Christian in America (and Canada)

In light of the American election race a couple of things came up that I thought I would share.  I have been comparing Canadian approaches to church and Christianity and politics with American attitudes and approaches and some of my musings I posted here while I was in Boston.

The first little thing was this hilarious picture that my son sent me.

Producing a card that said "Keep Jesus Canadian" just wouldn't make sense and just wouldn't be funny. But in so many ways Americans really do have their own Jesus.

This comes to light in the second thing I saw this week. In the latest issue of Time Magazine both McCain and Obama share a bit of their faith journeys. Barack Obama is pictured praying while holding hands with Rick Warren. John McCain has a picture of him reverently bowing his head. They also make a few personal comments. Allow me to quote a few lines.

McCain Relates a story from his time in a Vietnam prisoner of war camp: "On Christmas Day I was standing in the dirt courtyard when I saw that same guard approach me. He walked up and stood silently next to me not looking or smiling at me. Then he used his sandaled foot to draw a cross in the dirt. We stood wordlessly looking at the cross, remembering the true light of Christmas, even in the darkness of a Vietnamese prison camp."

This is a great story celebrating the cross of Christ and the true meaning of Christmas. But if a Canadian politician shared the same story he/she would be censured for their exclusive statements about religion - implying that he/she would not be inclusive or fair in their treatment of people of other religions.

Barack speaks of his own faith story this way: "I began my Christian journey over 20 years ago, as a young man fresh out of college. And since that time I've been serious not only about deepening my relationship with Christ but also about the way that all Americans can live together in our diverse, pluralistic society. Faith shows us that the weak and defenseless are not a problem but rather a priority, and a chance for us to live out the message of the Gospels."

Wow! I commend both of them for speaking frankly about their faith. To be honest, it sounds like Obama has a more personal faith - more in line with what Evangelical Christians would affirm whereas McCain's faith sounds a bit more "mainline Protestant." But that's only my view from a distance.

The sad thing is that in Canada comments like that would have marginalized both candidates. I honestly think that many Canadian journalists and more left leaning politicians believe that a strong faith makes you incapable of running for government positions. Actually it is only strong Christian faith that disqualifies you. Being Jewish or Muslim or Sikh or a devotee of Wicca would be acceptable options.

Secularism

I am just finishing off two weeks in Boston for my last residency in my DMin program. We have had a good time of discussing ministry and renewal. One of the most difficult things to communicate to the other members of my class was the difference between Canada and the United States. In some ways we are very similar – particularly when we talk about Christian issues. However, most of the USA is still much more conservative than Canada. Massachusetts residents consider themselves among the most liberal in the US.

This was backed up by a recent Pew Forum report which did show that this understanding is actually true. There are less people who believe in God, less people that go to church and more people who believe that there are other ways to heaven than through Jesus Christ. But at the same time, every day that I was here at seminary, the Boston Globe had an article about religion either on the front page or on the front page of the Local section. One day it was an article about Eugene Rivers (a black pastor in South Boston credited with the “Boston Miracle” – an inner city renewal project), a piece on female leadership in Reform Synagogues and then some local interest pieces about local churches. It just seemed that religion was at the forefront of everyone’s mind.

The language we use is the same and some of the problems are similar but somehow Canada is further down the road to secularism than our neighbours to the south. I listed some of these issues in one of my assignments which I pasted below.

Hills Church is located in Thornhill, a community of 132,000, in the city of Vaughan (population 240,000) at the edge of the largest city in Canada (Toronto – census metropolitan area population of 5.1 million). In some ways we live and minister in an unreachable neighbourhood – at least in the sense of a traditional approach to ministry and to church planting. Church growth, church planting and evangelism encounter deeply entrenched barriers. This may be true for much of the United States as well, but there is an even stronger resistance to active Evangelicalism in Canada – for a number of reasons.

The first is a strong secular and multicultural ethos. Even though this secular mentality does not necessarily represent the majority of the population statistically, it still exerts a strong influence over the Canadian psyche. We see this most clearly in politics. In the USA, all presidential candidates (Obama and McCain and even Clinton) attend church. They are expected to attend church. Not attending church would actually constitute a significant political disadvantage. In Canada attending church has become a political disadvantage. All you need to do to discredit a candidate is to expose their regular church attendance or their adherence to traditional values. This is only one example of the prevalence of secularism in Canada. There is no appeal in Canada to the “traditions this country was built on.” Canada is a self-proclaimed secular nation. We have no entrenched law concerning the separation of church and state because the church at one time was the state (Roman Catholicism in Quebec and the Church of England [Anglicanism] in much of the rest of Canada). So we have a history of groups resisting the state established church (Methodism and Catholicism resisting Anglicanism in English Canada and more recently, a complete break against Catholicism in Quebec). This has paved the way for a militant multiculturalism and political correctness (don’t offend any minority groups) in the current socio-political landscape.

The second is a strong resistance to and distain for an American-styled Evangelicalism. There is a deep bias against what is seen as the war-mongering, anti-gay, anti-abortion Evangelical platform. Most Canadians vote for liberal or socialist political candidates – especially in urban areas and most are virulently opposed to a legislated conservative morality. Many Canadians view American politics as being controlled or at least strongly influenced by the Evangelical power base. It is perceived as swaying the White House and imposing its morality on the country. Most Canadian provinces would be “blue states.” All major cities return liberal members of Parliament.

Third, there is very little tolerance or space in the Canadian media market for a right wing voice. Except for occasional public voices from the USA (which are widely ridiculed) and perhaps some voices from western Canada (Alberta) there are no strong conservative voices speaking to the culture. The government has only recently allowed religiously based stations to exist and even then they are often required to give equal space to “opposing viewpoints.” Our first religious television station (VisionTV) established by a coalition of Christian business people and broadcasters has become a vehicle for a multi-faith, multicultural religious outlet.

Fourth, to most Christians living in Canada, the days of Christendom are very tangibly over. There has been a change in mindset of those who would plant churches. As the number of nominal Christians without a church shrinks, and as the number of unchurched who once were catechumens of Christianity grows extinct, the success of traditional church plants is threatened. We can no longer merely compete for the leftovers of Christendom or try to find the church model that has just one more innovation. Church planters in Canada have needed to become missionaries, and plant churches cross culturally, across the barriers to people who have no knowledge about Jesus and no language to discuss Christian concepts. The church in Canada can no longer draw on people familiar with the premises of Christianity. There are almost none of those people left. Our culture has produced offspring who are not only unchurched but also unversed in the cultural canon of Christendom.

Fifth, on the micro level, Hills Church located in an almost exclusively Jewish neighbourhood. Ninety percent of the people living here are cultural Jews and there is strong “anti-missionary” sentiment. Jewish people (or Muslims or Sikhs or Hindus) will not attend church as “seekers.” To add to the complexity of this overpowering multicultural environment is the cost of land, the unwillingness of municipalities to zone for worship uses and the competition for existing worship land and space by many other faith traditions.

A Role for the PAOC

My denomination is the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada – a denomination coming out of the Azusa Street Revival and is now almost a hundred years old. We have a fairly strong presence in Canada with over 1000 churches. Over the past few years we have been discussing our future. This is an open letter to the PAOC putting forward some of my ideas and expressing some of my frustrations.

I went to a denominational think tank meeting a couple of years ago. I was disappointed on a number of levels but the most disturbing sense was that I felt like I really didn't belong - an outsider in my own denomination. Maybe it's because I haven't really been part of “normal” church for the past 17 years and I don't feel like I'm on the same page as everyone else. In my ministry in Thornhill I really feel like I'm having church 10 or 15 times a week. I meet in groups of two or three or ten. Sometimes with pastors and sometimes with men I mentor and sometimes with non-Christian neighbours. We talk about our failures and confess sin to one another. We discuss and sometimes study Scripture together. We sing and pray and listen for the voice of God. We pray for one another and the lives of those who need to know Jesus and we pray for our city. We reach out to include our neighbours in this process. We recognize that our whole lives are lived out in worship to God. It's ministry by hanging out and walking around. I guess I hadn’t really seen that I'm doing stuff differently or looking at the world differently until I actually got together with “normal” pastors to do something like this.

In the last Canadian census the numbers for participation in PAOC churches plateaued. (For some of the reasons for that result you might want to check out an article by Rick Hiemstra called Evangelicals and the Canadian Census) Those results caused quite a stir when the numbers first came out. In spite of our passionate commitment to church planting, we've increased the total number of churches nation-wide by a total of ONE in the past 4 years. The total number of people served has increased by only 10000 in four years - that's 2 or 3 more people per church per year. Let's say we were wildly successful as missional churches and every PAOC church in our nation doubled its Sunday morning attendance with new Christians over the next 12 months. We'd then have reached exactly 0,5% of the population of Canada. We need to be looking at radically different models and paradigms of church not just tweaking what we already have. We are still talking about the church as a place or a time or an event instead of a people gathered to do mission. We are still talking about "our" churches or PAOC churches or Pentecostal churches instead of the one church in the city. We are still talking like the great commission is all up to us instead of a work of Jesus incorporating the whole church. We are still talking about single churches planting other churches instead of the united body of Christ expanding into uncharted, unevangelized areas.

Sometimes our focus as a denomination is how to keep growing and maintain our denominational distinctives. However, I think we need to be shifting our focus away from survival to finding new purpose. The PAOC has fulfilled its original mandate – bring the reality of the Holy Spirit and the spiritual gifts back into the life of the broader church. We no longer have a monopoly on the gifts of the Spirit or on speaking in tongues. We no longer have an edge on great worship. We don’t plant the most churches and are not the fastest growing denomination. We have a bit of an identity crisis. This is a crucial time. What is God calling us to be? Who is doing that thinking and that praying? The other positive impact of the North American Pentecostal movement has been to spread that vitality around the world. The fastest growing segments of the church in the global south (the third world) are those that embrace Pentecostal belief and practice. This reality of the dynamic operation of the Spirit of God in daily life deeply connects to a culture used to dealing with evil spirits.

In terms of our identity, I think we need to be discipling people as Pentecostals and not as Baptists. We have abandoned anything that smacks of the wilder charismatic and instead adopted safe teaching materials from those who marginalize the work of the Spirit. For example we adopt the Modified Wagner-Houts Spiritual Gift Inventory (a decidedly non Pentecostal resource) to help teach people about the spiritual gifts. We also use things like the Navigators 2:7 course for discipleship. Both of these are excellent tools but don’t really do anything to promote a Pentecostal ethos or theology – even with supplemental materials and explanations.

We should be teaching classes on “how to listen to the voice of God,” and “how to pray for healing” and “prophetic intercessory prayer” and “prophetic evangelism” and “effectively prayer walking your neighbourhood” and even practical teaching on deliverance ministry. Instead we’ve left these to the fringe groups either because we are afraid to touch these topics or we don’t know how to teach them. The result of this “safe” approach to the supernatural and to the gifts has marginalized us to only emphasizing (and often apologizing for) the infilling of the Spirit with initial evidence of speaking in tongues. A spiritually alive church operating in the gifts of the Spirit can be messy and even sometimes unbalanced because we want to be open to the move of the Spirit. We also need to shift the focus from the infilling of the Spirit to the purpose of the infilling – it empowers us to attempt the impossible, to reach our neighbours, communities and cities for Christ. Our churches need to be outward focused and training centred, built to make disciples. We need to reject and confront the “church as shopping mall” tendency – congregants as consumers. We need to be focused on reproducing disciples.

So what is our next mandate as Canadian Pentecostals? We need to discover why we exist as a denomination. What does a PAOC church offer in the Canadian evangelical church milieu and in the broader context of world Christianity? I think it must be post-denominational in that our purpose needs to be much more about the church as a whole as opposed to a particular denomination. I think some of the elements of our new mandate need to incorporate an understanding of the unity of the church, of the city church paradigm (ie there is one church in a city – church in a locality as opposed to a local church), ministry to the poor (i.e. faith based social ministry), and developing radical new models for church in inaccessible locations. For example the city of Toronto is building 30,000 housing units (population 100,000 plus?) south of Queen Street in the east end. There is no land for traditional church buildings. How do we make church happen in that area? We need to be pioneering that kind of thinking – thinking that moves beyond church buildings and traditional models of church.

In terms of world Christianity, we need to be mentoring new Pentecostal denominations in Africa, Asia and Latin America, providing low cost biblical training schools for indigenous pastors. We need to be raising up African and Asian Bible college and seminary professors who are able to teach contextually and incorporate more local theologies. That takes courage and vision. We also need to be a home (or a “covering”) for those who will be immigrating to Canada. We may very soon see third world Pentecostals sending missionaries to North America. We may also see new Pentecostal denominations springing up in Canada that have their headquarters not in Mississauga or Springfield but in Jakarta or Dar es Salaam. We need to welcome and embrace them because they have much to teach us about passion and faith.

We also need to think about how we structure our denomination. We have too many levels of bureaucracy. We have a national leadership and eight district (more or less provincial) offices as well as a number of ethnic branches. I want to propose a more practical structural suggestion or two (just some wide open thinking here). First design districts around mission targets as opposed to arbitrary geographical or provincial lines. One that focuses on cities, and another for specifically rural areas,. We certainly should factor in the significant East-West-Quebec-Maritime differences unique to Canada. For example, we should probably have one district specifically dedicated to the city of Toronto and the GTA – one for English speaking congregations and perhaps another for ethnic mission in the GTA. Vancouver should also have its own district. Make the districts much smaller (20-50 churches) and have a district for rural churches and one for city churches. Then farm most of the district administration stuff to the national office.

Doesn’t it make more sense to have a national health care benefits provider? The higher the numbers the better the rate. Most district events and ministries could be nationally coordinated: youth, Christian Education, men’s and women’s ministries, conventions, training, etc. You could even have the same people speaking at events and just do a national tour. The economies of scale would be great. Then the districts could focus on local targeted mission – seeing our cities reached for Christ. Right now city pastors hardly talk to each other let alone plan how to plant new congregations or meet to pray for the mayor or local situations. My suggestion would be to have a district pastor/superintendent and some admin support all of whom should be able to have offices in one of the churches in their district. Their function would be more pastoral and (dare I say it?) apostolic. District staff costs would be greatly reduced and all district buildings and properties could be sold. National office would then be very administrative in its functions and responsible for world missions. They should also oversee training institutions and Bible colleges - which may be the topic of another post.

Perhaps these thoughts are only pipe dreams. Some of the suggestions may prove to be unworkable. Some things are already being done. My prayer is that we could actually anticipate the coming national and global shifts in Christianity and adapt our structures to fit the reality around us instead of redefining reality to fit our pre-existing, out-dated structures and philosophies.

Church Going Behaviour - Canada Style

In following up the previous post on the Barna research I found some research by Reginald Bibby that relates specifically to Canada. His findings line up with those of Barna but are close to my estimates. He wrote a great paper covering this information and in it he questions why there is this perception that religion and church attendance is in freefall when it is actually increasing. The specifics? Four out of five Canadians (78%) identify themselves as Christian and thirty four percent of Canadians attend church at least once a month (25% at least once a week!) But what does the press say? He gives these recent examples from Canadian media outlets.

During the period spanning the Thursday before Easter in 2007 through the Monday after, the country’s number one national newspaper, the Globe and Mail, ran 44 items that included the word “Easter.” During the five-day period, only seven had a religious theme with only one what could be described as a positive and current portrayal of faith – the Pope’s Easter mass in Rome. The dearth of religious material in the paper was all the more puzzling in light of the results of its own on-line poll conducted over Easter. The paper asked the question, “Does the Easter holiday hold religious meaning for you or is it just another day off?” Some 4,000 of the paper’s readers responded – and no less than 80% said it holds religious meaning.

On Easter Sunday, 2007, the most-watched evening news program on national television featured only one religious item – the Pope’s mass in Rome. No Canadian angle or Canadian content was included.

Over the Christmas season in 2006, one of Canada’s two national newspapers, The National Post, ran a weeklong series of articles on the state of Christianity in the country. The lead-in to each of the articles started with the line, “With interest in spirituality on the rise and church attendance in freefall…” (Brean 2006). No data were provided to document the alleged “freefall.” Actually, the paper used Bibby's most recent findings on beliefs and spirituality – but took a pass on his findings showing a post-90s increase in attendance.

A year earlier at the same time of the year, a widely used article produced by the national news service, Canadian Press, announced that, in 2006, “Pastors and priests face ever more empty pews” (Shackleton 2005). The documentation consisted of observations from select opinion leaders, including best-selling critic of Christian churches, theology, and scriptural interpretation, Tom Harpur. In a column of his own, Harpur (2003) has written, “The current decline [in church attendance] is a drop in the bucket compared with what’s coming. …all is far from well in Canada’s churches. It’s the role of false prophecy to cry otherwise.”

Together, these findings on religion in Canada can be summed up as follows.
• There are some 30,000 religious organizations in place – second by a small margin only to the number found in the sports and recreation sector.
• They have more participants than any other kind of organization – even pushing sports and recreation into second place.
• They have a core of 25% of the national population who attend their services every week, 35% every month, and about 45% in a six-month period.
• A total of 84% of the population continues to identify with the traditions they represent.
• Two in three people who are not highly involved are open to greater involvement if they can find that religious groups touch their lives in significant ways. If that adds up to a bleak situation, one has to wonder what the Golden Age of religion in Canada must have looked like (Bibby 2006:194).

On of the reasons there is perception of secularism in Canada is because there "is a subculture of people, especially individuals in the humanities and social sciences. “While its members are relatively thin on the ground,” he says of the subculture, “they are very influential, as they control the institutions that provide the ‘official’ definitions of reality" notably, education, the media, and the legal system. “What we have here is a globalized elite culture,” writes Berger, who can easily fall into the misconception that their views about religion reflect those of their respective populaces. This, he says, is “of course… a big mistake.”

A couple of charts help visualize this data. The first is a graph of monthly plus attenders (those who attend once a month or more) and weekly plus attenders (who attend weekly or more). This graph shows that attendance has been increasing over the past five years.

The second chart shows the percentage of those that identify themselves as belonging to various religious groups and denominations. Here again we see that 78% of Canadians identify themselves as Christian.

So How Many People Do You Have? 5

This is the conclusion to David Fitch's posts on how church planting is changing in Canada. It has been an enlightening read for me and it is something I plan to study in greater detail. It reveals that what I have been doing almost instinctively in trying to respond to my community and the changing Canadian cultural scene, others have been doing as well. Maybe God is up to something.


THE PROMISE OF CANADA'S NEW MISSIONAL LEADERS

All of the above paints a picture of a leader mentality drastically different from the church planter of the past. Yet most (not all) of the missional leaders I have met possess strains of this new mentality. I believe this bodes well for the future. For I believe this next generation of pastors (in my experience coming mostly out of evangelicalism) provides hope for a renewal of Christianity in Canada.

Like a fermenting revolution evolving out of a tired and reified ancien regime, these tiny bands of Christians have come on the scene committed to live a life together of worship, spiritual formation, community, hospitality and service to the poor (of all kinds). In ways never imagined by the machinations of the mega church, many of these bands are already infecting their neighborhoods with an embodied gospel that cannot be denied, only responded to. Knowing Christendom is gone, they carry no pretension. Instead they embody the gospel in its most compelling, authentic, non-coercive form.

This new wave of Christians is small in number and possesses little to no resources financially. Most do not impress with their grandiose visions. They do not hang in the halls of power. They do not make a show of their successes. Yet their vision of a simple Christian habitat as witness in the world reminds me of the Irish missional orders God used to effect a profound conversion of European society in the 4th century. We have seen the world changed like this once before (read How the Irish Saved Civilization, Thomas Cahill). Could we be in the early stages of seeing God move in a similar fashion once again? Let us pray it be so.

So How Many People Do You Have? 4

This continues the (copying of a) series of posts by David Fitch. In the last post he described how Canadian missional church planting is changing. Here he describes how leadership is changing.


SOME OBSERVATIONS CONCERNING MISSIONAL LEADERS

THEY WILL BE SURVIVORS

Enduring missional leaders learn how to survive financially and spiritually for the long term. They must be able to hold down a job that does not consume him/her, merely enable them to live simply for the long term. In Christendom, the denominations used to pay someone to get a self-sufficient church going in three years. This person was in essence paid to extend an organization, open up a franchise, and set up a version of church with the distinctives of the denomination.

In the new post-Christendom, this doesn't make sense. In my opinion it takes at least 5 years of "seeding a community" before one even begins to see an ethos of community and new life develop that can be a cultural carrier-transmitter of the gospel. As a result, the new missional community leaders must have patience, steady faithfulness and the ability to live simply. They must have a mental image of how they are going to sustain their lives financially, relationally, spiritually and personally. It all must take the shape of a sustainable rhythm.

THEY WILL BE COMMUNAL SHEPHERDS

I have found that missional leaders are most often shepherds of an overall ethos of a community. They are not starting and managing an organization. They may not even be good at organization. Instead they are cultivating a communal sense of mission identity among a gathering people "for this time and place".

It used to be every church planter had to be an extravert entrepreneur, someone who looked good and had the perfect family. This person had to be a good salesman (woman) and had to have endless energy. He or she had to set a vision, direct a course, motivate and sell. Yet I have seen, in this new era, that the missional leader is most often someone who can take time and be with people. He or she will listen to people, discern the needs, articulate where we are going, knit the community together in a common struggle with gentleness, encouragement, listening.

For we do not gather as we once did to hear a charismatic leader preach an entertaining piece of inspiration. We do not gather for a professional piece of programmed worship experience. In the new post-Christendom we are coming together to be formed and shaped, supported and edified for the Mission as a band of brothers and sisters. Yes we do gather on Sundays to hear the Word, to be nourished at the Table, and respond to what God is calling us to, but we do all this not as individual but as a community, a community "sent out" into mission.

Missional communities will not grow unless there is a nurturing sustaining presence prodding for the long term. Leaders that can adapt, roll with the punches, and shepherd communally are more valuable than the high-powered "strong starters" who wish to be gone in two years. These leaders are mentored not through leadership conferences and books. Instead, we must have regular times together to practice together listening, mutual submission, responding with love and guiding instead of dictating. We look together for what God is doing in our lives and in and around our community.

THEY WILL BE INTERPRETIVE LEADERS

Rarely do missional leaders lead their communities as a feature Bible teacher who dictates the a.'s and b's of Biblical doctrine. Rather they are interpreters of what God is doing communally through the teaching and preaching of Scripture. They read Scripture in community and preach looking for what God is calling us to in the neighborhoods. It used to be that every church planter would be this high-towered charismatic gifted preacher. He (normally a man) would draw the crowds. Soon a crowd would be gathered to hear "the show."

These days are past, not because you cannot attract dissatisfied or thrill seeking Christians from other churches with a great preacher, but because we have seen that true spiritual growth occurs communally only when the whole congregation is involved in times of praying, hearing, submitting and responding to the Word. Interpretive leaders do not dictate from the pulpit a list of do's and don'ts and solutions from God for every problem. They interpret the Scriptures to open our eyes to what God is doing and where He is taking us.

In a different way then, we must mentor leaders who are more than great preachers. They must lead their communities in interpreting what God is doing via the eyeglass of Scripture. Where is God taking us, where is he calling us? His/her sermons therefore fund the corporate imagination of God's Kingdom in our midst and where He is at work in our everyday lives. And when conflicts arise, we sit and pray, submit, pray for courage and humility and discern the Scriptures for the journey we are in called God's mission. This kind of leader often does not come from our (all too often) modernist seminaries. They are grown in a community who gathers to worship the Triune God so as to discern Him at work in our midst.

THEY WILL BE DIRECTORS OF SPIRITUAL FORMATION

I believe that missional leaders must know how to guide the community in a spiritual formation. Admittedly, this kind of leadership is not common among younger evangelicals at least. Yet I still believe that the development of communal worship liturgies that are historically thick yet still local and organic, is crucial for these times. For we now recognize that the consumerist forces of our post Christendom Canada (and even worse United States) cannot be resisted as an isolated individual. An individual alone cannot resist the forces of desire that tell us things are more important than Mission, the life itself we share with the Triune God. Our communities therefore must be places of spiritual formation, of resistance to the forces of distraction, unsatiated desire and exploitation of those we choose not to know.

This means that our Sunday/Saturday? gatherings must be places of spiritual formation, encouragement and sending out for Mission. We must ever navigate against putting on a show that will attract, yet develop a liturgy that is simple, accessible and Scriptural that thereby guides our lives into Christ and keeps us from the distractions that would take us from Mission. But there will be no missional community of people formed and shaped for mission if we just preach Mission as a legalistic requirement. Mission requires patience, a sense of vision and a self-denial that can only be trained in the simple organic disciplines/liturgies of the historic church.

THEY WILL BE LEADERS WHO GIVE AWAY POWER

Missional leaders that have served for any length of time have learned how die to their ego's and allow God to use every man and woman's gifts in the community for the furtherance of His Kingdom.

Hierarchy is the product of Christendom. It hails to a day when Christianity still held power in society, when, Jesus was still established as a given in Canada. Hierarchy made sense in a day when the preacher in the town was looked up to and held power. This world, when one man could wield influence and get things done in the name of Christ, is waning. As a result, no one man or woman can lead a community from the top down and expect the church to go on as a viable social reality. We cannot be the very Body of Christ if we do not empower the manifold gifts in the community to minister the kingdom as part of everyday life. If we even try to operate out of the old hierarchical ways, missional communities will flounder and their leaders will die from exhaustion. I have seen it happen over and over.

This model subverts the CEO pastorate style we have all become so used to for each pastor gives away power instead of consolidating it. This kind of pastoral leadership models a kind of community for the rest to see instead of dictating the rest of the church to just do it. In this way, all shall own the leadership of this community and the journey we are on in the Mission. This kind of leadership needs to be modeled and practiced and it does not come easy in our day.

So How Many People Do You Have? 3

This next post by David Fitch describes the general movement toward new understandings of planting churches. This was the "aha!" post that suddenly named what I had been doing for the past 8 years. I had been cultivating a garden. There were a couple of comments after the post that I really enjoyed and I've copied them too. My apologies but I often enjoy the comments people make as much as the original post and I wanted to make sure you were able to see them connected to the post.

FROM SETTING UP GROCERY (BIG-BOX) STORES TO CULTIVATING GARDENS

For those of us born before 1970, this change (to post Christendom) is truly stunning. The landscape of post-Christendom demands we think about church planting with a new eye for faithfulness, truth and integrity. Among the new missional leaders, church is the name we give to a way of life, not a set of services. We do not plant an organized set of services; we inhabit a neighborhood as the living embodied presense of Christ. Missional leaders now root themselves in a piece of geography for the long term.

We survey the land for the poor and the desperate, not just physically but emotionally and spiritually as well. We seek to plant seeds of ministry, kernels of forgiveness, new plantings of the gospel among "the poor (of all kinds)" and then by the Spirit water them, nurture them into the life of God in Christ. We gather on Sunday, but not for evangelistic reasons. We gather to be formed into a missonal people sent out into the neighborhood to minister grace, peace, love and the gospel of forgiveness and salvation. The biggest part of church then is what goes on outside gathering. If the old ways of planting a church were like setting up a grocery store, now it is more like seeding a garden, cultivating it, watching God grow it amidst the challenges of the rocks, weeds and thorns (I owe this metaphor to my fellow co-pastors at Life on the Vine). What do these leaders look like? How can we walk alongside them? After hanging with a hundred or so of these leaders over the past few years, I offer the following observations. I'll post on this next.

Comments
len said ...
david, glad this has been an opportunity to put these thoughts on paper. Here are some thoughts from Michael Toy a few years back reflecting on the implications of organic gardening..


• take crap and use it to nourish things 

• it isn't "dirt," it is soil, and the preparation and maintenance of the soil is really important

• things that are garbage are used to grow the garden 

• vigilance is important 

• be willing to take smaller fruit in order for it to be truly healthy 

• gardening requires a systems understanding

• gardens die every winter and require replanting 

• things can only grow in certain climates 

• hybrids don't reproduce 

• if you use miracle grow to start, you have to keep boosting the amount 

• what you plant next to what is important 

• you have very little to do with the success of the gardern, photosynthesis is still a mystery, you can't make it grow, it is a miracle 

• backs and knees are sore because you are down in the dirt, you don't stand above the garden

• we need to protect the garden from bunnies. Worms are good, bunnies are bad. 

• organic fruit doesn't all look like the stuff in the market. Quality is over beauty, and there is no uniformity.. you share from the excess.

bigmikey (not me) said...
Dave,

Great post. Very enjoyable. The more you explain the metaphor of the garden, the more it resonates with me.


Len, great additional comments. If I may be so bold, the "bunnies" in my experience are the disaffected evangelicals who hop from church to church. They come in so gently and softly, saying all the right things etc, but you turn your back for one minute and ... the radishes are GONE. Those evil b*st*rds!

Around the World in 800 Days

My nephew Andrew Gardner and his friend Ryan are sailing around the world in what looks like a 35 foot sloop. (Well he's not actually my nephew - he's the son of my wife's second cousin.) Quite an adventure for a couple of guys just out of university. They will be posting their journeys on a blog Ryan and Andrew... Sailing Adventures Around the World.

Sail On!

A Beautiful Day

We went down to the Beach again today – Brigitte, Kirstyn and I (Jared was off to London to see off a friend to university). That's Brigitte and Kirstyn sitting on the bench and the last picture is Kirstyn silhouetted against the sky. It was one of those late summer days that was just too beautiful to spend indoors. We brought books to read as we sat on a bench. We met some old friends from our Stone Church days.
It was a “longing” day. I don’t know why but this type of day creates this deep sense of longing in me for … I don’t know what really. Maybe it is just melancholy and childhood memories. Maybe it’s just that summer is almost over and those long, lazy days are just about gone for another year. Maybe it’s that I’m remembering other beautiful days that are steeped in warm fuzzy memories of days I will never have again. I don’t really know what it is that I’m longing for but days like this really bring it out. It’s an almost tangible ache.

Of course the conditions are perfect … a beautiful, cloudless sky, the late afternoon sun dappling through the trees, the fresh breeze blowing in off the lake bringing that sublte but distinct water smell to my nostrils, the view of the sparkling water and the sailboats skimming across the surface of the lake. And I had two of my favourite people by my side.

Then there’s the boardwalk and the people … the little boy running in that waddle that only two year olds can manage, arms and legs pumping furiously; the kaleidoscope of nationalities where you hardly hear anyone speaking English; where you see people dressed in bathing suits, three piece suits and everything in between; and the only place in the city where the dogs may actually outnumber the people.

It was an amazing afternoon. It stirs me even now as I reflect on my day. That sense of longing always points me to God. It is that feeling that convinces me that we are not alone in the universe. Someone once said that the longing for eternity shows that we were built for heaven. A day like today proves it.

Wandering Again

A great op ed piece by Sam Schulman in the Wall Street Journal on the lack of "charm" shown by modern atheists. Read it here. While you're at it you may want to check out another site on the emotionalism of atheism here.

An increasing number of Canadian churches that identify themselves as "Emerging" are starting to pop up. A list of these emerging ministries across Canada can be found here. No, we're not on it. However Thinker Labs is putting together a documentary film about Emerging Churches across Canada and they are traveling across the country and will be in Ontario in October. I hope I get a chance to see it. One of the people behind Thinker Labs is my buddy Joe Manafo (check out his link "The Story" in the list on the left side of the blog - or probably better is to check out his blog - because his website is just a picture).

And then there's just some weird stuff out there in the Christian blogosphere, like dog church, the Virtual Church of the Blind Chihuahua, an irreverent take on creating church in cyberspace, that exists just to be controversial, and is an interesting postmodern take on the church - and sometimes they're funny. Another virtual church (just click and pray) is vurch, a slightly more reverent approach to church on the web. Where do I find this stuff? Here's a page of links that I got from a Canadian church site.

Just information here - not necessarily endorsement.

More Athiests at Church

Remember a few posts back when I reviewed the book "Jim and Casper Go To Church?" Well, a guy named Drew Marshall, who has a radio program on the Oakville based Christian radio station Joy 1250, has done something similar - but for Canada. He hired two non-Christians (not necessarily athiests) to attend five churches in the Greater Toronto Area (the GTA) - TACF, The Meeting House, Sanctuary, Orangeville Baptist (Drew's home church) and another church still to be determined. The set up a blog to share their impressions.

The two people they chose are young, intelligent and articulate and do a good job of reviewing the churches they visit. They don't always agree with each other (which is good) and they have some probing insights (which is also good). The blog has a place to comment (like most blogs) which allow people to ask some follow-up questions (which is very good). They ask some insightful questions and provide an intelligent critique of some of the "churchisms" that many Christians take for granted. It is always refreshing to get a different perspective - even if it is sometimes a critical one.

However, my criticism is similar to my review of Jim and Casper Go to Church - they don't really get the God or the faith piece. And for non-Christians they also have very many "Christian" stereotypes that they are working through which is understandable. People get most of their information about Christianity from TV and other second hand sources or rely on childhood memories about what they thought they learned or heard. Even though Christianity might be rejected it is still very hard for almost everyone in the West to have a non-biased view of the Church. My other criticism is that they are way too serious about all this. They don't understand the playfulness of God or the fact that nobody who does church or goes to church really gets everything right - not even some of the time.

It is some very interesting reading (but don't buy the book). I thought their love for the Sanctuary (my friend Greg Paul's Church/Ministry in downtown Toronto) was interesting given that it really is more like a "mission" (like Evergreen) that started a church and quite different than your typical suburban church. I like it better too! Their take on TACF was so very Western and Christendomish. I wonder how they would have responded to George Whitefield's preaching? I hope the fifth church is a West Indian or African Canadian church.

You can check out their blog and make comments or ask questions here. Please do.

On The Harbour

Or maybe I should write "harbor." I keep running into the "our" ending in many words here in USA. Words like behaviour and neighbour and harbour are spelled without the "u" south of the border. Most days it doesn't really matter but today we were talking a lot about the affecting the behaviour of others and it kept coming up as misspelled in my word processor (but not on the powerpoint presentation). I actually had to change my essay because I didn't think it would be all that well received.

At any rate, last night we went for a three hour cruise in Boston harbour - which is actually very expansive and has a number of islands and lots of lighthouses and a couple of forts. The whole Boston area is a history buff's dream come true. Boston was settled in the early 1600's and the founding dates of towns all around where we are is 1643, or even earlier. Just to put that in perspective, Thornhill was founded in 1795 - 150 years later.

it was a beautiful night and I posted some pictures here on the blog and on my Flickr site. The sunset was spectacular and the view of the city at night was amazing. We have a guy in our course whose sister runs a charter boat and we arranged to rent it for our class at cost (well probably below cost). They prepared an amazing meal for us and we spent a great evening together. Our class is quite small (only 6) and we've gotten to know each other quite well and we are having a good time.

We are doing school work as well and I'm in the middle of trying to put a proposal together for my next project which will also lead to what my thesis looks like.

Beaches

Brigitte and I went for a walk down on the boardwalk Sunday afternoon. It really is quite a lovely place to walk and talk. The trees were budding and the tulips were out (see the bottom picture). We had a coffee (well at least I did) and shared some ice cream and sat on a bench for a while and watched the lake and the flowers and the people. Toronto is very cosmopolitan. We have commented to one another that we hear so many languages spoken down on the boardwalk. For sure we heard Spanish, German, French, Russian and broken English, and English with a strong accent.

I took a couple of pictures as well. The first one is the Leuty Lifeguard Station - a beach landmark. The second is the Gardener's Cottage in Kew Gardens - a historic site (built in 1902 by Kew Williams) and also a Beach landmark. You can see Brigitte standing behind the tulips.

It's a long trip down there from Thornhill but it always seems worth it.

Road Trip Home

I'm finally sitting at my desk in my office again, very tired but home. We decided to drive straight through from Halifax to Toronto without stopping overnight.

We started the day (Wednesday) by sleeping until we got up. For me that meant about 10am. We had a leisurely morning packing up, having lunch and talking with my sister Dorthea and her husband Michael. Then we headed to downtown Halifax with our car packed to browse that CD store and the big used bookstore again. Of course the afternoon was beautiful and I let the boys browse and I walked down by the harbour and took a few more photos (second and last photos).

We met up again, had a coffee and at around 5:15pm (Maritime time) headed out of the city over one of the bridges to Dartmouth (top picture), the city on the other side of the Halifax harbour. The running joke out East is that Halifax has everything that Dartmouth has except a beautiful view of Halifax. (Apparently, Dartmouth is not a very nice place to live or to visit - but don't tell anyone you heard it from me.)

We stopped for a few minutes at Magnetic Hill just outside of Moncton and let our car roll backwards up the hill - three times! It really is strange and it doesn't make sense to your brain. In the picture to the right we are looking "down" the hill that we just rolled "up" backwards. Click on the photo for a bigger view.

We then just drove - taking turns - all night. In case you're interested, you can make it from Halifax to Edmunston, New Brunswick is seven hours, (it SNOWED - heavily - as we were driving north of Edmnston! - click on the picture and you can see it somewhat) to Quebec city (or Levis on the south side of the St. Lawrence River opposite Quebec City) is ten hours and you can be in the tunnel to Montreal in just over 12 hours. I did discover that the best way to make it through Montreal traffic is to do it at 4:30 in the morning.

We dropped John off in Perth at 7:30am after being on the road for 15 and half hours. We had a leisurely breakfast with him while people interrupted us to say hi to John (small town life is just so ... well, small). We made it home by 11:15. So if you're planning to drive to the East coast You can do it easily in under 20 hours.

My reflections on the road trip? I loved the relaxed pace. It is so good to be able to stop when you want and get out and look. At the same time, one week is plenty long for a road trip ( that is, unless I could have spent two or three days in each spot camping and hiking - but then it would have ceased being a road trip and become a camping trip). Make sure you have a reliable car - we put over 5000 km and my maintenance was to make sure I started with a fresh oil change, and to check the tire pressure occationally. A final (blatantly obvious) tip is - make sure you like the people you are with and make sure you like to drive and be in the car. This was the case for our trip and I loved being able to spend some extended and relaxed time with my son.

This travel blog has been fun and rewarding. It has helped me process and remember the trip and certainly helps in putting the pictures in their proper order. I hoped you liked it and I hope it helped you experience a little bit of our trip with us. Let me know what you think by leaving a comment.

Road Trip Day Seven

It's hard to believe that we've been gone for a week already. The days have gone fast and the time has been good. We have all gotten along well and have had a number of good conversations. The trip yesterday and today has been through some amazing parts of the country. Cape Breton has been truly amazing - even seeing it through the rain and drizzle. I'm wondering if I could have kept my eyes on the road if it had been clear and sunny. The rest of my pictures are on the Flickr site HERE. Of course the other photos we've already taken can be found HERE at another Flickr site.

Today we started out the day by going to Louisbourg, the French settlement and fort that was built in the early 1700's to serve as an ice-free harbour for France to export coal and protect the Grand Banks and the entrance to the Gulf of St Lawrence. It was one of the busiest ports in the new world in the 18th century. There is lots of info on the internet about this community - just type Louisbourg into Google.

Technically the fort was not yet open and although we saw the cars of a number of the workers preparing it for the summer season, we didn't see anyone at all and had the place to ourselves. We explored for a couple of hours but I could have stayed there for the rest of the day. (I don't know how many of you know that I worked as a guard at Fort Henry in Kingston.) The fort was partially reconstructed in a massive project done by the Government of Canada in 1961 and although what they have done is impressive, it is still only half done. Unlike Fort Henry (which never saw action) Louisbourg was attacked twice and defeated both times - once by the New Englanders (1758) and the second time by the British in 1765.

We left through a "secret tunnel" and cut our walk time back to the car in half. Stuff like that really gets my imagination going thinking about how life must have looked like when the fort was in operation. I especially thought about how the fort was defeated in battle.

After Louisbourg (and after taking a gravel road - something Brigitte would have deeply disliked) we drove down along the coast of the interior lake Bras D'Or which is absolutely spectacular - even in the rain. We then just headed to the Canso Causeway and then down to Halifax where the sun was shining - go figure. In the evening we headed back to downtown Halifax where the guys checked out another used CD store and John found some good cheap tunes.

Tomorrow we will sleep till we get up and then head out for home when we feel ready. With three drivers we will drive straight through to get John home for late Thursday afternoon and we should get home by 9:00 or 10:00pm. I'm ready to head home.

Road Trip Day Six

This morning we left Halifax around 9:00am and headed up to Cape Breton to travel the Cabot Trail. The weather has been on and off raining and we actually got some wet snow. At the very tip of Cape Breton, called Cape North, the ceiling was very low and we were basically traveling through fog.

The snow was also still present and actually quite deep - as you can see by one of the pictures. Either it has been very cold late into the Spring or they had a great deal of snow up here this winter. I think both are true because it was quite cold today (hence the wet snow). The drive was spectacular in spite of the rain. I'm not sure we could have made it all the way around if the weather had been sunny and clear because we would have been stopping every couple of minutes. Even the low clouds and the rain created a mournful beauty that affected the soul and created a sense of longing.

The guys were alternately silly and comatose today. They were jumping around and hamming it up for the camera when we stopped to take pictures and then they promptly fell asleep anytime we settled into any lengthy drive.
Cape Breton had a noticeable difference in the style of churches. It was the first time I saw the first brick and stone on church buildings outside of larger cities - not for every church but it was a marked difference. The other difference is that we are in a noticeable French-speaking area along the west coast of Cape Breton. There is a strong Acadian presence on the cape and many signs are only in French. That affects the church architecture and I saw more two steepled churches as well as more colourfully painted homes.

Well we are almost ready to come home. We are spending the night in Sydney and will meander back to Halifax tomorrow. Hopefully we can drop by the fort at Louisbourg tomorrow - something that interests me, this former member of the Fort Henry Guard (FHG 559). I'd like to see at least part of the fort and see how they run the fort. Of course I could spend the whole day there - maybe I can get the guys to commit a couple of hours.
Tuesday evening we should be spending the night in Halifax at my sisters place and then heading back to Thornhill on Wednesday/Thursday. After six days on the road we are all feeling like we would like to get back home. The rest of my pictures are on the Flickr site HERE. Of course the other photos we've already taken can be found HERE at another Flickr site.

Road Trip Day Four

We began our day in Charlottetown with overcast skies, drizzle and a low ceiling and so we spent some time at Future Shop where John bought himself some electronic gadgetry. As we got to Truro we actually decided not to head out to Cape Breton today because of the drizzle and because we were only an hour away from Halifax thought we would go there first. So we took the scenic route from Truro to Halifax via the Minas Basin and sections of the Bay of Fundy.

In other news, I found it actually quite strange that the first two churches that we saw on day four were fairly ugly compared to the beautiful country churches we had been seeing along the way. One was the PAOC church in Charlottetown and the other was a Baptist church so hopefully I'm assigning blame equally here. How is it that these old buildings seem to beautify the landscape and the new ones just look like eyesores? Where one dominates the landscape and creates a wow experience, the other seems to pollute the landscape and create an uugghh! experience.

Just in case you didn't notice the first picture is a lighthouse on the Minas Basin and the second is one of those eyesores and the third is one of those that beautifies the landscape.

I've also been noticing distinct differences as we go through regions of he country. In Quebec every town had a huge cathedral like structure in the middle of the town dominating and defining the entire community. It was also on the highest point of ground in the town and then often raised up on a built up portion of ground. In Quebec almost all the churches had two symmetrically balanced usually square but sometimes round towers with steeples at the front of the building. The churches were predominantly white with silver coloured roofs on the church and the steeples.

As we went into New Brunswick, there was almost always only one steeple and it was square and more squat looking than the steeples in Quebec. Here the churches were almost exclusively white and sometimes there was more than one church in town. Interestingly enough the churches were usually on the main road but not usually in the centre of town.

In PEI the churches were similar to New Brunswick but were sometimes outside of the town altogether or sometimes on a back street in the town. In Nova Scotia the churches were similar to NB and PEI but seemed more weathered with paint peeling. It seems as if they were not as well taken care of and other times the churches had been converted (pardon the pun) into community centres or theatres. I have no real verifiable conclusions about all this, but it seems that in Quebec the church was central to all of life in a small town and it still serves as a symbol of that today - even if the reality of it is not there. In NB and PEI religion was important but was separate from day to day life - maybe a reflection of the holiness tradition. Whereas in NS religion does not seem as important and is reflected by the lack of maintenance. I don't know enough to make more than a guess.

As for our trip today, the Bay of Fundy and downtown Halifax at night dominated the photos. Jared and John slept for quite a while in the car as we travelled. I'm still amazed at the beauty of our country and could stop every few kilometres and take some more pictures.

In Halifax, we went straight to my sister Dorothea's place. Her husband Michael and son Daniel were there but her daughter Christel was at her new apartment (she had just finished moving out today!) We will see her tomorrow. So then Daniel played tour guide and took us downtown and we walked through downtown and headed up to the Citadel and took some night photos of the city and the harbour. As always you can check them out at my Flicker site HERE.

These last two pictures are first of all my sister Dorothea and her son Daniel. The second is a shot of the lighthouse in the eastern part of the harbour in Halifax.

Road Trip Day Three

We finished the day yesterday in Bathurst, New Brunswick forgetting that we crossed a time zone and lost an hour. So instead of getting to bed at our usual 1:00am or so, it was actually two and I don’t think I fell asleep until three.

Today it was mostly driving as we went through Miramichi, slipped through the outskirts of Moncton and headed for the Confederation Bridge to Prince Edward Island. We stopped for some directions to some nice sites and checked out some coastal scenery (including lighthouses - that's me leaning against the lighthouse) before heading up to the north shore to visit Green Gables. We were the only ones there. There is some advantage to going off-season. The house itself was closed (the disadvantage of going off-season) but we didn’t really want to see the inside anyways.

I think we are mostly “scenery” guys anyways and took more photos of the north shore. (Today we took over 300 photos! At this rate we will be calling this "The Trip of Ten Thousand Photos!") Then we headed down to Charlottetown to find a hotel and something to eat.

The guys (John and Jared) are fun to be around and we all get along well. They actually went out to catch a movie while I stayed back to read and do the blog and post some more pictures at the Flickr site HERE. We tried to take more pictures with us actually in them instead of just shots of the scenery.

Jared and I are loving the camera – a Fuji f30 – which has been easy to use, takes great point-and-shot pictures and the battery life is amazing.

Tomorrow we will be heading back across the bridge (the ferry doesn’t start running until May first) and out towards Cape Breton along the Cabot Trail. Hopefully the weather will break. It started raining just after dark here.

In this last picture you can see the Golf (I'm actually sitting in the car). John is in front of the car and Jared took the hike down the coast to take the picture.

Road Trip Day Two

We woke up in Quebec City this morning, ate breakfast, packed up, checked out and went back to check out Quebec City. Jared and John found a great second hand music store on Rue St. Marie and I sat on a bench on the sidewalk having a coffee and reading a good book, enjoying the spring sunshine.

This is such a great city. It kind of reminds me of the Beaches, Yorkville and Europe all rolled into one. I could live here – if I spoke French. There is something about mountains and water and history that is just so amazing. It makes you wonder why so many people live in drab Toronto and the equally pedantic GTA.

We have such a beautiful country. Driving along the St. Lawrence River with its views and vistas and then driving through the back country was stunning. We stopped for a while at a place called Bic (it’s the place where they make the pens – just kidding) just west of Rimouski on the St. Lawrence. There was a stunning little waterfall pouring out with all its spring flood fury. And walking along the beach was a bit of a transcendent experience. God was there.

Not only was the scenery spectacular the weather was absolutely stunning. The day was finished off so wonderfully by an amazing sunset over the Restigouche River estuary near Campbellton, New Brunswick. We drove for another couple of hours and stopped for the night in Bathurst.

Our plans for tomorrow are to head over to Prince Edward Island or maybe even to Cape Breton first depending on what the weather is like. The Cabot Trail would be so much nicer with a view. I think some of the history in PEI can be appreciated in any kind of weather.

Jared and I have continued taking tons of pictures which I have uploaded to my Flickr site. I hope you are enjoying the travelogue. I had made comments and titles for all the pictures on Flickr but it didn't upload properly because we were having difficulty with the internet connection. But some of the photos are nice and you get a bit of a feel for the grandeur of the country. Try them out HERE.

Road Trip Day One

We have arrived in Quebec City and will be staying overnight.
We left this morning at 8:00am (or so), picked up Jared's friend John in Brockville at around noon (at where else but Tim Horton's), survived a harrowing trip through bumper to bumper Montreal traffic - even though the signs all said traffic was moving well, and arrived in Quebec City at around 5:30pm. It really was a great day for driving - no rain - and most of the afternoon was sunny and very pleasant. If only ...

We are absolutely delighted with Quebec City. Our hotel is a bit of a walk from the Old City but it was actually fun going through the streets meandering along what I would call a small lane but which carries two lanes of traffic and has buses zooming through. The Old City is so picturesque and everywhere you look you can see history and culture. I do regret not keeping all that high school french in my head. But the folks here have been very gracious - even with my Je ne peux pas parler Francais. It has been so much fun just walking around and stopping wherever we want. The downside is all the grade eight bus tours. Boy can you believe the nerve of them coming to Quebec city just when we are here?

Jared has been having fun with the camera taking about 300 pictures - some of which I have posted on a flickr account HERE. Unfortunately they are in reverse chronological order and I couldn't stay up late enough to fix that. Anyways, I hope you can check them out. (Rabbi Mykl is me by the way!)

Tomorrow we will be spending a bit more time in Quebec City and then heading out along the south shore of the St.Lawrence River up to Rimouski and then down to Bathurst, New Brunswick where we may stay the night.
We really don't have a strict agenda except to be in Halifax by sometime Sunday and be home sometime Thursday of next week. I will try and post something every day.