Here’s a story from the draft to my next book. I’m looking forward to catching up with Nathan and Lipok in India next week.

It’s early Sunday morning. Lipok and Nathan are traveling down the mighty Brahmaputra River to visit the believers among the Mising people of Assam, a state in northeastern India. They travel by ferry and then on the dirt roads of an island that is home to 300,000 people.

The Mising people live along the fertile riverbeds of the Brahmaputra, which they regard as holy.

They live in thatched houses raised on stilts that provide protection from floodwaters during the rainy season and from wild animals during the dry season. When the floodwaters rise, the Mising pack up their few possessions and move across the river or downstream where stilts have already been erected.

The Mising deal with annual floods, malaria and water-borne diseases. yet they continue to live along the banks and tributaries of their beloved Brahmaputra River.
Lipok and Nathan have been working with the Missing people for three years; they teach them to follow Jesus and make disciples up and down the river system that is their world. One local worker has started three hundred churches in his “stream.” He can go where Western personnel and funding can never reach.

When the Mising church gathers there is no printed order of service and no powerpoint presentations. No one receives a salary, and they don’t need a church budget. A permanent building would be useless along the flood prone Brahmaputra River. The Mising believers’ guide for church is Acts 2:38—47.

They begin a meeting by confessing their sins and repenting. They baptize new believers outside in the river. They teach the word of God, celebrate the Lord’s Supper, and pray for the sick. They share their needs with each other and, if possible those needs are dealt with immediately through a gift or offer of help. Worship flows out of a response to God’s word. They finish by reminding one another of the gospel and by committing to go out and share before the sun sets that day.

A story like that of the Mising believers reminds us that our experience of church shaped by the world we live in. It also helps us think about what essentials all followers of Jesus share across time and different cultures.

Population decline is the elephant in the world’s living room. As a matter of arithmetic, we know that the social life of most developed countries will break down within two generations. Two out of three Italians and three of four Japanese will be elderly dependents by 2050. If present fertility rates hold, the number of Germans will fall by 98 percent over the next two centuries. No pension and health care system can support such an inverted population pyramid. Nor is the problem limited to the industrial nations. Fertility is falling at even faster rates—indeed, at rates never before registered anywhere—in the Muslim world. The world’s population will fall by as much as a fifth between the middle and the end of the twenty-first century, by far the worst decline in human history.

The surprise is not the declining birthrate in the West—the US is an exception—but that it is matched by the decline in Islamic societies from Morocco to Iran.

“How Civilizations Die: (And Why Islam Is Dying Too)” (David Goldman)

Brazil, home to 200 million people, just passed Britain as the world’s sixth largest economy. China passed Britain in 2006. Russia is closing, and is set to become the world’s fourth largest economy by 2020.

The centre of the world is irresistibly shifting from the West to the Rest.

Better make sure our mission strategies are ahead of the game.

We are accustomed to thinking of Christianity as a European religion. Yet until the Islamic conquests of north Africa, the Middle East, Iraq and Iran, Christianity was at least as strong in these regions.

There are Christian communities in Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon and Syria that go back two thousand years. Just as there have been Jewish communities throughout north Africa, the Middle East and Persia (Iran) for thousands of years.

These communities are under gave threat, according to the reports on the aftermath of the Iraq war and the “Arab Spring.”

The killing has begun, and could get worse. In Iraq, about two thirds of its 1.4 million Christians have now fled — being firebombed by the jihadis. Last year, gunmen entered a Baghdad church and killed 58 parishioners. To go to church in Iraq, which Christians have been doing for two millennia, now means risking your life. Baghdad’s Jewish community has now been almost eliminated — by some estimates, half a dozen remain.

Tunisia’s Arab Spring has also let the jihadis loose: a Polish priest was executed recently, and they’re turning on its ancient Jewish community too. This has spread to Egypt, where Coptic Christians have lived in peace with Muslims for generations — until now, with 25 dead in October. Syria’s 1.5 Christians have suffered from the Assad regime as much as anyone, but they now pray for its survival, fearing it will be replaced by Islamic fundamentalists who will start persecution in earnest.

The Arab Spring has unleashed the demon. Power has gone not to the most popular, but the best-organised. This means the hardline Salafis, who follow the same mutant strain of Sunni Islam as al-Qaeda.

This is a war within Islam. The majority of Muslims are appalled at these Christian pogroms. After the Egyptian Copts were attacked last year, Muslim elders sat in the pews when they celebrated their (January) Christmas, acting as human shields. Egyptians changed their Facebook picture to a new logo — the crescent and the cross — to show unity. But the Facebook crowd have lost power to the Holy book crowd: the hardline Islamists are filling the void. The Muslim Brotherhood is well on its way to a new constitution which looks terrifyingly similar to that of Iran.

Jim Collins said, the difference between Good and Great is how you confront the brutal facts. You can’t confront them if you don’t know them.

Every five years the National Church Life Survey (NCLS) conducts a survey into church life and mission in Australia. Previously they have done some great work tracking the effectiveness of church planting.

The latest NCLS findings are due out soon. I’ll read them with interest.

Here’s my wish list for the NCLS or any research into church life and mission health and progress:

1. Generational growth

Most surveys focus on single local churches. Are they growing or declining? What’s the age range of attenders? Who has come to faith?

Mildly interesting stuff.

What would get me on the edge of my seat are some questions like these:

Has this church started a new church in the last twelve months?

Have any of the new churches started new churches?

I’m not concerned if the church has a membership of five for five thousand—I want to know where are the churches with children, grand children and great grandchildren. Show me some four generation churches and I’ll be happy.

2. Variations within the same denominations

The NCLS provides figures on the various denominations—Anglican, Baptist, Uniting etc. They tell us something, but not a lot.

Show me the difference in vitality and growth between say the Sydney Anglicans, who are evangelicals, and the Perth Anglicans who are not. Are the Sydney Anglicans multiplying churches or just planting them? Why?

Let’s compare the evangelical St Matthew’s Anglican church with the rest of the Perth diocese. What’s the difference and why?

What about the Baptists in NSW who are evangelical, who have a strategy to plant churches, and have committed good leaders to pursue it? Let’s compare their progress with say, the Baptists in Victoria, my home state.

A few years ago the BUV had just two churches that had planted churches in the previous five years, Crossway, my home church and Lilydale Baptist, which has fallen on hard times.

These variations have more to do with orthodoxy of belief and effectiveness of practice rather than geography.

3. The ratio that counts

I’d like to know what the ratio of churches is to the growing Australian population.

In 1991, using NCLS figures, I estimated it was one church to very 1561 people. In 2001 it was one to every 1800 people. I’ve not been able to get the figures from the NCLS for 2006, I suspect was around one to 2000 people. Where are we now?

Church leaders in Australia are flying blind on one of the most important indicators of progress in our mission.

4. The Pentecostals

Since 1977 the Australian Christian Churches have been one of the fastest growing movements in the land.

Two years ago I suggested the rate of ACC growth may be slowing. The ACC has been moving to a model of consolidation around successful multisite churches, rather than continuing an aggressive church planting strategy.

I’d like to be wrong, but since my prediction ACC figures have become hard to come by. That normally points to a plateau or decline.

5. The emerging-missional communities

For years we’ve had the critique. We’ve had the claims that, while the existing church can only reach 9% of the population in Australia, the emerging-missional communities are going after the 91%.

So how are they doing? Are they seeing new disciples, new groups forming, new churches started of any shape or form? Are they multiplying disciples and communities? Or are they lost in a missional fog? Show me the people.

6. The exceptions

Will the survey show us the unexpected outcomes—good or bad? What churches and denominations are collapsing?

I don’t think the Uniting Church counts it’s people any more. I don’t think it wants to face just how bad things are.

What churches or movements are seeing unexpected progress. What new groups are out connecting with people, sharing the gospel, making disciples, and multiplying communities of Jesus’ followers?

Perhaps I expect too much from the NCLS and participating churches. Then again, how carefully do you track your money? Do you know your financial status? Do you have a budget? Do warning bells ring and red lights flash when you’re dangerously close of bankruptcy? So, if it’s important to track financial key indicators, why not key indicators for the progress of the gospel?

It’s only a matter of time before Australia embraces same sex marriage, with the support and advocacy of progressive Australian clergy.

So what’s next? We all know it won’t stop at same-sex unions.

So who’s up for group marriage?

For weeks, Sydneysiders and Melburnians who believe menages-a-trois and other polyamorous relationships can be just as committed, loving and valid as marriage between a man and a woman, slaved away together to earn their place in the sun. They drew up plans, sawed wood, hammered nails.

Finally, in early March, it was ready: the first float celebrating polyamory to join the colourful flotilla in the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.

Here’s some background to the movement for “poly pride.” They even have their own “community.”

The polyamorous community in Australia is a broad church, with the slogan of its very active website being “ethical non-monogamy”.

It is increasingly prominent, with organised groups in most capital cities that hold regular discussion sessions and social nights.

Polyamorists generally distinguish themselves from the monogamous gay community, and from those seeking kinky casual sex. Some also see themselves as different from heterosexual polygamists where the “hinge” member has sexual relations with the two of the opposite sex, but the two of the same sex do not have sex with each other.

Rather they may form, in polyamorist lingo, a “polyfidelist triad” in which there is an equilateral triangle of sexual activity.

Group marriage is not without it’s trials and tribulations.

A recent Australian legal case involved a man whose wife had left him for another man and a woman, and taken the children. When the trio set up house together, mingled their respective offspring, and shared the same bedroom, the jilted husband applied to the court seeking an urgent order that the children be removed from the “immoral” household.

But magistrate Philip Burchardt rejected the application, saying the threesome seemed to be “thoroughly decent and honest people” and “I do not regard the relationship . . . as being damaging to the children.”

What’s next after group marriage?

Melbourne-born Peter Singer is a world-renown ethicist, philosopher, and professor at Princeton University. In 2005 he was one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world.

What does this great man advocate?

Singer argues that “mutually satisfying activities” of a sexual nature can occur between humans and animals.

I have a question for those progressive clergy and theologians who have rejected the plain teaching of Jesus. You have rejected the prophets, and apostles. You have rejected 2,000 years of church teaching.

How will you stand against the very forces you have allowed to be unleashed?

Researchers asked 1094 Australians who do not regard themselves as Christians:

How open are you to changing your religious worldview?

A majority of 51% are not open at all.

So you can agonize over how to change the 51% who are resistant, or you can change your perspective and ask,

How do we connect with the 49% who are at least partially open?

An even better question is,

How do we connect with the 17% who are extremely, significantly or somewhat open?

Are we washing our hands of the 51%? No way. We’re just following the example of Jesus and the early church by looking for receptive people who become the bridges to reaching less responsive people in their world.

What is the most compelling reason for someone in the 51% coming to Christ? The witness of a friend or family member from the 49% who has been recently converted.

Ask my dad, he was a 51 percenter.

A clip from the launch of the report into what Australians think about Christianity.

Peter Jensen has some good insights:

“The situation now is not as bad as it was in the first century!”

“I’m very much a believer in the strength of the gospel, the transforming power of the gospel and the God who is the great Evangelist. So I’m not at all discouraged by these figures, but I am in formed by them and helped by them as I think of how to translate the faith in a way that will be heard.”

A bill to legalise gay marriage will be rushed into Parliament early next year after the governing Australia Labor Party conference voted overwhelmingly yesterday to adopt marriage equality as its official policy – but granted a conscience vote to its MPs to avoid a damaging split.

Outside over 5,000 gay rights advocates called for same-sex marriage to be recognised in law.

Inside the conference a proposal give Labor members a conscience vote in the parliament was won by just 12 votes (208 to 184).

Labor powerbroker, Senator John Faulkner opposed the motion saying, “Human rights can never be at the mercy of individual opinions.”

The Australian Christian Lobby today said it didn’t trust claims that churches would not eventually be forced to perform marriage ceremonies for same-sex couples.

Olive Tree Media have released a report on what Australians really think of Christian faith, Christians and the Church.

No surprises.

1 in 2 Australians do not identify with a religion

40% Consider themselves as Christian, identifying as Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant or Evangelical

31% Do not identify with any religion or spiritual belief

19% Spiritual, not religious

Download the report summary.