C'ville

Continuing the theme of "where I've been" during the silence:
This past weekend, Somer and I were in Charlottesville, VA with the rest of the World Harvest Emerging Generations team.
Friday and Saturday we went to a conference to hear Pete Greig founder of 24-7 Prayer.
A couple things for us as a team came out of the conference:
First, the challenge to make prayer central (not just a component, not just an after-thought like we're prone to) to a church planting work in London. Second, the reality that you don't have to be a leader in the church to have a powerful ministry. Another way to say that: God does extraordinary and powerful things through people who are not gifted/called to lead his church. We want to see God unleashing his power in and through young people in London - leaders or not. Sure, we want to see the next generation trained for leadership in his church, and that's important; but leadership is not to be equated with being a channel for God's power.
Aside from the conference, we had a great time together as a team. We prayed together (a lot), talked about our passions, our plans for the months before returning to London, went bowling, played Settlers of Catan (see photo) and somehow I got the name Stinking Bishop. I'm debating whether or not to rename this blog under that title.

Next to me and Somer are John and Kathy Hall, Pat and Jen Wallin, and Rebecca Williams. That's our team. We love you guys!

Utah

Appologies to those who have come to expect more frequent updates...I've been in and out of town a lot recently. Here's part of the reason why:

I went snowboarding/skiing with my two brothers in the Wasatch mountains in Utah. First time the three of us had done a trip like that together. We had a great time. I enjoyed getting to know my brothers better - when you're the oldest sibling, you kind of forget that when you move away from home, the rest of your family continues to grow and change. So even though I "know" my brothers, they've changed a lot since I left home. And even though we've seen each other loads in the past 6 years, this was the first time it was just us. So thanks guys. Thanks for setting this trip up, thanks for inviting me, and most of all, thanks for letting your older brother share life with you.
Of course, it didn't hurt that we were able to fly down the mountain (sometimes in untouched powder) and soak in the hot tubs while snow flurries fell on us.
I tried snowboarding - even took a lesson the first day. But two days of it was all this aging body (yes, I turned 27 yesterday) could take. But it was lots of fun, and I'll probably try it again. That first picture in the series is me. In the one of the three of us behind our goggles, I'm closest, and I think Mark is in the middle with Andrew at the far end.
The beauty of the place is amazing. One day I looked straight up and lost myself in a sky that was so smooth and consistent it looked almost solid. At times the contrast between sky and mountain was so sharp that there was no sense of depth - it looked like a flat painting, with the top-half Cobalt blue and the bottom-half pure white.

Beautiful Quote

In an e-mail to me, in the context of making plans that aren't set in stone:

"Remember: the Holy Spirit is a wild goose!"

Diversity in Community

I spoke at Sunday School at New Life last week on Diversity in Community. It was an extremely challenging topic, but one that I really enjoyed. I'll give you a few random thoughts, in no particular order of importance...mostly because that's about all I did with the class - it was more a facilitated discussion than a lecture.
I had us interact with a couple articles that analyzed the riots in Paris this past November. This article compares the model for diversity in France with the model in India; while this one argues that no model of diversity will work unless there is a sense of purpose within society. This second article especially intrigued me, because it connected with something else I was thinking - namely, that the church is united in its missional calling to be about God's purpose of reconciling the world to himself.
I had us look at Genesis 11, the story of the tower of Babel. Here, linguistic diversity is actually a blessing that enables humans to get back to their original purpose - to be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it. At the begining of the story, humans had all congregated in one place and didn't want to be scattered over the whole earth. We then looked at Genesis 12, where God tells Abram he is going to bless him, and that through him all nations on earth will be blessed. We can't talk about diversity with the local church without connecting it to God's purposes to bless all nations. We also looked at a few others - Genesis 7, Acts 6, and one of my favorites - Joshua 9, the story of how the Gibeonites brought diversity to Israel by basically stealing their way into the community.
In all of this, the overriding assumption is that it's the Holy Spirit that forms the church into a community - he is the one that unites us under one Lord, giving us His mission and making us His body. For those of you who are interested, that fits under the scheme of Kingdom-->Mission-->Church