MV: What did you learn about community and neighbourhood? Two or three things that you have brought back to your community.

GM: “Faithful presence in place” was a common theme in every church community we visited. Every community had been at what they are doing for four to five years minimum, some for much much longer. Fruit didn’t come overnight, it took years, and perseverance and patience were key traits of members, but fruit did come and it was deep and rich and tangible. There was no program or formula, just people taking ownership over their call to love God and their neighbours in the same place for a long time no matter what got in their way.

“Radical Hospitality” was another common theme amongst every community we visited. Every community we visited welcomed us as their own family, even though most had never met us before. When our kids walked in the door, adults and children came around them like they were their aunts and uncles or cousins. Everywhere we went people welcomed us around their table, gave up their beds or apartments for us, gave us generously of their time, included us in their community gatherings, and even gave us aquarium tickets! This spirit of welcoming and hospitality was true of every individual we met, from the youngest to the oldest. Every time we left one of the communities we had visited, whether it was just for a few hours or four days, we felt like we were leaving as family members.

MV: What new questions does this open up for you?

GM: Many of the communities we visited had formal covenants that members committed to and others had informal covenants that were based around understood agreements they had with one another, but all members of each community were on the same page. In our fledgling missional community in Chilliwack, BC we have gone through an extensive process of writing our own covenant and felt affirmed in our desire to be a covenant people.When we returned home, some of the questions we began asking concerned how we can begin to put our covenant into action, how we might simplify it so as to make it easier to communicate to others, and how we might bring new folks along who want to explore what it means to be covenant members with us.

Scott Hagley (Ph.D., Luther Seminary) is the Director of Education for Forge Canada and aTeaching Pastor at Southside Community Church. He lives in Burnaby, British Columbia with his wife and two daughters. scott@southside.ca 

Green Shoots in a Complex Place: A Review Essay

by Preston Pouteaux

[This article appears in the latest MV newsletter. Download your copy here: May 2013 Missional Voice Newsletter]

John P. Bowen sat across from me at Il Bricco, the little family owned Italian restaurant in my neighbourhood, and asked me about my town and the church. He was keen to learn about what God was doing. John is as inquisitive as he is thoughtful, reflecting on the changing landscape of the church in Canada during what some call a “dry-spell.” Faced with declining numbers and apparent irrelevance, churches are looking for the silver-bullet to restore the church to her former glory. But what if the church of tomorrow looks quite differently than it did in 1983? What landscape markers might we use to guide the church and offer hope?

John Bowen’s book, Green Shoots out of Dry Ground: Growing a New Future for the Church in Canada (Wipf & Stock, 2013) brings together nearly 20 Canadian voices from across the denominational spectrum to reflect on the big questions facing the church today. From Anglican Bishops and Lutheran Professors to church planters and missionaries.Altogether the chapters unfold a complex 3D, multifaceted snapshot of the Church in Canada today.

Glenn Smith, the Executive Director of Christian Direction in Montreal, Quebec, describes how he made sense of the struggles facing his city. His story is one example of how the way forward involves careful cultural and social reflection and response. Glenn Smith says that in his many years engaging the culture of his city, he has discovered that “all things religious have been marginalized

Complex Adaptive Systems behave according to three principles:

1. order is emergent as opposed to hierarchical

2. the system’s history is irreversible

3. the system’s future is often unpredictable

In light of complex adaptive system observations and the insights from stories found in Green Shoots, I would suggest that pastors of tomorrow will not be able to lead their organization through a changing landscape by claiming a set direction, by going back to what once was, or by predicting the future of the organization. Rather, the pastors of tomorrow will need to be deeply attentive to the heart of God for the place, people, and culture of their city, respond in dialogue with the community, and be open to new directions as the Spirit of God leads.

What Green Shoots out of Dry Ground does more than anything else is offer a picture of people responding to complex realities in ways that seek to live into the Reign of God. It is a compelling call for church leaders, pastors, and missionaries across Canada to walk faithfully as followers of Jesus, becoming agents that help churches adapt to an ever changing environment.What the church needs today is adaptive leaders with eyes to see and ears to hear (and perhaps a dose of humour and poetic imagination for good measure).We may not yet see what these transformations bring, but we know we cannot go back and we cannot contain or control what is. But we can trust God and live attentively and responsively to what the Spirit of God is doing.And as John Bowen concludes,“We do this to join in the work of God, in the mission of God to reconcile the world to himself through Christ, that all may have life.This is good news, and it is worth sharing” (Bowen, 283).

Amen.

Preston Pouteaux (DMin.,Tyndale Seminary) is a National Team member with Forge Canada and is the Director of Discipleship Ministry at Lutheran Church of Our Saviour in Calgary,Alberta. Preston is a neighbourhood church planter, water-colour portrait artist, and beekeeper. preston@forgecanada.ca 

To order your copy of Green Shoots out of Dry Ground, click here; and to learn more visit here.

Living in Community

by Jamie Arpin-Ricci

[This article appears in the latest MV newsletter. Download your copy here: May 2013 Missional Voice Newsletter]

“So, are you a church? I mean, an actual church?”

You would be surprised how often people have asked us these questions when they hear about the inner city church we planted in Winnipeg several years ago. It’s not entirely an unfair question.After all, a name like Little Flowers Community, which makes no mention of the word “church”, understandably makes some people unsure. Further, our community is especially committed to the values of intentional community, with a significant number of our members sharing life in co-housing situations. So while we are a worshipping community, these distinctive features understandably generate curiosity.

The words “intentional community” usually inspire images of hippy communes or monastic enclaves. In reality, intentional community refers to organizing our lives together in proximity for the purposes of relationship and common mission.While that does often include co-housing, it isn’t a prerequisite. However, life in intentionally geographical and residential closeness, as opposed to an incidental proximity, is crucial.

We embrace intentional community as a discerned response to the nature and call of God on our lives as His people. Created in the image of the Three-In- One, the redemptive result of dying to self and being resurrected together into Christ is that we are His Body, the Church. In other words, the intimacy and devotion of genuine community is a fundamental product of the gospel.

Our context, the West End of Winnipeg, lends itself well to intentional community. Our neighbourhood is characterized by poverty, slum housing, high percentages of mental illness, crime and other “inner city” dynamics. Our neighbourhood needs stable and affordable housing along with relational support systems. However, this wonderfully diverse neighbourhood is the dream of city planners. It is laid out like a village at the heart of the city and provides an ideal context for just such supports.Yet too few people are able to sustain rootedness due to such things as economic challenge, gentrification and response to crime.

Our intentional community emerged almost by accident.A group of us lived together in the neighbourhood because we were all serving as missionaries with Youth With A Mission (YWAM), an organization that stresses the importance of shared life in mission. However, when our friends and neighbours started to see how we lived – both with respect to co-housing and the simplicity and support that came with intentional community – they began to show great interest.We soon discovered how critical such community was for people to have the best opportunity for wholeness, both with respect to their faith journey and with respect to issues such as mental health, addiction recovery, financial stability, etc. In other words, community deeply served to produce whole life transformation.And so we began to share life with others beyond our fellow YWAM missionaries.Today, the majority of people living in our main community house are not part of YWAM.

Yet our home was far from enough to respond to so great a need. As one of our members overcame addiction and severe debt, she was able to buy a home and extend the reach of our intentional community. It has become a beautiful house of hospitality where people share life, food and joy together every day. Further, as gentrification began to drive up housing costs, thus pushing our neighbours out of the neighbourhood and away from the support of the community, we saw the need to do what we could to protect affordable, dignified housing. One result has been the development of Chiara House (www.chiarahouse.ca), a low-rise apartment building being renovated for low-income housing and intentional community with a partial emphasis on supporting our neighbours living with mental illness.As we continue to do these things and embrace people in true communities of belonging, our connection and ministry among our neighbours grows in breadth and depth.

Yet, it would be a mistake to think that such intentional community is an approach that is exclusively (or even primarily) designed for such low-income, urban communities.While it will look differently, this kind of community is essential in suburban and rural contexts as well. In many ways, those contexts present challenges that make such intentionality more difficult, but also necessary for those very reasons.The relative privilege of most suburban/rural Christians often allows us to create lives that function in significant isolation – commuting to work, shopping across town, and larger homes decreasing our need to use public third places such as theatres, cafes, etc.We organize our lives in such a way that the pervasive individualism of our culture is given primacy. In light of those realities, embracing intentional community can be an essential, counter-cultural witness to our neighbours.And I believe we will discover that beneath the surface of self- sufficiency, they desire belonging like everyone else.

Again, intentional community does not always have to include co-housing (though the option should always be given genuine consideration in all contexts). That said, intentional community is always costly. It will always call us to sacrificial lives of self-emptying for the sake of our love of God and neighbour. Most churches define their people as functioning as a community – and there is likely to be a degree of truth in that assessment. However, there is so much more we could (and should) be doing to intentionally embrace this movement as an expression of missional faithfulness in a culture characterized by isolation and self-sufficiency.

In the end, the costly nature of intentional community – that is community shaped by the costly call of Christ – is well worth it.The gift of intimacy and discipleship that comes as much from the hard times as the good (perhaps even more so) stunningly prove that the Body of Christ is where our salvation is worked out together daily. Not only does it produce new life within us as Christians, but stands as a bold and beautiful witness to a waiting and watching world.

Jamie Arpin-Ricci is a writer, pastor, and missional church-planter living in the inner city of Winnipeg with his Aussie wife, Kim, and Ethiopian son, Micah. He is the pastor of Little Flowers Community (www.littleflowers.ca), co-director of Youth With A Mission (YWAM) Urban Ministries Winnipeg (www.ywamwinnipeg.com) and the director of Chiara House (www.chiarahouse.ca). Jamie is also the author of, “The Cost of Community: Jesus, St. Francis & Life in the Kingdom” (Downers Grove, InterVarsity Press: 2011) & writes at a blog by the same name at www.missional.ca. 

Our theology is plain and simple.We are made in the image of God who exists in community – Father, Son, Spirit.We are created for community with God and with one another. As we live in community, we bear witness to what we believe about God.We do this in the context of a neighbourhood or local mission field. The way we learn to live together in that place points to the presence of the kingdom of God as we become a sign, servant, and foretaste of that kingdom and of its King.We are missional in that we point to the King and His kingdom, drawing people into relationship with Him.

However, we must guard against certain things.When we work at allowing the Spirit of God to dwell in us in such a way that we become conduits for the love of God to flow through us, we must recognize that this is only an incomplete or partial end.The end or hope of our community is that others will meet the King in and through our fellowship.We must also meet together regularly (Acts 2, Hebrews 10) not just with the idea of gathering for worship in mind, but in being shaped by spiritual practices that help us to more clearly reflect the nature of God together.These spiritual practices are again only a means to an end. We must also learn to live in covenant with one another around these practices and a rhythm of life that fosters a deep sense of mission in our midst – believing that all followers of Jesus are invited into a missionary life.

We must never stop proclaiming that Jesus is Lord and Savior. Today, however, we have a remarkable opportunity to demonstrate what it means to be a community of people who have been drawn together not just for the sake of a local cause for a brief period of time, but for the sake of the world for all eternity. We face several challenges in creating such a community within our church for the sake of the world. In this issue of Missional Voice, we will explore these challenges from several different angles by looking at some covenantal practices of intentional communities as well as a theological vision for intentional community.We are the body of Christ. How we function together has perhaps an even greater chance of attracting people to want to become part of a community of believers than does any church service or even a “good deed” in the neighbourhood.

Cam Roxburgh is the National Director for Forge Canada, the VP of Missional Initiatives for the North American Baptists,and theTeam Leader at Southside Community Church in Vancouver, Canada. He lives in Surrey, British Columbia with his wife and four children. cam.roxburgh@forgecanada.ca