The Deification of Shane Claiborne

I like Shane, but he's not Jesus. I think his "irresistible revolution" is one of the best book around.

Atrophic communities

I was listening to a talk by a great friend of mine called Graham, who when he was young had a really bad motorbike accident, this led to his arm being in plaster for many months. The doctors became very concerned that his arm would suffer from atrophy, actually I think it did.

Graham likened communities that didn't connect with the worlds they where placed in to a limb suffering from atrophy!

Atrophy is the partial or complete wasting away of a part of the body. In the case of his arm it was what is known as disuse atrophy!

Interestingly if something isn't used it partially or completely wastes away. I wonder if communities can become atrophic if they don't flex their community engagement muscles? Or in old school terms communities that aren't evangelistic will waste away partially or completely.

Resting inside the plaster caste of the churches we may have created are the rotting disused limbs of a once vibrant, fit and healthy body.

Interestingly atrophy can be turned around by exercise.

Just more thoughts, on a roll here......

You can check out Grahams talk HERE

More on community living

Community is such a broad word, it comes in so many different forms and we all experience community in a variety of ways throughout our lives. The communities of large and small families, the communities we experience in school, or at work, the communities we meet in pubs the communities that are villages or towns. All sorts of community.

Anyway, what am I looking for in community? Which in itself is a strange way of phrasing it. Instantly the question becomes about what I want not about what I can contribute.

If I approach community as a consumer and not a contributor it will never really leave me with any sense of fulfillment.

1.
A place where I can be myself but not a place where myself won't be challenged to change. Although I need to be accepted for who I am, I need to feel secure enough to be vulnerable and allow people in, to challenge and help me grow.

2.
True community will not allow you to be invisible. Which is scary. In the condensed forms of christian community I have experienced here in Ibiza invisibility is the one thing I have found different from being part of a larger church community, when it's small you can't hide.

3.
Community with a purpose. One of the things that gives our community life is its sense of outward focus. We live for something beyond ourselves. A community that just exists to worship and pray and feed the christian sheep, will ossify and lose ground. The momentum of mission will sustain christian communities.

4.
Community need an emphasis on growth, which is almost the same as purpose. Although you can get a community that is involved in social justice and has great purpose without a sense of looking to be added to. A community that is seeking to make disciples is a true christian community.

5.
A prayerful community, this goes almost without saying. Although we can get so caught up in the work that we forget to pray. I heard one christian leader say he thought we could do 85% of what we do with the holy spirit!! A prayerful community should lead us to become a Holy Spirit dependent community. I love liturgy but this is also the thing that scares me about liturgy, the words without the spirit can become dead and just vane repetition. Even daily rhythms of prayer can be become dead lifeless acts and if we are not careful we get a form of pride that comes from us being repetitive and persistent.

6.
A generous community, a willingness to share and give. A willingness to sacrifice. If a community is generous this will affect its outlook in so many ways. When you come together instead of it being about your needs a generous community will be looking out for others needs. Generosity has so little to do with money and so much to do with heart.

7.
A community has to learn to rest. A restful community will give space for people to rejuvenate and truly live. I have been in churches where everyone is so busy they just don't appear rested, the programme grinds them into the ground. Sabbath for most churches can be a very busy time. The art of rest is something we must perfect if we are going to be truly counter cultural. We live in a cash rich time poor society, community must give people time, value time and allow people to take time out.

8.
A learning community, we must always have a willingness to learn. A community that can't be told from outside that it needs to change or thinks it has got it all right is in danger of being arrogant. Yes we must be confident in the path we have chosen but we must marry that confidence with the humility to learn. Knowledge speaks and wisdom listens, we must be wise enough to listen. We don't have all the answers.

9.
Communities need mothers and fathers. Without the input and help of older wiser more mature people we will never grow up!

10.
Communities must love and keep loving, show grace and keep showing grace. We will never arrive we will always keep growing, evolving but we must do all this in the spirit of love. We can't sacrifice people along the way. Love has to be the centre if we keep loving we'll keep growing.

You may have noticed I haven't mentioned Jesus, well not by name, but He's there He's in all of these points without His example community wouldn't work.

Community Living

Had few people ask me about the challenges of community living, here are my top ten challenges:

1.
Community living and communal living are two very different beasts, we all live in various forms of community but we don't all live communally. I think it is important to make this distinction, communal living is often held up as the zenith and holy grail of all things community. Biblically it isn't a model you read about. The israelites were a community of people yet they all had their own tents!

2.
If you do go for a communal living experiment, you may have had people living with you before. You need to realise there is a big difference between people living with you and people sharing with you. When people move into your home, no matter how chilled you are, they will live by your rules or your unspoken code of living. When you share everyone gets a say in how to live, how to set up rooms, how to allocate jobs, how tidy everyone needs to be!!!

3.
If you find yourself in a communal living situation it is important that you still have a private family space, something the farm didn't afford for any of us. This is actually just as important for singles as for couples and families, if you don't have private living quarters you will eventually find yourself having whispered arguments in a room somewhere because you don't want to wash your dirty linen in public. We all need our own space to walk about naked in, if we want to!

4.
Communal living is restrictive to growth and can easily give the impression there is a group who are in and a group who are out, houses will eventually reach capacity. This can lead to the impression that the communal livers are really doing community whilst the rest of us just aren't hard core enough!!!! It can also lead to other people thinking you are a weird exclusive cult, especially if you get a farm in the hills.......

5.
Everybody working together and living together can lead to a lack of delineation in your home and work life. People will talk about work when really they should just be chilling. I think if you are going to do communal living people working in different jobs would be a real help. This of course can also happen to couple who work together.

6.
Homes need to be havens, places of escape as well as places of hospitality. Think about the fact that you will want visitors and so will the other people who live in the home, this can add pressure. Living abroad makes this even more intense as visitors tend to come for a week at a time!

7.
Communal living can make more sense economically, and it will grow you in grace. Shared pots can be good, but can still lead to tension as someone will think one thing is a necessity and another person thinks its a luxury!

8.
Communal living will highlight how judgmental we are. We all have an idea that the way we do things is the best way, the way we spend money is the most sensible way. When people do it differently we can soon become judgmental.

9.
Communal living mixed with simple living can add pressure. Actually living simply is very difficult, we need to remember that the industrial revolution happened for a reason! The reason some people, Shane Clairborne included, can live simply is because some people don't live simply, they work real hard and help provide for other people and ministries to exist. Rich people invest in kingdom initiatives all around the world and without them people couldn't try to plant communities in tough places. Give the rich a break.

10.
Community living is the way to proceed, by all means try communal living, but for me community living is a necessary part of our faith that has to be accessible to all. Geographical proximity would be the best way forward for this, all live separately but in the same neighbourhood, have rhythms of prayer, times of eating and gathering.

Then at the end of the day everybody goes home to their own tent.

Decades

Was chatting with someone yesterday we were talking about how we're not good at being patient. We live in the world of the remote control were we get everything in an instant. I think we in western culture live with the reality that if we don't like the channel we can change it. If we don't like our job we can change it, if we don't like where we live we can change it, if we don't like our relationships we can change them.

If we don't get what we want quickly we easily feel frustrated and give up. We flick the channel to something else, something new to focus on, something else to help us get through life, something else to try and give our lives meaning, something else to make us significant.

I occasionally meet people who appear to be flicking the remote of their life all the time, going from one channel to the next until they find what they enjoy. Although by the time they find what they enjoy they have so shortened their own ability to give anything long term attention they move on. Thus they just flick through life hoping one day to land on the channel that suits them. Project to project, new initiative to new initiative!!!!

Life as a channel hopper can't be fun.

I once heard someone say ( I think it was Pete Greig, he probably borrowed it from someone) "We don't often think of our lives in decades!" Ok let's say we have 8 decades of life to live with, if your reading this you have probably lived between 2 and 4 of those decades. I like to think most of my readers have only lived 2 but it could be closer to 4 and 5, I mustn't kid myself that I attract a young audience with these ramblings. So you have 3 or 4 decades left.....

Lets say you have 4 uber productive decades, what would you like to stick at and achieve per decade? 4 Decades, maybe 4 achievements! Maybe achievements is the wrong word then again maybe it's not. Be good to see people getting a bit more definite about what they want from life.

People without vision wander aimlessly.

Of course thinking in decades counteracts remote control living.....

more

What father doesn't want to give his children good gifts?

I hear this a lot especially from the prosperity people who believe God wants us all to be rich and healthy. If we just say the right formula and put the right words in place God will do what we want!!!

What's a good gift? When does the child know what is right? Had a bit of situation with one of my sons who is getting a hard time at football because he's a foreigner, pretty much your typical sort of stuff that immigrants have to put up with. Would a good gift be for me to step in and deal with the child concerned? Would a good gift be for me to do what he asks, which is let him drop football, at 11 o'clock at night when he is tired? Or is it a good gift for me to get him to tough it out and grow from the experience? Now I don't want answers for what I should do, I'm his dad and we'll work it out together. But it is so much more complex than me just doing what he wants.

You know I have met some kids whose parents give them everything they want, it doesn't help the child. I know wealthy people who could give their children everything they ask for but they don't and their children are so much more balanced than the child who gets all he ever asks for!

Here's another thought, when we got the farm we quoted Ephesians 3.20 "Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us" the farm not working was immeasurably more than I asked for or imagined!!!

What if someone died or got ill who you where praying for, wouldn't that be immeasurably more than you asked for or imagined? What if you prayed for success and met with failure wouldn't that be immeasurably more than you asked for or imagined? What if you prayed for money and riches and you became poor wouldn't that be immeasurably more than you could have asked for or imagined?

You see when you look at that scripture we can nearly always imagine immeasurably more than we have when it is translated into positive results and getting more or getting better! God has done more than I could have asked or imagined with regards to the farm....

Update

The photo has nothing to do with anything, just two objects of beauty.

So things are moving along with my fine, we have gone to appeal using our spanish lawyer. Locals have been really great; the local medical centre have written us a great official letter saying they use us loads and we never charge anyone, this is signed by the director which is just superb. The policia local in San Antonio will also vouch for us, we were stopped by the policia local in Sant Josep, which is also superb. Bob has also written us an official letter on behalf of the anglican church in Ibiza with all this and the fact our lawyer can also send the documents with regards to our application to become a spanish charity, should be a help. I am still slightly nervous and don't really trust the Spanish administration system but we are on to it. Just got to wait for a few weeks and see what happens.

The other news is we have found a new house to move to in San Antonio, which is fantastic. A great little family house, with electricity, running water, telephone, internet and all the other things we need to survive!!!!

We are moving in November, the only down side is that our spanish landlord for the existing house appears to want to get out of paying our deposit back, which once again is a pain in the buttocks....

All in all I feel a bit better, although realised that this has all been a bit more stressy than I thought it would be, but I'll get over it.

By the way we have had one or two comments about the guy we dropped off at the hotel telling the police he had paid us. He was so drunk he couldn't even remember his hotel, we had spent 2 hours with him whilst he puked etc.. he was disorientated and in a complete mess. So much so that he even got us to take him back to the wrong hotel!!! When the police pounced on him he must have been freaked out and thought he was in trouble for not paying!! So not his fault he was just a vulnerable guy in a bit of a mess, he never intended us to get in trouble.

Keep us in your prayers

Coming down the mountain

I have just sent this out in email form to all our supporters but rather than a massive rewrite I thought I would post it here as well...

Sorry for it's length......

Urgent prayer
Brian has been charged with operating an illegal taxi! A drunk guy we took home told the police he had paid for our services, which just wasn’t true. This is very stressful and we are currently trying, with the help of a solicitor, to convince the local council that we do not charge for what we do. If the truth does not prevail we will end up having to pay a 6000 euro fine, or Brian will be asked to leave Ibiza and not allowed back for 5 years! We could really do with your prayers on this one.

The farm and the future
This is a time of transition for us as a community. Many of you were excited with us when we shared our news about the farm last year; we want to update you thoroughly on that, so the next bit is quite long!

After much deliberation, prayer and stress we have decided to leave the farm. There have been many contributing factors…..

Brian and Tracy have craved a sense of family space and feel that it is increasingly important as the boys enter adolescence. The layout of the farmhouse does not lend itself to this.

Bruce would much prefer to be close to San Antonio to facilitate developing relationships with people who live here all year round.

Helen will not be here for the winter; after faithfully honouring her initial 3 year commitment to the work here, she will being going on a 5/6 month furlough back to Germany. Please add your prayers to hers as she asks God to show her whether to return to Ibiza at the end of that time.

All of us need to live in a place that feels like home – although we have tried hard, we acknowledge that the farm has not been that for any of us.

We have recognized that we do not have enough people here to realize the dreams that we had of offering a place of refuge and respite in addition to the rest of our work. Although we have been able to use the farm as a place of hospitality, there is not anything that we have done here that we would not have been able to offer if we had been living as we did previously.

We have not found that living here enhances the work that we are already doing; in reality it could even detract with the additional work that is involved in looking after the property and basic amenities. ‘Living simply’ is hard work!

The lack of a telephone has been a major factor in making us feel disconnected from relationships with our family and friends who are not in Ibiza and this has been a big struggle.

Although the tranquillity and beauty of the location has been incredible, we all feel that friendships and connections with residents would be improved by being less remote. This is also relevant to Ellis and Dan as they are now old enough to begin to go out independently.

It has been a hard decision; we all felt so sure that God had brought us to this place and people got behind us and supported us financially. We have learned a lot and with the decision to move made, have started to focus on the future here again.

We have struggled with questions. Did we make a mistake in moving? Was there something that God wanted us to do here that we haven’t been able to do? But we are clear that we cannot continue to live here in the same way and have come to a place of peace with God about that.

What next?

Brian and Tracy particularly have struggled with a sense of guilt and responsibility for ‘walking away’ from the farm, especially with the awareness of people who dreamed with us and generously gave to help to make this happen. Those of you that we have already spoken to have been very gracious and affirming in your support for us and the work, which has been a huge relief. We are now looking for a family home.

Bruce will need to find accommodation. This will mean either living alone or lodging/house sharing with others.

Helen will drive her car back to Germany. Someone very generously blessed Brian and Tracy with a new vehicle this year and they have passed on their previous car to Bruce; this will mean an extra financial challenge for him in insurance and general maintenance costs.

We have come through a tough year, a little weary, but with a growing optimism for the work of 24-7 Ibiza. We feel there is more still to be done here in both summer and winter and have not arrived at a ‘plateau’.

When we decided to leave the farm a wise friend said this to us “Little about God's movements and directions in our lives are about the "ministry" itself and more about character and relational strength - that is the Long Term nature of God's dealings in the immediate time and space. The call of God to the farm was the call of God, you were obedient, but you may have thought it was about expanding the ministry when in reality it was about bringing your team together, readjusting the focus of your vision for Ibiza and showing you the sanctity of having a more private family life - a lot of idealism gets punctured in this process, some pain and tons of fruit will come from it.”


Thank you once again for your love, prayers and support.

The fine

aaaggggghhhhhhhhh

The british consulate appear unable to help me get out of my illegal taxi driver fine. It's not their fault.

I must admit I got home yesterday and for the first time in years I had a moment of thinking "I have had enough of this place, I'm out of here"

Can't seem to get this fine thing sorted got to go talk to solicitors tomorrow, don't know what to do. Please no answers from people who live in a country that has a sane legal system.

The pain is that if I don't pay the fine they can kick me out of the country for 5 years! Obviously I'm not going to pay it because it unjust.

Hopefully i will get this sorted soon then I can clear my head and get into some normal blogging.

Grace Slap

Where does grace end? and when does someone just need a slap?

Just had a guy come into the centre and asked to use the phone, I said "Yes as long as its to a UK landline" he said fine he just needed to phone his mum to get some funds transferred to get his flight sorted.

He sits right next to me and by the nature of his conversation I can tell he's phoning a UK mobile, which costs us a fair bit of money. I'm not even cross about the money it costs us. In fact weirdly I have just had to stop typing because a friend from Hush a local bar came in and made a donation which will more than cover the call.

It's more the being lied to, I know we all probably get lied to a lot, I just hate it when it's someone taking advantage. This guy was basically ripping me off.

I challenged him, he looked afronted then just got up and walked out!!! If I am honest I could have got up and slapped him, but I am glad I didn't. What Would Jesus Do?

Anyway I'm calming down, even as I write this... probably tiredness leads to low grace levels. He didn't deserve a slap he's just a blagger, bless him.