Soma Church Blog

Recently, I have been struck by a couple of great one liners.  These have been phrases that capture a complex idea in a single line like we see in the book of proverbs.  Thought I would share some with you that have helped me as a pastor helping people to find out about Jesus.

Speak where people are listening

I heard this during a Hillsong talk and it has been wondering around my mind for sometime.  The church background I am in tends to look for where people are, as opposed to where people are listening.  Where are people listening these days?  Not at work, not at the front door.  But on TV, on the internet (which is cheap!) and around tables at cafes and homes.  This is where we need to talk with people about Jesus.

Necessity is the mother of innovation

OK, so this is not a new one.  But what I was challenged by is creating the necessity.  If you are a church leader like me and you ask for ideas on an event (say how do we get 50 people to a night of talking about Jesus) and keep hearing the same ideas again and again, see what happens when you add an 0 to the number.  What works for 50 does not work for 500!  Create the necessity to innovate.

A Good Idea beats Good Production

I heard this from Scott Wilson who leads 2100 productions in the US.  The point he was making was that a good story or idea can make a better film than one with good production, etc.  Pixar, I think, are the kings here.  They have great production, but the ideas are what makes the films great.  A good idea can be better than just throwing money, people or other resources at it.

A Half Truth is more Dangerous than a Lie

This is a line from a talk by D. M. Lloyd-Jones.  His point is that people who are religious are harder to convince, humanly speaking, of the Gospel than people who are not.   This, he explains, is why sinners and tax collectors fall at the feet of Jesus and religious leaders want to question him on everything.  I come across a lot of people in Sydney, who are happy to take the values and ideas of Christianity and have nothing to do with God.  This means that “low lying fruit” people who are close to Christianity in ideas, may not be the easiest of people to convince of the Gospel.  Perhaps going out to the person who is so different is a better way of moving forward.

I am sure there others…any suggestions?

I recently crossed over to a completely alien culture.  I didn’t go overseas, just to a live gig.  I have been to live gigs before, but I had not realized for how long: there was no drunkenness, violence or smoking.  People were there to actually listen to the music.  So this was a real step into another culture for me.

As I looked around I tried to work out “what is it that this culture values?”.  For example if I were to walk into a nightclub (which I haven’t for a while so this may be a case of walking into a nightclub in the 90s) what is valued is ascetic appearance.   So girls are dressed up (or not as the case may be), guys are looking for the girl that looks good, etc.  At this gig, what was valued was not as apparent as a nightclub, there were all sorts of people from all sorts of ages and backgrounds.  It obviously was not physical.

After talking with a couple of friends I knew, I started talking with their friends that I didn’t know.  It did not take long before I worked out that what was valued in this culture as talent.  The band we were here to see (whom I had not seen before) were extremely talented.  I was told this several times before they came on and impressed as I watched them.  What really struck me was the reaction of the audience to the band.  Many of the songs were quite dark and you really felt that the songwriters were bearing their intimate soul to the audience with all of their pain and hurt from broken relationships and unrequited love.  While at the end of some of the songs I wanted to go up and give them a hug, the rest of the audience were clapping and cheering.  They were not clapping and cheering at the pain, but the talent it took to be able to express it.

Now, the bottom line is that I don’t have that sort of talent.  Most of the people who were there had some kind of talent like this or at least were aspiring to.  And this leaves me with the question of how well can I fit into this culture?  Here are some thoughts:

If you have the thing that the culture values use it, as long as it does not lead you or others to sin.  if you have this sort of talent then use it to in the culture.  I have been mediating on the phrase “you need to speak where people are listening”, and if people are willing to listen because you share a value then use it.  Sport is another value that was used famously by Howard Guiness, C. T. Studd and Eric Liddell at the beginning of the C20th.  More recently, I remember hearing from a man who used to work in an urban gardening collective, and he was a good gardener.  He was asked about why he was involved and he simply responded that God was a wonderful creator and he loved to help God in the garden.  The person had never heard anything like this before and my friend went on to share other things of the Gospel with them.

However there are limits.  If you are a girl who has been blessed with good looks this does not mean you should frequent nightclubs dressed in as skimpy clothes as you can.

But God has sometimes given us gifts to use outside the church to build bridges (I don’t think Paul ever made tents in church, but used his abilities to support the church and talk with others – Acts 18:3)

But what if you don’t have what the culture values?  I am not sure, what to do but here are some suggestions:

• Look for a culture that values the things that you have been gifted in.  Bill Hybels famously spends his summers sailing with non-Christians because he can sail and loves to sail, but doesn’t spend summer at rock concerts.
• Learn to appreciate the culture.  What things about this culture please God?  And learn to speak about it.  Most of the conversations I had were asking people about the band and what they liked about them and other bands that were similar.  People were very happy to talk about what they were passionate about.  I probably will not get the same opportunity to ‘speak’ as someone who is valued in the culture, but the opportunities will still be there.
• Pray that God would give you the gifts to be appreciated in the culture.  God can give people all sorts of gifts.
• But most importantly, while having something that is valued in the culture is important, learning to love the people in the culture is more so.  Looking for opportunities to love and serve those in the culture is a much better witness than simply being another one like them.

I am sure there are other suggestions….add them to the comments list

This morning the Sydney Morning Herald published an extract from a speech from Joe Hockey.  It is always interesting when an Australian politician speaks on religion.  I think it signals that he or she is positioning to make a play for a leadership move.   This essay is definitely in that vein, a thinly veiled reaching out to all people of Australia:

The God of my faith is not full of revenge, as the Old Testament would suggest with a literal interpretation. The God of my faith does not cause earthquakes or tsunamis as acts of retribution.

As the Pope identified in his recent encyclical Caritas in Veritate (Love in Truth): “Love is God’s greatest gift to humanity, it is his promise and our hope.”

It is not a loving God who wilfully inflicts pain and suffering. No God of any mainstream religion would do that if God’s love is real.

This is the kind of rhetoric that the public wants to hear.

He is able to identify with a number of religious backgrounds: Jewish, Muslim and Christian, but that is through his Dad.

My father migrated to Australia from the Middle East – the son of an Armenian father and a Palestinian mother. While Dad was a Christian growing up in Jerusalem, his closest childhood friend was a Jewish girl. Dad speaks fluent Hebrew and Arabic. He taught me tolerance. He is very ecumenical for someone who lost his home to a war that was based on faith. In Australia he found a country that tolerated diversity.

Again this is the kind of thing that the public wants in a leader.

Hockey has attempted to distance himself from any extremism whether that be “Muslims…who bomb buildings” or the new atheists who “go further than simply trying to pick holes in a literal or historical interpretation of the Bible”.  And that the central message of all religions the Golden rule:

Religion asks of us to become better people – to choose a life of giving and compassion. This “Golden Rule” is a thread that runs from Confucius to Christianity, from Buddhism to Islam.

For me this is the essential message of all faiths – that we should love our neighbour as we love ourselves. As Muhammad spoke in his final sermon, “Hurt no one so that no one may hurt you.” Or as the great Jewish Rabbi Hillel put it: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.”

This is not religion in the theological sense.  This is humanism as his supporters in the comments section point out and my question to Joe would be “Do you pray?” if so to what end?

Again this is the kind of thing that the public wants in a leader.

Unless you are an evangelical like me.

After looking at the Scopes trial where some Christians lost a legal case based on a literal interpretation of Scripture, he lumps all evangelicals in the same box as the extremists he wants to distance himself from.

There are some who will with great conviction, even to this day, argue that all of these things were so. In fact a number of fast-growing evangelical Christian churches in Australia take a literalist approach to the scriptures.

I have a literalist approach to Scripture.  But this in the context of a Biblical theological context and an understanding of reading the Bible in its genre.  Hockey has missed this completely.

But what I really want in a leader is someone who has the guts to say “this is what I believe and here is why”.  Hockey has just given us a bunch of stuff he thinks we want to hear, in doing so has offended me, and I suspect a number of others as well.

I have been reading a book on Pastoral Ministry called Five smooth stones for pastoral work (Eugene Peterson, Grand Rapids, Michigan: W.B. Eerdmans, 1992).  He makes the interesting connection between sex and prayer.  For him they are two sides of the same coin.  In fact the first chapter opens with meeting a woman who he will counsel, in their first session she says “Well, I guess you want to know all about my sex life” to which he responds “What I would really be interested in finding out about is your prayer life” (She didn’t know what to say and so he heard about her sex life instead). pp23-24.

What’s the connection?  Connection.  Sex and prayer both involve intimacy.  Peterson’s point is that intimacy is what we are all really looking for.  Which is why we have a sex obsessed society.  We are looking for that opportunity to be intimate and be able to relate on a deep level, or as Robbie Williams puts it:

All we’ve ever wanted
Is to look good naked
Hope that someone can take it
God save me rejection
From my reflection,
I want perfection
(Bodies from Reality Killed the Video Star)

Sex is not the only place that this intimacy can be found.  Intimacy with your creator can also be found.  This is what prayer is, being able to share the most intimate details of your life, feelings, hopes, dreams, fears, etc. with the one who already knows it.  God.

Early in the new year we are planning to start our small group ministries.  One of the things about Soma is that we want our small groups not just to be Bible studies but communities.  And communities which are able to reach out and make relational bridges and reach out and serve the community.  While we only have one Gathering, there will be multiple Gospel Communities.  But the question is how do we split them up?

This is more complicated by the idea that we want Gospel Communities to go beyond the community of Soma.  The problem is that the things that link and unify me with other people in Soma are not the same as the the things that link and unify me with other people.  And vice versa.

So the problem is there is a gap between “my friends” and “their friends”.  Which means my friends and I prefer to do somethings that others and their friends do.  So how do we all spend time together?  What do we have in common?

Here are some solutions as I see them:

1. We focus on a new set of people.  This is something that The Crowded House have done.  So each Gospel Community finds a way of serving the community in doing something like teaching English as a Second Language.  This establishes relationships with the people we are both serving with and serving.  That is we look for something else that unifies us.  It mean that we will have to find other ways of linking up with friends.
2. We set our Gospel communities around group likes and dislikes, age, etc.  This could be hard as to how this works and the Gospel communities would end up being quite small, and others possibly more popular than some, as well as it being very easy for people to feel like they don’t fit in because there is not a group for ‘them’.  But it means if the people in the Gospel community have more in common, and so likewise the people they are in contact with.
3. We set up Gospel communities around geography, i.e. where people live, and ask people to adjust as much as they can.  This has the advantage of showing the world that what we have in common is community and this is a community that anyone can join, i.e. this is what the Gospel can do.  But it can also lead to friction within the Gospel Community.

The bottom line is what is the unifying that that Gospel Communities will have, apart from the Gospel?

Friendships can be great, exciting, necessary and tricky.  Friendships between Christians and non-Christians can be especially tricky?  Why?

What makes a friend?  Being connected to them on facebook?  Here are some things I think make a friendship:

• You tend to have a few close friends.  You might know a lot of people, but only a few are friends.
• You tend to have friends that you have things in common with.
• You generally want to spend time with your friends.  (I know this is obvious, but sometimes it is the sign that someone thinks you are their friend because they want to spend time with you, but it is not reciprocated…awkward huh?).
• You have a sense of equality with your friends.  Which is why it is hard to be friends with your boss.
• You tend to have friends who see the world in a similar way to you.

Or as one person put it: “A friend is a trustworthy peer, whom we mutually chose to lovingly live with to seek our mutual good”

Sometimes though friendship can be put to the test when you don’t have everything in common, especially the way you see the world.  It is hard to be friends with someone who sees the world as something to be exploited when you see the world as something that needs to be looked after, or being friend with a racist when you think everyone has a right to live in the world.

This is where Christian/ non-Christian friendships can be difficult.   There are some core values that Christians have because they are Christian and non-Christians have because they are not.  There will also be some core values that they share because people tend to have somethings in common.

Here is where things might get a bit touchy if you are reading this as a non-Christian.  I can’t work out another, less awkward way of putting this, so until someone else helps me here is the honest truth. Christians will tend to go to other Christians for advice or counsel, because they are seeking counsel from people who share their worldview.  That might make you feel like you are a second rate friend.  But you need to understand that part of friendship is having a similar worldview and you may not.

What do we do?

1. Realise that we have differences and that is OK.

2. To be friends we need to be looking for things that we have in common.  No-one is going to agree 100% with someone else.  But where you can seek counsel from one-another about the things you have in common.

3. Christians need to realise that they are called to love more than their friends and that means loving people you might be friends with.

““43 You have heard that it was said, Love your neighbor and hate your enemy. 44 But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 so that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. For He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. 46 For if you love those who love you, what reward will you have? Don’t even the tax collectors do the same? 47 And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing out of the ordinary? Don’t even the Gentiles do the same?” (Matthew 5:43-47 HCSB)

4.  non-Christians, we would like you to help us do this.  We want to be friends with people who aren’t Christian.  We do want to share with you about our view of the world and Jesus, not because we will get brownie points (Jesus has given us all we need on that front) and not because we think we are better than you (though I can understand that might be how you feel) but because we simply think that being a Christian is the best thing in the world.

Questions to ponder:

• Who are your friends?
• Who do receive counsel from?
• Who do you like hanging out with?
• How do you be friends with someone who has a completely different worldview to you?

Here are a few notes on where we are and, God willing, where we are going…

Where we have been?

We started meeting in March.  We spent a lot of time talking to people who did not go to church about why it was that they didn’t.   We have worked on who we are and what we are on about and how we wanted to make sure that anyone was welcomed at Soma.  We also worked out our name!  We worked out a members agreement and course so new people could join us and understand what we are on about.

We also worked on getting to know each other more so we could be a community.  This included a weekend away where we just hung out with each other.

One of the things we wanted to have is a different culture to other churches and this included music.  Our music team has done a great job at this and you can find out more about it here.

We also wanted to make the most our technology.  Our tech team has worked on a new website and an online community called Church Community Builder.

We then worked on making ourselves known to the world.  We tried a lot of different things: postcards, letterbox drops, facebook, press releases, t-shirts, twitter, but the big surprise was the success of Google Adwords.

Not all things went smoothly.  We were due to start at the Ranch hotel, but there were some problems with the booking and so ended up at the Community Room of Macquarie Shopping Centre.

September -December ‘09: Get the Groove on

20th Sept saw our Gatherings up and running and this is exciting.  But what now?

Firstly, we need to work on the Gatherings and get a groove of momentum happening.  We are doing a lot of things as well as we can, but we need to work on things like: how can we welcome people without them feeling like target?  How can we make the room ‘feel’ better?  How can we help the kids to know and serve Jesus better?  (Hopefully we will have Soma Kids up and running this week).

But there are lots to look forward to in the weeks to come at the Gatherings:  continuing the “Life is all about Jesus” series, looking at Colossians, hearing some great testimonies, getting some training in foundations of the Christian life, having a 1552 prayer book service to celebrate Reformation Sunday, Soma on the Water – a church harbour cruise during Summerfest, etc.

Secondly we need to keep welcoming new people into the community.  We need new members and while we need people to be passionate about what we doing we need to pray that we will find people who are passionate about:

• People to drive our prayer ministry
• People to do sound and tech at our Gatherings
• People to help with the video production side of things
• People to drive Summerfest and Easterfest
• People to link us with other ministries like Compassion and missionaries.

Thirdly we need to prepare for Gospel Communities to start in the new year.  We need to do two things for this: one is to keep hanging out together.  We need to have some fun (and that’s an order!).  The other thing we need to do is get some training and help in this because it will take some work to get it right for the Australian context.  I am hoping to get a guy from The Crowded House to help us in December and keep talking with Soma in the US.

Finally we will partner wtih our good friends at North Ryde Anglican Church to do Summerfest, a mission over December starting with an NTE team.  Being a church in a shopping centre should be interesting for the Christmas season!  We also need to work on some content for the website including more video, talks online and even an online book “Has God Failed?” looking at a Christian response to disasters, poverty, injustice, pluralism and the cross.  We will also run a course based on the Jesus All about Life ads that will be coming out soon.

January – Easter ‘10: Get the Rut Out!

In 2010 I think the danger is the “we can do this church thing” thinking.  We need to be careful that our groove does not turn into a rut.

While the Gatherings will keep going, Pete will take a break from preaching over January to deal with No. 3 in the family and other preachers will come in and deal with 1 John, which is the members choice.

The focus will then be getting our Gospel Communities up and running and dealing with the teething problems a new ministry like this will have.

But there is no letting up on mission.  In March we have booked Greg Clarke and John Dickson to run a movie night to present their “Life of Jesus” as others have done.

And then Easter gives us a great opportunity to talk with people about Jesus and we need to take that opportunity.

After that….

The longer term plan is that the more members we have the sooner we will be able to establish ourselves as being financially viable.  My guess is that once we have about 50 members we will be able to be stand alone without the help of our brothers and sisters at North Ryde Anglican and allow them to go on to plant the next church.

Once we do this we will be free to establish new ministries like one to look at how you can think Christianly about your work, whatever it is, as well as be a godly evangelist and more Gospel Communities.

To grow we will need more staff and the priority will be to find and employ leaders for each of the four teams, as well as setting up Soma Music and Soma Community as separate trusts.  At some point we will need to find a new venue to keep the Gathering together especially if the kids ministry grows.

After that….well there are thousands of people who could join us in the area so let’s see what God does with us!

Recently I was sent a comment:

“Through the ages man appears to have a great capacity to forget what God understands to be His Church.  Are we called to “do” church or are we called to “be” part of the Church (Christ’s Bride)?”

I thought I would respond with a post rather than a reply because this is a very common question these days.  Bridget Willard made a similar comment:

“Church isn’t where you meet. Church isn’t a building. Church is what you do. Church is who you are. Church is the human outworking of the person of Jesus Christ. Let’s not go to Church, let’s be the Church.”

So, let me respond.  Firstly, I think the two phrases can be difficult to understand.  What means to ‘be the church’ can be different to different people, so if I don’t sound the same as you on something it could be we have different understandings of the phrases.  Secondly, I think this is a false dichotomy: being or doing.  Church must be both.

On one hand you need to ‘be’ the church, without which you don’t understand salvation.  God has sent Jesus to save us from things to to things.  He has sent Jesus to save us from our sins, death and the devil.  But he has also saved us to a life of freedom and more importantly to save us into a new people, a new community (1 Peter 2:9-10).  Being the church is the goal of salvation.

But because we ‘are’ the church, we ‘do’ church.  One of the ways that church is talked about is as a body (1 Cor 12:12) and it needs to be run under the principle of love (1 Cor 13) and so the gifts that Jesus gives different people are for the building up of the church (1 Cor 14:26) especially as each member of the church does it’s part (Eph 4:16).  Hence church needs to be ‘done’ because God has given us different gifts so we must lovingly rely on each other to get to heaven.

Or let me use another argument.  Most people think the word church means ‘gathering’.  But it means so much more than that.  It is used to translate the Greek word ‘ekklesia’.  This is one of the words that the first Christians could have used to call their gatherings, another being synagogue.  (We think one is Jewish and the other is Christian, but this is something that happened over time.  Christians could have called themselves Christian synagogues and it would have been right and easier for them to do so).  So what would the average person in C1st heard when they heard of a Christian ekklesia?  Coenen(1) explains:

“ekklesia..(d)enotes in the usage of antiquity the popular assembly of the competent full citizens of the polis, city”

“In contrast to ekklesia, which had become a technical term by an early date, the other word which is important to us in this context, synangoge, exhibited from the first a wide breadth of usage.  It denoted quite generally, in the translated sense, the collecting or bringing together of things (books, letters, possessions, fruit at harvest time) and also of troops and people.”

“Thus ekklesia, centuries before the translation of the OT and the time of the NT, was clearly characterized as a political phenomenon, repeated according to certain rules and within a certain framework.”

In short a synagogue was a gathering, but an ekklesia was a political gathering where the citizens of a city would gather to enjoy their citizenship and fulfill their responsibilities of that citizenship.  Not all the people living in a town could be a citizen, only the free and only the men.  To be a citizen and not attend an ekklesia is, for the ancient world, bizarre and would only happen for good reason.

In a Christian ekklesia, the citizenship is open to all who are free in Christ, not just the men or legally free.  To be a citizen of heaven is a gift.  But it is the place where the Kingdom of God is expressed as the citizens of heaven (Phil 3:20) come and enjoy their citizenship and fulfill their responsibilities.  They ‘do’ church.

So, what does all this mean?  Because we are church we do church.  Putting a dichotomy between them profoundly misunderstands what ‘church’ is.

(1) L. Coenen, “Church,” in New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology and Exegesis, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 1986), 291.  See also P. T. O’Brien, “The Church as a Heavenly and Eschatological Entity,” in Church in the Bible and the World (Exeter: Paternoster Press, 1987), 90.  Also refer to G R. Stanton, Athenian Politics c. 800-500 BC, A Sourcebook (London and New York: Routledge, 1990).

Well, we are due do kick off THIS SUNDAY!!!!  3pm at the Mac Centre, check out this link for the details.

In the meantime we thought we would run a competition.  Over the last few months we have been asked several hundred times (at least that is what it feels like) as to what Soma stands for.  It doesn’t stand for anything, it is the Greek New Testament word for the word body.  The New Testament uses the ‘body of Christ’ as one of the ways to speak of the church.

But we thought we would have  some fun and hear what you think Soma stands for.  There will be a prize for the person who has the wittiest comment and comes to the launch.

Here are some to kick you off:

Soma: Sick Of Many Acronyms

Soma: Solid, Oh Man of Awesomeness

Soma: Signs of Maximum Acrimoniousness

I am sure you can do better, let the fun begin….

I have had a lot of people ask me what is Soma?  Is it a church or a youth group or what?

Soma is Christian

This is the first thing you need to know about Soma.  We believe that Jesus is building his church (Matthew 16:18).  The name Soma is the Greek word for body, body is one of the metaphors that BIble uses to describe the church.  If the church is the body, then Christ is the head (Colossians 1:18).  This means Soma is all about Jesus: showing how great he is, seeking to please him, to listen to him through the Bible.  So, yes Soma is a church and as a church we are unashamedly about Jesus.

Soma is a community

The second thing is that Soma is a community.  A community where potentially anyone who wants to be a part of what we are on about can join.  This is important for you to know if you are one of those people who think that church is a ‘Sunday thing’.

To help understand the community we have a formal membership process.  We have two structures: Gatherings and Gospel Communities that enable people to love the community in different ways.  In Gatherings we love lots of people a few ways and in the Gospel Communities we love a few people a lot of ways.

Soma is a mission.

Soma is also a mission.  We think that Jesus is the best thing in the world and we want everyone to know about it.  This effects the way we do things.  We want people to feel as comfortable as we can so the can get to know Jesus, so there will be a number of things we will do differently: music, where we meet, where people can ask questions, etc.