A New Year and a few changes

I hope this new year will be special for us all and that we expect to encounter God in a fresh, new way.  I'm not sure what this year will bring for me and the family but I am looking to see God anew and to see lives changed for the better because of God.
In the pages above the blog I will post my diary month by month (as best as I can) so that you can see where I hope to be over the month.  Ministers normally don't do this but I believe that I need to be more open and consequently, more vulnerable. My plan is to spend part of each week in each of our churches.  This is a departure for me as I like to respond to things as they happen and am not used to tying myself to any particular location or time so please bare with me as I make changes to my normal operation.
If you particularly want me to attend a meeting or event, then let me know.  I should already know about it, but there is always a chance it hasn't been noticed - so let me know.
I wanted to get round to visit people more than I have in December but the poor weather has stopped my plans here. Hopefully January will be kinder.
Take care and may we find the Trinity in all that we do.

Is there enough evidnece...? Part 2

A couple of posts ago I mentioned that I recently had a conversation with someone about mission and evangelism and that we were talking different languages.  To help me explain this difference I was reminded of a situation between a senior pastor and his three junior pastors (sorry it's an American story. When will we Brits come up with stories like this?).
The senior pastor of a number of large churches visited three of his junior pastors to make sure they were following the programme that had been set.  The agreement was that the churches would pursue a missional focus from now on.  The three junior pastors had been working hard to deconstruct their failing structures and to encourage the members to live lives as followers of Jesus and to share the Good News wherever they went.  This was no easy task and the congregation were finding great difficulty in accepting that it was their own responsibility to take Jesus out of the church not just the mission team's job.  The senior pastor was unimpressed and asked, '...but where are your programmes and projects?  All the other churches have projects happening.  Get some programmes happening or look for some other church to minister in!'.  This was an uncomfortable conversation because from all they had read, they believed they were turning around the tanker and (slowly) becoming missional.  Four months later the senior pastor called them in to his office.  The junior pastors were being obedient to a missional understanding and consequently they had no fancy project or programme.  Although people in the congregations were engaging with God more fully than before and starting 'works of God' in the work places of the non-churched it was not an official programme with budgets and rotas.  The three junior ministers were last seen clearing their desks.
Being missional is not and cannot be about programmes and big spends.  It's about sharing the encounters you have with the Father/Son/Holy Spirit and living out that relationship.  I felt sorry for the junior pastors.  If the senior pastor should ever read this blog, I would just like to point him to Alan Roxburgh's book, The Missional Leader.  In the introduction (p xv) he writes, 'Just as it's  [the church's] Lord is a mission-shaped God, so the community of God's people exists not for themselves but for the sake of God's work.  Mission is therefore not a programme or project some people in the church do from time to time; the church's very nature is to be God's missionary people.  We use the word missional to mark this big difference.'
For those people interested in church mission in the West, Roxburgh's  books are a good entry reader.