Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to Thriving, brought to you by the discipleship and advocacy team of the Synod of Victoria in Tasmania, produced on the land of the Wurundju People of the Kulin Nation. Hi everyone and welcome to the Thriving podcast.
It's delightful to be here today with Steve Taylor. Steve will introduce himself in a moment, but he is a missiologist from New Zealand who's worked quite a bit in Australia as well, so he knows our context really well. But we, we. The exciting thing is we are about to start teaching, practicing a missional church through Pilgrim College in, at the end of July. So we're enjoying getting to know each other as teaching colleagues and looking forward to working together with. With a group of students. So we thought we'd have a go today at talking a little bit about the subject we're teaching some of the things that excite us about this. And I think, given that the whole idea of practising a missional church is all about creating thriving communities of faith, means that basically what we're going to talk about is going to slide perfectly into the theme of this podcast without us trying too hard. So good morning, Steve. Welcome to the podcast in Australia from New Zealand. Just tell us a little bit about yourself first,
[00:01:19] Speaker B: Which is me and Te Rao Mori. I'm bringing my greetings to the Kai Tahu people on the land of Te Waipunamu, and so acknowledging them and their ancestors, their maraes and their hopes and aspirations in terms of the future, and in doing so wanting therefore to pay my respects to indigenous peoples on whichever lands people are listening to this recording from. I'm Steve Taylor. So in Mori culture you introduce yourself with your mountain and your river. So K Atari te Awanga, ko Aramea, te awa ko Gudala, te iwi Moresby a te Whenua. So my mountain is in Papua New Guinea. I was born and raised in Papua New Guinea. My parents were working over there, serving over there, missionaries over there. So that's where my Whenua is.
And I was looked after by the Gulgadala people of the Aramea River. So I moved back to New Zealand when I was 13 years of age. I have a background as a Baptist minister, New Zealand Baptist minister, which is slightly different from Southern Baptist ministers. One of my delights was introducing myself in the United States a couple of times as the real original gangster Southern Baptist, because I came from the Southern hemisphere and therefore I was more Southern Baptist than any Southern Baptists that were in the room. So New Zealand Baptist and have a background in church Planting what was sort of a fresh and expression missional type church called Graceway in Auckland and then was a Baptist church planter. So working out how to help congregations, established congregations, a 90 year old congregation, reimagine itself around mission and plant congregation within itself. And then in the surprise of God, I was called to serve with Uniting Church in South Australia. So I was the inaugural director of missiology for AS they tried to reframe their training around mission to serve their candidates and to serve the Uniting Church, and then moved back to New Zealand to serve with the Presbyterian Church. The last six years I've worked as a for myself, as a researcher. So I do empirical research.
I joke on questions the church doesn't quite know the answer to. If you know the answer, you don't need me. But if you have questions, then I use my research skills through my PhD to help develop appropriate strategies and go away and do that.
[00:03:46] Speaker A: It's helpful to have research that, that affirms that what we think is true is true. So it's actually even if you think you might know the answer, I think research can be incredibly helpful.
[00:03:58] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So just an example of that. I've just finished my 99th interview with people who are in journeys of ministry formation, asking them what their barriers and obstacles are. And I'll take that back to a trust who's keen to keep funding. I want to do that in a way that connects with need as it is today, not how we imagined theological education was even 10, 15, 20 years ago. So that's me. Are you going to introduce yourself, Sandy?
[00:04:25] Speaker A: Sure, I will a little bit because hopefully people are starting to get to know me already.
So I should say that the introduction to the lands I'm on was in the bit that the people will have heard at the beginning. So I live on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation, in what's now known as Melbourne, but known as naam. So that's where I live and work and that's where the podcast is hosted. So even though we might be coming from different places, that they are the people on whose lands I live and work and the unceded lands, I should say, of those people.
So my original background is that I was a secondary teacher. I come out of a Chinese teaching background. So I have a lot of experience with working with, with Chinese culture and with people of Chinese culture learning English and trying to fit into Australia and with people taking teenagers to China and experiencing Chinese culture and learning about culture. So that that's a big part of my background and an English teacher. So I'm very heavily interested in language in my background. And I. After that, after teaching for 17 years, I went into ministry. So I have been a minister of the Word for. I think I'm up to something like 14 years now. And my first placement was in a network of churches. So similar to you really doing church planting or fresh expressions inside an existing network of churches. So birthing them within something in that. What now gets called a mixed ecology model, which I found really fascinating. I did that for 12 years, which was enough to both start them, but to have them grow to something healthy before I left. And hopefully, I mean, they're still going two and a half years later. So I'm feeling a little bit like, well, at least at this point, you know, we've managed to do the transition and who knows what God has in store for those communities into the future. And then my current position is I work with the younger gen team of the Synod of Victas as the education and Strategy coordinator, which is what brings me into this space of teaching this subject with you at Pilgrim. So hopefully bringing some intergenerational flavor, intercultural flavor, but certainly a deep love of mission. And my. I guess my real passion in ministry is around discipleship and faith formation. So helping people come to know Jesus, helping people deepen their understanding of who Jesus might be for them and therefore what God might be calling them to.
Which is what leads you into the other conversation about mission, I guess. So all those things for me are really deeply intertwined and really important to say how they go together.
So let's talk about what we think this idea of practicing a missional church is about. We've inherited this subject and we've inherited the title, and we're. And we're kind of trying to live into it as we're working out how we're going to teach it. What does practicing a missional church mean for you?
[00:07:24] Speaker B: Yeah, I quite like the title, actually.
I like the word practicing that was in there because that seemed to me to be about the actual lived and embodied actions of a community of faith. And the image that comes to mind for me is like a number eight, which just keeps on moving.
And so you have that movement between action and theology, action and theology. And action is theologically informed, and theology is therefore informed again by actions. And so practices are not just about what we do. They're also about the imaginations and frameworks that we have. So it wasn't mean to practice the missionary church versus study it or analyze it, which is a slightly different type of word because we're actually therefore involved in this thing, which appealed to me greatly. And placing mission alongside church is always a really interesting tension, I think, because it's very easy to make the church the most important thing, particularly for congregational ministers or people going into congregational ministry. Therefore we think through church land.
One of my elders gently reminded me one day, they said, you're the only person that thinks about this church beyond Sunday. Yeah. And so ministers, often, they spend their entire time, you know, thinking about the church. But mission is about God's life in the world. And so how does a group of God's people participate in that? I mean, God chooses to have people, the church, participate in that. So we're invited into that as a missionary church. But what does it mean to do that without some of our default understandings and prioritisations? Yeah, so that's what it means for me. And the word church has layers to it too, of course, because it's about the synod as it gathers, it's about the local congregation, it's about the life and witness of a lay person who is connected to and resourced by this thing called church. It's got a history backward and it's looking forward as well in terms of fresh words and deeds that we're called into. So there's lots of complexity and it certainly deserves a course to start to think about. So that's for me, what the words mean. What do the words practicing in a missionary church mean for you, Sandy?
[00:09:34] Speaker A: I like that present tense sense of practicing because as you say, it continues to evolve and shape and change.
[00:09:41] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:09:41] Speaker A: Once upon a time I preached a sermon based on Ephesians, or we did a series based on Ephesians. And I was really caught up in the idea of the church coming in to be fed, to go out to serve, to come in to be fed, to go out to be served. Which I think is another way of saying what you just said. And I like that figure 8. But you know, the idea that, that actually both of those things are caught together and, and held together.
And so, and the practices I think just deepen and embed you in your sense of who God is. Which, and I don't think you can focus on, on practices without them actually spinning you out into action. Because if you're going to be doing something that involves prayer and listening to, to the God who is the one who, who is passionate about the poor and the weak and the marginalized and the hungry, that God's going to be sending you out.
So. So yes, the nurturing and being fed is the work of the church in order, all do that work of going out into the world and being, being God's hands and feet in the world. Does that make sense?
[00:10:46] Speaker B: Yeah, it does. And for me, the other tension is, which you have partially alluded to around the sending and the going is, you know, for God so loved the world.
So mission has this orientation of love and impulse, of love from the divine doesn't start with the church, it starts with God's love for the world.
God sends the Son, so there's ascending in that. But the Son also abides with us, so there's an abiding in that.
And so part of the call of the church is to abide in solidarity with the world around it, with the suffering and the homelessness and the situations of injustice. So there is that double tension as well around how do you send and abide?
Do you need one more in a particular season of the life of a church or the life of a nation?
How do you keep them both in creative tension and creative harmony?
[00:11:38] Speaker A: So maybe being a body means that some of us are doing one and some of us are doing the other and we're constantly feeding each other through both of those actions the whole time possibly might be part of it. So, yeah, it's really lovely having ideas held intention so that you can work out where you are in that.
[00:11:57] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:58] Speaker A: So how did you start thinking about this? Where did, where did your impulse to be involved in missional church stuff beginning?
[00:12:04] Speaker B: Well, I was a missionary kid and so my early experiences of church were on a split coconut palm floor. All the houses in Papua New guinea are raised above the ground to catch sea breeze because it's so hot. And so you go up these stairs, these rickety stairs, and you listen. And when you're of a different ethnicity and you're the missionary's child, you're often looked at and observed.
And so there's that observation going on. And the services went for three hours.
And we're in a different language, so to keep us occupied, my mum will give us raisins, a packet of raisins per hour. And by chance, one day I realized that you could do strategic things with raisins in a elevated house with a split coconut palm floor, because the flooring is never straight, it's woven so you can see what goes on underneath. And all the village wildlife would gather underneath. So you wait until the minister, perhaps your dad, is praying, and then you drop a raisin down and all the chickens go yeah. So those are some of my early formative experiences. And of course you go back to New Zealand and there are no chickens and no split coconut palm floors and no three hour services.
And so very quickly you realize that mission, the word mission is actually enculturated in culture and context and therefore what does it mean to think about that and take that serious was one of my formative experiences and then also being involved in church planting as a seminary student.
And so I went to a seminary that had just started a new was influenced by Lesley Newbiggin and Mission to the West.
And so I was wanting to encourage students to be involved in church planting alongside their study.
So I signed up for that. I wanted to do and be and learn at the same time. So those early experiences were pretty important for me. So that's me. What about you Sandy? What were some of the formative experiences around your mission practicing journey?
[00:14:07] Speaker A: So I have lived in Australia with the exception of having lived in the UK and lived in China my whole time. So born here and born not very far away from where I live.
But having that strong sense of culture and the importance of culture and being able to read culture has formed who I am very much. And so I think one of the things that I I was never going to be a minister, did a bcl, loved teaching, didn't ever want to stop teaching until suddenly it became clear that God had other ideas and I needed to get with the program. But at which point I had to do a master's. So I already had a fair bit of kind of stuff in my head. But the, the formation for ministry I think broke me open in a way that I wasn't expecting. So I had thought about school, school chaplaincy, coming out of a school background. I had thought about being a congregational missioner. Minister, minister. And it wasn't really until I went was was called into a placement that was really about wanting to start new things that I discovered this is who I am, right. And realized that I actually wasn't the minister that I had thought I was going to be.
That actually what I'm about is new communities and what I'm about is helping people come to know Jesus, which is coming out of my school background. And having taught years of RE is hardly surprising really.
So the joy I got from being involved in those 12 years with people wanting to come to know Jesus. People, you know, we had a coffee shop on site as part of what we did in Heidelberg and the number of because we were Just down the hill from the local hospital. Right. So people would come down the hill having had whatever awful experience they'd had at the hospital. And we were not far in the other direction from the mental health service. So we had all sorts of interesting, interesting people coming past the door. And so you'd end up having these extraordinary conversations with people that you were never expecting to have on any given day when you happen to be around of people deeply wanting to engage with stuff that had happened in their life, who God was, what this meant for them. Lots of people who'd been damaged and hurt by their church experiences, who wanted to work out how to unpack that and how to make sense of how can I actually, I still have this sense that God is real. I still have this sense that faith is real. But my experience has damaged me so badly that I've got to work at how to, you know, re center myself. So I had a lot of those kinds of conversations and then working out what that meant. And for me, the practices really made a difference. So I was inspired early on by the work of Andrew Roberts, who has become a good friend. Yeah, and that's the messy church version, not the, not the original version, but yeah, the holy habit. So he picks up the work of Acts 2 and what the early church did. And so we spent a lot of time in my community doing prayer practices. And I was astounded by how they really kind of formed people and how that then sent them out to engage with others. It was really beautiful.
[00:16:58] Speaker B: So another link there is that because I was involved in this pioneering thing called Graceway, this church thing I want, and people will been quite critical of it because it was new and different. It wasn't what Baptists normally did in terms of worship.
I began a PhD around this and one of the people I interviewed as part of my PhD study was Andrew Roberts. Yes. Okay. Yeah, so that's the link there. Yeah. So I became interested in what was happening with the alternative worship movement in the UK because I had quite some influences on early innovation and creativity in churches in New Zealand and in Australia as well. And so I went on that journey. And of course the alternative worship, which became fresh expressions, was a bringing together of Methodist and Anglican together. And Andrew held that story.
And so I got to interview Andrew Roberts to hear the Methodist side of that story along with Rowan Williams and Steve Croft, to hear the Anglican side of the story and to realize that there was some denominational mutuality that was at work in terms of those early missionary impulses.
[00:18:08] Speaker A: So there we are, I find that really inspiring, actually, when we're able to step out of our denominationalism and actually learn from one another and discover that there are deeper things in the tradition which bind us and hold us together. And I think that that is a kind of inspiring story for others that are coming into the church too, to see us working as one, as one body, rather than as the divided parts that we sometimes appear to be.
Hmm.
[00:18:35] Speaker B: That is a strength. Yeah. Thank you.
[00:18:37] Speaker A: Well, I hope so. I hope it is. What are you looking forward to in the 12 weeks of our course?
[00:18:44] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm looking forward to a number of things. I'm looking forward to team teaching with you and not just because that's a polite thing to say, to bring people on board.
Yeah. I have appreciated and admired some things that you've done in placement.
[00:18:59] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:19:00] Speaker B: But you know, through Facebook, watching and observing along and appreciated your instincts and your creativity around mission. And so it's nice to be working with you and to be working with someone who has instincts and has been involved in congressional life. Because it's one thing to sit in a classroom and go, there's this theory, it's another thing to be involved in actually doing it. And I think we both bring significant church ministry experience to this course, which will be quite a distinctive of that. So that's one thing I'm looking forward to, is to working with you and to, you know, the collaboration that can involve, evolve. Sorry, in terms of that. And the second thing I'm interested is I've done a lot of personal empirical research on various dimensions of church and mission, missionary, church practices. In the last five years, I've done interviews with community chaplains sent out by uniting churches. I've done online digital analysis of eco praxis from Pacific and Western faith based activist Christian activist groups.
I've done focus groups with ministers about the future of the church and training leaders.
And so I guess I'm really looking forward to what that empirical work and hearing all those voices, how that might actually sit alongside current students and current learning needs and just to see the interplay.
Yeah. So those are a couple things I'm looking forward to. What about yourself?
[00:20:24] Speaker A: Well, I. It's interesting when you talk about the empirical work because that scares me a little bit because I. The only thing I've ever failed, seriously failed badly in my life was statistics. I'm enthusiastic about it, but I feel like, oh, that's something I'm not sure I could quite be clever enough to do. But.
So I really appreciate that and I have enjoyed reading your work over time so that it'll be nice to actually work with you and actually be able to ask you all the questions that are in my head when I'm reading you and you're not really there in real life. So that will be great. I appreciate a fellow knitter, somebody who's learning about the, the joys of knitting. I appreciate somebody who's able to learn from the other things in life. These are, these are Steve's socks that he's just learned how to knit.
Here we go. Let's have a look.
That is a big sock.
[00:21:12] Speaker B: Yeah. So about six years ago, I became aware that people online were knitting Christmas angel and yarn bombing them.
And I thought, oh, that's a really interesting missionary practice in terms of love and Christmas and angels, but outside the life in the church, outside into the community. And so I began to research the act of the impact of that by reading through all these tweets. Yeah. And then I thought, well, I should actually practice and not just think. So my daughter, one of my daughters taught me to knit and then my other one gave me a knitting pattern and said, can you start with this sock, please?
[00:21:49] Speaker A: Is it a top down sock? That's hard, that stuff to do that, that as a beginner, really, I have to say it's very impressive.
[00:21:58] Speaker B: Thank you. My daughter said this, this is the easiest one. So I got into it. I just do, I just do what I'm told.
[00:22:05] Speaker A: Well, she obviously has expectations of your ability because that is not the easiest one to start. So those are the things I think that I'm, I'm interested in as far as learning from you. I know some of the people that are going to be in the class and I know some of their background experience because they're, they're candidates. The thing for me is what we are practicing into or what we are leading into is a church that we don't know yet or can't see. And the expectations of what people will be doing we can't even really imagine yet. So certainly, as I said before, the church I thought that I was being trained for is not like this is nothing like what I expected I was going to be doing. The missional stuff was not, not in my head. The people that we're forming now are going into, we can only just begin to imagine. So that keeping that very present tense and very sense of, well, what are the things I need to know? What are the practices in terms of me as a minister to try things, to experience things, to Re theologize to make sure that I'm doing the thinking and the analysing but continuing to practise as I do all of those things so that I have healthy practice and being aware too. I think most importantly that I do nothing under my own steam. It's actually about us as the body of Christ doing things together and it's actually us as the body of Christ doing what God is calling us to do. So at the end of the day, what I do is only but a small part of what. What needs to happen in order for a thriving faith community to evolve. Yes. What I think I'm looking forward to being able to look back in five years time with some of them and say, we know where's, where's the thread of what we learned then come through in your practice.
That'll be fun.
[00:23:48] Speaker B: And is there anything you're not looking forward to?
[00:23:54] Speaker A: No, not really. Even things like marking I quite enjoy. So, you know, I'm looking forward to all of it. I think I enjoy the wrestling with students. As a teacher, what I like to do most is to have the conversation and the wrestling and the playing with the ideas and us all doing that work together. So not a lot of talk and talk, but a lot of wrestling and engaging and working through it together. Working out where the rough spots are and where might God be in that.
[00:24:20] Speaker B: The thing that I am not looking forward to is there is a slight time zone difference between New Zealand and Australia.
And so by 9:30ish Australian time, it's 11:30ish New Zealand time. And yeah, so I'm starting to drift a bit, so. And then of course, you know, your brain's all alive and I'll go to sleep and I won't be able to sleep because I'll be thinking about all the wonderful conversations that students have been involved in. So that's what I'm not looking forward to.
[00:24:49] Speaker A: I did a subject online last year with Cambridge, which started at about 8 o' clock in the evening here and finished at 3am And I use it for that last hour. A couple of times I had to be the person that was on and doing the engaged listening in the last hour and oh lordy, I was not good. So in the second intensive I was actually in the UK and I said to the teachers, oh, I'll be much better when I'm in the same time zone. And they agreed that I'm definitely better awake than I am.
Yes, we'll keep you entertained. And then I'm sorry about the inability to Go to sleep when you get offline.
[00:25:25] Speaker B: And your best and worst moment of trying a new practice.
[00:25:30] Speaker A: My, probably my best one we did. Just before COVID started, I started a practices thing using Andrew Roberts stuff again around the holy habits of prayer. And I set up this group that I was going to do with some older members of our congregation as a Lenten study. The first week we ended up on Zoom, and we'd never done Zoom before. And like I had to get a whole lot of 80 year olds onto Zoom, which I think was pretty impressive. They were amazed and, and I said, oh, well, now we're going to do breath prayer. This isn't going to work online. Like it won't work. So what I'm going to do is explain it to you and you can go off and do it.
And they went, no, Sandy, we're going to do it now. I went, okay, it's not going to work, but sure, if you insist. You know, I'll do, I'll do whatever you think. So I led them into the breath prayer and because at that point you could hear noises in Zoom in other people's rooms, and as we all kind of closed our eyes and prayed, I could hear the birds in one person's backyard and the birds at someone else's house and the rustling in the trees somewhere else. And you know, and then when we all opened our eyes at the end of the breath prayer, we had that kind of beat of beatific look on our faces like we'd been in the presence of God. And I said it worked. I didn't know that was good. Oh my goodness, we've learned something together.
So that, that thing of just being prepared to go with what other people suggest, even when you think you know better and discovering that in fact you don't, it's really lovely. And I love the fact that they were brave enough. To me, yeah.
[00:26:54] Speaker B: One of my best slash worst moments was I was leading an intergenerational church service which had the local boys brigade in.
And the text was one of the parables of the lost things, the parable of the lost sheep.
And I jokingly said to the worship leader, who I knew had a father who worked on a farm or we could bring some sheep for the church. And I had imagined in my head that they would put them outside the church. So I got this message saying, actually, I can do that. And when I arrived to get ready for the worship service, there was a trailer there, empty, and they had put up a fence inside the church and there were three sheep inside the church, and they'd gone to such a lot of work that I didn't really. They put a tarpaulin down and everything. You know, in terms of doo doo's and everything, I didn't really have the heart to say, look, I'm not sure about this. And it was all fine. The sheep were very quiet until the violin started halfway through the first song, and I think something about the violin sort of resonated, and the sheep got up and panicked and one of them jumped out of the fence.
And so I'm the responsible health and safety officer, as it were. So I rushed forward and I trap the sheep between myself and the fence, but I'm not strong enough to lift the sheep back in to the thing. And I'm sitting there and the rest of my team are basically laughing at me because of this. So that was my worst moment, as it were, to be trapped, holding a struggling sheep out of a cage in this intergenerational family service.
One of the best moments was there was a young gersh. Youngish person from the community who just quietly walked across and picked up the sheep and put it back in for me and then walked back again. And it was a wonderful moment when I suddenly realized that the best shepherd at that moment actually wasn't me and wasn't my paid pastoral team, was actually that young person who just taken initiative, done what was needed to be done, and cared for the sheep.
And so this reminder that shepherds actually can take different forms at different places, which was a wonderful outworking of the parable, that's my best and my worst moment in terms of intergenerational, trying to be missionary and creative and ending up trapped in the front of the church
[00:29:23] Speaker A: in real life, in a real moment. Yeah. Yeah.
That's brilliant. That's brilliant.
Well, we're going to have a really fun time with our students. If you did feel you wanted to join us, you can contact Pilgrim Theological College and I'll leave the information about how to do that in the.
In the notes.
There are ways that you can audit the class, or you could take the class for credit. I warn you, though, that theological study is a dangerously addictive thing, and if you start it, you might keep going for the rest of your life. It is like that, I think. Steve, do you have that experience about theology? Studying theology?
[00:30:03] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:30:04] Speaker A: Yeah. So you can audit. You can do it as an undergrad, you can do it as a post grad, and it's all online, so you don't even have to be in Melbourne because Steve's not going to be in Melbourne, he's going to be in New Zealand. I think a couple of times. I'm teaching. I'll be interstate as well. So you can be anywhere and join us 6 to 9 Melbourne time. Pilgrim Theological College, practicing a missional church. So with Steve and I, we're going to be having a ball. Come and join us.
Lovely to talk to you and working with you more closely over the next few months.
[00:30:35] Speaker B: Definitely.
[00:30:38] Speaker A: Thanks for joining us for the thriving podcast hosted and produced by Sandy Brodine.
