Eating mushrooms!

Our story is essentially a combination of God’s grace & faith (spelt r.i.s.k.). We have never been people to sit and hope things will happen; we have always seen value in looking at new ways of doing things.

It may be a bit of a strange place to get your theology from, but if you watch the movie “Con Air” (and you shouldn’t by the way - it s a bit rough!) there is a wonderful moment when Nicholas Cage as the main character looks across to another prisoner who is totally insane. The crazy guy looks at him and asks “do you know what the definition of insanity is?” Cage shakes his head, “No” to which the guy replies “doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result!”. In the movie, the point of this line was totally lost on me but its bit of logic stuck - if we want to reach our friends for Jesus we are going to have to look at other ways of doing things - because the current stuff was not doing it!

We were invited by the New Zealand Vineyard churches to plant a church. So on a Wednesday in late March ‘99 we started Mount Vineyard (MTV) with 4 people in a friend’s living room. Within a short period of time we had outgrown that living room so we headed to another one just a bit larger. Within 18 months of starting we had grown to about 50 people and the living room thing was really not working for us. We took over a little warehouse with the sure knowledge it would last us for three years (the term of the lease). We filled it on the second night we were open. Wednesdays continued to work for us - people were intrigued that we had church on Wednesday but not on Sunday. The people God added to us were pretty cool - we saw heaps of really talented musicians come in and soon music became one of our strengths.

We really emphasised a few things from the beginning.
One - we want to look, feel and sound like we belong to this world not time travellers from 30-40 years ago.
Two - God is not permanently mad at us, in fact He loves us and is for us and grace is his way of changing lives.
Three - God has a plan for your life and you would do us all a big favour by finding what that is and getting about doing it.
Four - the real limit of your life is your imagination (or lack of it).
Five - the bible does make sense - check it out!
Six - Fun is not a dirty word and being real is not optional.

The pressure of growth saw us finally relocate and move to our current location in Newton road, a more industrial area and more in keeping with the sounds emanating from our musicians at the time. In line with our value of ditching “trad” church in favour of something that worked better for us, and not knowing how design a “proper church” building we went for the look that best suited us, that is large rock venue meets cafe look. We started with one third of the building - there were two other tenants at the time we moved in who could not figure what we were about. As we continued to grow we would look at their space with the benevolence of a shark considering a potential meal - eventually they all got the idea and moved on and now we have the whole place to ourselves without any blood being spilt - well none that you can find anyway.

Babies & babies.

As people do they meet. Sometimes you wonder if church isn’t the last great unspoiled hunting ground of the terminally single? Anyway people met, fell in love, married, had sex and suddenly were talking to us about Wednesday being “a bit hard with the wife and kids an all…” So we innovated. Sunday services. Well it was totally new to us. However we had learned something - keeping Sunday mornings free meant families had quality time and no-one wanted to lose that. So we settled on 5.00 Sunday afternoons which by divine miracle meant some of us could keep fishing & surfing - it really was a sign. With a promise to feed the kids we started a Sunday service in the afternoons - boy did it take off - today it is our biggest service.
Now people were asking us could we bring our service to their town. This was a new chapter in our story so with some really amazing people we planted churches in other towns. To date we have planted in Matamata with Dion and Stacey and in Te Puke with Braedon & Rachael and in the not too distant future we have more plants in the pipeline.

So what about the mushrooms?

As we grew we noticed something - we were growing slightly odd, in comparison to other Vineyards. We never gave it much thought and figured it was probably a result from building on an old nuclear dump site (joke for those of you of the tree hugging persuasion). Vineyard was an awesome place for us to grow and develop. They would smile and encourage us in much the same way you encourage a large friendly dog that been chasing parked cars for too long.

In 2004 we began to feel we really needed to address issues regarding the future. Things like what shape did we need to be? Who would pull us forward etc? So we invited Erwin McManus to come to New Zealand in 2005 and hold a conference (church speak for hui). The impact of Erwin on us was about as subtle as the result of eating a bucket full of green kiwifruit (i.e. everything began to move for us - really fast).

The essence of the challenge Erwin gave us was in the form of a story. The question in the story was who would eat a mushroom that no-one had ever eaten before - why would you risk your health like that? He was talking about innovation & change in the church for those of you not yet making the connection. There is really nothing that looks appealing about the average mushroom so why do it? The nice ones that look pretty will kill you or at least replicate the kiwifruit effect, and the ones that are ok to eat look about as appealing as that nasty mould that grows in the corner of a fridge in a house inhabited only by males. Erwin’s point was this, “only a person with loved ones dying from lack of food is desperate enough to risk death for themselves to find life for others”. We must care about the lost enough to risk new things.

Something was kindled in our hearts that day and we recognised that our dna was really identifying with Erwin. DNA is an interesting thing. We all have it. We can’t control it. It can make us like those country twins you see in horror flicks - you know the ones - eyes too close together, undershot jaw and when they run you can hear banjo’s playing, or, it can suddenly shift you to an entirely new direction in God because you recognise He has been building something into your spirit.

In September of 2006 in recognition of who we were growing to be and in response to an invitation from Erwin we made the move to become “Mosaic” in the Bay of Plenty, New Zealand. It was a bitter sweet decision for us. Bitter in that it meant we had to grow up and leave home - the wonderful comfortable place called “Vineyard”. Sweet in that we got to be part of something that for us was a much better fit. So we listened to Jesus - didn’t hear banjos and made the same call we have always tried to make - risk it all to follow him, to eat mushrooms and hope for the best.

So here we are today - first load of mushrooms down - plenty more to come. Bring on the future!