On Friday I walked into the staffroom at Quinns College to say g’day to some of the staff and recognised an old face – ‘Mrs S’- a woman who I taught with in my second year of teaching, a brilliant teacher and a wonderful woman from whom I learnt a huge amount about teaching. It was great to see her and as we chatted she reminded me of my days teaching English at Kingsway and our infamous ‘Survival Camp’.

In my second year of teaching I somehow found myself with a year 11 English class and one of our texts was Goldings ‘Lord of the Flies’, a real classic.

I was lying in bed one night pondering what we could do to really get the kids into the story – to actually help them connect with it and get its significance… and I began to wonder…

What if we were able to dump the entire class on an island for a weekend, scatter some food around and let nature take its course?…
What if we created our own ‘Lord of the Flies’ simulation?…
What if we let them experience it rather than just read about it?…

Wouldn’t that help them get into the story far better than ‘Brodie’s Notes’?!…

Just a bit…

I didn’t sleep much that night as my mind was racing and I couldn’t wait to put it to the other staff and see who was ‘in’. My brain was buzzing with all sorts of wild ideas that would make English a little more interesting… In case you are wondering if I am joking, remember this is 20 years ago before the ‘fun police’ declared any risky experiences off limits.

I was thinking Lancelin island would be the go. We’d paddle them across on surfboards or hire a boat and we’d stay there for an entire weekend. As staff we’d have food, beds and all we needed but the students would be ‘shipwrecked’ and would have to fend for themselves…

Of course Lancelin is a bird sanctuary so we had to drop that idea straight away – but the idea still had currency. So we finished up heading up to a Tuart Forest somewhere in the Cervantes region. I don’t think I could find it again today if my life depended on it, but it was a great spot. With 20 kids, and a couple of staff we headed off to ‘do English’.

The students weren’t allowed to bring anything but the clothes they were standing in. No matches, no knives, no toilet paper… No food.

Nothing… not a cracker…

We managed to get to the Tuart Forest after a fun drive and as teachers we set off hiding fruit and veg in the forest. The deal was ‘Whatever you find you can eat… if you don’t find you don’t eat’. Or you need to learn to negotiate and ask others for help.

We did leave some matches lying around, a knife and a tarp. It was ‘finders keepers’ when it came to the stuff. Some got lucky. Others did it tough for the 2 days.

We released a couple of live chickens which were caught, killed and eaten by the students. They were promptly vomited back up the next day… I’m guessing their cleaning procedures weren’t world class. Fortunately things didn’t degenerate quite like they did in Golding’s novel, but it was a taste of what those kids experienced when they landed on the island.

The following year we did the same down at Conto’s Springs. The picture above is of the Conto’s area. We stopped the cars at the top of the cliffs and as staff we made our way down and scattered the food among the dunes. Then we let the kids go and they either ran straight thru the bush to get to the bottom – a bit of a dangerous route, or they ran the 2ks down the track to the bottom. Either way the fittest got the food and the least fit – those who were used to eating a lot – discovered that they were going to be enjoying an enforced diet.

These blokes got the lion’s share…

Anna didn’t…

Other’s managed to negotiate…

It was another successful camp, but with some real tension and conflict at times. It needed some better debriefing than I was able to do at the time, but again the kids entered the world of the novel rather than just imagining it.

There is no way in the world any school would let us run a camp like this these days. The physical dangers, psychological dangers and the risk of litigation just wouldn’t be worth the risk. Which is very sad in my opinion. The ‘fun police’ have won the day and I reckon we’re poorer for it.

Any time I see those students and we get talking about school days do you reckon they remember Survival Camp?…

School days can be pretty damn humdrum, so some wacky experiences like that make it a little more memorable and who knows maybe they even learnt something…

I know I had fun!…

From John Ortberg via Dick Staub : What did I need to do, I asked a wise friend, to be spiritually healthy? Long pause. “You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life,” he said at last. Another long pause. “Okay, I’ve written that one down,” I told him, a little impatiently. “That’s a good one. Now what else is there?” Another long pause. “There is nothing else,” he said. “You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”

To add to the last post here are some great thoughts from Seth Godin. I have copied and pasted the entire post cause I reckon its on the money

Rightsizing your passion

Excitement about goals is often diminished by our fear of failure or the drudgery of work.

If you’re short on passion, it might be because your goals are too small or the fear is too big.

Do a job for a long time and achieve what you set out to achieve, and suddenly, the dream job becomes a trudge instead. The job hasn’t changed–your dreams have.

Mostly, though, it’s about our fear. Fear is the dream killer, the silent voice that pushes us to lose our passion in a vain attempt to seek safety.

While you can work hard to dream smaller dreams, I think it’s better to embrace the fear and find bigger goals instead.

I reckon that’s how long it takes me to get itchy feet and a need for change. Some people seem to be able to stay in a job for 20 or 30 years but I’m not that person.

When you’re 47 you have enough life in which to observe patterns and this seems to be my ‘transition point’. No matter what it is I’m doing, after 5 years I seem to be scratching my head and wondering if there is something out there that is more meaningful, more stimulating, more purposeful…

Mid-life crisis aside I think I am just about there with retic and turf. Maybe its been the heat of the last 3 weeks that has smashed me a bit, but equally I’m feeling a bit over it all.

It seems the ’5 years’ has several discrete stages:

1. A new adventure – where I discover a new skill, ability or focus and I get my teeth into it. This is often an exhilarating time as I am usually out of my depth and just surviving. I like the steep learning curve but you can’t live here!
2. I can do this – In this stage I have got the basics happening well and I’m enjoying being able to do something new.
3. I can do this well – By now competence is high and some of the job is virtually automatic. Its a time to focus on doing things better. Improving systems and getting a better result for the same effort.
4. I am not enjoying this as much and losing interest – In all the roles I have had (and there has been a heck of a lot of variety) there seems to come a point when I lose interest. It happens slowly and shows up in poor work, or a lack of effort maybe because I feel I am competent and can cruise. Of course that only re-inforces the feeling of needing a change.
5. I’ll give this one more year… – If i learnt anything from the past its that this phase needs to be cut as short as possible. Usually a year is enough to finish up actually hating whatever it is that I have been doing and hoping I never need to do it again. So once I observe myself in ‘disinterest’ phase its time to flag it and look to shift into a new space.

I’ve never had to do a job I have hated simply to pay the bills and I hope I never have to. However I know that’s where many people live and have no choice.

So I’m currently observing that with retic I’m in a ‘stage 4 mindset’. I’m struggling to stay interested and motivated and on the lookout for new opportunities. It makes me chuckle a bit because it was only 6 months ago that I was loving it, feeling inspired and wondering about what the future may hold for it. I considered expanding and ramping things up, but realised that wasn’t where I wanted to invest my life. Maybe that choice – to ‘maintain’ – has been the catalyst for my discontent.

These days I find myself limiting my work, and my work areas, giving heaps of work away because I don’t want it and living with an ear to the ground for any new adventures or business opportunities.

The big challenge in any change would be relinquishing my autonomy and taking a drop in income as that would be inevitable, but I’m even at a point where I’d be willing to drop a decent slab of income to feel inspired again and get back on the learning curve.

The flip side is that I wonder if there is something I need to learn in moving thru the boredom phase. Maybe nothing else will present itself and I will just have to figure out how to be content in this space.

Anyone else observe any similar patterns in their lives?

This week at QBC we get stuck into the book of Acts so lately I’ve been reading it again and reflecting on it to get my head & heart in the right space to approach it.

I reckon its a grenade just waiting to explode the life of any church that reads it and I’m both genuinely excited and apprehensive about what it could bring.

Of course we could just teach thru it systematically and (re) learn all the same stuff we have done for the last umpteen years or we could lob that grenade in and see what new inspiration come from it… Perhaps ‘grenade’ is the wrong image as its one of destruction and read freshly Acts can be incredibly constructive, but perhaps some deconstruction is required first.

For example as I began reading Acts I found I was placing myself in the disciples shoes and asking ‘so what do we do now?’ Jesus dies, comes back, spends 40 days hanging with us, then ascends and we are left with the commission to ‘go and make disciples of all people groups, baptising and teaching them to obey eveything they had been commanded from Christ.’

‘So how shall we do that?…’ must have been a prime question.

And hopefully they would look back to the time spent with Jesus to see how he went about his mission and how they were involved with that. Hopefully they would immediately be asking questions of establishing the kingdom on earth. Hopefully they would be asking ‘so what really matters?’

What I can’t imagine them doing is immediately figuring out who was responsible for running the weekend gig. What I can’t see them doing is drawing up a roster for music and preaching… Forgive me if I sound cynical, but I am constantly disturbed that the priorities of the church in the 21st C seem so different from those of the first Christians. And I don’t want to stop being disturbed until I see us really grappling with the questions. I understand that we live at a different time in history and I don’t think our goal is to be a first century church. But in the process of reading the book of Acts it seems almost impossible not to read it thru the lens of our 21st C experience.

When we read the classic Acts descriptions of church being both from home to home and in the temple courts its easy to read that as ‘small groups’ and ‘Sunday worship’ because that is our frame of reference. But that wasn’t where they were starting. Jesus didn’t leave them with the church planting manual that explained how to move people from ‘community to core’, in 5 steps.

So when we look at the highly predictable format that the vast majority of 21stC churches take I can’t help but imagine that if Jesus lobbed in, he might say ‘really?… that’s what you thought I wanted you to focus on?…’ I am sure he would be glad that we hold some core DNA, but I think he’d be somewhat mystified that our core DNA had become our denominational / cultural preferences rather than the foundational elements of a church.

I sense that our familiarity with ecclesial processes and procedures of all kinds may have a tendency to stunt our ability to read this book afresh. We may struggle to ‘clear our heads’ and think afresh about what the mission of church is.

As I observe it in the western world the biggest priority for the church is to run the Sunday service and to do that as best we can. Can someone please find that priority for me in the book of Acts?…

Seriously, I’m not for dissing the importance of meeting together, but I can’t help but wonder if our enemy may have created a perfect distraction for us – a seemingly positive distraction – that consumes so much of our time, energy and resources that we find it hard to get on with the other things that matter to the establishment of the kingdom.

Anyway that’s probably incendiary enough to provoke some thinking and to give you a taste of what I see as I start to read this book. I see the danger of both rigid thinking – that reads Acts thru the lens of our own expeirience and lazy thinking that says its all too hard to re-imagine, but I hope to lead us in some creative thinking that will ask questions of ‘what if?’ and see where they lead.

In my last post I mentioned Ben Witheringon’s series of posts reflecting on the death of his daughter and the accompanying grief process.

The series of 4 posts (so far) is very ‘gut’ honest and admirable for that. But I’d suggest its greatest value is in the theological framing it gives to the issue of pain, suffering and grief. Its a bold move for a theologian, to theologise in the midst of pain, but I found it all inspiring and hope giving.

I’d encourage you to read it.

Start here.

We are due to start a series in the book of Acts at QBC, but I’ve had a message pressing on me which I feel is from God (as distinct from all the others where I just fluff along and hope for the best…) and it concerns the issue of how we see God in the midst of serious pain and suffering.

I’m not talking about how we deal with ‘first world problems’ ie. unexpected bills, a faulty air con or not enough holidays. I’m thinking of how we deal with life’s major disasters. When a child dies, a marriage busts up, a family member is diagnosed with a terminal illness… BIG stuff… ‘valley of the shadow’ type stuff.

If you read Psalm 23, a Psalm that typically gets read in tough times, you would notice that almost every statement in it is positive and encouraging, (ever noticed that?) but there is an allowance for ‘walking through the valley of the shadow of death’.

Its a powerful metaphor for the type of suffering that I am alluding to. And my theory is that sooner or later every single one of us will walk thru the valley. In one way or another our lives will involve significant pain and we need a theological framework for dealing with that.

If we don’t (and sometimes even if we do) we will end up ‘blaming God’ and berating him for his failure to be an adequate father. This can lead to ditching faith altogether and being disappointed with God because he didn’t meet our expectations

At another extreme is the whole idea of ‘thanking God’ for the suffering, as if it were a good thing. I have seen and heard people thanking God for the most bizarre stuff based on the idea of ‘giving thanks in all circumstances’. Now I’d want to say there is always something to give thanks for, but chances are it won’t be the death of a spouse, or the loss of a child…

I won’t give the game away in terms of what I want to say, (although its not rocket surgery) but I will point you to two posts that I have found helpful in this process and both know suffering firsthand.

The first is by a friend and an ex school student of mine who died on Jan 2nd this year of bowel cancer and it is his final words written a short time before his passing. Kristian suddenly became ‘famous’ after making a video for his wife’s birthday, putting it on Youtube and then discovered it had gone viral.

What I admired about Kristian’s journey was the way he honestly expressed his pain and struggle, and how he didn’t end up pinning it all on God. To the end he called a spade a spade but he also acknowledged God as good, in control and to be trusted. You can read his final words here. I watched the memorial service online and it was a real tribute to a both the way he and his wife dealt with ‘the valley of the shadow’.

And then there is this post by New Testament Theologian Ben Witherington, that is the start of him reflecting on the unexpected death of his 32 year old daughter from a pulmonary embolism. It takes a different tack and shows a biblical scholar coming to grips with the valley of the shadow. Here’s an excerpt:

So, for me, the beginning of good grief starts with the premise of a good God. Otherwise, all bets are off. If God is almighty and malevolent, then there is no solace to be found in God. If God is the author of sin, evil, suffering, the fall, and death, then the Bible makes no sense when it tells us that (1) God tempts no one, that (2) God’s will is that none should perish but have everlasting life, and that (3) death is the very enemy of God and humankind that Jesus, who is life, came to abolish and destroy.

So my theory – as dark as it may be is this: One day you will enter the valley of the shadow – if you haven’t already – and how you see God will be critical to how you walk that journey.

One of my deep convictions is that a healthy grasp of the true character of God can help us both grieve, express pain and not lose our way all at the same time.

So the question comes back to who is God and what is he like?

I dunno how you do faith stuff with your kids. We do it both in the ebb and flow of life but also more intentionally around the dinner table.

Last year Danelle found a book of kid’s devotions with one for each day of the year so we used that maybe 4 or 5 times a week.

This year I picked up the Scripture Union E100 Bible Challenge. I have had the guide sitting in my study for a couple of years now and always thought it could be useful. I found the last devotion book a bit lame so wondered how the kids would go with just straight Bible content. And in the E100 there is a fair bit of it…

Here’s an excerpt from their website to give you an idea of what it is:

The Essential 100 Challenge (The E100) is an effective Bible reading program built around 100 carefully selected short Bible passages — 50 from the Old Testament and 50 from the New Testament. It enables people in your church to get the big picture of God’s Word and in the process develop a daily Bible reading habit.

The E100 Bible passages are usually one to two chapters in length and can easily be read in 10 minutes or less. The E100 Challenge takes a reader through all of the major types of biblical writing including Historical books, Poetry and Wisdom Literature, the Prophets, the Gospels, Acts, the Epistles and Revelation.

It seems some churches have used it as a preaching guide and integrated it into their whole teaching program, so it can be a churchwide thing as well as a very locally based activity.

What I’ve noticed is that our kids have responded well to it. Each night we read around 2 chapters of the Bible (currently Genesis) and as we are reading I ask them to consider a) one thing that strikes them and b) one thing that they would want to ask a question about.

And crikey… there is no shortage of questions…

Genesis is just chock full of stuff that needs questioning and mums and dads don’t always have the answers. But it is really good to have the conversations with the kids and to see how their minds enquire and explore. Just the last few days have led us into some pretty murky theological water.

I am conscious that they at a very early stage of faith and need concrete answers as much as possible to their questions, but I am also conscious that I don’t just want to feed them a party line that won’t hold water as they get older and think things thru more carefully.

Either way I’m not too worried. I think it matters less that we get the answers right and it matters more that we raise the issues.

Anyway if you’re looking for something really simple and surprisingly productive to do with your kids (probably 6 & above) then you could check it out.

How we started the conference from Epic Fail Pastors Conference on Vimeo.

This is a longish post provoked by the clip above – a starter for the ‘Epic Fail Conference’ last year.

I was reflecting this morning that after 47 years of life I have had a fair old mix of failures, successes, failures that some would consider successes and successes that some would consider failures.

So much depends on perspective and the ability to learn.

One of the most pivotal experiences of my life (as young as I was) was ‘failing’ the 11+ exam when we lived in Belfast. Essentially this was a test to see if you were a smart kid or a dumb one and as a result you would either go to ‘grammar school’ and then uni or a ‘tech college’ where you would learn a trade. I have a lousy memory, but I do remember that when the numbers were counted I finished on the wrong side of the ledger and was bound for life as a tradie rather than someone with a university qualification.

I hadn’t realised before that exam that I wasn’t smart. I honestly hadn’t thought much about it, but at that point it was made clear to me. Then shortly after that exam we moved to Australia. After 3 months living in Nollamara which was a small slice of hell for a fat, freckled Irish kid we moved to Innaloo (yep – its a real suburb name and I’ve heard all the jokes…) and I went to North Innaloo Primary School.

I remember immediately getting slotted into the ‘lower academic stream’ class, which based on my immediate history was probably where I belonged. I was in that class for all of about 2 hours. What became apparent very quickly was that I was far more advanced in my education than my Aussie mates. The simple and very uninspiring reason for this was that we started school in Ireland 2 years younger than in Oz so I had done a lot of the work that Aussie kids were just starting on. I managed to knock off an hour of long division work in just 10 minutes and then 30 minutes later I found myself being relocated to the ‘smart class’.

Me?… Smart?…

You’re kiddin me right?

But I discovered that compared to those around me I was now above average academically. What happened over that year was that I began to believe I was actually a smart kid… and I finished up as runner up dux of the school.

Had I been back in Ireland chances are I would have been believing a different story about myself and living out of that. The interesting thing is that I wasn’t stupid – but I likely would have believed that about myself because ‘men in white coats’ told me so.

That was a formative experience and one that gave me courage for the future. In early high school I probably wagged as much school as I attended and consequently got caught up to academically. I was still pretty capable and had grown in confidence, but wasn’t quite the ‘superboy’ I once felt I was. Now I was just the ratbag kid who was constantly in trouble. I could still get decent grades with minimal effort so my energies went into other more important activities like basketball and surfing.

At the end of year 12 I bombed on the TEE and scraped into Phsy Ed at UWA with the lowest entrance score of all 120 of us. I know because we compared results on the Phys Eder’s orientation camp (now there’s another story…) and I was bottom of the pile. This time it was sheer determination that got me thru. After 1 year there were 60 of us left and at the end of the course 30 and I was a mid level performer. I had made it and even scored a job as a teacher down in the little country town of Wagin.

Since then life has its fair share of successes and failures. To be fair the next 15 years were fairly full of successes. I did well at teaching, did well at ministry, got offered some pretty cool jobs, managed to get chosen for some roles I would never have imagined myself in and generally felt fairly invincible and able to take on anything. I see that same indomitable self belief in 30 somethings now and smile. I remember that feeling – or should I say that illusion?…

If its true that we learn more from our failures than our successes then the last 10 years have been my education – and I’m sure I’m not done yet. Living with an illusion of invincibility is wonderful until someone sticks a pin in the bubble and you realise that reality is quite different.

I left my team leader role at Lesmurdie Baptist to begin Upstream with a sense of being someone who would ‘show the world’ what decent church planting looked like. My reasoning was that if I could succeed there (Lesmurdie), then I could succeed somewhere else and who could possibly stuff up a church plant in a new suburb?

Yeah, well if you’ve been a long time reader then you’d know that things didn’t go to plan at all. It was a really hard road and it didn’t turn out anything like I imagined or hoped it would. It was humbling and at times even humiliating not to achieve what I thought I could. My vision of success wasn’t in blessing and serving a community and seeing God’s kingdom come. It was in growing and expanding a church (albeit of a different kind to the norm) that would do some good things but that would ultimately make me look pretty good.

I won’t bore you with the ins and outs of that journey as there is plenty in the archives to do that… but fair to say that in my personal failure there was some amazing learning.

I need to add that what we did with Upstream wasn’t a failure in the sense of it not being valuable. (Danelle always reminds me of this.) It was a brilliant time and there was much good to come from it. But in terms of what I personally set out to achieve – it was a big ‘F’.

Since then there have been a few other significant ‘F’s, some that have knocked us around a bit (again I won’t detail them all) but in the process of ‘effing’ I am conscious of becoming a much fuller human being. Some of the quotes in the clip above make much better sense to me now. Some of the struggles of others who find life hard make more sense to me now too.

I find myself somewhat less idealistic these days and at times barely optimistic. I understand some of the cynicism I used to see in older people who have ‘been there done that’an couldn’t get excited if their life depended on it.

And yet I do have a deep sense that some of our best adventures and our service to God are yet to come. Maybe they won’t end with my fame and glory as I once thought, but perhaps there is stuff of real consequence and significance to invest our lives in. I think so anyway…

Perhaps one of the most powerful learnings of the last phase of life has been that ‘I cannot make it happen/ I am not in control’ as I once thought I was. Its a pretty obvious one really. But in the wake of a number of successes its easy to see yourself as the common element. That learning about the limitations of my own abilities has at times caused me to be passive as I have thought ‘it doesn’t matter what I do – it isn’t going to make a difference’. That thought is a long way from the gung ho attitude of my early 30′s, and is obviously an unhealthy overreaction.

Lately I’ve been feeling like the ‘dust has been settling’ somewhat and that maybe there is a new challenge