(e)mergent Voyageurs

Hey there,

As you can probably see, I have not regularly blogged at this address for some time.  However, I am still getting a fair bit of traffic here.  I am now blogging at my new site A Living Alternative, Our Missional Pilgrimage.  I would greatly appreciate it if you headed over there to take a look.

Also, if you have a blog, I would appreciate any linkage.  Believe it or not, by doing so, you will be helping support our inner city ministry & church plant.  Thanks!

Peace,
Jamie Arpin-Ricci

Some time ago, I shared about our friend who was shot near our home.  Things got quiet for awhile, but they seem to taking a turn for the worse.  The last few weeks has seen an increase in gang violence in our neighbourhood.  In addition to the recent murder that occured a few blocks away, there was also a serious beating on our street the same night:

“Two youths are in custody charged with second degree murder after a man, 21, died Saturday from a beating on Beverley Street.  Police said today the attack happened shortly before 9 a.m. when the 21-year old man was assaulted by two male youths. The victim was taken to hospital, where he died from his injuries.  A 16-year-old male has been charged with second degree murder and aggravated assault and a 14-year-old male is charged with second degree murder. A 15-year-old male was charged with aggravated assault.” - Winnipeg Free Press (click here for full story)

No matter how long I am in this kind of ministry, I will never get used to the idea of kids willfully and brutally taking the life of another person.  We desperately want to be Christ in this community, but feel helpless in the face of it.  I love my neighbourhood, with its wonderful diversity, rich heritage and some hardcore, committed neighbours.  And yet, when people read these stories we become a “ghetto”, a problem area and place to be feared and avoided.  I am not judging- I understand the impulse.  I just wish things would change.

At any rate, please pray.

There has been some excellent discussion in the blogosphere of late wrestling with the challenging task of defining the word and concept “missional”.  As a topic that I am very passionate about, I have been enjoying what I been reading.  Brother Maynard has been producing significant quantity (and quality) as he wrestles through some of the ideas and Ed Stetzer is beginning a series on this challenge as well.

While I am planning on weighing in more thoroughly in the weeks to come, I thought I would collect a few of the posts I’ve written that lay out a foundation to my understanding.  I hope you will check them out if you haven’t already read them:

What Is Missional… To Me: This article is my first full post tackling what missional meant to me.

The Community Coming To Be Known As Missional: This is, perhaps, my most thorough look at what I hope to see the church become as it relates to missionality.  I further develop the concepts in a follow up series (Part 1, Part 2 & Part 3).

Missional And Emerging: These two posts- Redemptive Taxonomy & Why I am Missional, Emerging and Emergent- explore the relationship and differences between the concepts of Missional, Emerging and Emergent.

Being Missional In An Age Of Liminality: This post is a more pragmatic look at how missionality requires us to evaluate and change in our expression of community, service and ministry given the shift in time and context.

Pattern Of Missionality:  This three part series specifically looks at what being missional looks like in the context of our missional “third place”, The Dusty Cover bookstore & cafe  (Part 1, Part 2 & Part 3).

Exploring Micro/Macro- Missionality: In this post I try to help navigate the often confusing terrain of the missional conversation by making a distinction between micro- macro- missionality.  It was a follow up, of sorts, to my post on missionality & location.  Possibly my favourite post on this theme.

Previous Post – Spirituality

I will be teaching this week for our Mission Adventures summer program, so I won’t be writing at all this week.  When I return, I hope to bring you up to date about The Dusty Cover (we are on the verge of unveiling our new logo) and some other important info.  Have a gret week and please keep me in your prayers. 

Sorry for the delay in blogging lately, but I have been busy at work at the store where we will be opening The Dusty Cover in September (Lord willing). We gots keys to the space at the beginning of the month. Unfortunately, we are stalled at the moment, as the previous tenants “stuff” has yet to be fully removed. It has tried my patience work around it, but it is still exciting to be in the building.

We have already begun making some purchases, including most of the shelves (found a great deal), as well as the couches and chairs (another amazing deal, but still painfully expensive). I have been researching equipment for the coffee section, with some great options brewing (pun intended), but I am always open to suggestions. We want to serve fair trade, but not sure our neighbourhood can sustain the cost. Perhaps someone out there would like to support the store by providing the product…? We’ll see.

I hope unveil a new logo in the coming weeks, so stay tuned for that. We have a gifted designer donating time to that project, for which we are very grateful (again, more on that later). Some creative ideas are coming together for the kids section, with some volunteers showing interest in adopting the section as a project. All very promising.

Funding is still a challenge, as not many people have expressed interest to support the project (many, MANY thanks to those of you who have and do). Our goal is to make the stores “success” not dependant on income, so this is a crucial part of the plan. We have a few grant applications out, but no word so far. I am hopeful it will all come together.

Anyway, feel free to make any suggestions, ask any questions, so forth. I’ll post some pictures next week.

It has been quite some time since Kim & I have done a ministry update, so last week we sat down to write our newsletter. While some of you already receive it in the mail, for those who do not, you can either download the PDF here or read it at our ministry website here. The past year or so has been full for us, with great blessings and joys, as well as frustrations and disappointments. It is never a matter of things being simply good or bad, but the constant reality of life, intermingling the joys and challenges together.

Even as I was writing this update I received an email that one of our long time supporters was no longer able to do so. As his gifts represented a significant portion of our regular financial support, we are prayerfully looking at how we will respond to this. Please keep us in prayer. In the end, we know God will provide for us as He always has.

If any of you are in supporting us financially, you can do so through YWAM Canada’s Project Funding office. Make your cheque or money order payable to Youth With A Mission and include a separate note with our name on it. Do not put put our name anywhere on the cheque. Send cheques to our Project Funding (see below info). If you are interested in giving on a monthly basis you can send in post-dated cheques or use our pre-authorized payment method. If you are interested in receiving a pre-authorized payment agreement form please email or call our donor office with your name and address.

They send out income tax receipts to donors monthly or annually. You can also give (without receipting) through the PayPal link on the sidebar. Any and all support is appreciated, especially in this time of increased expenses and ministry responsibilities.

Project Funding
PO Box 57100
2480 East Hastings Street
Vancouver, BC V5K 5G6
CANADA
Ph: 604.436.4433 Fx: 604.436.4466
Email: donorservices@shaw.ca

Missional

Previous Post – Sunday Is for Saints – Canonization

After only a few quick weeks of planning, our local evening event on Missional Leadership fast approaches. For those within a drive of Winnipeg, I want to invite you to join us at 7pm tomorrow evening (Tuesday, June 5th) at the Ellice Theatre (see map below). Our speaker will be noted author and speaker Alan Roxburgh of Allelon. Allelon is a multi-generational network of missional church leaders, schools and parachurch organizations which envisions, inspires, engages, resources, trains and educates leaders for the church and its mission in our culture.

The evening promises to be a fruitful conversation of what it means to be missional Christians and pursuing missional leadership in the Body of Christ. Wanting to encourage as many people to come as possible, the event is free. A free will offering will be taken to help cover the costs. There is already an exciting cross-section of Christians signed up to join us.

If you are in Winnipeg or within driving distance, please consider joining us for this event. If you know of any one else who might be interested, please bring them along. Our desire is to see the Body of Christ in our area encouraged and equipped to be faithful followers of Christ in reaching our communities.

For more information and to pre-register (simply to help us get an idea of who is coming), please visit the website: www.missional.ca

Ellice Theatre – 585 Ellice Ave. Winnipeg, MB (click on map to enlarge)

In our recent YWAM regional meetings where we discussed our responsibility as a Canadian ministry in relation to the First Nations peoples, many of the ministry leaders raised an interesting point. Our First Nations guests shared various perspectives, but generally believed that as Canada’s first people- the host people of the land- it was critical for all Christian communities to respond to this issue in their region. While some of us are engaged in and relating to the First Nations community, many of our other leaders are not. Because of this many of them questioned if this was really a regional or national issue rather than a context specific issue to those of us it was relevant to.

This raises some serious question, both specifically with this issue, as well as with the broader question of what level of freedom do we have to focus our missional emphasis on specific groups- or lack of focus, for that matter. In respect to the issue of the First Nations people, I deeply believe that as North American Christians we must own our responsibility in both healing the wounds of the past, as well as move forward to a mutual future of relationship and unity. This does not mean we will call the shots in this process (as this is part of the problem in the first place), but rather that we cannot decide it does not apply to our specific context. Almost without exception it is something we must address.

On the broader issue I am less certain. I truly believe that we must be strategic and authentic in our missional engagement with communities, cultures and sub-cultures. It requires an intentional contextualized approach that cannot always works across the spectrum of our diverse society. That being said, we also must acknowledge that we are called to love and serve all people. Too often the church uses specific calling to justify a failure to respond those areas of great need. This can be seen in many areas, including the urban poor and the racially marginalized.

So what is appropriate? How specific can we or should we be in our missional focus? How have you seen this done well? Please share.

This evening I came across an interesting post by Mary over at One Thing Is Needed about the challenge of missionary support in the changing culture of the church. Being a missionary that relies on such support, I believe she rightly points to this change as one of the most critical questions facing the Church (in both its modality and sodality forms). Here is what Mary asks:

“I have a question that’s been in the back of my mind for a few years now. Since the face of Western church is changing and many people have left and continue to leave institutional church (IC), what does that do for missionary support? I have friends who are missionaries overseas who have either had their support cut in half or dropped altogether as their supporting churches, and consequently the budgets, have gotten smaller. How do they build their support base back up? I also have friends who have left IC and believe that God is calling them to overseas missions. Their house church just doesn’t have the financial resources that can be found in a large church. How do they raise support? As people find other expressions of the local church, are there new ways of handling missionary support? I have more questions than answers. What are your thoughts and insights?”

Here are a few of my thoughts.

Tentmaking (that is practicing a trade to finance ones own mission) is a common response to these questions. It does work in many contexts and it requires a healthy integrated, missional view of life within a culture. Living in commonality/mutuality with those to whom are called is essential, and this can help develop that. It also requires a level of creativity that can be very beneficial. However, not every culture, context or circumstance allows such options. Speaking personally, the level of work I do in my ministry could not be accomplished should I try to keep another job- even 1/4 time. It just wouldn’t work. Some missional endeavours require a more consuming involvement. This is not better nor worse than tentmaking, it is simply a reality.

Part of this challenge comes as a result of churches learning that to be missional they must connect to the communities they find ourselves in. A challenge for the truly missional church is to develop this local connectedness while maintaining (or discovering, as the case may be) the global identity that is and must be inherent to Christianity. The beautiful eschatological image of worshiping before the throne of God- with every tongue, tribe and nation- brilliantly affirms both our local identity and our unified diversity.

One of the approaches that YWAM has maintained to offset some of this is that the missionary connects individually to each supporter. While YWAM may offer the service of processing the support, the line of relationship goes from the missionary directly to the individuals or communities that support them. This brings with it other problems and some additional work, but it has helped bypass most organizational overhead and casual or habitual giving (as opposed to relational giving).

Further, even small or house churches- more specifically those Christians who are part of them- must recognize that their own lifestyles must change if the challenge to support missional endeavours is to succeed. (I should add that is also essential to support their own missional engagement). We need to be honest about the fact that most of us in the West live incredibly rich lives, especially given the level to which we fail to live practically as communities. I have learned much about living simply within community from years of being part of a missionary organization that values this. (This point deserves a post unto itself).

I should also say that, as my recent post on relational leadership touched on, when I refer to being a missionary (an awkward term weighed down by centuries of mixed history) I am not referring to a professional worker, but someone responding to a very specific spiritual vocation. The nature of this vocation may more explicitly involved in what is seen as “ministry” in the traditional Evangelical sense, but it should not be seen as having any more value than those responding to their missional vocations as teachers, plumbers, doctors, mothers, etc.

The reality is this- things are changing. Missionary support- nay, the whole concept of missions- must change as well. However, it is not about abandoning one system for another, but rather shifting and developing as is needed, led by the Spirit and fueled by the gifts He gives.

What do you think? What have you seen that works? What are your questions?
(Be sure to join the conversation over at Mary’s blog too)

If you missed it, I was very pleased last week to announce the upcoming Missional Leadership Conversation with Alan Roxburgh we are hosting on June 5th. Visit www.missional.ca for more information. To give you a taste of some of what Allelon is up to, check out the videos below. The first is an interview with Ryan Bolger by Alan Roxburgh, the second is about the Allelon Summer Institute. Check them out.