Previous Post – Weekend Linkage #8

With the summer behind us, Little Flowers Community has decided to spend the next few months exploring The Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5-7).  As a Mennonite missional community that follows a Franciscan way, an emphasis on this Sermon is fitting, as Anabaptist and Franciscan traditions both attempted to live life around this set of teachings.  We are all excited to see where it leads us as a community.  Before we started into the Sermon itself, however, I decided it might be a good idea for us to explore what preceded it for Jesus.  And so, together we dived into Matthew 4.  Here are a few of our thoughts on it.

• The chapter opens with Jesus facing temptation (which we explored in detail in another sermon).  We reflected that Jesus faced His temptation alone in the wilderness.  Sometimes we can view resisting temptation as a social pressure or public witness.  That is, we resist because we fear consequence from our peers and/or to maintain credibility of witness to a watching world.  While these two aspects have their place, Jesus’ solitude in the face of His temptation teaches us that the temptations of in our hearts and in our private moments are most critical.
• Soon after his temptation, Jesus goes out and, in the midst of his preaching of repentance, He calls His disciples to Him.  Here we see that being a community of faith is no small part of the work of the Gospel.  It is not incidental or a casual analogy that we are called the Body of Christ.  As we die to the sins of our individual hearts, we are resurrected together as one, as His Body.  To truly be an authentic community of Christ, we must be intentionally and consistently committed to submission- both to the Holy Spirit and to one another- not because we must, but because we love God and each other.
• Jesus then continues on with His disciples and begins to proclaim the Gospel in word and deed, moving powerfully and miraculously in the Spirit.  Through the authority of our righteous & humble lives, out of the context of a mutually submitted community, ministry is born. Each factor contributed to leading Jesus to preaching this significantly important Sermon, calling His people to a specific way of life together.

So, it is on this foundation that we are getting ready to dive into the Beatitudes this week.  I am really excited about this series and feel as though the above ideas have really prepared us to move into it.

What do you think?

Previous Post – Weekend Linkage #4

This week’s gathering of Little Flowers Community, our inner city church plant, was a real reflection of the unique life of our group.  First, our wandering homeless friend Chris was back in town.  It was his birthday on Friday, so I told him that I would get him a big cake with candles.  He was so excited he invited a group of his buddies to join us (convincing them that we weren’t some creepy cult).  When several of his friends agreed to come, he ran out to buy groceries to make his famous “Poor Man’s Soup”, as I wanted to contribute to the potluck.  Amazing guy.

With these fun loving guys added to the potluck, the language was a lot more colourful, which we are hardly notice, but our other guests had to adjust to.  It was really neat to see such different people enjoying a meal and each others company.  After the meal, we sang Happy Birthday to Chris.  He & his buddies decided to take off before worship, but they said they might join us again.  I guess we weren’t too cultish after all!

I put aside this week’s planned sermon/discussion and had a time of community sharing.  We centered it around James 5.  Are any of you happy?  Sing songs of praise!  And so we celebrated and prayed blessings on Andrew & Rachel, newlyweds in the church who have been part of Little Flowers since before we officially started.  It was good to commit to them as a couple to stand with them as a community, even in the face of many challenges.

Are any of you sick?  Lay hands and prayer for them.  The evening became a little more somber as Delia (who with her husband have been a huge support to Kim & I as leaders) shared that she had been diagnosed with the early stages of cancer.  While the prognosis is very good, it is nonetheless scary for them and all of us.  Delia shared this with the group:

________________________

For the past several months—more specifically weeks, I’ve been walking under a somewhat overcast sky. Not that there hasn’t been bright sunshine. Sometimes conditions have been so beautiful I could almost convince myself there were no clouds overhead, ever. But the clouds were never far away.

At this point my main prayer request is that I will be ruled by God’s peace and not by fear, and that this thing won’t become too all consuming. There is still a lot of other stuff to attend to and living to enjoy.

________________________

While not nearly as devastating, Kim & I also learned some disappointing news this week: the adoption process is slowing down, making the likely time that we will bring our child home from Ethiopia closer to October 2010.  It was comforting to sit together with John & Delia last night sharing our mutual struggles, encouraging and praying for each other.

Last week also saw the closing of The Dusty Cover.  For those who missed the Winnipeg Free Press story, it was online in Fredericton (no idea), found here.  While we are sad to see it close, we also know it will be reborn into something new in the year to come.

As a community we continue to share life together, both the joys and the suffering.  I love our community, even though there are times of heaviness and frustration.  Keep us in your prayers!

Previous Post – Weekend Linkage #3 – Updated

With the first week of our Blow Out sale for The Dusty Cover behind us, we are gearing up for our last week open.  While it is sad to see it close, we are also excited by the next phase.  It also seems that others have been pretty excited too.  The Winnipeg Free Press did a story on the bookstore on August 2nd, resulting in a FLOOD of people buying several thousand books.  Unfortunately, the story is not online.  However, today Christian Week posted a story online (in print in their Sept. edition).  It sums things up very well.  At any rate, if you are able to get to Winnipeg this weekend, please drop by.

As I consider the future, I filled with both excitement and a little trepidation.  I am excited because God has been so faithful and gracious to help plant Little Flowers Community in large part through the work of the bookstore (read “How Our Church Was Born Out Of Mission” here).  In the few months since we formally started, we have experienced and grown so much together- some tragic, most wonderful.  In truth we had become a church long before we called ourselves a church.  Our plans for the new building are moving forward which is more than I could have dreamed of.

However, I also feel some uneasiness as there are so many unknowns.  I know we all face them, but that doesn’t make them any less daunting.  Our community needs more mature Christians to help us continue to serve in a community that experiences the challenges of poverty, addiction, mental illness, racism, abuse, etc. on a staggeringly high level.  In addition to needing leaders to work along side Kim & I, we also need people who will simply be a part of our community and share the relational task of nurturing the church.  I am very tired, but most of that is learning my own limits and boundaries as a pastor (which is hard when it often means saying no to people who desperately need to hear a yes).

I trust God.  I really do- well, most of the time.  He has always come through for us, even when He was redeeming tragic situations.  We cannot ignore the reality, however, that things don’t always go smoothly and without failure, suffering or loss.  Pray that we will remain faithful in following the path we believe God has laid out for us.

And perhaps you might be a part of that journey yourself.  You never know… unless you ask.

Little Flower Community is the first church plant I have pastored, so I am by no means an expert.  I have (and continue to) benefit for the wisdom and experience of church planters and pastors I can only hope to emulate in the years of pastoring that are ahead of me.  That being said, I wanted to share some thoughts on how Little Flowers emerged as a new congregation.  While it isn’t a formula and won’t be as applicable to every context, I hope it is encouraging and challenging to some of you.

When we started our ministry with YWAM in our community we had no intention of planting a church.  In fact, in YWAM culture, it isn’t something that generally happened.  However, we were also approaching the formation of our ministry in a way that was fairly unique to the organization.  Rather than primarily training Christians to do mission elsewhere, we wanted to be a missional presence in our neighbourhood.  This included making it our home, which we did with the help of our friend, the late Rev. Harry Lehotsky.  Any training or outreach programs would be out of existing relationships drawn from being in the neighbourhood.

After several years, even though we had integrated in the community, we were still struggling with meaningfully connecting to many of our neighbours.  This was due to a number of factors, including the long, harsh winters that kept people indoors, the privacy cultures of both the inner city and Canada in general, and having an amazing team that was made up of introverts (which is not a liability, just a factor to be addressed).  It was around this time that we started exploring the idea of missional third places.  Thus was born The Dusty Cover.

With 5 years of mission in the community, establishing a public commitment and identity as neighbours, the bookstore provided a safe, neutral place to connect with people from the West End.  While I was aware of the possibility that a church would be born out of this approach, it seemed a distant and often vague possibility.  However, something happened that I could not have been prepared for.  Many of the people who we had begin to share life and faith with through the bookstore and our presence in the community approached us, asking us to be their church.  After prayer and dialogue with Mennonite Church Manitoba, we decided to begin Little Flowers Community.

One of the things I love about our church is that it is almost completely made up of people from the neighbourhood, with a few exceptions.  While several people face the challenges of addiction, mental health issues, poverty, developmental disabilities and disillusionment with the faith, they are also passionately longing for meaningful relationship with God, genuine community and a missional purpose in their neighbourhood and the world.  That we could build the kinds of relationships that would lead them to wanting a church is something that gives me great joy.

In many ways, we had become a church before we knew to call ourselves such.

For over a year now The Dusty Cover has grown into a small hub of relationship and activity in the West End of Winnipeg.  When we opened the doors our goals were to create a hospitable and safe environment for people in our neighbourhood to connect with us and each other.  The books & the coffee were secondary to our commitment to be present for our neighbours in a neutral context in order to build genuine relationships and trust.  Our weekly kids program has developed into connections that serve families of all kinds.  We wanted to tangibly love our community while taking our place alongside the people as part of the fabric of the West End.  In all these things we have been successful.  In fact, it has gone far beyond our expectations.  It has been out of the core community built from the bookstore that our church plant, Little Flowers Community, was born.

While we have exceeded our own expectations in the vision for The Dusty Cover, we have been faced with some very serious challenges.  Though set up as a business, it was intentionally designed to place emphasis on community building and relationships, not profit or marketing.  The growing expenses of sustaining the business side of the ministry have become more than we can handle.  However, the bigger challenge is volunteers.  Because of the hours and nature of the ministry, it has proven nearly impossible to get adequate volunteers, making it a significant stretch on our small missionary staff who are also actively involved in programs & ministries both here and abroad.

Faced with these challenges and after much prayer and consideration we have come to a decision.  At the end of Saturday, August 15th, 2009 The Dusty Cover, as it is, will be closed for good. We cannot express how appreciative we are to all those who made this project possible.  The time, energy, passion, books and money people invested into us have born good fruit that will continue to blessing our community for years to come.  We do not see this as a failure, but the next step in an exciting journey for our ministry.

You may have noticed that I said that The Dusty Cover as it is will be closing.  That’s right!  This isn’t the end of The Dusty Cover.  Little Flowers Community (which is a partnership between YWAM & Mennonite Church Manitoba) is in the process of working with a group of Christian business people who want to help us find a more permanent ministry centre in the neighbourhood.  Their goal is to acquire an apartment building in the community with retail space on the main floor.  In addition to providing quality housing to low-income people and a Christian presence in residence, they are committed to converting a section of the commercial space into a multi-purpose ministry centre for Little Flowers, community programing & outreach, etc.  In other words, like a small community centre.  (More details about this project coming in the near future).

Since The Dusty Cover did it’s best to building community, our hope is to integrate the store on a smaller scale into this community space.  Why have a church library when you can have a community book space?  We may even try to develop a lending and/or trade program.  So, as you can see, while the store will be closing in it’s current incarnation, it will return.  Please pray for us through the coming months as we process these changes.  I’ll keep you posted, as we are sure to have some special events/sales (as well as work days, for the braver few) in the months to come.

If you have any questions, please feel free to let me know.

Twice a week we have a small group of inner city kids coming into The Dusty Cover for our after-school kids program.  They are a great group of kids, many from really tragic situations.  Even though we are completely unfunded (and therefore can’t offer too much in the way of programming) they faithfully return week after week.  It has become a little community.

One of our volunteers recently had the idea of helping the kids tell their story by making movies.  Not only would it give them a chance to share their wisdom, but it would give them an opportunity to learn about film-making and technology.  The kids caught wind of the idea and have been excited by the possibilities.

Doing a big of an inventory we realized that we had everything we needed in skills and equipment to make and edit the films, but for one thing- a fairly significant item: a video camera.

My friend Eliacín tweeted a great suggestion today: Why not invest in Flip Camcorders?  This compact units are not only affordable, but ideal for our needs.  While in the long run multiple units would be great, we think this would be a great to start with just one.

As I mentioned, we run our kids program with zero funding.  In fact, the bookstore carries the cost even though it still doesn’t cover its costs.  We do it because we love the community and know how much both mean here. We will continue to invest our time and resources into it with no reservations.

However, we are hitting a point where we need your help to continue.  If you are interested in helping us make this project happen, please contact me through my Gmail address (jamiearpinricci).  We really appreciate your consideration in this.