See you there!

Pete

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?

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!

“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).

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….

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.

We would love to see you there! For those of you on facebook, you can find more details here

We will keep you up to date with more details as they come to hand….

Unfortunately, the Ranch Hotel have canceled our booking on the 6th of September. The launch therefore is on hold and we will get back to you when we know when and where we are going to kick off. Sorry about that.

In the meantime we are looking for a new venue. If you know anywhere you think it would be good for a church to meet on Saturday night or Sunday then please send me a message:

Pete Hughes
0402 287 424
peter.hughes@somachurch.org.au

What we are looking for is:

- A place we can rent on an ongoing basis, somewhere loosely in the Ryde area.

- It can accommodate up to about 200 people

- Ideally it would have an extra room for kids ministry

- Ideally it would be where people normally are on a Sunday afternoon/ morning/ Saturday night/ afternoon. (We are flexible there)

- Ideally it would have a kitchenette.

To explore this I want to refer to an article by John P. Wilson, “From House Church to Home Groups,” Reformed Theological Review 63, no. 1 (April 2004): 1-15.  In this John outlines the history of the relationship between churches and smaller groups.

He beings by pointing out that the for the first three hundred years churches were house churches.  There is lots of evidence for this just search for ‘house’ or ‘home’ in the New Testament.  John also gives a brief survey of archeological evidence as well.  A lot of people tell me that this is the way things should be done, but with the reason “they did it that way, so should we”.  That argument does not hold water: they had slaves, so does that mean we should do the same?  John’s conclusion is right about the early church meeting in homes: “They had to- where else could they meet?” (p15).

The next stop on our historical journey was Methodism.  Here the Wesley’s borrowed from their pre-conversion life to using small group societies to meet together for the purpose of encouraging each other and studying the Bible.  But these groups appeared to decline soon after the first generation of methodists.

Moving forward to the late C20th.  As churches grew the need for intimate Bible teaching and community became more and more pronounced.  Small groups were see as the place where people relate.  Interestingly John cites Willow Creek as the ‘supreme example’.  This is interesting because Willow Creek, as I understand it, used there Sunday services as evangelistic services and so the small groups were where the Christians grew as Christians.

Finally we arrive at the C21st.  Here see a movement of churches that see the importance of smaller communities not just for Christian growth but also evangelism as a community.  The best examples of this are Crowded House in the UK (of Total Church fame) and Soma Communities in Tachoma in the US.  Here the emphasis is not on the Sunday gathering at all, but on the smaller communities called to love each other and reach out together.

So, where does that leave us?  Are small groups essential for church?  Theologically I would say no.  There have been centuries when churches have not had or needed small groups.

But practically I would like to say yes.  The reason comes from a good friend of mine.  (I call him my good friend because I keep ripping off his ideas and want him to keep sending them to me!) Tim Adney I think has resolved this with the mantra:

Love a few people a lot ways,
Love a lot of people a few ways.

It’s not about just about the teaching, but more about the love that people are capably expressing.  I wonder if churches often reach ceilings because the people just can’t love each other any more than they are.  Setting up expectations of loving the larger and smaller communities mean that people can say “I can do that, and still have some love left over for outsiders”.  I think what Crowded House and Soma Communities are doing is spot on,  it is not just about meeting for a few hours each week, but sharing your lives together with each other and the people you are trying to reach.  That’s why small groups are important.

I am sure that now people will remind me of the 100 other ways small groups are important…

Militant v Victorious church
The fourth dimensions we need to look at is that of Militant v Victorious church.  The Militant church is another way of saying the suffering church that struggles to deal with a world that does not understand it and if it does, wants to stand against it (John 12:25, 1 John 3:13).  The victorious church is the church that we will see at the end of time when Jesus brings all his own together.  A couple of pictures of this can be seen in Revelation 7:9 and Revelation 19-22.  Confusing these two can be very dangerous.

Overemphasizing the militant church can lead to withdrawal (sectarianism), or seeking only to transform society (social gospel), or having an entrenched sense of persecution (i.e. expecting persecution from every angle).  But this is not always the case.  Preaching the Gospel is God’s means of salvation and people can and do respond.

Overemphasizing the victorious church can lead to people living out what should be a victorious life here and now.  This may lead to what is known as a “over realized eschatology” meaning that people will expect what is promised in heaven now – blessing, immunity to illnesses and sin.

Organic v Organisational church

The last dimension is that of organic v organisational church.  There are the relationships that we have in church.  This is the organic church.  Then there are the structures that the church needs for people to love each other.  Because the church is loving it is to be ordered (1 Corinthians 14:40, Colossians 2:5).  We see this in action in the Jerusalem church in Acts.  In chapter 2 a community of at least 3,000 has come into being.  But by 5:1-11 we see the need for church discipline.  In 6:1-11 we see the need for new structures to be introduced so that the church can continue to be a loving community.
The key here is that the church organic needs to drive the church organisational.  Structures are there to help people love each other, not the other way around.  So we need to be prepared to sacrifice and change structures so that people can continue to love each other.

So, here are 5 dimensions of church?  Are there some that are over emphasized?  Are there some that are missing?  You tell me….