Where Everybody's Crazy

In case you hadn't gathered, yesterday I wasn't all that impressed with CPI at the end of the day. Today, everything has changed.

The first talk of the morning was essentially a sales pitch for the "Church Planting Network" concept. These things depress me a little because in order to sell them you need to present them almost as an end in themselves. And so it came across that propagating "Church Planting Networks" was more important than, say, helping people experience the love of God. Anyway, that's probably my excess cynicism again.

After that we started the house church planting seminar series. I've been really looking forward to this and it did not disappoint. It's taught by Mitsuo Fukuda, who I discovered in college and have come to really respect. I've had a few questions about it already, and although I have very detailed notes, I'll try to sketch an outline here.

The first thing we learnt was how to teach the Christian life in two minutes. Not because it should take two minutes, but if you have an outline you can get across in two minutes, then you can get it across in a longer period as well. It's a little Japanese specific, but I think it can work outside Japan as well. It basically teaches that a Christian lives in three love relationships, and uses the kanji for "person" to show how those relationships relate to one another:

The first relationship is our relationship with God, which produces joy - God made you, he loves you, he rejoices in you, and so you can rejoice in Him - and also produces obedience. Obedience to God's will and an overflow of joy leads naturally into mission and telling everyone else about it, and serving the other people he has made. This may produce a reaction, which causes you to suffer, but suffering produces perseverance which produces character, and that leads to a change in oneself. This change together with fellowship with other Christians creates a testimony, which further enables evangelism and service.

It doesn't cover the whole of theology but it gives you a framework on which you can hang stuff. The intention is of course that you flesh it out later. But this is something that you can teach to new Christians and they can get started off with the Christian life straight away. And you can get it across on the back of a napkin. I'm not 100% sold on this, since it does miss out some stuff I consider to be important, (this is the only time the word "Jesus" appears in this explanation, for instance) but I think it's a powerful schema.

We then applied this schema to devotions: two devotional questions or Bible study questions each on the "heaven", "outward" and "inward" relationships:

• Father, what do you think about me?
• Father, what do you want me to do?
• Father, who do you want me to serve, in what way, today?
• Father, who do you want me to share the Gospel with, in what way, today?
• Father, in the past 24 hours, is there anything I have done that I need to repent of?
• Father, is there some way I can show love to those around me today?

So we did a practical devotion session based on that. Then we applied the same schema to evangelism and I forget exactly how we got there but we ended up with a model of evangelism based on personal testimonies. The rules for the testimony were:

• At most 90 seconds. People won't listen for longer.
• Include one Bible verse to tie what you're saying to a Biblical faith.
• Say what was the situation before in your life, and then the situation after.
• Make sure the praise goes to God.

Again we practiced, and then we headed out to Moto-Hakone to do it. I have never been so scared in all my life. But having this schema gave me a - well, call it a crutch if you like, but I couldn't do it before today and I could do it today.

What excites me about all this is that it's very, very transferable. The whole concept is that instead of allowing people to get used to occupying pews for the first few years of their Christian life, their "imprinted" understanding of the Christian life is one of evangelism, service, fellowship and internal transformation. I'm looking forward to tomorrow's session, where we look at accountability and church planting.

I'm currently at the Church Planting Institute conference. There are six of us here from WEC/SFDD; five of us came down yesterday in Martin's van and stayed over in the most bizarre youth hostel ever. It's next to an army camp, and to be fair, it was difficult to distinguish between the youth hostel and the army camp, particularly what with the soldiers marching through the grounds and everything.

Up for a parade at 7am with the national anthem and flag raising - that's not military, that's just Japan - and over to the conference venue at Fuji Hakone Land. Most of the day and afternoon was taken up with setting up, as Martin was in charge of the resource area and I was acting as the general dogsbody. I'm also demonstrating my own worship projection software at a booth in the resource area.

The conference started in earnest at about 4 o'clock, with a sermon from Gary Fujino. Gary came to our missionary conference in April and I really appreciated his talks there. This time it was a bit more abstract, talking from Habbakuk abou having expectations for God to bring change into a situation. He talked about how God had challenged some of his hang-ups and preconceptions about missionary activity, and that was certainly good to hear.

After dinner appeared to be the comedy hour. One Japanese pastor spoke about how his church saw growth not through casting a vision but through creating an image, which was an interesting idea. It's a little like my philosophy of preaching, that you don't necessarily draw out an application but you walk through the story with people and expect them to meet Jesus through that. I guess I was put off a little by his style, which was certainly too fast-paced for his interpreter, but there was certainly something in there worth investigating.

And then there was a talk about how all the problems of the Japanese church would be solved if we started by teaching creationism. Mmm, Single-Issue Christians.

I'm having a lot more luck with the "corridor track", and have met a few interesting people and some good connections already. I think to be honest that's mainly what I'm here for.