I am currently the chaplain at a YWAM hockey camp in Westbank (now Westside? somebody help me out here), BC near Kelowna for the week. During my time off I brought with me a few books, one of them being Signs of Emergence by Kester Brewin and so far I am enjoying it.

It is hard to find an “emergent” type book saying something new, but what I like about Brewin is he is bringing to light many thoughts that I have been stewing on for a while. The one that I appreciate the most is his chapter on Advent. It basically talks about how we need to take more breaks from our ministry so that we can reflect and patiently establish a community as God desires. We frantically want to get our programs and churches up and running in record time, and usually at the expense of new thoughts or perhaps trying soemthing new.

I was personally feeling like we were creeping in this direction so our church has currently taken most of August off so that we can reflect on where we’ve come from and where we are going. It seems like a dumb idea if you are trying to start a church, but already I am seeing many people in our group take time to connect on different levels. The guys have had a camping trip, the girls a little get together, a few people are going to another friends music show and still others are doing some beach trips.

The point here is not that “breaks” equal growth, but that advent is necessary for creativity to flow and for ideas to be explored. And the cool thing is that the answers to the establishment of our church is from within the community.

As Luke 17:20-21 says:

“The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, nor will people say, ‘Here it is,’ or ‘There it is,’ because the kingdom of God is within you.”

And to leave you with one quote from Brewin:

If our churches are going to be reborn, to emerge and evolve as self-organizing systems, then they are going to do so as organisms adapted to their environment…The success or otherwise of “the kingdom” in our area is “within us.” The answers lie “among us” in our shared, networked, distributed knowledge of the particular space we inhabit, whether geographical, social or cultural.

And how do we as leaders find this unless we stop our busyness, listen and nurture the ones who make up our community, the ones with the eyes to see and the ears on the ground?