As a small boy I once went to church with my new cowboy hat and gun and all was fine until during a prayer or a reading or something, stood up on my chair and shouted ‘bang.’ Cue frowns and a quick pull down from my embarrassed mother. Apparently it’s not good for the pastor’s son to be disruptive.

Churches, at least the churches I grew up in, were known for their love of order. Sunday best, quiet in church, somber, respectful, ordered. These churches voted conservative, were conservative; honouring and largely trusting authority and prizing a quiet life above all else.

The idea, then, of the disruptive church would be a profoundly uncomfortable one. Likely, in fact, to be treated as an unbiblical one. ‘God is a god of order and not of chaos’ would be the refrain.

Yet, today, it is critical that the church learns again how to be disruptive. I say again, because throughout history and especially in its origins the church was a profoundly disruptive body. However, before we think briefly of the disruptive nature of the church and its founder, let’s ask why? Why should the church be disruptive today.

The idea of disruptive innovation or technology is well-known in business. As large companies succeed they tended to focus on high-end, high profit products and ignore the bottom end of the market. Along would come a small company with an idea and focus on the low margin end of the market and by their low-cost appeal would slowly, surely and inevitably take the market from the previously unassailable giants.

Some examples would be: Amazon – for years loss making the internet retailer has completely disrupted the whole industry of publishing and bookselling and now other areas of retail too. The internet is completely disrupting journalism, advertising and probably education. Why pay thousands to learn at a university when you can learn on the internet for free? It is the focus of many entrepreneurs for their business to become the next disruptor.

So how does this apply to the church? In the western world there is a very modern narrative still at work – religion is dying, religious ethics are at worst bigoted and evil, at best old-fashioned and quaint. The supernatural doesn’t exist, faith is a killer and not a force for good in the world. There is a dominant narrative that runs through media & government and most forms of institution in western europe. It’s not a conspiracy but it’s just a prevalent, dominating worldview from the top down.

The church in the West has often been full of angst and unease about this state of affairs, and sometimes due to its own internal bickering or fragmentary nature or the generally anemic ability of umbrella organisations to act creatively the church has been anything but disruptive and has often been irrelevant.

Alpha is a good example of the church being disruptive, to the extent that it’s influence on the Church of England is questioned in the national newspapers, foodbanks and debt advice centres could be. The Campaign for Marriage is not and instead reinforces the national narrative rather than disrupting it.

What we need today are churches that tell compelling stories that challenge the ruling narrative, we need churches that act in such a way as to challenge long-held notions of the church, what it is and it’s power (or lack thereof) but that needs innovation and creativity.

Jesus was incredibly disruptive, he declared himself as bringing a sword that would divide families (Mt 10:34-35), disrupt notions of the use of wealth (Lk 12:20), extend grace to the radically wasteful (Lk 15:14). Long held laws were thrown on their heads (Mk 2:27), the exercise of supernatural power disrupting religious sensibilities (Lk 6:7-11). Jesus’ parables were often shocking, unnerving and disarming. Within Judaism a new story was disrupting the old.

This new story then began to disrupt other stories, the much bigger one of polytheism throughout the Roman Empire and challenge the supremacy of the empire itself through it’s conviction that ‘Jesus was Lord’ and there was no God but the God of Jesus (Acts 19:23-29).

We must learn again how to shape the church in such a way that it disrupts lives and ultimately changes the story. We must become a disruptive church.

It’s world news that Stockholm has been troubled by five nights of unrest.

It’s also mostly taken place, if you’ll excuse the phrase, within a stone’s throw of where we live. As I began to write this post I could see from my study window, in the near distance the smoke from another burning car. It’s not happening somewhere else, it’s happening here.

Last night I joined a group of parents and residents who spent their night hanging out around the local nurseries and schools, doing their bit to ensure that all was calm. It was.

Ännu en gång slår vi rekord i antal! #husby #svpol twitter.com/BenjaminDousa/…

— Benjamin Dousa (@BenjaminDousa) May 24, 2013

This is where we live, it’s now our home and we don’t see ourselves as temporary but permanent residents here. We care, it matters, so I went. All this to say, that what is happening isn’t simply just news reports to us.

In fact the picture on the left is of a burnt out classroom in an infant school just a few hundred metres from where we live. Our kids are on the waiting list to go to that school and we regularly play in the playground there. The arson attacked happened two nights ago while we slept peacefully and blissfully unaware.

But as the world takes pictures of burning cars it’s easy to wonder what on earth is happening here in Stockholm? Yet it’s important to get the picture right.

Is Stockholm burning and it’s society on edge? If you read this report you might think the answer is yes. The headline throws the spotlight on Swedish inequality, which actually isn’t very unequal. Read this report on the other hand (and one which I think is nearer the mark) and you’ll conclude the answer is, instead, no.

So here are a few thoughts on what has been happening the last week:

• Riots is perhaps too strong a word. There haven’t been running battles with the police, no real fighting and no looting. If when you think of riots you think of what happened in London in 2011 then this is not the same. No deaths, no looting, a few hundred not a few thousand people, no stories of ordinary people getting caught up in extraordinary mob violence. It’s mostly a bit of stone throwing and burning of cars. Now it feels more like ongoing vandalism and it’s calming down.
• A picture of a burning car in a news report can make you think it’s happening everywhere and the whole neighbourhood is in flames. It’s both true and a distortion at the same time.
• The word ‘deprived’ is similarly misleading. In terms of signs of urban decay the area where we lived in middle-England had more signs of deprivation than these large communities. What that tells me is that social exclusion has a variety of different forms and in Sweden the sense of alienation is not accompanied by decay and neglect in the urban environment.
• We live close to the main troubled areas and regularly visit those areas but we don’t feel unsafe. We’ve (so far) never been threatened, robbed, hassled or in any other way felt like these areas were no-go areas for us.
• All the main areas are predominantly immigrant communities but that includes immigrants like us. There clearly are some underlying issues at work, some of which will be the fault of the host society and some the fault of the immigrant. That’s not news, nor is it startling social analysis but it is most likely the case. Are most immigrants well provided for? Mostly, yes. The Swedish welfare system is still generous. Are there jobs around for the young and unskilled? No, there aren’t. Are there some injustices, of course – it would be surprising if there weren’t. Is life easy for the people of these communities? No.

Our response is to pray, is to join in the community efforts and I think to represent our area well, to stand up for it – to correct misrepresentations when they happen and to be committed to its welfare – physically as well as spiritually. All prayers appreciated as we seek to do just that!

We had an interesting discussion at church on Sunday, seated round our kitchen table, sparked off by Colossians 3:18-4:1. One of the women related how, on the child minding course she is studying, she received lower marks for not agreeing to the idea that boys and girls are the same and by this they mean no different at all. In order, it is thought, to have true equality you cannot say there are differences. It’s a peculiarly Swedish approach.

The instinctive reaction around the table, from men and women from three different cultures across two continents was that this just simply isn’t true. Even as we set aside traditional concepts of gender roles there was a conviction that difference does not imply lesser value. Seated around our table were multiple cultures Afro-Caribbean British, Scottish, English, Swedish & Chinese – each culture different from the others in sometimes subtle ways and in other more obvious ways. There was no attempt to put these cultures into a hierarchy – different but equal was the consensus.

My culture (White English) has a long history of oppression and colonialism (alongside other more  virtuous traits) and there were others whose history was on the side of the oppressed – yet despite the injustices we were working toward discovering how the gospel changes our approach so that a more beautiful unity is created by an appreciation of our diversity and not a creation of a bland uniformity.

With gender today, because of the often oppressive actions of male towards female, we struggle with the idea of equal but different. Yet not every area of modern life would welcome a complete levelling of the field – take sport for example. It is perhaps the one area of life, outside of child-birth, that the physical differences between men and women are most evident – where equal but different is the right approach.

In the London 2012 Olympics Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce of Jamaica won the gold in 10.75 seconds; it was the fastest time ever run in Britain by a woman. It was, is, a remarkable achievement. Yet had Fraser-Pryce run against the men it would have been, perhaps naturally, a different story. She wouldn’t have finished last, she would have just beaten Asafa Powell who pulled up with a hamstring injury but more accurately she wouldn’t have even made the final with that time.

Nor would she have made the semi-final. Instead she would have finished last or second to last in all seven of the round one heats.

Equal and the same would have obliterated all women sprinters and every single female track and field athlete in every single event. Same goes for every sport that relies on strength, speed, stamina. No medals for Jess Ennis, Becky Adlington or Victoria Pendleton or Katherine Grainger.

Yet equal but different means we get to watch these women compete and triumph and our celebration of their victory is not lessened by the fact that they competed against women. We can see the skill, the strength, the brilliance of these women.

There are some sports where men and women do compete against each other because the sport allows for it – show jumping (the skill is with the rider and the strength with the horse). I’ve no idea whether it would make any difference in sailing or shooting or archery for example but if women have sufficient fitness to compete at the highest levels they should – unlike Sterling Moss.

What, if any, relevance does this have for the church where, let’s face it physical fitness is not one of the requirements for eldership? Is this an argument for no female elders? No.

What I’m trying to say and to demonstrate is that ‘equal but different’ exists and sometimes it can be good and sometimes we celebrate it, rise up on our feet and shout our loudest for it. I want to cheer on these remarkable, amazing women and there are women in church who, in different ways are just as remarkable, amazing and strong and sometimes it’s the difference not the sameness that allows me to see it for what it is.

Despite being one of the most secular countries on earth, cultural religion still has a significant role in Swedish society not least in their national holidays. Today the nation is busy having a day off courtesy of the ascension of the saviour of the world.

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of preaching on the ascension at Barnabas Community Church in Shrewsbury, UK. Yet the ascension has often been a slightly odd event, this apparent levitation of Jesus into the sky. As I reflected on this, the following example came to me:

“Let me give you a very recent illustration of how I felt about the ascension. It has been a long, cold winter in Sweden. Cold enough in fact to go for a walk on a lake which, coming from the UK is not something I’m used to. Right at the end of March we went for a family walk on a nearby lake. The sun was shining and it had been above zero for a few days and the snow was beginning to melt. As we walked on the lake we saw a few cracks here and there, a few places looked thinner than others and not being used to walking on frozen lakes we were a bit nervous, walking a bit gingerly. We didn’t feel at all confident in our surroundings.

Until that is, we looked up and saw….

A tractor driving on the lake clearing snow for the skaters and skiers. A tractor on a lake at the end of March. Apparently you can drive a car on ice when it’s at least 10cm thick and this winter the ice had frozen to nearly 30cm thick. We felt a bit silly, breathed a bit easier and walked a whole lot more confidently out onto the lake.

For me if I look and think about the Ascension in isolation, I feel a bit nervous about whether it can hold the weight – I feel if this is what my faith is resting on then it’s not really strong enough, I don’t trust it enough to put the weight of my life upon it. However if I look up and consider instead the evidence for the Resurrection I realise it can take my weight, it’s like a tractor driving past on the lake. It’s still an act of faith but I can walk much more confidently now.

It is not thin ice, it takes the heavy weight of all that we put on it – Christ is not dead, He is risen and ascended.”

For more on the significance of the ascension here’s a good post from Desiring God.

Tim Chester has also recently co-written a book, which although I have not read yet looks like a good read, on The Ascension.

“Wycliffe translator Lee Bramlett was confident that God had left His mark on the Hdi culture somewhere, but though he searched, he could not find it. Then one night in a dream, God prompted Lee to look again at the Hdi word for love. Lee and his wife Tammi had learned that verbs in Hdi consistently end in one of three vowels. For almost every verb, they could find forms ending in I, a and u. But when it came to the word for love, they could only find I and a. Why no u?

Lee asked the Hdi translation committee, which included the most influential leaders in the community, ‘Could you dvi your wife?’ “Yes” they said. That would mean that the wife had been loved but the love was gone.
‘Could you dva your wife?’ ‘Yes’. That kind of love depended on the wife’s actions. She would be loved as long as she remained faithful and cared for her husband well. ‘Could you dvu your wife?’ Everyone laughed. ‘Of course not! If you said that, you would have to keep loving your wife no matter what she did, even if she never got you water, never made you meals. Even if she committed adultery, you would be compelled to just keep on loving her. No, we would never say dvu. It just doesn’t exist.’

Lee sat quietly for a while, thinking about John 3: 16, and then asked: Could God dvu people?’ There was complete silence for three or four minutes; then tears started to trickle down the weathered faces of these elderly men. Finally, they responded. ‘Do you know what this would mean? This would mean that God kept loving us over and over, millennia after millennia, while all the time we rejected His great love. He is compelled to love us, even though we have sinned more than any people.’ One simple vowel and the meaning was changed from’ I love you, based on what you do and who you are’ to ‘I love you, based on who I am. I love you because of me and not because of you.’ For centuries, the little word was there – unused but available, grammatically correct and quite understandable. When the word was finally spoken, it called into question their entire belief system. If God was like that, did they need the spirits of the ancestors to intercede for them? Many decided the answer was no, and the number of Christ-followers quickly grew from a few hundred to several thousand.”

What is the role of prayer in building and a growing a new church plant? It can be something of a truism that the church planter affirms the place and power of prayer but plans according to his own strength.

It’s a lesson I’ve learned by experience and questioned whether the first church I planted could really be said to be ‘devoted to prayer’. It was a disturbing moment to realise the answer might actually be ‘no.’

Our determination this time was to plan around prayer. We’ve established a rhythm in the church plant that I hope will sustain us. On Sundays we teach our children, study the Bible and break bread together, while on Wednesday evenings we worship and pray.

That is, if you like, our daily bread but now we are planning a feast of prayer. On the 8-9th June this year we are organising a prayer weekend.

Our hope is twofold, firstly to pray for the church plant – that it will be Jesus centred, Bible based and mission focused and all that comes with that. Our second hope is to pray for the city – for a blessing on it but also to listen to God for signs of the kingdom, aspects of the life of the city that we can then hold on to in prayer. A modern metropolis is too vast and complex for a church plant yet we believe that amidst all the complexity there will be things that God would have us pray for, believe for and work for – for the advancement of the kingdom and, if they go hand in hand, the good of the city.

Already a growing number of people from the UK are coming to join us and there’s still time for others to join in. Materials will soon be available (on this blog) for those who can’t come to Stockholm but who can pray where they are.

We’re anticipating ‘one weekend of prayer to shape a church to reach a city.’ If you’re interested in joining us, please get in touch.

Some invitations to mission in northern Europe over the next few days. First up The NEW:

The NEW is taking place in Riga, Latvia on the 19th-22nd July this year and is hosted by my friend Matt Medd.

This event is aimed at people who are considering a call to cross-cultural mission, and who are interested in working with Newfrontiers in the Baltics and Northern Europe.

As Matt says,

“It is an intimate event over a weekend that seeks to help people on their journey of cross-cultural mission with a particular focus on New Europe. It has been running for a few years now and has proven really helpful to people who are seeking God and want to know how to take the next step. I have also found it a really helpful way of exposing people to Newfrontiers vision and values; particularly those among us who have never been to a big Newfrontiers event like Newday or Brighton conference.”

For more information and booking go to http://neweuropeconference.eu/

We’ve just returned from a two week visit to the UK catching up with friends, family & supporting churches. Tiring and good are appropriate descriptions. We left the UK two years ago to come and live in Sweden because this was the mission field God has given us. As we’d see people it was reasonably common for them to ask, ‘Is it nice being home again?’ and we knew what they meant.

Except, of course, we weren’t home.

Home at its most basic is your place of permanent residence, so we weren’t home. Home however has more to it than your postal code, which is why we can say of someone or somewhere that ‘we felt right at home’. Home is a place of security and comfort, it is the place we love and are loved (or at least should be). Home is the place where we retreat from the difficulties of the outside world and home is the place where we invite the world in. Home is the place that roots me in the world and is one of the few places that we get to express who we are – our rooms, spaces and houses become perhaps our biggest display of the kind of people we think we are. Most of all home is the place where I feel I belong.

It is these kinds of feelings and associations that make marriage and family breakdown all the more painful when we realise that the place of comfort, nurture, nourishment, safety and love is no longer a place ‘where I feel at home’. I’m saying I no longer belong.

We have made our home in a suburb of Stockholm and we feel comfortable, we are beginning to feel like we belong, we feel at home.

Home is an interesting idea when seen in the  light of the biblical story of humans cast out of their first and most ideal home, away from where they most belonged. The next thousand years or more trace a wandering people, nomadic but searching for a place to call home, the powerful pull of a promised land. Home, exile, home again and exile. It’s no surprise to see people fight for a land they can call home.

Jesus also challenged our notions of home. He challenged it because the son of man had no place to lay his head (Lk 9:58) and that those who would follow him must be willing to abandon their homes (Lk 9:61-2). It would be easy to think then that instead we have heaven as our home, as we are now strangers and sojourners, we are just passing through (1 Peter 2:11-12). I’ve spent many a year railing against the passive comforts of home and urging the radical obedience that demands giving it up.

Yet Jesus spoke of parables where the master was away and would then come home, clear references to the return of Christ (Lk 12:36) or Paul speaking of being home in the body (2 Cor 4 & 5). So where is it? Where is the place that the followers of Christ should feel at home?

We should feel at home on earth, for it is the place we were made for, the place we were given to work and create, to go forth and multiply, to be fruitful image bearers of God around the world. One day the earth will be renewed and we will call it home. Creating then homes for families to flourish and grow, places to express our creativity and uniqueness. Places that image the kingdom of God to others through hospitality and love then are vitally important. Much more important than I used to think. However, it is not the place where we ultimately find our identity, our purpose, our safety or our salvation for that is in loving God (Jn 14:23) where it Jesus and the Father who through the Spirit come to make their home with us and is is in that home that we find ourselves loving and being loved and everything else following on from that.

Because of this love, I am not shaken when I am stirred to move from one country to another like a modern-day Abraham with a satnav. Because of this love the price of leaving is not nearly as great as the reward of following and wherever I go I am at home.

For a great mix of evangelism and nation building initiatives I’d recommend supporting the work of Great Lakes Outreach and for regular challenge, inspiration and humour read founder Simon Guillebaud’s blog.

Today, however I want to invite you to spend five minutes watching this video about a new initiative that would really benefit from your help.

For more stories on this project read Nigel Ring’s blog

I regularly walk through the spiritual exercise of counting my blessings, it’s a sure-fire way of dealing with first world problems and the creeping self-centredness that is hard to avoid in 21st century western europe.

I’ve discovered that as I count the many good things in my life that gratitude and thankfulness increase and I consider myself blessed. There is the danger here that I might think I deserve these manifold gifts and treasures. Fortunately, for every heads there is a tails and for every poison an antidote. The opposite plan to counting my blessings is, oddly enough, to consider the misfortune of others.

For a reminder of that, I can thank Dr Seuss and the old man in the desert of Drize.

“When you think things are bad, when you feel sour and blue, when you start to get mad, you should do what I do!

Just tell yourself, Duckie, you’re really quite lucky! Some people are much more…oh, ever so much more…oh, muchly much-much more unlucky than you!”

And then the old sage hits the proverbial nail right on the head.

“It’s a troublesome world. All the people who’re in it are troubled with troubles almost every minute. You ought to be thankful, a whole heaping lot, for the places and people you’re lucky you’re not!”

He’s right of course. For starters I had nothing to do with being born to great Christian parents in a rich part of the world instead of a slum in mega-city, dirt poor with incredible odds of survival stacked against me.

It’s a humbling thing to think through the many advantages and benefits simply from being born in favourable circumstances. It’s a pin-prick to my easily inflated ego. Into that thought comes the words of Jesus in Luke 12:48, “Everyone to whom much was given, much will be required.”

For those of us living in the West, considerable resources have been placed into our stewardship. Financial (even in a recession), educational, relational, technological, physical (consider the life expectancy of Zimbabwe compared with your nation for example) resources have been placed into our care. Sadly, few people seem to have any grasp of why that might be so or even if they do they squander it selfishly.

Count your blessings, consider yourself lucky and then ask yourself ‘what will be required of me?’