Welcome to the 21st Century!

This blog has been "percolating" in my heart for quite some time now. I'm on the pastoral team at Evangelical Community Church (ECCI), in Melbourne, and have pastoral oversight of the 6pm congregation ("Twilight"), which is demographically focused on young professionals (aged mainly in their 20s). For this reason, issues relating to the Gen-X church experience and the "emerging church" paradigm (which is church translated into postmodern culture) have been a priority and the focus of much prayer for me.

Whether you like it or not, if you are a believer/disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ, you are part of the Church of the 21st Century, simply because you are now in the 21st century! (sorry, no options there). But that doesn't mean that the average church experience has yet caught up with 21st century realities, let alone its 1st century foundations. At Twilight, we do not seek to be labelled either modern or postmodern, but rather a Christian community that is true to the Lord Jesus Christ. The old question, "What would Jesus do?", is something we are not just seeking to apply as individual believers, but also as a church. What would Jesus do in our city, in our universities, in our workplaces?

Obviously I have to state here the important disclaimer that not everything I express in this blog is the opinion of the combined ECCI leadership. This is very much a personal blog, an expression of my own personal journey of discovery and my unique contributions to the church experience of ECCI. Having said that, ECCI, as a church, is seeking to make the transition from a Chinese church to a community church in two respects:

1. We are becoming a cross-ethnic church - not solely Chinese, but also mixed with other ethnic backgrounds, including those who are Australian-born.

2. We are becoming a next-generation church - not just a church focused on the needs of the older generation, but also one that builds effective multi-generational bridges.

No transition is easy. By being willing to embrace change, we are entering uncharted waters. But this is where the combined experience of the ECCI leadership comes into play. We represent a broad spectrum of experience, and together we have extended experience in cross-cultural ministry and the pioneering of new churches. We've already charted many of these waters, and thus know where many of the hidden reefs are. Still, we are very conscious of the need to continually wait on the Lord, to be sensitive to His guidance and to be humble enough to admit that none of us "knows it all". After all, it was Jesus who said, "I will build my church..." (Matthew 16:18), and so it is to Jesus that we must look in this awesome endeavour.

In John 5:19, Jesus Himself declared:

"I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does."

If this was true for Jesus, how much more true is it for His Church? If the Son of God Himself could do nothing by Himself, but relied totally on observing and following His Father's initiative, then we too, as the many-membered Body of Jesus upon the earth (Ephesians 1:22-23; Colossians 1:18), must be constantly looking to our Head (Ephesians 4:15; Colossians 2:19) for His initiative, not our own.

This post is the beginning of an exploration of one of the most exciting subjects on the face of the earth: discovering what it means to be the living, corporate expression of Jesus Christ in the postmodern world. I invite you to join me in this exploration, for I won't simply be teaching you what I already know; we'll also be learning together what it means to be the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ in the 21st century.