A bit more about the International Church leaders' workshop
The journey there? Interminable! We travelled on a Corail train that passed through the Dordogne, the Limousin, then the Auvergne. The scenery was lovely, but we boarded the train at 10h30 in Bordeaux and got off at 19h00 I think, in Lyon. That makes 9 hours in the one train. There was a trolley service pushed by a very genial chap, but I had just two euros in my pocket after failing to find a cashpoint in the station at Bordeaux (I'm sure there used to be one.) I also had a banana! Every now and again they'd have to take the locomotive off one end of the train and put it on the other, and this gave opportunity for a 5 minute stop and a "petite cigarette" - but at one station around 5 o' clock we had a 15 minute break, so I dashed into the station buffet and bought a croque monsieur and some iced tea and paid with my card. It was a really nice croque, full of flaky wafer-cut ham. I arrived at the chateau at about 20h30 and they'd kept some dinner for me. Thanks!
The journey home was better because I found a cashpoint in Bourg-en-Bresse and I took a TGV up to Massey TGV (Paris) and then another down to Bordeaux. The ticket inspector said "You're going a long way round - oh yes, if you went direct you'd not get there till tomorrow." Exactly!
The workshop itself showed various things. One is the breadth of the Internaional Church leaders invited. We ranged across the evangelical spectrum from those who embrace post-modernism and the perspectives of Brian Maclaren over to the more conservative end. (I was not the most conservative person there. There was one guy more conservative than me!) We talked about various aspects of Christian service - balancing demands on your time and energy, and things like that.
For me there was a pivotal moment. It was when we were set the question "No holds barred, what would you really want to do?". People talked about seeing great cities change, etc.. I thought, "train men and start a chain reaction", so I said "Pick some men and train them", and Dan said, "You basing that one what someone else did?" or something like that, and just that remark encouaged me tremendously in the role I'm playing here.
See, how do you make disciples of all nations? Well, you take twelve men - twelve somewhat unpromising men - and you spend lots of time with them, then tell them to take over the world.
I know it's not as simple as that, but it suddenly occurred to me that both in the student work and in the church I have been given the brief of doing what I would dream of doing. Isn't that great?
The other things that I want to see happen will, I hope, follow on from that and be interweaved with that - church establishment, church planting, English language provision, whatever...
Another thing that became clearer for me, too, was the advantage for an international work of being a ministry of an indigenous church, if possible, to avoid the "American church in France" thing. I'm not American and American Christians are not Welsh. At a fairly basic level we tend not to understand each other sometimes. (I had to translate times into British for a friend "a quarter of four" - ça veut dire quoi, exactement? and when people start conceptualising they just lose me totally!) The common factor we should have is that we are Christians in France, so to key an English language work into a French church would seem to me to help avoid the separation into a cultural ghetto. This needs a bit more discussion with the powers that be and a bit more reflection on my part, too.
The journey home was better because I found a cashpoint in Bourg-en-Bresse and I took a TGV up to Massey TGV (Paris) and then another down to Bordeaux. The ticket inspector said "You're going a long way round - oh yes, if you went direct you'd not get there till tomorrow." Exactly!
The workshop itself showed various things. One is the breadth of the Internaional Church leaders invited. We ranged across the evangelical spectrum from those who embrace post-modernism and the perspectives of Brian Maclaren over to the more conservative end. (I was not the most conservative person there. There was one guy more conservative than me!) We talked about various aspects of Christian service - balancing demands on your time and energy, and things like that.
For me there was a pivotal moment. It was when we were set the question "No holds barred, what would you really want to do?". People talked about seeing great cities change, etc.. I thought, "train men and start a chain reaction", so I said "Pick some men and train them", and Dan said, "You basing that one what someone else did?" or something like that, and just that remark encouaged me tremendously in the role I'm playing here.
See, how do you make disciples of all nations? Well, you take twelve men - twelve somewhat unpromising men - and you spend lots of time with them, then tell them to take over the world.
I know it's not as simple as that, but it suddenly occurred to me that both in the student work and in the church I have been given the brief of doing what I would dream of doing. Isn't that great?
We need a small army of people to work in the Gironde in these unreached towns. Dan's wife said "They don't just appear. You gotta find 'em and prepare 'em". Thought as much...
The other things that I want to see happen will, I hope, follow on from that and be interweaved with that - church establishment, church planting, English language provision, whatever...
Another thing that became clearer for me, too, was the advantage for an international work of being a ministry of an indigenous church, if possible, to avoid the "American church in France" thing. I'm not American and American Christians are not Welsh. At a fairly basic level we tend not to understand each other sometimes. (I had to translate times into British for a friend "a quarter of four" - ça veut dire quoi, exactement? and when people start conceptualising they just lose me totally!) The common factor we should have is that we are Christians in France, so to key an English language work into a French church would seem to me to help avoid the separation into a cultural ghetto. This needs a bit more discussion with the powers that be and a bit more reflection on my part, too.
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