Basecamp part 2 – Call, Vision and Character

Basecamp, the new Frontiers Church Planting weekend, was not only a time for meeting some great people with big visions and a desire to see the nations reached it was also an excellent time of teaching on the subject of church planting.

We were blessed with having a number of excellent speakers over the weekend including David Stroud, Matt Hatch and Tony Thompson. The teaching was fairly basic in some ways but brought to life through the speakers sharing their experience of church planting, how they had done it and the issues they had faced and overcome.

David Stroud took the first session focusing on Character, Vision and Call.

CHARACTER

• Humility
• Conviction
• Endurance
• Stability
• Security in who we are in Christ
• Strong relationship with the Lord
• Secure marriage
• Good follower

On CALL we looked at the different ways God can call you to church plant.

These included

• God speaking into your heart
• Prophetic calling
• Dreams and vision
• Being asked by someone to do it

And finally VISION based on

• Scripture
• You
• Context

These need to be in equal tension with each other, best described as triangle with equal sides and angles                                           

Finally we looked at the skills of the church planter

• Motivated for the lost
• Able to gather lost and believers
• Self Starter
• Manage time and set goals
• Raise up other leaders
• Cast Vision
• Communicate to a small group
• Communicate clearly
• Preach to 30 – 70 people

This is some list of things and against some Mrs Beatthedrum and I do well in others we fail miserably. The good news for us is that God is involved and wants to be part of the process or changing us, or to some degree sanctify us so we become the people he wants us to be.

So we have a lot to learn, a lot to change, a lot to repent of, a lot to do and a lot of prayer is needed. For us the big thing is that God is involved and wants to do this through us.

There will be a lot of hard, difficult work ahead, but it will be worth it if we can bring Him more glory

Basecamp 09 – New Frontiers Church planting weekend

Mrs Beatthedrum and I were away over the weekend at “Basecamp” the New Frontiers church planter’s weekend away. The weekend was aimed at people who were either currently starting new church plants, were about to start church plants, felt called to a particular place to church plant or just felt called to church plant in general, (somewhere, at some stage, can we please find out where?).

In total there was about 50 couples represented on the weekend, people from THE SOUTH (in general, but including Hastings, London, Luton, Bristol, Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Kent and Essex), Bolton, Manchester, Southport, Leeds, York, Durham, Edinburgh, Lancashire, Cumbria and Norfolk.

What was exciting was seeing where they were either planting out to or had already planted to, these included, Bolton, Wrexham, Harrogate, Lancaster, various London boroughs, New Zealand, Australia, Italy, Canada, Birmingham, Malvern Hills, Bristol, Inverness, Bradford and Huddersfield, just to name a few.

Alongside the planters and prospective planters there was also a number of people who had already planted one two or even more churches and these were our coaches for the weekend. Lead by Matt Hattch from Mosaic Leeds and Tony Thompson from Luton (who is a complete mentalist so I really got on with him, and Debbie found someone to verbally spar with as well) these people really helped us understand what God was calling us to and gave valid teaching on our next steps.

The weekend also received excellent teaching from David Stroud on church planting, vision and skills, what sort of churches we need to plant and how to identify our calling.

I am going to write a series of blog posts about the weekend, what we leant and experienced and what our next steps are going to be. The last bit will follow on from consultation with our eldership team and church planting coach, which hopefully should take place sometime soon.

So for this one I am just going to talk about the people we met. Possibly the biggest fear that we had going on the weekend was that we were one of the few couples on the weekend that were not already elders in a local church, that everyone would be streets ahead of us and that we would feel like fish out of water.

When we got there however we discovered they were just normal people facing the same issues we were facing. The guys and girls on the course had a real humble spirit, were keen to learn, keen to listen and keen to share. They were warm, sincere and excited.

It was for us a great time of fellowship as well as learning and we have come away with a number of new friends who we will support in their endeavours and who will we hope share in our adventure to church plant.

It was great to be in a body of people who were obviously passionate for God, passionate for his church and passionate for the lost, in short people like us. Although we came from many different walks of life, from the very wealthy to the shelf stacker in Asda, from Scotland to all the way from Pretoria in South Africa, we shared those common passions that quickly bonded us together. There was a great sense of camaraderie, shared mission and purpose that was infectious and so encouraging.

That’s all I wanted to say on this post but I will hopefully over this week, post more about the weekend, including the teaching we received, the process we followed (interviews with our church planting coaches etc) and what Father said to us directly through the weekend. Finally, once we have chatted it all through with our eldership team, we will let you know about the exciting next steps we will be taking in the not so distant future.

North09 the most fun you can have in a field in North Yorkshire

North is the annual weekend get together of all the New Frontiers Churches in the North of England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. It started 5 years ago with about 400 people attending and has now grown to over 2000. It is held on a farm in North Yorkshire.

So where to start, I guess as we are in England the weather always plays a major part in camping, it can either ruin it or save it. Well this year the weather was indifferent, neither hot and dry nor cold wet and windy. It did rain but not that much and not for very long, there was a fair bit of wind but this is north Yorkshire we are talking about here, there was not too much sun or heat but it was not cold. So there was a weird mixture of shorts and T-shirts, jumpers, fleeces and trousers, sandals and heavy boots, depending on how ‘Geordie’ you are.

This year we in Durham had a good pitch, on the edge but not really in the gully’s of the main field. We were close to the crèche tents and not too far from the main barn where the meetings were held.

The good thing about North is that it is a good microcosm of the church spelt out in Acts 2 –

 “⁴²They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. 43Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. 44All the believers were together and had everything in common. 45Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. 46Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, 47praising God and enjoying the favour of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.”

Ok so nobody sold their possessions but they did share the bounty of their cool boxes and home baking and I know a number of children and adults were saved.

The teaching was brought by David Stroud in the mornings which were excellent, challenging, practical and provoking. The download will soon be available for all the meetings and I will post a link on here as soon as I have them. Jeremy Simpkins took the evening meetings which again were excellent.

In each meeting there was also a short piece about what was going on, typically these took the form of two people being interviewed by Julian one of the team. These were mainly covering church planting, which is a major strategy for NFI as a whole. I listen to and was encouraged by these as people discussed planting churches in Northern Ireland, Huddersfield, CANADA and Manchester.

For some this focus on church planting is an annoyance as they are not called to church plant but to stay and grow their current local church, however they should be aware that churches that do not plant out other churches typically become stale and wither, also in truth every church is still planting as new ministries are raised up and new missions starting.

The worship was amazing, Spirit lead and powerful. I managed to praise myself to a standstill, well I am a fat man without much stamina, and on one occasion sang or shouted myself hoarse. The band was amazing in how they led us and how they played. The PA was excellent and got even better as the weekend progressed, and the drummer was LOUD J. The worship had a more rocky feel and was God glorifying and focussed instead of us/me/I focussed and this led to people praising God with abandon. I feel this praise enabled and empowered, in some way, the ministry times that took place at the end of each meeting. These were powerful times of physical and emotional healing, challenge, direction and commissioning.

There were a number of seminars over the weekend which I hear were excellent. We went to the church planting one taken by Steve and Ruth Hurd who have planted a church in York and are now moving on to plant a new church in Huddersfield. It was an excellent session covering the basics and was very real and practical.

The kids work was again fantastic with the kids having a great time playing silly games, listening to great teaching and being ministered to. A number of them were saved and a lot of them were either filled with the Spirit for the first time or were given new gifts like prophecy or speaking in tongues.

As ever one of the main ingredients of North are the fellowship, spending time with people in your church, or other churches, just relaxing chatting and getting to know each other closer. We spent three nights, two around a fire pit we made from a BBQ, drinking wine, chatting, being silly and having peanut fights. It would not surprise me if we do not go back next year and find that there is a peanut plantation growing in the middle of the field. These are in some ways the best times at North.

For us it was also good to see friends from other churches who we only see at North, despite us all saying we must get together for a meal, it is great to see people moving on and what God is doing in their lives.

For us the highlight of the weekend was the fulfilment of a prophecy we had received a few months earlier and this has lead us to being able to take a step forward in what we believe God is calling us to do in the mid to long term. More news on this as it breaks of course.

So what were the highlights for us as a family?

1. The worship which was God centred and focused yet passionate and engaging
2. Getting the next step along the road to our mid – long term future
3. Seeing my eldest son on the floor floundering like a landed fish after being hit by the spirit (oh and I was a proud dad to see him on stage on the final morning giving his testimony on what had happened to him!)
4. The way my youngest son handled being hit in the face with a hard football and getting his nose bust without tears, he simply shoved a rolled piece of kitchen paper up it and running back to join in again, that boy is hard!
5. My daughter speaking in tongues for the first time
6. Spending time with friends from Newcastle who are looking to church plant to the home of the North East’s only Premiership Football team

If there is to be any criticism of the weekend it would only be this, those of us with children or multiple children in different age groups, need the children’s work to finished after the planned end of the meetings, we were unable to stay for any of the ministry times due to the fact they did not start until after we had to pick the kids up.

Oh and we were robbed in the final of the 5 a side football competition, the ref was blind and biased!

So all in all a fantastic weekend, I would encourage everyone who is in an NFI church in the ‘Northern’ region to go along to north, you may not like camping, I know I am not that keen, but you could always stay off site or hire a caravan. This weekend is too good to miss. If you have kids you should be doubly making an effort to get there as they will be blessed by the kids work and impacted by God in a major way.

So when the forms come out sign up and get along!