Previous Post – A Day with 100 Huntley Street

This year marks an interesting milestone for, in which I have spent more than half my life serving as a missionary, the last 10 years of which have been spent here in Winnipeg’s inner city West End.  While all were good and formational, it has been the last three years of pastoring Little Flowers Community that have been most impacting in my life, both in its many joys, but also its painful realities.  We dreamed of an alternative community that would share life and mission within the context of our neighbourhood.  We stumbled through following Jesus in our brokenness and have been humbled, both by His grace for our weakness and the miracles He has worked among us.  Never in my life have I been more sure of my vocation.

However, there is another truth that is abundantly clear: following this way of life is unusual, even in the church, creating many challenges and tensions that seem to threaten the sustainability of what we are doing.  Please understand that I am not suggesting we are somehow special, better or more “Jesusy” than other Christians.  Rather, the obedience to which we are called into is experimental, making our community more anomalous than expected.  This has resulted in a somewhat challenging dynamic.  On the one hand, we have so much support and encouragement from other communities and leaders, while on the other, our uniqueness makes it difficult for people to provide on-the-ground support/leadership, advice and adequate resourcing.

This has left me in a difficult place of late, made more pronounced by the (welcomed & amazing) demands of being a new dad.  Again, I know that this is my calling, that it is the truest community I have ever participated in and that we are discovering beautiful, though demanding ways to live Christ together.  I’m also in the unique position of being bi-vocational in such a way that I can still do full-time ministry.  However, as it is, I am not sure how sustainable it is.  Our community needs diversity in age and life experience, as the imbalance in our commonality is becoming a limitation.  Further, rather than one full-time (though unpaid) pastor, we need 2 or 3 people working less hours, but together with a diversity of giftings.  Typically, such a challenge could be resolved through funding, but such an option is not currently available to us.

Over the past 10 years, I have seen many amazing missional communities- ones that I still aspire to emulate in many ways- that did not last more than 3 or 4 years.  Some can point to clear causes for the dissolution, while others wonder if some kind of intervention from the larger Body of Christ might have been necessary.  As the same questions, challenges and limitation are now facing Little Flowers Community, I cannot help but become concerned.  And so, as this internet community has always been incredibly supportive and creative, I am coming to you:

What do you say to our challenges?  What might be some solutions?

Feel free to ask any question and be free to be frank with your comments.  I look forward to hearing what you think.

Previous Post – New Comment Policy

Hey everyone!  As I am sure you know, while I am at home writing this, my wife is in Ethiopia picking up our son, Micah.  She took him into custody a few hours ago and will be bringing him home on the 15th.  I am so excited.  Please pray that the travel visa arrives on time.

It is also my greatest pleasure to share with you first family photo (taken on our last trip to Ethiopia).  Introducing Micah James Nigatu Arpin-Ricci:

Previous Post – Much Ado About Judgment

As many of you have already heard from my Facebook or Twitter stream (or perhaps from watching the news), our friend & community member Michelle Funderburg had to fly home to Denver to be with her family to face the tragedy of two deaths.  For reasons unknown, her 12 year old cousin shot and killed his parents, then attempted to kill his two younger siblings.  The details are horrific, made more shocking by the fact that the boy had never shown any signs of such violence or anger before.

Please keep them in your prayers.  Thankfully, they are part of a large and supportive family who doing their best to bring the surviving children through this, as well as doing what is best for the boy who committed the acts.  This will be a journey of many years, so your prayers are very appreciated.

With Michelle’s permission, I also wrote a reflection on these events called “While the Blood Dries: Loving Our Enemies” at Tony Campolo’s Red Letter Christian site.  Stop by there and share your thoughts in the comment section.

Finally, as you can imagine, an emergency ticket to fly home to Denver without notice is rather costly.  Most airlines have discontinued their emergency rates, so it has cost Michelle a great deal of money.  As a missionary relying on support, this was a huge hit to her financially.  If you would like to help out, please feel free to contact me.

Previous Post – Romanticism, Familiarity & Faith

Several years ago, after living through a tragic miscarriage, the unexpected abortion of child we had planned to privately adopt & several other failed attempts to start our family, Kim & I made the decision to pursue adoption from Ethiopia.  At the time, the time line was not expected to be more than a couple of years tops.  That was five years ago.

The past five year have been filled with anticipation, impatience, longing and joy.  Then, just before this last Christmas we received the call from the agency.  We were going to be adopting a beautiful 3 year old boy- Micah James Nigatu Arpin-Ricci.  After so long, the relatively brief wait until we bring him home (hopefully around November) seems an eternity.  We long to share our life with this precious gift of God.

This rapidly approaching event, however, also brings with it the many challenges.  The biggest we face is the cost.  As long term missionaries, we’ve live our lives very simply, managing to live on far less than the average couple, finding ways to subsidize our missions support whenever possible.  The expense of adopting is significant for most people- for us it seemed impossible.  However, to start our family, we would have paid double!

So many of you have already been very generous in your faithful financial support of us as missionaries (which also works to our child’s long term well being).  And many of you have also stood with us in our adoption fund raising endeavors.  We would like to ask you to stand with us again, as we now face some significant costs to finish this journey and bring our little boy home.

Please visit Adopt-a-Pixel to donate directly to this journey.  The remaining costs represent more than I receive in missions support in a single years, so it feels daunting.  However, we know that God provides, often through amazing people like you.

Thanks so much!

Previous Post – Mona Lisa & Jesus

As some of you know, while I’ve spent most of my life in Canada, I am actually a dual citizen, making me both Canadian and American.  I am married to an Australian and am adopting an Ethiopian, so I love a lot of countries!  However, I do have a soft spot for Canada, eh?  Which is why I love this video (2nd only to this one):

For those not from Canada, the goofy sketches at the beginning & end of the video are spoofs of these well known Canadian Heritage commercials.  You can view the first one here.  The second one is as follows:

Previous Post – Community

Check out my new “About Jamie” page.  I came across About.me via Jordon Cooper this morning.  Like Jordon, I wouldn’t generally go for something like this, but I find it really clean, simple and practical.  With all my writing of late, I’ve been get requests for this information time and again.  I like it!

Previous Post – A Prophetic (Franciscan) Challenge

Recently, Jason Coker began posting a series of very raw and honest articles about their decision to shut down their missional church plant, Ikon (see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 & Part 4).  In these incredibly vulnerable posts, Jason explores the whole story of how his community came to be, the struggles throughout, the reasons for shutting it down and even his own personal insecurities and fears throughout.  As hard as it is to read about the end of a great community, these posts are also a gift to the rest of it.

As I shared with Jason, the parallels between Ikon and Little Flowers Community are many, even (and perhaps especially) in respect to the challenges that ultimately led to their decision to shut down.  To be perfectly honest, these realities scare the hell out of me.  People have tried to assure me not to worry too much about it, but I have deep sense that our community is facing some of the same challenges.

What scares me more is that this story- the story that I identify with in Jason’s experience- is one that I am seeing played out again and again in small missional communities.  I believe in the values we hold and even more so in the communities we are a part of.  However, I also know that survive, to be sustainable will require some significant changes.

The fact is this: the values and practices of being missional are much harder and less efficient than most church planting/growth models.  There is intentional commitment to resist choices that could quickly “solve” many of the immediate problems, yet compromise the core convictions and “DNA” of the community in the long run.  Some will suggest that these convictions are thus proven idealistic and untenable.  Perhaps they are right, but I am far from convinced.

Yet such conviction- as strong as it may be- does not help the difficult realities that we face.  Yes, I will trust God and be faithful.  I know that God provides and is faithful.  However, I also know that God invites us into costly lives of sacrificial service.  I also know that often His children suffer because of others choices.

I am discouraged, but hopeful.  Tired, but stubborn.  I deeply believe in what God is doing in our little community.  We are seeking to be obedient to God in community that has all too often been ignored or abandoned by the church.  We are building a family that desires to be faithful to God and one another without some of the basic resources that most churches take for granted.  We are imperfect, broken and messy, but we are seeing His grace revealed in ways we could not have elsewhere.

I am not sure if such a blog post is effective or helpful, but I know I need to say this:  We need a faithful few who are willing to join us- join us in our faith community and in our local neighbourhood- and share the joys and burdens of building God’s kingdom here. I don’t know who those people will be, but I want to ask you to genuinely consider what part you might play.

Previous Post – Missional Living & Idealism

Father’s Day.  Today is a day for which I have very mixed feelings.  On the one hand, I have been blessed to have a wonderful, loving and supporting father.  My brother, a new father himself, is clearly devoted to my nephew in every way.  Even my father-in-law is an exemplary Dad who has always supported his kids (and me) in every way (though as an Australian, he won’t be celebrating Father’s Day for several months yet).  In no way do I want to take away from the honour these men and others deserve.

However, I have to admit that this day leaves me unsettled.  Of course, part of that is selfish.  I so desperately want to be a father myself, yet face hurdle after hurdle in seeing that happen.  I see people in our community who manage to have children so easily, all too often unexpected and even unwanted.  Most of all I remember the loss of our first child during pregnancy, imagining what she or he might look like today.  I grieve that, because they did not survive to birth that we are often expected to act as though they never were- nameless, forgotten.  Never forgotten by Kim & I.

Beyond my own personal reasons, I also see how many people around me either do not have their fathers in their lives, whether through death, abandonment or estrangement.  For a church where the median age in the mid-20’s, the number of people whose fathers are no longer part of their lives is heart breaking.  And then there are those whose father are part of their lives, but are relationships defined by disappointment, abuse, rejection and disinterest.  For all of these, this day can be salt in an ever open wound.

Part of me- the cynical, wounded part- wants to reject this day altogether, but I cannot. For all the brokenness that I see related to fathers, I am also convinced that this very brokenness cuts so deep precisely because of the importance of fatherhood.  While not to be confused with some kind of statement on the gender identity of God, that He so significantly identifies as Father also reinforces the importance of fatherhood to our own identity and wholeness.

It is with this significance in mind that we must understand our call, as the Church, to be fathers to the fatherless.  This is not a poetic way of saying that we need to fund orphanages and combat divorce trends.  Both of these things are good, but when God calls us to be a father to the fatherless, He calls us to follow His example of genuine relationship and sacrificial love.  He calls us to an active love that blasts through the boundaries of cultural propriety and familial loyalties- not the detriment or neglect of our own families, but through the conviction that God is calling us to a devotion to Him and others that must rival all others.

Our world is filled with the fatherless- and in more than just the literal meaning.  This is call to extend the Father’s love to others is not some project or program that interested Christian might get involved with, but rather it is a defining characteristic of what it means to follow Jesus Christ.  And it is a commitment that should not be driven by guilt (though conviction for our failing to do so is surely important), but driven by the same thing that drove Christ to pay the highest price for us:

Love.

Previous Post – The Book of James – Part 8

At Little Flowers Community small group earlier this year, we went through Bonhoeffer’s “Life Together”, which was simultaneously trying, frustrating and incredibly encouraging.  While much could be said about the book, our group really found themselves in engaged in the following section (here is segments):

“Those who want more than what Christ has established between us do not want Christian community. They are looking for some extraordinary experiences of community… Such people are bringing confused and tainted desires into the Christian community. Precisely at this point Christian community is most often threatened from the very outset by the greatest danger… the danger of confusing Christian community with some wishful image of pious community, the danger of blending the devout heart’s natural desire for community with the spiritual reality of Christian community…  Only that community which enters into the experience of this great disillusionment with all its unpleasant and evil appearances begins to be what it is should be in God’s sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it…  Those who love their dream of a Christian community more than the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community even though their personal intentions may be ever so honest, earnest, and sacrificial.  Those who dream of this idealized community demand that it be fulfilled by God, by others, and by themselves.”

This really concerned our group, because we are all very passionate about our faith and our life together as His Body.  In the sense that we all have very high hopes and expectations for Little Flowers and our place in this inner city neighbourhood, we are all very idealistic.  While I don’t Bonhoeffer would outright dismiss all of this as dangerous idealism, his words do apply and carry with them a serious warning for us.  When he talks about idealism here, I believe Bonhoeffer is referring to expectations for community that deny our current state of being, both specifically in context and as people impacted by the brokenness of sin.  It is characterized by those who have their idea of the end product in mind and make no room for any other outcomes.  When people don’t meet their expectations, they are angry, disillusioned and confused.

I do not believe that Bonhoeffer is suggesting that, as Christian communities, we are not to have hopes in mind, even direction to move towards.  His writing on the Sermon on the Mount clearly indicates that Christians are called to pursue very radical lives of love and service.  Yet, like Jesus makes clear in the Sermon on the Mount, it is a journey in the midst of our own sinfulness and therefore we can only measure our “success” by our faithfulness and obedience, even in repenting our failings.  Further, that hope which we pursue is not an idea, but Christ.  What are call to become cannot be characterized apart from the person of Jesus, in whose image we are being formed.  And that transformation, while participated in by us with God, is not within our power to achieve, but is only possible through the cross and the miraculous grace of Christ.

This truth has much to say about what it means to be missional.  Missional communities are some of the most passionate and creative groups I have come across.  They are driven by an image of what things could be- should be- and are willing to work hard to see those visions become reality.  They understand that following Jesus is a costly and demanding vocation goes against the expectations of the world (and often even the wider Christian culture).  They truly link the nature and character and life of Christ to the nature and character and life that we, the Church, are meant to embody.

Little Flowers Community has always sought to be that kind of missional-incarnational community.  And I confess that I have let my passion for this go too far at times, thinking that we would prove ourselves a real missional community by achieving some measure of external success in respect to our impact and ministry in the neighbourhood.  While some of that was fueled by my own pride, my desire to prove to the naysayers that we are a “real church” (because we have been told on several occasions that we are not), but it has mainly been fueled by a deep desire to see people find freedom from sin and genuine identity together as Christ’s Body, actively continuing His mission to the world.  And when I don’t measure up or when people don’t “get it” or when complacency or sin creeps into the fold, I get frustrated and despairing.  When the “workers are few” and I find myself at the edge of exhaustion and fear of burn out (as I am close to now), I get resentful and discouraged.

Now I do not want to gloss over the complexity and tension of these situations.  After all, it is justifiably frustrating when fellow Christians from  large suburban churches take the wind out of the sails of young, inner city Christians by condescendingly dismissing their identity as a “real church”.  We are called to grieve the brokenness of sin in the world and to pursue with love all those who have wandered from God’s grace.  It is a truly lamentable reality that those communities most in need of God just and merciful touch are also the one facing the greatest leadership challenges and funding issues.  None of these realities should be ignored or denied.  This is not what Bonhoeffer is suggesting either.

However, when our expectations and ideals don’t allow for these realities, we face the risk of destroying ourselves and our communities as a result.  As we have been working our way through the Epistle of James, I have been encouraged at how the author doesn’t find contradiction between the high standard of obedience we are called to and the difficult realities that we must expect as followers of Christ.  We need to learn to live in the tension between eschatological  hope and persevering in the present, between the Kingdom breaking through into the present and the understanding that what we see now is only in part.  When we seek to live missionally and call others to do so, we must be ever honest with this dynamic.  We must live in grace in the present reality of our imperfect pursuit of Christ, not as compromise, but as humility.

This is a lesson I need to learn again.  I find myself discouraged.  I find myself overwhelmed by the demands of life and ministry in our troubled (but beautiful) inner city neighbourhood.  I know that in order to grow and mature as a community that we need more consistent, stable and seasoned maturity and leadership, without which (at this pace) I fear I’ll hit a wall in the near future.  Again, I am not denying these challenges nor their need to be genuinely addressed (and soon), but rather I must persevere and let go of any idealism that places greater value in the outcomes than on God and the people He has simply called me to love, even in my inadequacies and imperfection.

Missional living is by no stretch easy.  It is not meant to be.  It is a life that is born out of a death, death on the cross of Christ.  However, as we realize that the gift of grace and love from God is not a result of merits, but entirely a reflection of His perfect nature, we can begin to learn to sow the seeds in obedience and leave the fruit for God to produce.

Previous Post – St Patrick & Missional Formation

When I first visited my wife’s community in Australia, we were invited over for dinner by some close family friends.  The Nell family welcomed us into their home and accepted me a friend from the very beginning.  Their two kids were pleasant hosts as well, especially Christopher (better known as Toph), who was only a toddler at the time.  It has been wonderful to continue those friendships on our rare visits, as well as online.

Sadly, the Nell family was shaken with the news that Toph had leukemia.  Now 9 years old, Toph has fought cancer bravely for almost 7 years. Most of his life has been filled with tests, treatments and time of hopeful uncertainty.  And yet, this kid faces this tough journey with such courage and spirit.  Please keep him and his family in your prayers, as he faces more transplants and treatment.

As you can imagine, such long term treatment has meant a great deal of travel (to and from the hospital in Sydney, 3 hours away), missed day/weeks at work and the many other costly demands on the family’s stretched resources.  Many people have lost their homes to the expenses of such circumstances and we don’t want to see this happen to the family.

My sister-in-law, Ally Flint, has generously committed to help raise funds to support the Nell family in this season.  To inspire the donations, she will be shaving her beautiful hair off!  Try as she might, she has not been able to get the sponsorship she had hoped.  That’s where you come in! If you would willing to get involved by making a small donation (and helping spread the word), it would mean a great deal.  To make things easier, I can accept all donations through my PayPal account (jamiearpinricci@gmail.com) and forward them to Australia.  Be sure to make a note that it is for Toph.

If you have any questions, feel free to send them my way.  We greatly appreciate your willingness to help us out.  God bless!