landscape and community workshop

WORKSHOP 3: Landscape and Community. In a time of so much change in both society and church, how can we establish communities and gatherings that do not control, but rather equip and release the people of God into their life calling?

This workshop looks into this question from the standpoint of the hebraic vision of the church in creation. It presents an opportunity to look at both the creation space and gathered space for the church; giving an opportunity to look in new ways at the nature and shape of communities of work and worship.

conveners Bruce Judd & Michael Martin

Bruce Judd is an associate professor of architecture from New South Wales University. He has worked throughout his career to understand the relationship between the physical design of space and its impact on people’s relationships and activities within and from that space. Bruce is involved in a local fellowship in Cherrybrook Sydney and is a leader in a network of Christians across Australia.

Michael Martin has worked both in business and gathered church settings. He worked as a strategist for Christian City Church Oxford Falls for a number of years. During that time he had a substantial impact on the way people viewed their connection to others and to the church itself. He was instrumental in moving the small groups in that church from a more top-down pastoral care model to what he called a connect group emphasis, in which there existed a stronger sense of mutuality. He has now established a gathered church community – The Upper Room – in North Sydney.

preamble: The prevailing understanding of the church has, for the most part, emphasised the ‘gathered-church under leadership’ setting. This dominant emphasis on gathered community has, to my mind, arisen because of the influence of the dualistic and platonic worldview. In Plato’s plan people’s desire to get from a corrupt earth to a perfect heaven was to be realised by an institution he called the State.

This ruling entity was something –

• separate to the people;
• that had a special connection to revelation from the eternal realm;
• that could act as a mediating institution between the temporal realm and the eternal realm;
• that took to itself the right to regulate and rule the lives of the common people.

Plato’s plan was to create a deficit in human mind by removing the heavens of God from the earth; thus creating a situation where he could introduce his ‘state’ as a remedy to the very problem he had made. This well-known strategy is called ‘divide and conquer’.

As the early church gave up its hebraic heritage, it increasingly adopted both Plato’s worldview and his approach to how human community should be designed. The result was that the nature, shape and activity of the church changed dramatically.

What one thinks about the world they live in will impact on the kind of spaces they design for themselves and others to live, work and worship within.

In contrast to Plato’s design specifications, the hebraic worldview, with its emphasis on the heavens of God existing over the earth in space and time, leads us into a very different design for the church space – in regards to its physical, psychological and social dimensions.

Paul speaks of this design and this space in the book of the church, Ephesians. In chapter one he describes a church that exists in Christ who now stands in creation. Paul says that God put ‘all things in subjection under [Christ’s] feet, and gave him as head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fulness of him who fills all in all’ (Eph. 1:22, 23). Christ’s feet are on the earth, his head is in the heaven of God over the earth, and his body, the church, now stands on earth and though the heavens to the very throne of God.

It is this church in creation in Christ that is the primary design space in and from which the body of Christ is meant to function and thereby fulfil the purposes of God. This ‘creation space’ for church is primary, with the church gathered – which Paul calls a ‘pillar and support’ (1 Tim. 3:15) – being called to occupy a servant or supportive role.

We will not be able to design or sustain the support space, until we first know the design and purpose of the primary space.

The workshops at the teleios conference are not all about getting content from those up front. Although Bruce and Michael will have much to tell, their focus will be on drawing out key wisdoms, many of which, at this stage, they are only seeing in part. As these wisdoms are drawn out into the open on the day, they will serve to activate and give language to the wisdoms that are also emerging in your own life; wisdoms that are at this time still very fragile and unformed, but are such that as they connect with others and find voice, will be better able to come to the fore and over time make their wisdom-impact in creation. Each of the workshops will give time to small-group discussion and some journaling, this with a view to drawing out insights and wisdoms from the entire group there on the day.