I’m hoping to spend a bit more time this year working more closely with other youth ministry people in the Ryde area. I reckon that working together is much better (on so many levels) than working alone.

I’ve been watching the Soul Revival Jesus Movement with great interest; my ‘home’ Church (Cronulla Presbyterian) has joined the network, and some brilliant stuff has been going on in the last few weeks: one week devoted to prayer for the Shire, and one week devoted to mission/outreach/gospel preaching. No bells and whistles, no amazing technology … just prayer and preaching. It sounds like it’s been reasonably successful too!

I’ve been watching with interest, because I guess I have a few questions to figure out this year:

  • Should our little network in the Ryde/Epping/Eastwood area join in the SRJM?
  • What would joining the movement mean for us on a practical level?
  • Do we continue as our own network, develop our own name and identity, and act as a partner/friendship network to the SRJM?

It’s also been really interesting thinking about why we should even bother working together. At a recent conference, someone posed the question, “Is there any theological agenda for working together?” No answers were immediately given, though I have a couple of ideas to explore.

On the ‘theological’ level:

  • The nature of local churches in the NT times. Paul didn’t write to something equating to Colosse Anglican Church … he wrote to the churches in the Colosse region, with the intention that his letter would be circulated, and shared with the churches in Laodicea (Colossians 4:15-16)
  • All the stuff in Ephesians 2, especially the second half that speaks so strongly of being one in Christ; not just on the local, individual church level, but seemingly in the heavenly realms level. Especially when you get to Eph 3:10 which talks about the church (which I take to mean ‘all of God’s people’) displaying God’s manifold wisdom.
  • Tribes. I wonder if the OT, pre-Jesus thing about God’s people being a whole bunch of tribes, but one nation under God has anything to do with anything.

That doesn’t mean I’m all for ecumenism. We need to be heaps careful about who we combine with, and that when we combine, we combine on common ground (the gospel).

There’s also a stack of practical reasons for working together, especially for the youth:

  • They see that God’s work in the world is bigger than just what is going on in our church.
  • It kills off any sense of pride in who we are as an individual church, and teaches them to celebrate what God is doing in other churches.
  • They meet other Christian young people.
  • For young people who aren’t Christians, it shows them that Christianity is bigger than what they’ve experienced so far.
  • and on and on…
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