“Worship God, for the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of Prophecy”

It was as if these words would shape the character and personality of who this community would become. A church centered around that idea that Jesus is looking for worshippers and a people who would
be his voice in the earth.

As edge has grown and become a part of the church landscape we are beginning to see our part to play in the unfolding drama of God. It is as if we are discovering our dominant personality traits.

Worship and the Prophetic?  These are words that are loaded with meaning and need to be redefined and refined on a constant basis. We have to constantly reinvent ourselves if we are to help people do the christian life in an ever changing world.

What is worship?  ’the art of directing our devotion towards God’

Edge exists to promote the idea that God is ‘worthy’ of our devotion, and is looking for a people who will offer their lives to His service.

What is the prophetic?  ’to speak on behalf of God, proposing alternative futures’

Edge exits to help people hear from God and re-language the gospel to the world around us. It is our future and hope.

This our statement of intent, our attempt to be true who who we are and who we are becoming.

The final word goes to the mercurial David Bowie.  ”I don’t know where I’m going from here, but I promise it won’t be boring”.

Selah

We had a great time at Edge Sunday morning. Singing, dancing, eating, and remembering the birth of the one we love.

Check out a small Vid here of the kids singing… Edge Kids Xmas 2010!!

Merry Christmas!

The Edge offices will be closed on Dec 23rd and will not re-open until Jan 10th.

There will be no meetings on Dec 26th or January 2nd.
We resume the AM meetings on Jan 9th and the evening meetings Jan 16th.

Have a great break, enjoy the sun and the sand, and we will see you in the new year!

God bless,

The Edge Kingsland Team.

A: We can often use different words to try and clarify what it means to hear from God. Its as if we need to demystify the idea of hearing.
Hearing God invariably infers an audible interaction, which can often not be the case.
Synonyms like sense, felt, impression, thought, idea, can all equally be interpreted as hearing words.
When it comes to processing whether what we are hearing is us or God, we need to realise that it is always both.
God works with and through our humanity. We filter life through our interaction with creation and our creator.
In the end it comes down to some really helpful thoughts around the idea of confirmation and contradiction.
Does what we hear confirm or contradict what we know to be true as it relates to our covenant with creation, our conscience, and the canon of scripture.
Learning to hear from God is a lifelong journey. A journey of adventure, risk, and great reward.
Some helpful reading comes from authors like Henri Nouwen, Thomas Merton, Eugene Peterson, Richard J. Foster, and Madame Guyon.

Greg.

A: For me it comes down to being more alert, attentive, and aware of your immediate environment.
God speaks in many ways (Job 33:14) yet so much of it seems to avoid our grasp.

The discipline of ‘conscious sensory attentiveness‘ is a sacramental art that needs to practiced in our lives.

All of life is filtered through our senses both natural and spiritual.
Our sensory perception is enhanced by the practice of slowing, capture, processing, and living in the moment.

Slowing is about wasting time with God, by embracing the beauty of life that is all around us.

Capture is about spending time focused on a particular facet of life that stimulates and awakens our imagination.

Processing is about taking time to engage with thoughts, ideas, dreams, and imaginings in order to live differently.

Living in the moment is about recalibrating your life in collaboration with what God is saying.

‘Life is a garden, so let’s take time to stop and smell the Roses’

Greg.

Sunday week ago we had a question and answer time with Greg, and our guests Ben and Mel Arcus. We had some great questions come through and some provoking thoughts about hearing God and living a lifestyle that is open to his voice.

You txted us in some great questions and we didn’t have time to get through them all, so instead we are going to run a blog series under this title where we can answer some of the questions you have.

If you have any questions around hearing God that you didn’t txt through on Sunday night feel free to fire them through to us at admin@edgekingsland.co.nz. We may not be able to get through them all but we’ll give it a red hot go!

Peace,

The Edge Team.

Saul the Pharisee – the stone throwing Christian killer – was one day struck by the presence of Jesus. 3 days later God told faithful Ananias to go and pray for Saul, that he might receive sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit. At first Ananias affectively said, “Not even ow!” Ananias knew Jesus, and knew that Saul hated Jesus followers. Yet God had bypassed the wisdom of Ananias and sent him to pray for someone he couldn’t possibly imagine would ever follow Jesus.

Likewise with Cornelius the centurion in Acts 10. He, a non-Jew, was on the outside of all things red-hot in the Christian scene. But it was said of him that he was a God-fearer who prayed and gave to the poor. Linda mentioned that this is a little picture of who we are as a community – we pray and we serve others. God was with Cornelius and moving in his life. Yet Peter the rock, the star of the newly founded Church, when prompted by HS to go visit Cornelius, said to HS, “Not even ow!” Peter had his rigid, cultural “clean and unclean” perimeters. God didn’t. God saw, and sees, beyond the scheme of things we think he should see. (You might wanna read that line again).

Which leads to what I shared Sunday night. God builds his ekklesia: his political gathering of community-decision-makers, on the revelation of who he is. The distinguishing difference between Church and any other social group on the planet is the known and revered Spirit of Jesus amongst us. And, for some reason, the revelation of Jesus comes when we pray. In the gospel of Luke John the Baptist sees the Holy Spirit descend and remain on Jesus, after Jesus “prays” (Lk 3:21); the night before Jesus chose his disciples, he stayed up all night praying (Lk 6:12); Peter’s revelation of who Jesus was, came “Once when Jesus was praying in private…” (Lk 9:18).

And it was the same for Ananias and Peter. It was in prayer that they both heard Jesus and saw a vision that challenged them to think and act outside the box of cultural-Christianity. In prayer, they were commissioned to break their own taboos and extend God’s reign in the heart’s of humanity. Which leaves Cornelius, a 1st century Italian centurion, exhorting a 21st century church in New Zealand, to pray and give to the poor: to love God and love people.

See you Thursday at 5:30pm for prayer.

jay

In the days of the Old Testament we see the nation of Israel gather for two specific reasons: war and worship. War happened out of necessity, but the worship was prescribed and frequent. God had set up within the community life of Israel, several annual feast’s – aka party’s – where the nation was called to worship God and celebrate in thankfulness and gratitude. God gets a kick out of his kids gathering.

In the New Testament when Jesus initiates his Church, 120 people gather to wait for what he had promised would come upon them – the wonderful Holy Spirit. And the rest is history as people have been doing the same ever since! It seems like a pretty simple formula really: gather and wait, and the Holy Spirit WILL come. Yet the aspects we’re responsible for – to gather and wait – often don’t happen.

Well for Edge Kingsland, Labour Weekend, has become our annual celebration as we gather at Eastern Beach. Camp is a brilliant time to hang with friends, make new ones, and just enjoy the time to eat, chat, have fun together and let the kids run riot! And parents don’t need to cook meals for three days… Three days! But a highlight of camp is our annual evening where we come before Jesus, worship him, wait on him and ask him to speak. He always shows up! Funny that.

So guys, sign up for camp and get along this Labour Weekend. It’s going to be good – It always is!

- Jay Lucas

It’s a fluid world. It used to be solid – it had right and wrong, clear beliefs, strong families, definite hopes and dreams. Now everything seems to float, to be flexible, to be changeable. We change jobs, cities, countries so easily – we can even view the people around us as another temporary arrangement. Such is the effect of the whispers of the liquid world.

And family life has been profoundly impacted by the changes in our culture. We used to get married and then have children. This approach came from the belief that children needed a solid and certain world to grow up in, to flourish. It was based on vows, covenants and church buildings. Now this approach seems like a living fossil from a world that once was.

We now live in a world that has seen families break up and is less confident about making formal commitments. Marriage has given way to living together – and so our relational commitments tend to evolve, and we find, sometimes to our great surprise, that we have made some kind of commitment. And we can end up in a life that we never chose – it kind of just happened!

Our children can be affected by this fluid approach – when they arrive they become the central focus of the home. Now a couple must commit to work together to bring these children up. But what if they are not even certain of their commitment to each other? Far too many relationships fall over with the extra demands that children bring to a relationship.

So what am I suggesting? I confess I am a fan of marriage. It is based on promises that people make intentionally – where each person faces their fear of commitment and says ‘for better or worse, for richer or poorer’ I will stick with you. This gives enormous security to each person – though I acknowledge living out those words will take real effort sometimes.

And children need solidity. They need security and stability to do well. And they need both parents. So our commitment to our partner/spouse needs to be rock solid – clearly expressed, lived out in the choices we make.

I want to lament that the focus of ‘marriage’ is now on the wedding day. We have been Americanised and now people delay getting married due to the huge cost of having the ‘perfect’ big day. I want to suggest that marriage is about the rest of your life – so why waste all your cash on a day? Put a deposit on a house!

You may choose to take a different route and I am not suggesting that marriage is the only option – but maybe, just maybe, the fluid approach to relationships has not served us well. Perhaps making promises of loyalty, and the challenge of living to keep our promises, can make adults of us.

The end. I look forward to being with you. On Saturday i will be looking at how a visual consumer culture impacts on our christian lives and our life as a christian community. Sunday will involve some outstanding, as yet undefined, teaching. See you in the weekend!

Cheers
Nigel