A Time to Mull

A comment on an earlier post: When do you 'mull'? Do you set aside time for mulling? Do you mull as you run/train etc? Do you mull as you go about the day? how important is mulling to you?


A good question! I would say that mulling is crucial for leaders - for those of us with an activist temperament it is important to find time to do some reflecting, as constant, unreflected upon action tends to result in exhaustion or stupidity. In extreme cases, it may even end up with one being too busy to marry one's girlfriend - and that is certainly something worth mulling over...

How does it work for me? Well, I tend to start the day with a fairly mulling type prayer time, as I wander around the park with the dogs. And running or cycling is definitely mulling time. I hardly ever plug in when I am exercising - neither to listen to music or sermons. I just don't like to have noise in my ears when I'm exercising outside as I find this an ideal time to plan and process and ponder, or - in other words - to mull. I like to observe the world I am cycling or running through, and often find that this is when I have my best thoughts, or crack a problem or difficult sermon I have been struggling with. Having an iPod on doesn't help me in this.

Sabbath time is also often mulling time. Monday is a work free day for me, but I am often mulling over the previous day and week. Doing this can have its downside - if I haven't been happy with Sunday my Monday musings might not be very energizing - but generally I think it helps get my mind and soul straightened out for the coming week.

I think one of the big challenges with mulling is that the activist type doesn't do it naturally, although they really need to do it, while the introvert can do it to an unhelpful extent. So, in either case its going to take some self-discipline to mull in a helpful way.

Hope those mulling musings help!

Unready Eddy?

Ed Miliband gave his first speech as leader of the Labour Party today. Leaders speeches are always worth noting, in order to note what can be noted in them about leadership. Miliband's speech was aimed at a number of audiences, including his own party, and the wider electorate who he wants to believe that he would make a good Prime Minister.

Whether or not Miliband found his target is rather beyond the brief of this blog, but - at the risk of risking a little bit of politics - in terms of the character of the speaker I'm not sure that someone who claims he has been too busy to marry his girlfriend or put his name on his child's birth certificate is ready to lead anything.

Someone that busy clearly needs to make some time in his schedule for what should be priorities in a leaders life, not taking on yet more commitments.

More Thoughts Provoked by Hunter

In To Change the World, Hunter caricatures different sections of the Church as falling into three paradigms of cultural engagement: ‘defensive against’, ‘relevance to’, and ‘purity from’. He then describes his preferred model of ‘faithful presence within’.

Mark Driscoll uses rather snappier terminology to describe the same observation:

1. Church as bomb shelter:  Culture is seen as dark and dangerous and something to hide from. This kind of church is not missional.

2. Church as mirror: This kind of church simply reflects the culture. It does not seek to redeem, but rather blesses what God doesn’t.

3. Church as parasite: This kind of church uses and enjoys what the culture provides, while at the same time condemning the culture, and failing to add anything positive to it.

4. City within the City: This is Jesus language. A bible-believing, Jesus-loving, mission-focused, people loving church, who live differently from the culture but not in an adversarial way.

To be honest, I think Driscoll does a better job of summing this up than Hunter, and his application is certainly easier to follow.

My own preferred way of expressing this – and the way we summarize our vision at Gateway – is with three words: Adventure, Purity and Compassion.

1. Adventure: This is basically the great commission – the mission imperative for the church. We are called to be people who act in faith, empowered by the Spirit, to make known to the world the wonders of God’s grace.

2. Purity: The church is to be a community of holiness, not slipping into the standards and practices the world considers as normal, but living in a way that truly honors Jesus and blesses other people.

3. Compassion: The church is to be a community that demonstrates the upside-down economics of the kingdom, in which the first are last the last are first; in which the poor and the weak are served and cherished. This applies first to the household of God itself, as we help one another, but then inevitably must extend to us being a blessing to the wider community.

This Sunday at Gateway it is our annual September rallying cry of Vision Sunday and I will once again be trying to articulate this vision of what it means to be the people of God. I believe it is a vision worth living and dying for!

Getting Organized

I have just finished reading one of this years most talked about and quoted Christian books, To Change the World, by James Davison Hunter. I will probably review this book at some point on my other blog, but at the moment am rather mulling over what I think of it. Parts of it are brilliant, while in other places it is very disappointing. Much mulling to be done... But in the meantime I may post a couple of thoughts here that reading it has provoked in me.

Here is the first one:

It is common in the church circles within which I move to hear people say, "The church is not an organization, but an organism." This is a snappy way of emphasizing the dynamic, organic, body-life dimension of the church, and as such is a helpful thing to say. However, to be healthy, an organism needs organization. A disordered organism is in fact a mutant. Organization is necessary from the smallest level upwards. Without cellular organization a body cannot function, and the same is true of the church.

Organization and 'being organic' should not be seen as in contrast with one another. In the church it is proper organization - leadership, church discipline, regularity of meeting together - that ensures the body can respond to the call of God and leading of the Spirit as it should.

We all know that churches can be over-managed. The dangers of 'corporate church' are very real. But that should not make us fearful of organization. I am a fan of keeping church simple, minimizing the number of programs that are run and keeping the main focus on the main thing, but organization is still necessary.

To try and dispense with all organization is to generate a mutant, and mutants are neither healthy nor long-lived.

Are You an Ordinary Pastor?!

This looks interesting - "The ordinary pastors project"

The Pastor as Generalist

This week the latest rankings of the worlds top 200 universities came out. This was quite gratifying personally, as the two institutions I hold degrees from scored pretty well (Newcastle at 140 and King's College London at 21). What was most interesting though was that a British university - Cambridge - has for the first time knocked Harvard off the No. 1 spot. British universities score surprisingly well, taking four of the top seven spots.

A significant weighting in how these kind of rankings are scored is the quality of research a university generates. Serious research begins at the PhD level, and this is the point at which real specialization takes place. By way of contrast to this, Carl Trueman (who is always worth reading) over at the Ref21 blog is posting a series about why pastors should be generalists rather than specialists. On the same blog, Justyn Taylor links to Matt Might's Illustrated Guide to a PhD, which is very amusing, at least for someone like me who started a PhD and then dropped out of the program!

Trueman writes:

Titus 1:8, for example, says that an elder should 'hold fast to the trustworthy word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it.'   it is important to note, of course, that this is only one quality noted by Paul at this point: the others are all moral qualities, something of which we should not lose sight and which, if you like, indicate that the elder is to be that greatest of generalists in the broadest sense -- 'an all round good bloke,' as the English would say.

And this is something that isn't necessarily learnt at university - not even Harvard or Cambridge!