Gilbert Foster

Gilbert Foster led training with our Corps leadership team on Saturday. For this event we joined with Corps teams from Gawler, Ingle Farm, Oakden, Port Lincoln, Unley and Golden Grove. The guys from Golden Grove did a great job of looking after us and fed us far too well.

Over the next few weeks I want to share with the rest of the Corps some of the key learning that came out of the training sessions. Some of the material will be confronting or controversial for some, but all of it is designed to get us thinkning about the future directions for our church. Anything like this helps us to raise the bar in our efforts to shine God's light in Adelaide's south so that others join us as disciples of Jesus Christ.

For example, Gilbert suggested that good things in our churches cannot begin until bad things end. He quoted CS Lewis who said that "Festering lillies stink more than weeds", and then went on to speak of 'necessary endings'.

Sometimes in our churches we:

• Hang on to something too long when it should be ended now


• Don't know if an ending is the reality we should embrace or if something is 'fixable'


• Are afraid of the unknown


• Are afraid of confrontation


• Are afraid of hurting someone


• Are afraid of letting go and the sadness associated with an ending


• Don't possess the skills to execute an ending


• Don't know the right words to use to speak about an ending


• Have had too many painful endings in our personal history so go out of our way to avoid another ending


• Don't know how to process endings that are forced upon us, so we sink and flounder


• Don't learn from endings and then repeat the same mistakes over and over again


• Forget that everything has a life cycle and may out live its purpose or effectiveness

I wonder that even if we understand the above principles we still get so personally invested in things that we forget that they should be achieving some goal or purpose. I know that when we have spoken about some endings in our church, the concept has not been well received. While some endings have been executed well, others haven't necessarily ended well. There may still be some ministries that is we were honest need to end. Or maybe some practices that need to end.

The good can only begin when our time and environment is free of the bad.