas a ‘missional’ approach involves going out and living among people in a more low-key way. I think the divisions between the words are arbitrary in some ways, since truly evangelistic work – any work centered on the evangel – will surely involve going out and living among people where they are as a key element, and such activity should also be ‘attractive’. The concepts behind these words may be important, but the words themselves are frequently arbitrarily defined; it starts to slide into semantics. If you want to know more about what I think about the concepts, come back at me. And for what its worth, I do believe in what is generally meant by ‘missional’ – an emphasis on a church going out into its community, rather than expecting people to come in.

These were the questions:

1. How would you define mission/missions/missional? Do you see distinction between these terms or are they one and they same thing?

2. Much has been made in missions circles about the shift of the Christian centre from the west to the majority world. How do you think this will or should affect Western mission work in the Majority World?

3. You work with an organization that puts a lot of emphasis on the local church. How central do you see the local church to mission and especially foreign mission?

4. Do you think there is place for organizations which don’t place the local church at the center of mission?

5. With regard to missions agencies, how much oversight of these agencies should belong to local churches?

6. What would you suggest to the many small local churches interested in mission, who are firstly, financially unable to structure an effective foreign missions programme on their own, but secondly, don’t wish to align themselves with para-church organizations for fear of losing the centrality of the local church in mission?

I took the picture at the top of this blog last September in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India. The traffic actually looks relatively orderly on this shot because of the upcoming central reservation – in other places there could be cars, bikes, people, rickshaws or cows, all over the street heading in any and all directions!

Uttar Pradesh has a population of more than 190 million people – that’s more than three times the population of the UK, and two thirds of the population of the USA! If it was a country in it’s own right, it would be the sixth largest country in the world after China, India, USA, Indonesia and Brazil. It is India’s most populous state, and the world’s most most populous sub-national entity. In terms of the gospel, it is largely unreached. Most mission activity, historically, has been in the south of India. The north is fairly barren.

The work we connect with in Lucknow is the Tell-Asia Alliance headed up by Alok Srivastava. Alok spent some time in the UK training at the Cornhill Training Course several years ago. Now he is at the heart of a movement in North India, which is seeing many churches planted in many villages. There are many people coming to faith in the Lord Jesus. Radstock is helping people connect to this movement as they go out and help in training the house church leaders, and in developing well projects for villages. There are also some considering going to live there long term.

To find out more about this exciting work, contact Radstock's Anthony Adams at anthony@radstock.org

Brad Byrd (Radstock's US Director), and his family are busy preparing for their (short term) return to Kosovo this summer, with a team from the US and UK. Click here for their video diary, as they share on their preparations and expections.

The fourth in our series on short term missions, courtesy of the guys at Desring God.

Day four in our series on short-term missions. David Livermore has written a book on this topic that we highly recommend, Serving with Eyes Wide Open: Doing Short-Term Missions with Cultural Intelligence.

In "American or American’t: A Critical Analysis of Western Training to the World," he addresses a particular application of the short-term missions strategy: Teaching.

Some say that globally 85% of pastors have had little to no theological training whatsoever. Here at DG International Outreach, we are partnering with an increasing number of ministries using an informal, short-term approach for training pastors in developing nations.

David has some provocative analysis aimed to make us more aware of our cultural blind sides. This longer article is essential reading if you are focused on theological training of church leaders in developing countries.

Indigenous expressions of Christ’s Church exist in every geopolitical nation of the world. The entrepreneurial drive of American [Editor: and other Western] culture infiltrates our missions endeavors and therefore spills over into our cross-cultural leadership development initiatives. When we hear about the relentless growth of the global church, we’re inspired to bring our value-added contributions. But while the North American pastors consistently talked about urgency, the nationals consistently talked about the importance of process and of taking time to grow in relationship before developing a strategy for the kinds of collaborative exchanges that are truly needed for mutual benefit

[Editor's note: I agree. Here in Mongolia and other parts of Eurasia, process takes primacy over goal. Any endeavour that doesn't take account of the priority of process and relationship, is likely to miss its goal or goals in the long run.]

In this third look at short-term missions, we feature further comment from the guys at Desiring God, as well as from the personal blog of our US Director, Brad Byrd. First from Desiring God:

On day three of our series on short-term missions, we turn to Andy Crouch, author of Culture Making, for an article with some unique twists, "Unexpected Global Lessons: How Short-term Mission Is Becoming a Two-way Street."

[T]he whole apparatus of preparation for short-term trips assumes that the reason Americans [Editor: and other westerners] invest their time and treasure is to do something for others—to check off a list of activities that will supposedly help advance the gospel. In fact, it is the rare short-term team (with the notable, partial exception of medical and dental missions) that brings such unique skills and cross-cultural sensitivity that they can make a net contribution in their brief visit. Our counterparts in the developing world are more resourceful than we imagine—and we need them at least as much as they need us.

Now from Brad:

They take a lot of energy, are costly and sometimes emotionally messy. Put a team of relative unknowns under the pressure of cross cultural, cross language ministry and watch the sparks fly. Having said that, they are worth it, I am a living testimony that they have a much farther impact than we will ever see this side of eternity. John Piper, pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church and leader of Desiring God Ministries, in Minneapolis, MN, says, "One of the payoffs is that there is scarcely today an under-fifty missionary on the field who didn't do a short term mission before they went out." Grace Team, watch out!

[Editor's Note: The Radstock network emphasis on long-term, low-key and relational in mission partnerships is key to the mutuality in learning that is essential for both sides of the partnership, including members of short term teams. For more on our values, click here.]

Continuing our series on short-term missions, we reproduce the following by permission of the team at Desiring God. This post addresses the very important subject of the effect of short-term missions on poverty.

For day two in our series on short-term missions, we feature two articles by the Chalmers Center for Economic Development. Their vision is to train the church worldwide to minister holistically to the poor without creating dependency.

The article, "Short-Term Missions Can Create a Long-Term Mess," lays out the challenges and implications of how we serve the poor.

The approach of most short-term mission teams seems to be to do things to the people instead of with the people. This approach exacerbates the feelings of inferiority that already paralyze the poor in my country and the feelings of superiority that often characterize those of us from wealthy countries. This dynamic is particularly problematic here. The government and the church have such a long history of paternalism that the people often believe they cannot do anything without the help of money and resources from others.

"Doing Short-Terms Missions Without Doing Long-Term Harm" reinforces this by showing that to authentically serve the poor we need to examine our mindset.

STM trips can play a positive role in the lives of all those involved, but a different paradigm is needed. Rather than going as “doers,” some powerful dynamics can be unleashed if STM teams go as “learners” from the poor or as “co-learners” with the poor.

Deciding what role a short-term team can effectively play is a difficult task. The staff at Chalmers recommends asking questions like these before the team even leaves:

• What is the nature of poverty?
• What does it take to alleviate poverty?
• What is God already doing in this community?
• Who are my brothers and sisters there? What issues are they facing?
• How does this trip fit into the overall picture?

Courtesy of John Piper and his team at the Desiring God blog, we plan to run a mini-series here on short-term missions. Short-term missions are a great way of growing mission and growing disciples, but they have their pitfalls. The following is taken by permission:

The last few decades have witnessed explosive growth in short-term missions as a strategy of the Western church for spreading the Gospel and serving the poor. Your church is probably sending teams out this summer.

As we approach this season, we want to direct your attention to articles that will challenge your assumptions about what it means to do short-term missions well. Many of us have made significant mistakes in the past, and some damage has likely been done. Thank God for his patience with us.

Please don’t receive these challenging articles as admonitions to drop short-term missions as a strategy. Rather, use them to think carefully and prayerfully about how your team should approach this task in a way that will honor the Lord and serve the cause of expanding the Kingdom.

Over the next four days, we will feature articles from some leaders who regularly address this topic.

Watch this space!

Let us introduce Ivan and Nadia. We wrote recently about their ministry 'in the forest' in central Russia. Their church started an internet cafe for young people - the first facility in the town! This town has major problems with alcohol and drugs-taking.

The cafe now hosts English and computer classes, not just for young people, but for babushkas as well! This year, Ivan, Nadia and their team began activities for children in the town, a place where they could find out about Jesus. Already one five-year old girl has started bringing her whole family!

This church is quite small now. But we believe that the Lord will work mightily through his people there!

Find out more about this work by contacting Paul Williams at paul@radstock.org And pray for this little crew in the forest! Thank you!

'Month to View' comes to our blog. It is now possible to view an entire month's blog entries in one or two clicks!

Previously it was only possible to view the most recent five entries in any one month, but with so much going on across the network, we didn't want to get to the end of the month and find we'd 'lost' the content from the beginning!

How does it work? Click on the month of May in the Blog Archives (on the right of any blog page), and you will see the most recent five entries listed, as previously. Go to the bottom of the page, and you will see links to the rest of May's entries by page number. So now you can capture a month's news from across the network in one place. Or why not use our new RSS feature to capture the news as it happens, in your internet browser?

And don't forget to check out the new Pray With Us blog, for the latest prayer news, also right here on the Radstock website.

Познакомтесь Иван и Надя. Мы недавно написали об их служении в лесу в центре России. Их церковь начала интернет кафе для молодые люди - первый интернет кафе в городе! В этом городе есть большие проблемы с алкоголом и с наркотиками. В кафе сейчас уроки компьютера, не только для молодые люди, но тоже для бабушки!

В этом году Иван, Надя и команда начали уроки ддя детей от города, где они могут узнать об Иисусе. Одна маленкая девочка уже приводит целую семью!

Эта церковь теперь маленкая. Но мы верим что Господь будет очень много работать через его людей там!

Узнаете больше об этом работе. Напишите к Павлу Виллямс. И помолите за маленкую команду в лесу! Спасибо!

Yes! RSS has come to the Radstock blog! Whether you let your internet browser organise your feeds, or you do it through a service like Google Reader, it's never been easier to stay in touch with the latest goings-on from around the Radstock network.

Visit the blog landing page here, and click on the RSS button at the top to stay on top of the news, wherever you are in the world.

Spread the word... Help make the Radstock network more widely known. Are you on one of the social networking sites, like Facebook, MySpace, Windows Live! or StumbleUpon - or one of the many others? Now you can share any entry from the Radstock blog with your peers and friends. Just click on the 'Share' button at the top of the page you want to share, and take it from there. Or why not link to us from your (or your church's) website or blog?

Just some ways to make our global network of churches more globally known!

Suffering followed by Glory

We said in the last post on Tim Chester's timely new book that we would not be uploading any more content from it. Well, we just did!

As Christians we can sometimes struggle with a God who allows suffering. But in this chapter we are reminded that suffering is not only part of the Christian experience, it is part of what it means to be a disciple - to follow in the way of the cross.

Click here to download this chapter.

Now for the rest, you really will need to get hold of the book. Click here or here to order on Amazon!

The Way of the Cross = The Way of Joy

In our second and final peek at Tim Chester's new book, Tim gives us a timely reminder that walking in the way of the cross really means walking the way of joy!

Click here to download this chapter. 

For the rest, we really recommend that you buy the book. Click here or here to purchase on Amazon!

My cultural education continues. Mongols, I have discovered, love Choco-Pies, those cake-biscuits made in Korea since 1974. In fact I’m rather partial to them, myself (he says, with a pack of three - originally six - in the refridgerator! OK, the third was a hospitality one!) Choco-pies made their way here after the fall of Communism in the early 1990’s, and have been ingrained into the culture since.

Speaking of stuff that gets ingrained into culture: I was recently reminded of the inextricable link between culture and language. In the UK, we have become used to bemoaning the lack of ‘commitment’ in post-modern British culture. People increasingly flit onto the next thing, whether the lure is a better house, better car, job, relationship, even a ‘better’ church. But at least we have the word ‘commitment’ as a measure by which we can see what we have lost, or are in process, of losing.

Here in Mongolia, we don’t even have this yardstick. For in the Mongolian language, there is no word that can even be translated ‘commitment.’ It is, by and large, a foreign concept, and the reasons are complex:

• For thousands of years, the nomadic lifestyle has characterised life in Mongolia, so much so that even though only around a quarter of the population are herders today, the nomadic mentality is deeply ingrained in the national psyche. Even if you live in the city, the reference point for many, of an ideal life is the broad steppe and open skies. If you are in one place long enough, then the grass, so to speak, is just greener elsewhere. Factor in the growth of city life here in Ulaanbaatar, where nearly half the population lives, and the picture is further complicated. Here as elsewhere, city life tends to loosen bonds of family and clan, so people can constantly redefine themselves by new sets of relationships and possibilities.

• In living memory, decades of Communist rule brought its own distortions. As elsewhere in the Soviet world, you had a basic division between those at the top, who generally called all the shots and made all the plans, and the rest, for whom, and to whom, all this was done. They had no stake in the system other than to believe in the paternal goodness of their rulers, whether or not they actually believed in it.

People learnt how to please, to say the right things, but often believing, and sometimes doing, the opposite, in their inner, private worlds. Mongolia was not alone in this. Similar patterns of outer conformity and inner deceit were practised in Russia and other parts of the Soviet world.

At the root of this lay a mentality that ran along the lines of, ‘how I survive in a world where I don’t know who to trust.’ In Soviet thinking, the object of trust was the state, or so the powers that were, liked to think. The reality was always more complex. If your private world and your public persona were in different places, as it was for most, then trust was something you tended not to do, since that trust could be betrayed, often for favours, to the state. And since you didn’t know who might be acting secretly for the state, trust was more easily withheld than given.

This mentality has survived the downfall of Communism. Beyond the ready smiles and easy camaraderie, Mongols still find it enormously difficult to trust others, whether they be family members, colleagues, bosses or subordinates. When disappointment occurs, as it inevitably does, the culture does not provide substantial equipment to stay the course. So people move on, or retreat into self.

Such a curse is not easily broken. And convincing folks that there is One Who is worthy of all their trust, Who is amply able to satisfy all their hungers, Who is totally committed to them, and therefore worthy of their total commitment, even when that commitment leads them to people and situations they would not ordinarily trust themselves to, is no small task. But it is a task worth the undertaking, for a people whom God loves as any other, and which has such significant Gospel potential in this part of Eurasia, to reach some of the most unreached people-groups on earth.

Why such Gospel potential? Because in the outworking of God’s total commitment to humanity, Jesus lived a life that many Mongols can readily identify with, which he summed up thus to one of his enquirers: “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” (Matthew 8:20, NIV) He was always on the move, because there were places to go, things to do, and people to see. As he put it himself: “I must preach the good news of the kingdom of God to the other towns also, because that is why I was sent.” (Luke 6:43). This is travel language, but for the disciple, whether nomadic or settled, it is the language of pilgrimage (Psalm 84:5). Its destination is a Home (John 14:2) whose dimensions are so great that they would settle even the greatest wanderer.

But meanwhile, back on earth: who knows, but that committed believers of nomadic cultural heritage could be a such a powerful tool in the hands of God! Such a possibility, I believe, is deeply worthy of us, wherever we are in the world, putting hands together to pray for!

To find out how you and your church can make a difference in this part of the world, contact Paul Williams, Radstock's Eurasia Network Developer, at paul@radstock.org

Churches in many parts of the Radstock network face persecution at different levels. Many of us will remember the horrific attacks last year on Christians in Orissa, eastern India by militant Hindus. These attacks went largely unreported in Western news media. Although churches in Orissa are not at this time part of the Radstock network, we feel this issue to be of growing significance to our churches, both in the cause of the Gospel, and in the cause of social justice. (Christians in Orissa are mainly low-caste Dalit). We are therefore bringing this to your attention. We have also asked Alok Srivastava, our network leader in nearby Uttar Pradesh, to comment further. We hope to hear from him shortly.

For now, here is the latest news on the situation from the Desiring God Blog.

The Christians in India's east coast region of Orissa, largely the Dalit, are still struggling to recover from the devastating anti-Christian violence that occurred in 2008. During the sudden attacks from August through October, about 54,000 Christians were displaced from their homes. Only a few thousand have been able to return. Most of violence was in the Kandhamal District where about 3,000 people are still in government relief camps.

Some victims have moved out of the state to start new lives, but the majority still live in tents only a short distance from their former homes. As the local government continues to downplay the seriousness of the attacks and provides minimal support, organizations like All India Christian Counsel (AICC) are stepping in to help with the many needs of Christians in the area. AICC is involved in rebuilding homes and churches, helping with aide in the camps, and helping support the widows and orphans of pastors who were killed. They are also helping to pursue justice and peace for those who were victimized. The number of those affected by the violence is staggering, and it is evident that our brothers and sisters in Orissa are still in much need of prayer and support. Please remember to pray with us for the peace and reconciliation of these Christians. You can help the cause of AICC by donating through Dalit Freedom Network under Orissa Relief Fund.

In the introduction to his forthcoming book on the meaning of Jesus' Cross and Resurrection, Radstock Conference speaker and church planter / trainer Tim Chester asks about the things that really matter. (exerpt reproduced here by kind permission)

What’s really important to you? What matters? Here’s God’s answer to that question. ‘For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures’ (1 Corinthians 15:3–4).

This book is about what it means to follow the Christ who died and who was raised. How should the cross and resurrection shape our lives? What difference do they make on a Monday morning?

One of the phrases the New Testament often uses to describe Christians is ‘in Christ’ or ‘united to Christ’. You and I are in Christ. This means his death is our death and his life is our life. It means his cross is our model and his resurrection is our hope.

Perhaps rather surprisingly, when the New Testament writers tell us how we should live, they don’t often point back to the life of Jesus. Instead they take us again and again to the cross and resurrection. Whether they’re talking about marriage or conflict or community or money or opposition or leadership or temptation or work or suffering, they look to the cross and resurrection. So if you want to know how to live as a Christian, you need to understand how the cross and resurrection shape our lives. The pattern of the cross and resurrection needs to become our reflex, our habit, our instinct. We need to live the cross and resurrection …

The death and resurrection of Jesus are the most extraordinary events in human history. That God’s promised Saviour King should die was beyond comprehension for the people of his day. It was unthinkable. That the Son of God, God incarnate, Emmanuel, God with us, should die is extraordinary. And that he should be crucified, cursed, shamed, and die under God’s judgment, abandoned by the Father – for the Jews this was weakness; for the Greeks it was foolishness. Yet this is the power and wisdom of God. It’s the pivot of history, the centrepiece, even the purpose of history.

And then Jesus rose again. Whoever heard of a dead man coming back to life? A dead man now living. A condemned man now vindicated. This isn’t just an historical event. It’s an event that pushes the boundaries of history. It signals the end of history. It’s the future invading history.

But here’s the point I want to make. The cross and resurrection are extraordinary events that create extraordinary lives. When we are shaped by the cross and resurrection, our ordinary lives become exceptional, special, heroic. We become ordinary heroes.

'The Ordinary Hero' is now available on Amazon. You can order your copy here or here.

Click here for the English version.

[Editor's Note: as part of the internationalisation of our website, we're inviting contributions and translations of current pages from contributors whose first language is not English. This is the first of these. We plan to have parallel English language versions available soon for all such entries. This is an update on the ministry of London Russian Fellowship, now known as 'Дом Жизни' (House of Life)]

На Конференции Радстока г.2009, слева направо: брат Валерий Гугля,
пастыря церквей города Киева Владимир Омельчук и Максим Тихонов, пастор Андрей Петрин

Дорогие братья и сестры во Христе, Приветствуем вас из «Дома Жизни» - новое имя нашего служения, видинием которого является достижение Евангелием Славян в Британии.

Мы инклюзивная церковь (это не относится к либеральной теологии), чьи члены приехали не только из России, но и из Украины, Белоруссии, Азербайджана, Молдавии, Литвы, Румынии, Болгарии.. – в общем, в основном из стран Славянских народностей. Основным языком нашего служения остается русский, так как именно он служит связующим звеном в нашем совместном служении. На нашем вебсайте вы все еще найдете нас под нашим старым названием, и это будет так некоторое время, пока мы официально не переименуем наше название в согласии с Комиссией по Регистрации Благотворительных обществ.

Сейчас о других новостях:

• С Божьей помощью мы открыли две домашние группы, покрывающие восток и запад Лондона.
• Прошло приблизительно 4 месяца с тех пор как мы работали с Церковью Святая Троица на Бромптоне (HTB = Holy Trinity Brompton Church), используя их здание для молитв в подготовке к началу Альфа Курса на русском языке. В то время как я пишу это послание, я на пути в НТВ, где сегодня вечером пройдет первая сессия этого курса. Это будет первый Альфа Курс, который пройдет в самом здании НТВ. Во время учения речь Никки Гамбл будет переводиться синхронно для тех, кто не понимает английский. Во время ужина, молитв и песнопений мы будем вместе с англичанами. Для обсуждения вопросов мы будем общаться в нашей отдельной группе на русском языке. Я верю, что это благословение Господне и хорошая возможность достичь новых людей. Пожалуйста молитесь за приход алчущих душ.

Вот некоторые молитвенные нужды, за которые мы просим вас молиться, так как эти существенные моменты, которые еще не покрыты нашим служением:

• Музыкальное служение – одаренные музыканты и певцы
• Больше ведущих для создания новых домашних групп – мы вообще нуждаемся в большем количестве посвященных людей
• Помощники в нашей Воскресной Школе, насчитывающей приблизительно 7-10 детей
• Мы все еще нуждаемся в дополнительном финансовом благословении для покрытия основных нужд служения как административного так и миссионерского характера.

Дорогие братья и сестры, благодарю вас за поддержку.

С любовью во Христе,
Пастор Андрей Петрин

Узнаете больше об этом работе. Напишите к Андрею Петрин или Павлу Виллямс, или посмотрете сайт Российского Служении в Лондоне.

Click here for the Russian version

[Editor's note: This is the English language version of a post originally submitted in Russian. As part of the internationalisation of our site, we are inviting contributors and network leaders whose first language is not English, to submit entries in their own language. This is the first of these.]

At the Radstock Conference 2009, from left to right: Valerii Guglya,
Pastor Vladimir Omelchuk, Pastor Maxim Tichonov (Ukraine), Pastor Andrei Petrine

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,

Greetings from the “House of Life” – the new name for our ministry whose vision is to reach Slavic people in Britain with the Gospel of our Lord. We are a church whose members come not only from Russia but from Ukraine, Belarus, Azerbaijan, Moldavia, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria... in short, from the majority of Slavic nations. The main language of the service is still Russian as it serves well to join all of us into one coherent entity. On our website you will still see us under our old name, but that will be so for a while until we arrange an official change with the Charity Commissioners.

Now, other news:

• With the help of God we have started two home groups, one in the east, the other in the west, of London.
• It has been for about 4 months since we have worked together with HTB (Holy Trinity Brompton Church) using their premises for prayers in preparation to launch an Alpha Course in Russian. Now, as I am writing this memorandum I am on my way to HTB for the first session of Alpha that will take place this evening at HTB. It will be the first Alpha that will happen at HTB itself. Nicky’s talk will be translated simultaneously for those who don’t speak English, we are going to eat and worship together and then, for Q and A time, our group will be using the Russian language to discuss the arising questions. I believe that it is a blessing of the Lord and a great opportunity to reach new people. Please pray for the inflow of hungry souls.

Here are some topics to pray for, as these essential things are not yet covered in our ministry:

• Worship group with the gifted musicians and singers.
• More home group leaders – we generally need more willing souls.
• A few helpers in our Sunday School which has approximately 7-10 children.
• We still need to cover the essential cost of running the ministry in its administration and mission.

Thank you dear brothers and sisters for your support.
With the love of Christ,

Pastor Andrei Petrine

Find out more about this work. Contact Andrei Petrine, Paul Williams, or head to the ministry website here.

All the New Testament writers refer often to what we are to do to or for ‘one another’ (or ‘each other’ - the Greek is the same). This concept of ‘one anothering’ is a central feature of New Testament ecclesiology, albeit one which receives little attention in contemporary academic discussions. Some time ago I worked through these ‘one anothering’ statements and summarized them in to the following categories. (I’m posting them after a request to do so form someone who listened to my audio talks on ‘rethinking church’.)

• be at peace with one another, forgiving, agreeing, humble, accepting, forbearing, living in harmony and greeting with a kiss
• do not judge, lie or grumble
• show hospitality to one another
• confess your sins to one another
• be kind to one another, concerned, devoted, serving and doing good
• instruct and teach one another
• admonish, exhort and stir up one another
• comfort and encourage one another

Reflection questions
1. Which do you think you (as a church and as an individual) are good at?
2. Which do you think you (as a church and as an individual) are not very good at?
3. What stops you (as a church and as an individual) doing more ‘one anothering’?

This list is based on the following verses:

• Mark 9:50
• John 13:34-35*
• Romans 12:10
• Romans 12:16 (Romans 15:5)
• Romans 14:13
• Romans 15:7
• Romans 15:14
• Romans 16:16 (1 Peter 5:14)
• 1 Corinthians 12:25
• 2 Corinthians 13:11-12
• Galatians 5:13
• Ephesians 4:2
• Ephesians 4:32 (Colossians 3:13)
• Ephesians 5:21
• Colossians 3:9
• Colossians 3:16 (Ephesians 5:19)
• 1 Thessalonians 5:11; 4:18
• 1 Thessalonians 5:15
• Hebrews 3:13
• Hebrews 10:24-25
• James 5:9
• James 5:16
• 1 Peter 4:8-10
• 1 Peter 5:5

*See also John 15:12,17; Romans 13:8; 1 Thessalonians 3:12; 4:9; 2 Thessalonians 1:3; 1 Peter 1:22; 1 John 3:11,23; 4:7,11-12; 2 John 5.

Tim Chester, who was our speaker at the Radstock Conference this year, quotes some ideas great ideas by Jonathan Dobson at the Resurgence Blog for missional living.

Here are the headlines:

• Eat with non-Christians.
• Walk, don't drive.
• Be a regular.
• Hobby with non-Christians.
• Talk to your co-workers.
• Volunteer with non-profits initiatives.
• Participate in city / community initiatives.
• Serve your neighbours.

For the full blog entry at Resurgence, click here.

The election canvassers at my door the other night quickly deduced that I would not be eligible to vote in the upcoming presidential election due here on 24th May! The current incumbent (from the ruling ex-communist party) is pitched against a coalition led by the opposition Democrats.

The picture above was taken in the aftermath of parliamentary elections last summer which led to a riot here in the centre of Ulaanbaatar, amid allegations of electoral fraud. Public buildings were burned, at least five people were killed, and troops and tanks were deployed here to enforce a curfew afterwards.

Above: one of the buildings burned in last year’s election protests. Churches here are praying for a different outcome this time.

Both main blocs have accused the other of dirty tricks in the current campaign, but for now, the atmosphere is calm. Mindful of what happened last year, churches are praying for the election, and for righteousness to prevail through it.

As with many post-Soviet countries, there was initial euphoria at the arrival of democracy here, with all that it promised. But here, as elsewhere, the euphoria gave way to despondency, as corruption took hold, and the promises failed to materialise. This year, there is the added stress caused by the worldwide economic downturn, which Mongolia has not escaped. Whoever wins the election on 24th May, will face enormous challenges, and possibly not least, allegations of electoral malpractice.

Please join with the churches here in praying for a fair outcome to this election, and for good government to prevail as a result.

For more information on our developing network in Mongolia, contact Paul Williams, Radstock's Eurasia Network Developer at paul@radstock.org.

'In each place we were struck by the thirst for God’s Word... We saw people healed from illnesses, have hearing restored to them, and some come to a saving relationship with Christ. And, in each place we were struck anew at the way God uses ordinary people to build His church.' Everywhere the team went, they saw first-hand God transforming lives in the country that only recently was the setting for the killing fields of the notorious Pol Pot regime.

Such was the experience of an international team comprised of members of Stopsley Baptist Church, UK, Disciples Church, Albania, and Breakthrough Ministries Church in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Just back, they can't wait to share the story! The goal of the team was 3-fold:

• to teach church leaders, who have no chance to get any formal Bible training
• to provide an outreach to the community through the Hearing Clinic, which would bring non-believers into the church orbit and hear the Gospel
• to encourage and pray with any and everyone!

The hearing clinics (brought from Albania) were a blessing to many!

We visited two village church plants in Pailin (near the Thai border), a church planted only in July 2008, and Kampong Chnang, a small town with a church that runs a Bible Training Centre and English classes as outreaches into the community. The team also got to Svey Reng (near the Vietnamese border), where two other churches joined for a weekend of fellowship with each other. Some of those attending the meetings had ridden for three hours on motorbikes. And then it was to Phnom Penh for fellowship with the church that commissions Yin Bunna and Pastor Mao-an to visit and feed spiritually a number of churches in villages and small towns throughout the country: a church with a vision? You bet!

To find out more, and to get connected with this work of God in the once-killing fields of Cambodia, contact Audrey Jose (UK) here, or Rudina Gogaj (Albania) here.

International partnerships for mission and church planting are the heartbeat of Radstock's growing international network. For more information, contact us. We look forward to hearing from you!

Session 5
The Don introduces K. Edward Copeland who used to be known as Kenneth E. Copeland! But he is trying to make a distinction to a certain other Kenneth Copeland...

Ed Copeland:
My friend is dying. Visited. Wants to talk, because he has been pasturing for 50 years, and wants to know who would pastor his flock after he has left, and would that person hold the line of truth. Therefore the text about to read is very palpable and personal to me today. A message from a man who knows he only has a few days left.

2 Tim 3:1-9
Paul starts with a thematic funnel with the broad problems of the last days, then he describes the people, then on to a subset of them, and ends with a pointed statement that gives us hope.

Refers to the 'last days' - once Jesus invaded this planet, the fourth quarter started. We are in the musical coda. Paul is in his last days too. When you know you have little time, you zero in on the most important things.
That fact should inform our ministry. Getting practical. We have no time for recreational preaching. Fiddling about. It's 11.50. The pardon has been granted, but the inmate hasn't heard.

There will be certain kinds of people in these last difficult days. 18 or 19. Not an exhaustive list. An indicative list. But I want you to focus on the real problem. The essence of this list is wholesale shift to where the centre of all existence will be self. In that black hole of self-centredness there will be all kinds of violence and degradation. Making idols in our own image. You shall be greedy because I am greedy. Etc.

Verse 5. The tragedy of this is that it will not be mainly contained in the secular world. Somehow the people of God will be the ones who have these very characteristics. Main reason? They have chosen form over power. Problem of professing Christians who are practical atheists. Lip service but no life service. A form, but denying the power. Barren fig trees.

You can arrange the wood, but only God can send the fire. You need to recognise the power is not in your external practices. We think, like the neurotic rooster, that the sun is coming up because we are crowing. Power is not in performance. Power is not in your passion. Just because it is emotive that is not power per se.

The power is in the gospel. Rom 1:16. It is inherent in the message. People in the last days will deny the power. Avoid such men. Personally, virtually, electronically, absolutely. Stay away.

Specific subgroup of that set, v6. ‘For among them...'
Heralds were like reporters, just bringing news, the facts.
We don't have journalists today, so much as political and social commentaters. And we have pulpiteers like that. People who are bringing their opinions about the Son.
‘...among them are those who creep in and captivate weak women'. These creeps specialise in appealing to and approaching those who have a lot of time on their hands. Not that women are spiritually weaker, but here they were people who are the most vulnerable in that context at that time. Ever enrolling in spiritual classes, but never reaching repentance. Always learning but never maturing into application. Thinking exposure is the same as experience.

We are over-saturated with information, that we can make no application of. On a daily basis we hear reports of global wars, and the the economy, but are hard pressed to really understand and apply this. We hear much but do not know what it all means. In the last days we will be overfed but undernourished, because we will have cultural commentaters preaching recreationally, appealing to those who are laden with sins, led on by implulses, but we only giving enough truth to be inoculated against the truth. Paul says watch out for these people.

Refers to Egyptian conjurers, Jannes and Jambres, who opposed Moses. These men from the last days, are like these two OT people. In each chapter of 2 Tim, a pair of men are mentioned by names who rejected the faith, but put on an impersonation of true gospel ministry. Timothy, these men will oppose your ministry. Here is the good news. Verse 9. They will not make further progress. Their folly will be obvious to all. Jannes and Jambres posed a real threat, but had a real God-ordained limit.

The last days will be difficult because of the people who populate these last days. They are impostors. And there will be those in the pulpit but have no power. Don't get upset, because ultimately their folly will be seen. Luke 6v11 has the same word... there translated as enraged , such that senseless, unthinking.

Bottom line: God is still in control. If God is God and he is, if right is right, and it is, then evil is incapable of a perfect plan. It cannot anticipate God's intervention. God ain't worried about it and neither should you be. We don't live in a dualistic universe like Batman v the Joker. One day even death will have a funeral. Every lie has an expiration date, but truth will march on from everlasting to everlasting.

In their foolishness evil powers killed Jesus, thinking they had won, yet they activated the great victory. Since this universe hinges on moral foundations, so evil will not stand, that means that you and I must always remember several things:

- Stop acting like what you do does not matter. You are on the winning side. Act like that.
- Why so distressed about who is in office. God is on the throne and is not up for re-election.
- Don't worry about lies from evil men. Preach the truth.
- Be faithful in your proclamation, knowing the power of the Holy Spirit is working.

Final illustration: JS Bach died writing a piece and it was not complete. His son analyzed it. In Bach's last fugue, he put his name in the piece... ('B natural' was shown as H). His name lives on in his music. He wrote his name within the fabric of the music. Evil men will get worse, but we have a composer who wrote his name in every line. But we have to play it right. Get the notation correct. If you do, people will hear his name.

My wife has fuelled an addiction in me. I watch ‘24'. Exploits of Jack Baur. She purchased the DVD set of several seasons. I was so addicted, that I watched staying up so late. Finally in one episode, they kill Jack. How will that work? Watched on. Then I watched the credits roll, and I saw that Keifer Sutherland, is the executive producer... so then I went to sleep! Why? Because I recognised that if Keifer is the exec producer, he will make sure his character is alright.

In this final chapter of God's masterpiece called 'time', don't worry. I have good news from the exec producer. We win. He has written the script. According to the script, every knee will bow, and tongue confess. Do your best, but don't stay up at night wondering. We win.

Missed most of this talk by Philip Ryken, as was on the Radstock stand, talking, but heard the end on verses 2 Tim 2:3-13. He spoke about the three vocations mentioned of soldier, athlete and farmer. Arguably the three of the most hardworking groups there are. That Paul would choose these three three toughest of professions to illustrate the ministry is so significant.

Farmers are surely the most hardworking, rising early before dawn, and working hard until they drop, sowing the seed faithfully.

Great story about Luke Short who was converted at 103. He was sitting in the garden when he remembered some words he had heard in a sermon many years ago. It was a sermon from the Puritan William Flavel. Amazingly he had heard this sermon 85 years earlier. So the seed had been sown almost a century later, it had grown. Faithfulness in sowing the seed, like the hardworking farmer. He lived for another three years.

Session 4

Mark Driscoll comes on. Keller quips that if Piper is a dog, what does that make Driscoll? A sabre tooth tiger?

In this passage basically Paul tells Timothy not to be an emotional counter punching drama queen.

Reading 2 Tim 2:14-26

Three big ideas
You will face the opportunity to pastor three types of people

Positives - want gospel things for gospel ways because they want the gospel to win. Blessings more than burdens. Begin with love and grace and trust and mercy.
Negatives - want ungospel things for ungospel ways because they want to win. Stiff necked. Want to lead but lack character. You dread the sight of their email in the inbox.
Neutrals - Most are neutrals. What the bible calls sheep. Easily confused. Timid. Can be fearful.

Timothy has some negatives here, and Paul wants to be a positive. 2 of the ringleaders of the negatives are mentioned. CH Spurgeon says, negatives are like bees. Their sting isn't much, but when they swarm its trouble.

20 different kinds of negatives:
1. Success jealousy negatives. You are doing well, big building etc, and they are broke with real estate lust. Etc etc.
2. False witness negatives. Lie or tell half truths. Character publicly attacked.
3. Misinformed negatives. Hear something not true, and act as if it is. This can turn neutrals to negatives.
4. Personal dislike negatives. Don't like your age, dress, etc. Just you.
5. Take up offence for another person negative. Some people just repeat Junior High for 40 years.
6. Missiological negatives. Some on the right find all forms of modern contextualisation sinful (often via blogs ...!?), and others say you haven't gone far enough.
7. Single issue voter negatives. They ask your position on their issue on your first Sunday. Are you republican? I say "I vote for Jesus every time. I write it in the box every time. And one day he's coming back". Home school, public school? Eschatology? Always Jesus plus something...
8. Chain of command negatives. Don't respect it.
9. Little world negatives. There are City boundaries - like your network. State boundaries - important emphases/themes. National boundaries - broader, other evangelicals. E.g. some only fellowship with the reformed... not with scary Arminians?
10. Tradition negatives. Opposed to change.
11. Unforgiving negatives. Even when you apologise or repent, they will not forget. They keep old rocks to throw, And they are archaeologists..
12. Plank-speck negatives. Preach repentance but don't practice it. Religious people need to repent of religion.
13. Diatrophes negatives - always wanting to be first. Upfront. On the literature.
14. Distrust negatives. Their default is distrust. You are guilty until proven innocent.
15. Control negatives. Don't understand difference between power and influence. They don't understand influence is more powerful than control.
16. Critic negatives. Nitpicking at something.
17. Worrier negatives. Looking for a hill to die on. Read stories of martyrs and want to be one.
18. One handed negatives. One hand: things worth dying for. Other hand: secondaries. These negatives are either fundamentalists who fight over everything. One guy said ‘I would die for the KJV!' Question: Who's going to kill you? And there are liberal one handed people too. People who only have an open hand, or a closed hand. Not both.
19. Gossip negatives. Watch out for ‘intercessors' - the Greek word for gossip. Just for prayer...
20. Theological negatives. Just not going to agree with them. Accept it.

Back to the text. Timothy is dealing with negatives.
Verse 18 - upsetting the faith of some. The neutrals don't know what to think.

Here's the crisis. Will Timothy be a positive, a negative or a neutral?
If negative, will return evil for evil, and the church will become toxic. We can feel guilty here, knowing we have responded badly ourselves. Note, nothing good said about young men in the bible... passionate and strong, yes, but so are terrorists.
So Paul comes in, as the positive. Remember Paul was the negative once. Breathing threats and murder.

He says 20 things to young Timothy:
1. Positively emphasise what you are for and not against. V14, remind them of these things. Be careful if your pulpit is always reacting to those who react to you. They are setting your agenda.
2. Positively use your God-given authority. V14 - charge them before God. Sometimes we are just cowards. Neutrals need that kind of strength when the negatives are active. Have nothing to do with foolish arguments.
3. Positively invest your words. Don't engage. You cannot change the subject or their mind.
4. Positively do your best. V15. Do your best to present yourself as one approved.
5. erm... missed this one.
6. Positively study harder. Rightly dividing the word of truth. V15.
7. Positively avoid getting drawn into endless arguments. It spreads like gangrene. Rick Warren ays : Communication today is instant, constant, permanent, global. V16,17
8. Positively warn the sheep about the wolves. Be careful about using strong words. Like heretic. But here Paul uses the term. Not that you can't use the word, but don't be using it all the time. And be careful, only naming names when you have to. These guys have been at it for years.
9. Positively remind the church that it belongs to Christ. They are not our people. They are his people.
10. Positively practice repentance before preaching it. Don't just share grace, enjoy it. Don't just preach penal substitutionary atonement, use it. Acknowledge failings. Repentance is at the heart of it all. The first of Luther's 95 theses... at the heart of the Reformation heritage.
11. Positively use your passion to be a better servant - v20,21. Honourable vessels. You are a tool in the hands of Christ, so be a decent tool - one he can actually use.
12. Positively grow up quickly. V22 Flee youthful passions. Full tank of gas and no map. That's the problem. Young guys go two ways - angry mean intense. Others, cowardly, passive, sweet church boys. Often feel too young. Find land mines by driving over them. You outgrow youthful passions by the gift of negatives and pain of failure.
13. Positively seek righteousness faith love and peace. V22. Peace is not dull.
14. Positively grow in discernment. Foolish V23
15. Positively be kind like Jesus. V24. Jesus did not curse Judas on the cross, call out his enemies. Jesus was not weak, but he was kind.
16. Positively harvest opportunity to train your people - v24 able to teach
17. Positively suffer patiently like Jeuss v24 patientnly enduring evil. For some this is your life's work. Toxic churches. One guy is faithfully sticking with his little flock because he knows if he leaves his bishop will send in a wolf. Pursue patience.
18. Positively correct gently. V25. Lovingly.
19. Positively desire good for your enemies. V25, 26. God may perhaps grant them repentance, leading to a knowledge of the truth, coming to senses.... They were taken captive in war. When they shoot you, you will still have compassion. Do you want the negatives to repent? To escape the snares of the devil? If not, you're a negative. You become so obsessed, that you become like them, reflecting them.
20. Positively use your energy to win converts and not argument. 4v5 Don't waste all your time on the negatives, there are people who need Jesus. Do the work of an evangelist. If Satan cannot get you into error, he will keep you busy. Negatives will take your time energy, passion, joy and evangelistic zeal and fervour. You'll think more about them than lost people.

Which positives in your life do you need to honour? Men you should honour.
And how can you be a better positive?
How can you be a better neutral? Someone influences us. Who influences you? Do you choose people who feed the worst in you.
How are you a negative? Just flipped it on you. You have had many faces in your mind, and we are al negatives too. We have a lot to repent of. Here's the good news. We have Jesus.

And thank you Lord that you allow hypocrites to preach, because I've enjoyed it.

John Piper is now being introduced by Don Carson. Observing the contrast between them as one who started as a pastor who ended up teaching in Seminary (Don) and another who went from Seminary teaching to pastors (John).

I am on a limited battery life, because I have 31 mins left, and I bet Pipes won't be 30 mins. So this will be briefer!

Interesting observations from the Donster on different ways of preaching. Tim K gets the main idea of the text right, and then applies. On the other hand, John P is like a dog, who takes a text and worries it like a bone. Gets things out Carson has never seen in 40 years. Each preacher has his own style - the diversity of gifts.

John Piper:

Reading 2 Timothy 1:1-12

Main point of paragraph - ‘Timothy, keep feeding the white hot flame of God's gift in you, namely: unashamed courage to speak openly Christ and suffering for the gospel.'

4 aspects of this passage:

1. Where does that point come from?

2. Is it the point of just this paragraph or the whole book

3. How do we feed the white hot flame in us?

4. Lets take how he did it and do it.

1. Where does this point come from?

Preach so people can see it. Don't generalise. Show the text.

Verse 6. Fan the flame. Make it hot hot hot... white hot. Not hot but HOT!

So keep on feeding it. Fan it. Blow oxygen on it. Keep on.

Fanning what? The gift in you. The ongoing presence of that fire, depends on Tim's obedience to verse 6. Verse 7,8 - courage to speak openly. When all your feeding is done and your flame burns brightly, and you are suffering well - you will know where it came from - God! God did this in you. ‘...by the power of God' That suffering sustaining flame is God's work. It is coming from outside you.

How does Timothy get the gift of this power? Through the laying on of my hands... Imagining... maybe Timothy's kneeling. They are gathered round him and praying that God would come. "Lord gift this man beyond anything he has known in his life so far - we know his weaknesses..." And then God speaks to Paul. And Paul then says something like "In answer to our prayers, God is going to give you a flaming hot courage for Christ beyond anything you have ever known" and I think at that point Timothy weeps. Reason: v4 ‘as I remember your tears'. Surely more likely than just something about them saying goodbye one time, re the commentaries!

I want this to happen for you... Piper says I am old enough to be your father, and want this for you real bad...

2. Is it the point of the whole paragraph or the whole book?

14 re-statements of this point through the book. It is the point of the whole book!

3. How do we feed the white hot flame?

How do you get the power? Answer, linking 1:2 and 2:1.

2:1... By the grace that is in Christ Jesus.

1:2 - Grace mercy and peace from God the Father. So easy to breeze over these. Every epistle of Paul begins with some form of grace TO you. All 13 end with some form of grace be WITH you. Why?

As they read his apostolic word, grace is coming to them. And when they get to the end, the church is ready to dismiss, discuss etc... Paul saying "as you finish reading this, the grace that has been coming through, will go with you... hold to it by faith"

So the Word mediates grace. As people hear the word they are receiving grace.

Ref Acts 20 farewell - the word of his grace!

Pastors this is what your people need.

4. Do it

What did Paul say in addition to make it happen?

3 things.

A. He said that Timothy's faith as authentic and he's speaking as a father loving his son.

V3-5. Paraphrase: Timothy I believe with all my heart that your faith is real eveen though it came from your gran and mom and not your ad. I know your dad was not there for you in these matters.

It's from your mom, yes but your faith is still authentic. You're a moma's boy - my - beloved - son. You didn't have a dad there. I am him.

B. (...battery died... so missed a bit here...)

...Timothy, when you speak as a preacher or teacher, you are going to suffer. Look at me, my life has not been easy, but I AM NOT ASHAMED. Even in prison.

Reason we don't need to be ashamed? He is able - powerful - to guard what has been deposited. So if fire is needed, he'll give it.

Look at me, your dad, sitting in jail. Unashamed. Learn from me.

C. ...and this is the most important point, though not the main point...

...He will put a support under your courage.

V9,10

This grace you need, was not given you when you converted, but before the world began.

God set his face to strengthen you and make you courageous before time... before anything else was.

This is the sort of thing weak people need. Why?

I want you to know that your calling is not based on anything you do, feel, think, act.

The contrast here is not between works and faith.

It is between works and God's purpose and grace.

Timothy, I want to strip you of every possible reliance for salvation, calling, boldness, speaking - that those things are dependent on you in any sense at all.

Good place to stand as a mama's boy.

From eternity, God planned to do you good forever.

Keep feeding the white hot flame of God's gift in you, namely: unashamed courage to speak openly Christ and suffering for the gospel.'

Session 1 is on at the moment. Don Carson is currently introducing Tim Keller. He has just declared ‘The Reason for God' as the most significant apologetics book since CS Lewis's ‘Mere Christianity'.

Tim Keller:
Most of the expositions are going to be on 2 Timothy, but the first and last sessions are going to be on Gospel Ministry. Something that is assumed in 2 Timothy, but not explicit. Acts 19:23-41. An incident depicted without an explanation.

Paul challenges the idols of this place. We will see how to discern, expose and destroy idols.

1. DISCERNING IDOLS
Paul preached the gospel in such a way that it changed their lives. And it affected the culture.
In the passages there is no preaching but there is a synopsis. He says ‘Man made gods are no gods at all'. He went to the marketplace... we just that means shopping. We need to realise that that was where the culture was formed. Pre-printing, this was where development of ideas happened. Things were debated. The arts were here, the law courts etc. Like going to Hollywood, Harvard and the boardroom of the New York Times. Over the marketplace were always the shrines, temples and images of the gods. All cultures look to something to save it and put their hope in something. If something beautiful becomes more than just that, it becomes a god - Aphrodite. Education is a good thing, but make it a god.... you get Athena. Making money is good, but make a god out of it... you get Artemis.

New York: it's "How much to you make?"
Boston: it's "Who do you know?"
Philadelphia: it's "Who's your family?"
And each of these sees the idol of the other. E.g. an artist who makes a lot of money out of it has sold out... etc.

2. EXPOSING IDOLS
3 kinds of idols: personal, religious, cultural

A. Personal idols:
1. Money (artemis goddess of business - fertility, moon, harvest). She was worshiped in ways including through child-sacrifice. I live in NY city, where there is child sacrifice. The goddess of business demands you have sacrifice your family. The jobs are set up that way. You will not be a good father or mother. You can't be. How you demythologise money so that it is just money? With the gospel.
2. Romance. If you love anyone, it is powerful. You look to this person and they make you worthy, valuable... "I'm noone unless this person loves me".
3. Children. Many parents think, ‘if my children are happy, love me, grow up to be successful, then I am happy...' that is idolatry.

Unless you get to the idols, your preaching will be superficial. Luther: Re 10 commandments... it's not an accident that the idolatry commandment is first. You never break 2-10 without breaking number 1.

B. Religious idols:
These people think they are very devoted to God. Three things that busy religious people trust in: truth, gifts and morality.

TRUTH: I am ok because of the rightness of my belief, rather than because of Jesus. Proverbs have several cats of fools: scoffer. 17 times.
2 marks:
a. Dogmatic and closed minded, never admits he is wrong.
b. Always is disrespectful to opponents.
Sarcasm and bluntness is sometimes necessary. But when always like that, you are a fool. Because you are basically a doctrinal Pharisee. You are afraid of losing rank. The internet breeds scoffers. Traffic increases on your blog if you are a scoffer. You can make an idol out of truth.

GIFTS: Jonathan Edwards: critique of mistaking gifts for fruit. Leadership, preaching etc. When you are a great communicator etc, and you re successful, you believe in justification by ministry. ‘Look at what is happening through me'. The Reformed world often makes an idol out of being a great preacher.

MORALITY:
See book ‘The Prodigal'.

C. Cultural idols
Enlightenment - was idol of human reason (a good thing) as an ultimate thing. Cultural elites think reason will rid of all the bad things. The results are devastating.
E.g.
In 1920, HG Wells praised belief in human progress. We will grow from strength to strength.
In 1933, he was appalled by the lack of progress. Need rational intellectuals to seize control and run everything.
In 1945, at the end of tether. ‘Homosapians (means the rational) as he likes to call himself is spent. This is the end.' The fact of original sin forced itself on him, and he reached the end of his tether.

3. DESTROYING IDOLS
How?
It's both objective and subjective.

OBJECTIVELY:
Two Jewish philosophers write on OT idolatry passages and conclude it's a conundrum...
Idolatry is a capital offence... God tells the wife she must die. Yet he wants reconciliation. Profound contradiction: it deserves death, yet the lover wants her back. But how can God both punish and reconcile the adulterous wife? Their conclusion? A limitation of the metaphor. They are wrong! Because Jesus Christ our true bridegroom took our punishment, so being just and reconciling.

SUBJECTIVELY:
What will help me pull my heart off idols? I need to see it, know it. When reality breaks through it frees me in my life. Your career can't die for your sins. Your wife can't die for your sins. I need to worship, pray and think the gospel deep into my heart, and this pulls my heart up to him. Re: marriage... one day one will see the other in a coffin. If your saviour is in the coffin, what will help you?

Do you know how to take the gospel to the idols? Learn how to do that, and turn the world upside down.

Church planter Tim Chester (http://timchester.wordpress.com) with The Crowded House network reminds us that being about our Father’s work means all of our work is for the building up of his kingdom:

John Laing died in 1978. Laing was a massive construction firm (which has now been broken up into smaller companies). The family business started in the nineteenth century, but it was Laing he oversaw its growth into a national company. By 1970 the company was 1,600 times bigger than it was seventy years before.....Read more at http://timchester.wordpress.com/2009/04/10/business-for-the-kingdom-john-laing/.

Somewhere amidst the snowy scene pictured above, lie the remains of Kharakorum (Харахорийн in Mongol). Almost nothing remains of the capital of Chinggis Khan’s Great Mongolian Empire. It almost seems impossible that the largest contiguous empire the world has ever seen could have been ruled from here. Yet in the early 13th century, this was how it was.

Naraa (one of my co-workers) and I were passing through Kharakorum yesterday, on our way from Tsetserleg in Mongolia’s Archangai Province, to Ulaanbaatar. We stopped to pray here. For me, it seemed appropriate to stand in the approximate centre of Chinggis’ empire, despite the blizzard, and to pray in a new vision of conquest. For among the emerging churches of today’s Mongolia, there is no less a vision than to conquer with the love of Christ all the places that were conquered by Chinggis Khan and his sons.

You have to look at a map of the Great Mongolian Empire at its greatest extent to see what a gigantic vision this is. Most of the lands covered are loveless places, where the Gospel of Jesus Christ is often known by its association with one ethnic group or another, or with the geo-politics of foreign powers.

Let’s ask the Lord of the Harvest to strengthen and embolden these young churches as they seek to step into a vision that is far greater than they are, in the hands of the One who is greater than all...

To find out more about this work, contact Paul Williams, Radstock's Eurasia Network Developer, at paul@radstock.org

The first of these is what I do the cooking and hospitality with, and the second does the laundry! Welcome to my new home in Mongolia, a Russian-built flat in central Ulaanbaatar. It’s somewhere near the middle of the picture below.

Ulaanbaatar is in some ways typical of many post-Soviet cities, with its fairly equal combination of glitter and litter! That said, it is the only city of size in a country three times the size of France, yet boasting a national population just a third that of London. Mongolia has taken its hit from the world economic crisis, with the government here bailing out a couple of banks, rising unemployment (including thousands of returnees who have lost jobs in the United States), and inflation nudging 36%.

A daily wrestle of my first week here was managing the huge amounts of currency needed for every transaction. Such as lashing out 40,000 Tougrug for a table lamp! On another day it was 25,000 for a toaster. Given the exchange rate of around 2,000 Tougrug to the UK Pound, you really can be a millionaire out here and have almost nothing to your name! In fact, three weeks after arrival, I have now passed the magic million Tougrugs expenditure!

I have learned a number of things in years of travel among the people-groups of northern Eurasia. One of these is standing me in good stead right now: Always remember to switch off the mindset that says when and how things should happen. The alternative is permanent frustration. As a rule, things ‘come to pass’ here, but not usually in the time desired or most convenient.

Another ‘first week’ adjustment: ‘What’s recycling?’ a co-worker asked me the other day. For someone like me, used to the UK drill of segregating items of waste for different categories of recycling or rubbish, this is quite novel: here, whether it is paper, cardboard, plastic, tins or food waste, it is all bagged up and (on my estate), thrown onto the street and scavenged before collection.

A couple of weeks ago, I met one of the leaders of the ‘Ger Church Movement,’ a movement with a similar modus operandi to the young churches of the Gobi, which have seen strong growth in recent years. On network development stuff, I have just established contact with a Ukrainian-led church in the mountains north of here, with a ministry among others, to vulnerable children. I hope to bring more news of this church, and possibilities for connecting with its work, before too long.

This is early days in this venture, with most of the time spent praying, walking, meeting new folks, getting to know older ones better, and kitting out my home and office for the longer haul... More soon!

To find out more, and to connect with this new work that Paul Williams, Radstock's Eurasia Network Developer is engaged in, contact him at paul@radstock.org

'More farewells than Frank Sinatra...' as it was put to me by my friend and boss, Dave Welch. Well, there certainly were a few farewells, and a number of these have come from emerging mission partnerships at different stages of development. The picture above comes from my final commissioning service at St Mary's Old Harlow, where I have been privileged to serve for the last six years.

Then there is the London Russian Fellowship, which has adopted me as their first mission partner, as part of the vital work of getting mission into their DNA as they get going. IMPACT, a youth group based at the Church of the Good Shepherd, Romford, UK, have joined as part of a strategy of enabling a church-based youth group to ‘own' a mission partnership distinctly from the rest of the church. They have already established a connection with a youth cafe outreach in Udmurtia, central Russia, as they seek to embrace a Gospel context that is outside their local scene in Romford.

So what leads me to write of a Gethsemane moment? What leads me to write of loss, when there is such a groundswell of prayerful support and partnership at both ends of the connection? I think of Jesus in Gethsemane, in that time of desolation, away from his friends (who in any case had fallen asleep): Jesus whose very humanity raged against what was about to befall him; Jesus whose divinity riled against the cleavage that would come between him and his Father as he took the full weight of our sinfulness on the Cross.

Of course, I can't for a moment imagine what the second of these agonies of the soul must have been like: divinity has only ever been borne by one Man. But the first of these is easier for me to imagine, as I prepare to cast off everything (well, almost everything), I have known and to parachute into a completely different culture. As I let go of the trappings of existence in my home culture, including a minister's stipend and pension, and prepare for at least geographical separation from many friends I hold dear, the deeper the experience of loss, and the greater the realisation of dependence on God as never before.

Yet here in Jesus' agony, we see not just God's leading, but the intentional orientation of the will: "Yet not what I will, but what you will." These words are the ultimate expression of meek humanity: meek, not in the culturally-imagined sense of weak, but meek in the Biblical sense of a humanity with all its powers harnessed to the will of the Father. For me, the exploration of this is no mere academic excerise, something that the mind can play with at will. Rather it is something in which I am intentionally engaged, as I continue in this transitional process.

When Jesus sent his first disciples on mission in his Name for the first time, he gave them a paradigm that would serve as well for their discipleship as for the mission they were being sent on. Luke 9:3: "Take nothing for your journey, neither a staff, nor a bag, nor bread, nor money, and do not even have two tunics apiece." ..... The radical simplicity and godly dependence envisaged here are so easy to lose sight of when we are surrounded by material comforts of every kind. I used to think I travelled light in this world until I began the process of shedding my ‘stuff.' Yet it is just this kind of simplicity and dependence that proclaims judgment on a way of life characterised by acquisition and debt on the one hand; and on the other witnesses so powerfully to a better way of being and doing, that points to the Place where true treasures are laid up for the children of God.

My grasp of this eternal reality is inversely connected to my ‘need' to hold on to things I can't take with me, either to Mongolia, or into eternity (Matthew 6:21). This is the paradigm shift I am engaged with right now. What it has done is all too obvious to me, as I see my surroundings stripped almost bare; where it will lead me, only the Lord knows - and how exciting that is!

Check out the interviews with Tim Chester and other international church planters at Radstock's recent international conference:

www.youtube.com/user/RadstockTV

My notes from the final message at the Rastock annual conference. Excellent stuff. Audio to follow.

-- Persecution is a common ingredient in church planting movements.

-- The lesson for us is not that we should pursue persecution but that we should live cruciform lives.

-- We take an incremental approach to discipleship. We take new converts and slowly warm them up to the sacrifices of the Christian life (evangelism, church involvement, missions, work with the poor).

-- But this doesn't work in a persecution context, where your first day as a Christian could bring about your martyrdom.

-- If to decide for Christ is to decide to die, then all of the other sacrifices of the Christian life are included. But that's exactly what Jesus calls us to do when he tells us to pick up our cross.

-- This shapes the way that we do mission.

-- A framework for how the cross and resurrection shape Christian life and mission: the practice of the cross and the pattern of the cross.

-- The practice of the cross.

-- We are called to be like Christ.

-- How so? We're not Jewish itinerant preachers. We're not saviors of the world.

-- But when the Bible talks about our similarity to Jesus, it talks about us taking up the cross like he did.

-- 5 ways we practice the cross

-- Sacrifice

-- Submissions

-- Self-denial

-- Service

-- Not "WWJD" but "WITWOTCITS" (What is the way of the cross in this situation?). The cross informs the way we live.

-- Selflessness -- Philippians 2

-- Perseverance in suffering -- I Peter 4

-- Generosity -- II Cor 8, I John 3

-- Patience with other believers -- Romans 1

-- Humble leadership -- Mark 10

-- In a sense, every small act of service is a reparation for martyrdom in that it's a dying to self. Many of us would die for Christ but won't clean up after other Christians joyfully.

-- Application: what would it mean for you to follow the way of the cross in the next 5 hours? Next 5 days? Next 5 months?

-- The way of the cross is a hard ask... death to self in small things and big things. But the kingdom of God is like a treasure in the field.

-- If we have Christ, we have more than enough.

-- We reveal the value we put on Christ by what we are willing to risk or give up for him.

-- The pattern of the cross: suffering followed by glory.

-- Mark 10:35-40. The way to glory is the way to the cross.

-- Mark 10:46-52. Healing of blind Bartimaeus. Jesus asks the same question of Bartimaeus that he asks of James and John in verse 36: what do you want me to do for you?

-- John and James don't see, they need spiritual eyes to see that the way to follow Jesus is to suffer for him. The story ends with Bartimaues following Jesus along the way (to Jerusalem and the cross).

-- I Peter 5:1-11 -- The true grace of God is that after you suffer a while, he will restore you and make you steadfast.

-- I Peter 4:12 -- This was the pattern for Christ, it is the pattern for our ultimate joy.

-- If we are suffering, it is evidence that we are united to the Savior who suffered.

-- If we have union with him in his suffering, we will also have union in his glory.

The power of the resurrection in our lives. That power comes to us to help us suffer and endure with patience and service.

-- Philippians 3:10

-- II Corinthians 13:4

-- Colossians 1:10-11

-- II Timothy 1:7-8

-- Christians have power so that we can be like Christ in his death. God doesn't use superstars, he uses ordianry and fragile and weak people like you and me.

If you set out to follow the way of the cross, it will crush you. You need the power of the cross (Luke 10:20).

Here are my noted from the second talk by Tim Chester from the Radstock annual conference.

Examining church planting movements around the world, we see three things:

-- The model of mission is supernatural.

-- The model of church is reproducible

-- The model of discipleship is cruciform (this is the topic for the last talk of the conference).

First, the model of mission is supernatural.

-- A passion for prayer
-- We cannot start a movement of God, but we are wholly dependent on him.

-- When faced with a crisis, our first response is usually "What can we do?" rather than "Let's pray."

-- Prayer is doing mission and pastoral care. It's not like we do mission and then sometimes pray about it. Prayer is the front line.

-- It's not as if prayer is a missions tool we use to manipulate God. The point of prayer is God. Prayer is fruit of an understanding of who God is.

-- Spiritual warfare

-- Where is Satan at work? Where are the barriers to belief in your community? We must pray against these things.

-- An everyday reliance on God.

-- We become good at creating risk-free mission.

-- When was the last time you felt dependent on God?

-- We minister is a safe way because we don't trust God.

Second, the model of mission is reproducible.

-- Reproducible churches.

-- Do Christians sit in your church thinking "I could do this."?

-- Lower the bar on how church is done (production values and performance) and raise the bar on what it means to be a disciple.

-- Reproducible missionaries

-- The motto of the Chinese church: Everyone is a church planter.

-- New converts shouldn't sit in the pew for 10 years before they are asked to do mission.

-- This creates a church suitable for the culture because we allow converts to adapt to our church cultures.

-- Reproducible learning

-- Neither the early church or the Chinese church had easy access to complete Bibles.

-- It's possible to make church/Bible study into a reading comprehension exercise. But one needn't be highly educated in order to be a leader.

-- We need more aural based ways of teaching people. Learning in Biblical times was often via story and conversation. Jesus' discipleship program was along the way.

-- We shouldn't only value people whose learning is expressed in thirty minute sermons.

-- Teach the Bible by telling the story of the Bible.

There was a Q&A time at the conclusion where Tim clarified some of his comments about preaching. He said that storytelling isn't the only way to teach (e.g., it's hard to tell the story of II Thessalonians), but 70% of Scripture is a story. "Let's let the genre of Scripture shape the way we teach it."

Why mission and what is Radstock?  Below are notes from the talk given by Radstock's Executive Director Brian Jose at this year's conference.

Playing Our Part - Churches Connected for Global Mission
Brian Jose, Radstock Executive Director

Our mandate as God's people is to bring in God's dominion or his kind rule to the world. Mission is what God is about. Instead of being a slice of your church life it should be the core. Everything your church does - you should be asking "how is this missional?"

God's called us together as a people to proclaim the excellencies of Him. The church is called to proclaim and display the grace of God. A sent church, a sent people, we're a missionary people because we reflect God's character. Church and mission were together at the beginning.

In Peter 2:9 we see: Church is sent; Sending is not secondary to being; Church builds itself up for the sake of mission; God is missionary God, focus of salvation is a community of people, not individuals; Focus on mission is community of people, not individuals (Israel); God's people are missionary people; Church and mission belong together from the beginning; Church without mission or mission without church are contradictions

Mission needs to be the fabric of our churches. Not autonomous mission-less churches nor autonomous church-less missionary societies.

What is Radstock?
Our Vision:
A growing number of mission driven churches equipped and planted.

What We Value:
Gospel Priority, Church Community, Humble Orthodoxy, Intentional Partnership, Multiplicaional Growth

What We Do.
Coach Churches, Develop Partnerships, Create Opportunities, Provide Expertise

What We Are:
Churches Connected for Global Mission.

Developing a Mission-centered Church
1. God has a vision for your church - not mission by proxy -- whole church commitment
2. Mission vision must "ooze" from the leaders - constantly preach it
3. Your people have vision. Tap into it and release it.
4. A formula for whole church commitment: Exposure + Relationship + Involvement = Commitment

3 models of Partnership
Mission by Proxy - includes Prayer and Finance
Motivated - includes Prayer, Finance, Short-term trips
Mobilized - includes Prayer, Finance, Short-term trips, Long-term plan

Greetings from the UK, where I am attending Radstock's annual International Conference.  Our speaker this year is Tim Chester, church planter with The Crowded House Edge Network and co-author of Total Church.

Here are my notes from Tim Chester's first talk entitled "Organic Mission", audio hopefully to follouw.

Main point: God is the great missions strategist.
-- Mission can't be planned beyond the next step because people are unpredictable and God is sovereign.
-- Acts 1:8, Acts 8:1-4, I Corinthians 16:5-8
-- Metaphors for growth in the Bible are organic (seeds, yeast, harvest, prune). Growth is like a sneeze.

1. We should have a humble confidence in God's sovereignty.

-- I can trust God to use my small contribution as part of his big mission plan.
-- It is pride to think that we can organize church growth because Christ grows the church.

2. We should have a clear vision for mission.

-- God's sovereignty is no excuse for bad missions strategy.
-- Paul has a plan: wherever God takes him, he will preach Christ and plant churches.

3. Put #1 and #2 together, and you have a liberating culture in the church.

-- Because you are not confined by a plan, you are free to respond to Providential opportunities. And because you have a clear vision, they know how to respond.
-- We need a culture in our churches where you don't need permission to do mission.

For leaders, this means:
-- Leadership is about creating an ethos of mission.
-- Leadership is about organising the chaos that results (Acts 11:19-26) and catching up with what God is doing.

Questions for reflection:
-- What is the functional DNA of the church?
-- Is your vision clear? Would everyone in your team describe it the same way?
-- Is your church flexible enough to respond to new opportunities?

The Radstock Conference is underway in Northampton, UK with delegaes from places such as Albania, Cuba, India, Ireland, Ukraine, UK, USA and Zambia.  We will be posting notes from each plenary session and audio files will follow shortly.  If you were not able to join us this year, we invite you to follow along at home.

But also behind the headlines is the work of local churches - beacons of hope in a dark world. Not least of these is the Cafe Church in the Urals. In the midst of recession, in a very poor area even by Russian standards, where a major local factory has closed with the loss of all jobs, the church is growing. Construction work continues on the cafe area itself, and people are coming in. Over Christmas they had an outreach which was attended by 36 children and 10 parents, out of which has arisen a Sunday group for unchurched children from the district: a major breakthrough after years of prayer. The pictures tell their own story. Here we have another reminder that in troubled times, our role as church is not to retreat to our comfort zones, but to reach upwards and outwards, so that in the midst of deepening distress, the world becomes littered with beacons of hope.

If you would like to know more about the work of the cafe church, please contact Paul Williams, Radstock's Eurasia Network Developer at paul@radsdtock.org.

We arrived in Ukraine last night and went straight from the airport to an evening session with some people trying to come off drugs. These people have come through some rehab and have now signed up to a programme where they report to this centre from 3pm until 9pm every day. They talk about why they are taking drugs, how they must change, they watch videos, and once a week my friend Max will go along and speak with them about the Christian Faith. Last night I spoke to them about the search for satisfaction, from the book of Ecclesiastes, and eventually (since I discovered they wanted an hour rather than 30 mins) led on to talking about the Samaritan woman at the well, from John 4, who found the living water that satisfies eternally. When I finished they started asking questions and we kept going until they had to leave. They were hungry. Pray for them.

Today we met up with Vova, a church planter from another part of Kyiv, and visited a drug rehab centre which is residential. There we met seven men who are in the throws of giving up their drugs. They spend their time growing veg in the land around the house, rebuilding the place they live in (its quite rough - they have just finished an indoor shower!) and working helping the people in the local village. Most of the men have trusted Christ over a period of months, some quite some time ago, others a few weeks ago. They were so refreshing to listen to. They sang and prayed and discussed the Word with us. I sought to encourage them from Colossians 2 6,7, to keep on going in the faith they have found. There is great potential for more of this kind of thing. And for new church plants in a number of places. In the village where the centre is situated, 75 km outside Kyiv, is so impressed by what the church is doing there that they are asking them to start a church for them. How can you turn that down?

This evening we are at the home of Alex and Lena and hearing about their vision for family ministries. More tea on the way. Gotta go.

The fellowship is one of a handful of gatherings working among the estimated 1 million people (yes, you've read it right!) of Russian-speaking heritage, living in London.
The harvest field is absolutely enormous.

Also envisaged are satellite communities meeting in different parts of London, along with educational, English language and other support facilities for a disparate group of people at the margins of UK culture.

London Russian Fellowship

Paul Williams, Radstock's Eurasia Network Developer, speaking at the inaugural meeting with Natalya Petrina (translating)

Hear Andrei and members of his team share the vision for this work at the Radstock Ministries International Conference 2009. To find out more and to book a place, click here.

WELL, that was quite a trip!

Team Christmas Party, Ulaanbaatar

Monday at Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow, I presented my request for a free meal at the airline Transit Desk. An hour or so later, I was enjoying one of the finest Chicken Kievs I think I've ever tasted! Was it just the cuisine, or was it because the airline was paying for it (to which I had also added bread for chip butties and a cappucino) that made it taste so good? The midday onward flight from Moscow to London had been cancelled. As it happened, I wouldn't have caught it anyway, because our early morning flight from Mongolia was so late coming in. A late take-off from Ulaanbaatar was followed by an unplanned, and somewhat difficult, landing in Irkutsk, in our ageing Tupolev. Our descent was a somewhat unnerving experience, of which the Mongolian lady sitting next to me, and to whom I was attempting to give an English lesson, seemed blissfully unaware! In counselling terms, you could say that I was not 'fully present in the moment:' sitting next to the window, our rapid descent was all too obvious to me. There on the runway we were met by a fire engine and a fuel tanker! The logic for that combination was lost on me, until I was told that when a plane needs an unplanned drink, a fire engine has to be in attendance in case something goes wrong. And that's without mentioning the cancellation of my outward flights a week earlier.

Micro-Enterprise

It would not be truthful to present a uniformly glowing picture of what has happened as a result of the micro-enterprise training in the Gobi in May this year. That's partly because not all the information is available, with many of the churches represented not even having phones. Also, some church planters are not yet confident in the skills they obtained to strike out in this way. This is not surprising, especially if you're used to subistence living, and your cultural heritage has been shaped by decades of Communism. Also, in the current economic climate, Mongolia's banks have been less than willing to lend start-up finance. Among the businesses that have started, there is a preponderance of ones making and selling crafts. I pointed out that this could leave them more exposed to the world economic downturn next year. But any church community-based business enables mission to become less dependent on outside help and therefore more self-sustaining. And we can rejoice that some businesses have started, including one making the all-important stoves for heating, cooking and cleaning in the Gobi gers, as well as the craft businesses. I also understand one church in the mountains close to the Chinese border has started a market garden, to help diversify a local diet which is heavily meat-dependent. Taken altogether, the interim results seem a bit like a 'Parable of the Sower' situation.

There is a growing interest in MED among churches in Mongolia, including in Ulaanbaatar, the capital. Look out for further developments in this story, or contact Paul Williams, Radstock's Eurasia Network Developer for more information: paul@radstock.org

The CiCA team and some extras took their first journey into rural Zambia. 13 women and the 3 men travelled through Congo to the other side of Zambia, and Erica Lugg was one of the team.  Read about their adventure and how God used it to bring mercy to those in need here.

Posted by Paul Williams. Our 'Gifts of Hope' Christmas catalogue has just been updated with a selection of items urgently needed by Mongolian church planters and their families. The most urgent need is for Mongolian Bibles. Our church planters are now down to 300 Bibles out of a projected requirement of 3000 for 2009. Food and fuel are also urgently needed. Visit our Gifts of Hope page and scroll toward the bottom to see how you can make a difference for churches in Mongolia this Christmas.

Chan Thon (that's him on the left of the photo) is a former gangster our church team met in Posat,Cambodia in May. His life had been transformed by Jesus, and after meeting our team during our all-day teaching, he asked if we could lead him through a study on baptism that evening.  

"This was a very beautiful message", he said, after we were finished. "I had never understood the meaning of baptism before."

The next day, the church walked down the dusty road to the local river, and I had the privilege of baptising him. 

The day after that, Chan Thon left us, along with his pregnant wife, for his home province of Battambang, off to start a church. He had been persecuted there -- locked in bird cages for hours in the hot sun by local soldiers -- Battambang was always a Khmer Rouge hotbed.  But he knew he had to go.   As the photo shows, already Chan Thon is baptising others as the church grows despite persecution and poverty in Cambodia.  He'd never be accepted by a Western agency -- not enough training, not a Christian long enough. But Radstock partner Bunna Yin with Breakthrough Ministries Cambodia is mentoring this young church planter as he learns on the job.  Is this a model for you to adopt in your church, perhaps?

Back in June we reported on the provision of gers (Mongol desert tent homes) to resource the work of church planting in the Gobi Desert in Mongolia. For the 23 Radstock network churches of the Gobi, gers serve as accommodation for church planters and meeting places for their churches. Six of the seven gers requested were in position, and funds for the last were on their way. Now the churches there have taken delivery of the last one (pictured).

Simple and portable, gers are ideal for the church planting movement there, and the churches once again express their grateful thanks for the generosity of donors like you. This generosity helps to make church happen in a country where average income is less than two dollars a day, and where, like elsewhere in the world, those incomes have been hit hard by the rising cost of food imports. From the bottom of their hearts, thank you!

What a wonderful picture of the body at work.  Imagine an immigrant Chinese congregation in the US sending out a caucasian guy to work with ethnic Albanians reaching Muslims in the Balkans. You couldn't have written a more comprehensive picture of God's plan for his church if you tried, at least I couldn't have.

This weekend Radstock welcomed our newest church, Stillwater Chinese Baptist Church (scbchome.org) into the network as they are preparing to send one of their brothers overseas. As the US Director I had the privilege of participating in the commissioning of Matt Barton from Stillwater, Oklahoma, USA. Matt is being sent as an extension of the body there in Stillwater. He has been an active participant in their gospel work among Chinese university students for several years now and has made several trips to Kosova since 2005. He will be heading off to Kosova on the 15th of October to work with Rruga e Paqes church, as they strive to reach their neighbors including, some of the 5000 Chinese living in Kosova.  In addition, Matt will be continuing Radstock's Business as Mission vision in Peje. Pray for him and pray for SCHC as losing Matt will be a great spiritual sacrifice for them.

Radstock is now able to accept on-line credit card donations and in the U.S., automatic reoccuring gifts.  In addition, giving by electronic check will soon be available.  Go to Donate Now page to sign up today!

Capitol Hill Baptist Church
525 A Street, N.E., Washington, D.C.
Entrance to the parking lot is on 5th Street
between East Capitol and A Streets, NE

Hear from:

A $20 registration fee which includes coffee, lunch and light refreshments is payable at the door.

You are encouraged to extend this invitation to others within your church and other church leaders. Please RSVP to karacallaghan@radstock.org or 202.468.4571.

"As I seek to prepare to go to Kosova I am continually humbled by the outpouring of love and support from my Chinese brothers and sisters. This is my third week of praying with them for between 1 and 2 hours a week before they send me overseas. Their love and closeness without a building, a pastor, or even a board they have shown me more love and compassion as a church and as individuals than anyone I have ever been around before. We had a 2 hour breakfast so they could better understantd the concept of Radstock because it is so foreign and they are genuinely excited about the idea of partnering in ministry with a Kosovar Church and in reaching out to their fellow countrymen in another country."

Church-based businesses begin in the Gobi Desert . Arising from Radstock's connections, a small team set out in May from St Mary's Old Harlow , UK to teach business start-up skills to church planters and their associates in Mongolia. Micro-Enterprise Development is one foundation of long-term local sustainability of mission in many communities served by churches in the Radstock network. Our Gobi Desert connections are no exception. Church growth here has been rapid (4-23 churches over the last 3 years), but many of the church planters are coming to the end of their initial support funding. Developing business ventures is key to building on this progress, not least by preventing the 'drain' of leaders from the Gobi churches to more prosperous areas of Mongolia and beyond. Through authentically Christian businesses, churches can also bless their wider communities and witness to the transforming power of the gospel in a business culture, where, if money is made, it is often made badly.

Following the seminars, our 'students' are now putting their skills to practice, and new business ventures are starting up, including:

a business making chimneyed stoves. These are essential for the people of the Gobi, who depend on them for heating (temperatures can fall to -40C in winter), cooking and washing. Situated at the centre of the ger (tent home), they are a focal point for family, community and church life. Because much of the population of the Gobi is nomadic, these stoves, like their gers, have to be portable.

a business making Mongolian pickle!

and businesses making traditional hand crafts and clothes. 

We also know of plans by one church to set up a market garden to help alleviate the rising costs of food imports, and diversify the mainly meat-based diet of the local population. Another planned to set up a bakery. Still another church, operating in an area worked by Western mining interests, planned a start a pizza delivery business! We have no news as yet as to how these ventures are going, but hope to be able to report soon.

You can read about the training itself in the current issue of Radstock's quarterly newswire, Rapport.

We expect to hear more from our network partners in the Gobi in the coming weeks and months. To find out more and connect with what God is doing in this part of our network, contact Paul Williams, Radstock's Eurasian Network Developer at paul@radstock.org.

One of the Radstock principles that we emphasise is that partnership in mission is best done when local communities of believers are cooperating together. In the context of a short-term mission team, it means that ministry is not in isolation, but is an integral part of the longer-term work in that locality. Long after a team has gone, the impact of what they have done goes on and relationships continue to be built, as those who live there all year round, live as salt and light in that community.

An important part of this, unsurprisingly, is that the church of the receiving culture be listened to when plans are being made. This should be obvious but sadly, it is not always. It is easy for teams of people from (let's be honest) usually British and American churches, to pile in and say ‘this is what we are going to do - this is what is needed here - this is how it should be done'. Even if it is not said in quite that way, it's implied.

In Kosova, this past week, we have tried really hard to take our cues from the local believers in the city of Peja, and to serve their wider work. A multi-church team from Derby, Harpenden and Birmingham in the UK, and Hungary, Romania and Kosova partnered together in the gospel. We did not do it perfectly by any means, but we did consciously seek to consult and connect and contribute to the vision and work of the local church community.

We plugged in to the ministry of Charis Cottage, working among some of the poorest families in the area, and tried to build relationships with these families that have been connected with the church for so long now. It was good have a BBQ on some rough ground near where some of the families live. We wanted to go where they were rather than asking them to come to one of the church-y buildings which would have been off-putting and a hassle to get to. It was great to sit around in the blazing sun, eating beef burgers, doing face-painting, chatting about cars with the men, and jumping around to some of the music blasting from the stereo. It is hard slow work, but that's how it is: long term - low key - relational.

Gani, pastor of the church in Peja, was keen that some of the team get involved with the men's and women's groups, encouraging the local believers. We'd never done that before, but this was something the local leadership felt was important, so we took their advice and planned it in. A number in the church are cautious about their faith, but meeting with other believers from different places, helps them know they are not alone, and raises their spiritual temperature.

There were many other things too numerous to detail now. Some of the team were on a building project in the mountains - a brilliant vision to have input into many thousands of lives as people spend time at a camp, away from the glare of the neighbours, and get to think through the gospel for themselves. There were afternoon children's meetings in another part of the city. Some team members went to a weekly art/bible class. There was a trip for two of us to Gjilan in the east of Kosova, to see what God is doing there. And there was time together as a team praying, learning about gospel partnership from Philippians, and considering what being a fearless, bold, sacrificial, passionate, loving, spirit-filled follower of Jesus looks like.

Loving God and his truth enough to live it.

Their plans are for a very intensive trip of about three weeks, visiting all the churches where people or churches support their ministry. The trip will likely include Dallas, Austin, and Forth Worth, Texas, Birmingham and Huntsville, Alabama, Suffolk and Norfolk, Virginia as well as potentially some spots in Florida. If you are in those regions and would like to meet with Max and Alex, or would like to support thier trip, please contact Max at pastor@jesus.kiev.ua.

Read more about their church at http://news.jesus.kiev.ua

The current fighting in Georgia brings to the fore once again the troubled history of the Caucasus and its many people-groups. The Caucasus is that strip of land between Turkey, Iran and southern Russia. Although a relatively small geographical area, the peoples who live here have been separated over the centuries by geography (the Caucasus is very mountainous), and mutual mistrust and hatred. Chechnya, Beslan, Dagestan and Kabardino-Balkharia are all areas of the Caucasus that have hit the news for the wrong reasons in recent years.

The special dynamic of this latest conflict there is the involvement of the regular forces of two sovereign countries - Georgia and Russia, making this situation particularly dangerous, and its consequences difficult to predict. News services are already reporting heavy casualties. The stakes are very high on all sides, for Russia and Georgia, and for the Ossetian people, whose territory straddles the border of both countries.

The Radstock network does not currently have connections in the Caucasus, but there are many churches in this region. Some of these churches may connect to the network in the future, but one thing that can be said for certain is that they are right there, right now, in the thick of it. Please pray that the churches would be strengthened in their witness to the peace and love that can only come through the Gospel of the Lord Jesus, for an early cessation of hostilities, as well as for early access for humanitarian relief efforts.

Peter LaRuffa is the Youth/Children's pastor of Grace Fellowship Church in Florence, Kentucky. He recently led a group of 17 individuals including many teenagers and young people on a short term trip to Albania. Grace Fellowship Church is in partnership with the Lushnje Disciples Church where Edi Halili is pastor. Peter sends this report:

I just returned from a 10-day mission trip to Albania. I know there are a variety of jet-lag experiences that vary from person to person, so I was rather curious as to what mine would be like. I'm pretty flexible when it comes to bedtimes. It's not unlike me to pull an all-nighter to get something done--usually a sermon. Although it is arguably not the best lifestyle I could be living, I think it contributed to my overall smooth experience in adjusting to the different time zones I traveled through during this trip. So far, my experience with jet-lag has been somewhere between slim and none. That's pretty cool.
~~~~~~~~

What I am experiencing is "heart-lag." Jet-lag has to do with certain bodily and lifestyle rhythms being thrown off kilter. What I'm calling "heart-lag" has to do with emotional rhythms becoming temporarily unstable while one adjusts to their reentry into everyday, normal life. Jet-lag is caused by traversing a long distance in a short period of time. Heart-lag is caused by growing incredibly close to people in a relatively short period of time. It happens when one's heart must leave a location physically before it is ready to do so emotionally.

During our time in Albania, God in His kindness was pleased to truly knit together the hearts of two groups of people who, for so many reasons, are very different. Our languages have almost nothing in common. Our country is a baby compared to the centuries of history that exists in Albania. Our grocery stores, our homes, our churches, our schools, our streets - all very different.

I think heart-lag is something that is fairly unique to Christians. I've never heard of someone returning after a business trip and struggling with dueling emotions, some of which are glad to be home with family and friends, others of which are pining for colleagues halfway around the globe. Christians have the unique ability to grow closer to one another in a short period of time because we have the most important things in life in common. We've both been recipients of unmerited favor by the grace of God. We're both poor beggars who don't know one another, but know where and how to be filled by the "Bread of Life" (cf. John 6:35). We're different in so many ways, but the one thing we have in common transcends the many differences and causes us to ask "Am I really meeting a stranger for the first time, or am I being introduced to a sibling I never knew I had?"

Not everyone we met was a member of this family. Not everyone knew their need for the love of the Savior. However, we truly believe that God was pleased to use, yes the teachings, but also the loving example that was lived out right before their very eyes to show them Christ's love for us. During our time there, we strived to teach what Christ taught, to live as Christ lived, but also to love as Christ loved-wholeheartedly, genuinely, and sacrificially.

~~~~~~~~

I believe heart-lag is indicative that one has loved as Christ loved. He did not love with safely, but loved vulnerably. It shows that one did not consider firstly the cost of pouring themselves into relationships, but instead saw what could be bought for that price. It shows that relationships-even Gospel-centered relationships-although messy at times, are definitely a mess worth making. Even more than that, it's a mess worth wallowing in for the glory of God.

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable."
~ C.S. Lewis

Meet Andrei and Natasha Petrine (pictured). Both from Russia, Andrei and Natasha are resident in the UK, and Andrei has been in church leadership in London for several years. He is now striking out in a new direction - church planting among the 200,000+ Russian-speakers living in London. The vast majority of these have no connection with any kind of church. Paul Williams, Radstock's Eurasian Network Developer, has been working with them over the last year to develop and refine this vision.

The vision includes establishing a central church, probably meeting in an existing building. Ministry will be primarily in Russian. Also envisaged are satellite communities meeting in different parts of London, along with educational, English language and other support facilities for a disparate group of people at the margins of UK culture.

The project is in its infancy right now. Needless to say, the vision is huge, and the resources, humanly speaking, are tiny. But we have a big God, and right now, the biggest need is for prayer:

• that the right premises will be found for a ministry base
• for suitable accommodation for the Petrine family
• for appropriate support structures around the new ministry

Other opportunities for partnership, including specific financial requests, will emerge as the project develops. Financially, the long-term aim is for the work to be self-supporting.

If you would like to commit to praying for this massive mission opportunity, or you would like further information, please contact Paul Williams at paul@radstock.org.

Last month a team of us spent some time supporting a group of believers as
they began to build friendships in the village of Jub, Albania, where they
pray there will be a vibrant church community in coming years. As we sought
to help them make their initial connections we spent time with some of the
poorest families in the village, taking them some gifts and talking with
them, and showing them respect.

The father of one family we visited asked me how things were in Italy. I
(and the translator) kept having to tell him I was not from Italy; in fact I
have never been there. He later told me his cousin had been to Germany,
Italy and America '...do you know him?'

This lack of awareness indicates something of their isolation. They are
isolated even in Albanian terms. Having no car, they will not be making the
40+ minute drive down the horrifically bumpy road into the nearest city all
that often. Besi, one of the church leaders initiating this vision who
lives in another village nearby, described it simply like this: "This
village is quite far away from the city. It's not big but there are people
who need Jesus there."

He's right. That's why they need a church community in their midst, living
as a salt and light. And that's why we want to link them up with churches
who will pray for them and support them in their ministry.

If your church wants to explore a connection with church planting in Jub, contact anthony@radstock.org.

Three years ago, while meeting colleagues in Russia, I had an unusual request. ‘On my next visit, could I bring one or two laptops for use by local church workers for mission.' Without promising, I said I would investigate. Two months later, we ran the ‘Laptops 4 Pastors' appeal in Rapport. Soon after that, we received a donation to cover laptops and data projectors for local mission workers in all 85 regions of Russia. Over 80 of these have now been placed, and reports are starting to come in of how they're being used, through youth outreaches, conferences and Christian family life seminars. The head of the Russian Baptist Union (RBU) even credited this provision through Radstock in his presidential address to the RBU conference the following year. The pictures speak for themselves.

Although Russia is now perceived as an economic power house, this perception is very different from the living reality of ordinary Russians in the far-flung provinces, where many still live at subsistence level. For churches at the heart of these communities, this is their life as well, and such generosity makes a huge difference to their life and mission.

We're currently trying to find finances to purchase two jeeps to assist church planters covering huge distances in north-western Siberia. We need £6,500 for each vehicle. If you or your church can help with a gift, no matter how small, please get in contact with Paul Williams, Radstock's Eurasian Network Developer on paul@radstock.org. Or contact either Radstock office.

Though we have heard no further updates from our friends in Ulaan Baatar, news services are reporting that the unrest in Ulaan Baatar is quieting down and the situation has stabilized.  For more info, read the BBC's latest at:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7486794.stm

Radstock's connections often put us at the heart of situations that are politically tense and uncertain.

Today (2nd July 2008) we received an email from one of our contacts in Ulaan Baatar, the capital of Mongolia, detailing severe disturbances following the election there on June 29th. The opposition believes that the election has been ‘stolen' by the ruling party.

Five people have been killed, with more than 300 hurt, buildings have been set on fire, and hundreds have been arrested, according to the BBC news site (see link below). Ulaan Baatar is under a 4-day dusk-to-dawn curfew.

Please pray for a rapid resolution of the situation there and for calm to return; for our partners to know God's peace and protection, and opportunity for witness to the One in whom all our hungers are satisfied.

To find out more about Radstock's work in Mongolia, contact our Eurasian Network Developer, Paul Williams on paul@radstock.org

BBC news link:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7484632.stm

This picture, sent by one of our contacts in Ulaan Baatar, depicts some of the violence occurring there.  Your prayers are needed urgently.

We have two leaders in our church who have struggled financially for a long time, but are very industrious and hardworking. They are a brother and sister, Rodin Ngandu and Nester Masumba. Mrs Masumba is married to the owner of Mine Farm, a large 400 hectare farm. Both have allocated portions of land on the farm but lacked the resources to cultivate them.

From the money sent by the Pastures [a church in High Wycombe, UK] we gave them each a grant, to clear the land, irrigate, and buy seed and fertiliser, which as you can see from the photos they have done. This is quite a remarkable project because almost everyone relies on rain to grow their crops, but this is the middle of the dry season but because of irrigation, they are growing a lot of crops as you can see from the photos.

They are growing maize, Chinese cabbage and tomatoes. They are providing food for themselves, also every day they are selling to market traders and they are also giving away crops to needy church families.

We have some money remaining and have decided to give them some more for top dressing fertiliser - you will see from some of the snaps the comparison of maize which was fertilised and that which was not (the fertiliser ran out) - the crops that are a bit stunted can be treated with this new fertiliser so they catch up.

Thank you so much for your support of these farming projects - we will keep you updated as to how things develop.

Some time back, Lordway Ministries in Zambia partnered with a church outside their network to establish what was called a ‘food bank' project. The church was in a farming area, and farming families were struggling year after year to raise a harvest. Ten families were chosen for the project and each agreed to cultivate one hectare of their land, using seed and fertiliser provided by the project. At harvest time it was agreed that each participating family would bring 25 bags of maize back to the project and would be able to keep everything they realised over and above that.

The project was a great success, with some farmers improving their annual harvest tenfold! Enough money was raised to provide seed and fertiliser for the same ten plus two more families the following year. The farmers were able to give their families food security for the whole year and have enough to raise money for other things on top! We are looking to replicate this type of project within Lordsway Ministries - two of our churches consist mainly of farmers, Mansa and Kalulushi. The farmers have the knowledge and the willingness to make it work, they just need the resources.

If you or your church would be interested in partnering with such a project please let us know. At the time we ran the original project, seed and fertiliser for one hectare was about £75/$150 - there have been some increases recently, we will keep you posted!

"I'll still hate this road", I replied.

But he's right, I'll love the memories. Here's what I wrote, back in October 2006, to some friends about what was then a slightly fragile church in Sukth:

Chicken of the Sea

We went for the second week running to Sukth, this afternoon. The Durres church has started a congregation in this village. Five years ago, we sent a youth team from our church to Durres and this is one place where they went house to house, visiting non-believers, sharing their faith. Christina, our daughter, was on it. We've sent other groups since in 2004 and 2005. The church started early this year, I believe. They have 15 or 20 people in their orbit, but for the past two weeks it has been about 7 or 8 plus our contingent of 8 from Durres. Today it was 3 men and 5 women from the village. Three of the women were Audrey's age (forty-something!) or up, and the rest under 30, including a newlywed couple, wife aged 17. Welcome to village life. We met in a grim, bare, one-story, flat-roofed house, about 40 chairs crammed into one room in precise rows. The floor was bare concrete, and immaculately clean. The song books were falling apart. As it got dark outside, I realised they don't have electricity in the house, so it got darker and darker inside. After a few songs, Miri, a local farmer and elder in the Durres church (of which Sukth is considered a sub-set for now) preached on Luke 12, Jesus' parable about the man who unwisely sought security from his massive barns and pleasure from his merry lifestyle. Miri opened by telling of how he once planted 30 hectares in a 'get rich quick' scheme which did not work. I was conscious that I was by far the richest person in the room. Outside, six or eight of the neighbour's turkeys prowled around (pula deti -- chicken of the sea, so named because they originally arrived in Albania from afar on ships, apparently). A few kids would come inside, peek in the door while we sang or listened to Miri, then run off, chicken of the church, in a child-like way. It was Audrey's first visit, as she missed last week. "Everyone in our church ought to visit this place, she concluded. Just eight people, but getting on with church." I was on those 2004 and 2005 teams. People thought we were turkeys, since we did things like tidy up the school for free (Albanian traditional value -- only a stupid person works for no personal gain). It was hot and hard. The kind of place you imagine Jesus tramping through, where the villagers had their traditions and were getting on just fine, thanks, without the likes of Him, even if life was a bit grim and survival very difficult. I thought of that young couple, now with hope in a hopeless place. I'm glad those teenagers from our church weren't chicken of the village. -
- October 30, 2006

I think we had 20 locals last week at the worship in Sukth. They are fired up about Jub. The women want to do more visits to Jub to evangelise. Has your church doubled in the past two years like the one in Sukth? I wonder why nobody writes best-sellers like The Poverty-Driven Church.

So why do I stay? In short, it is because of my commitment to my church family, their commitment to me, and our collective commitment to our city. I am a part of Grace DC, a church with a vision for loving the city of Washington. We are striving to serve the city in tangible ways, extending God's grace and mercy, believing He can transform lives.

For some friends and I, this mission led us to volunteer at one of the local nursing homes. Stoddard Nursing Home is home to elderly and sometimes ailing black seniors, most African Americans and a few Jamaicans. Our times at Stodard have included visiting with residents, playing bingo, doing crafts, painting nails, and singing.

On one visit, we provided entertainment by singing hymns for the residents. In our clear young voices, we sang songs like "Tis So Sweet to Trust in Jesus" and "Trust and Obey" in our measured Presbyterian style. They listened politely, quietly nodding their heads. When we were done, I gave a short speech about how much we enjoyed coming and, thinking how our singing must have really lifted their spirits, that we'd be glad to prepare more songs for next time.

"I love to praise His name," said Esther, one of the liveliest ladies.

Assuming she was merely making a statement, I smiled and responded, "So do we." At which point Esther busted out in a loud vibrant alto voice the gospel tune "I Love to Praise His Name." Her fellow residents joined in with a resounding chorus "I LOVE TO PRAISE HIS HOLY NAME!" They came alive, clapping their hands, pounding their feet, singing with exuberance, showing more fire than those 40 years their juniors.

My friends and I were astonished and embarrassed. We were facing the cultural divide between ourselves and those we were serving. We began to understand how little we had actually entered into their world, understood their needs and their culture. Having not even left the city limits, it was an important yet surprising lesson. We were better served by our elderly friends that day than they were served by us.

I am learning that mission really does start at my doorstep and continues to the ends of the earth. Loving my neighbor begins at home, and even there it can be a cross-cultural experience!

Disciples Church in Durres has planted a church in the nearby village
of Sukth. There are now about a dozen believers there, and they have
a burden for Jub, a few kilometres up the road, where one lady is a
follower of Christ. So, they're spear-heading this work. I love
it. A young, fragile, impoverished church who meet in a dire little
concrete building with no electricity decide it's time to be church
planting. Meanwhile rich-world churches or hundreds and thousands
wonder if they can "afford" to lose the people or the income and
declare themselves not ready to church plant -- or don't even think
of it at all.

It was hot and dusty. The owner of the little shop brought out soft
drinks and beer, and sat with us. "Where are you from?" (This is
always a most important question in Albania. The answer is also not
where you're now living, but where the family heritage comes from.)
Besi, 23, from Sukth, the only "local", was quickly asked "who's your
father?". His answer got a short, sharp nod of approval and the shop-
keeper relaxed. "What's your work here?" This began a chat about
serving the community as a church, soon joined by another man who
just drove up on his moped, animatedly engaged for a while, then
left. The talk went back and forth about Christianity and Islam (the
village is roughly half Muslim), the decline of the village, poverty,
and, of course, the European football championships, now in full
swing. Arvid, the pastor from Durres, explained that we plan some
events next week, and the shopkeeper offered the wall of his metal
shed as a venue for showing some football matches and films. As we
drove out of town, the man on the moped flagged us down, "Come to my
house for a coffee!" We declined, but now the door is open for the
next visit. Is he the village "man of peace"?

"Was that good?", I asked Arvid?
"Yes, now they know we're coming", he replied. Of course, we both
knew word of this visit would spread around the town. There are few
secrets in an Albanian village.
Next week, we'll bring the video projector, distribute some food to
the poorest families, organise a few children's and youth activities,
and make a few home visits. About eight years ago a youth team from
our church in the UK did much the same thing in Sukth. They came back
tired and a bit discouraged, not able to see that they'd accomplished
much. They were wrong. The church in Sukth is now following in their
footsteps.

Check out this link to see the adventures of a Micro Enterprise Team from one of Radstock's churches, who took their training to church planters in the Gobi Desert in Mongolia. 

The needed funding for these gers has been received in full and the gers (except one which is on it's way!) have now been provided.

The generosity of donors like you make it possible for these gers to be provided and helps further the work of these Mongol churches. Thank you! We give thanks to God for your faithfulness, prayers and support.