A Cloister formerly home to Jesus Generation - Yarralumla

Between 1990 and 2009 I pioneered and led a sequence of Missional Communities and Associate members centred on group-houses and a shared pledge to missional life. Between 1997 and 2009 this network existed as the JESUS GENERATION. Jesus Generation (or JGen for short) has included members in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Dubai and China. A sequence of sixty-six brothers and sisters played their part in developing a pattern for missional living, based on mutually selected accountability groups and group-houses. This pattern is laid out in a written constitution or "rule of life" called the TRAVELLERS GUIDE.

After JGen had been running for some years we realised that our rule of life - adapted from the constituion of an Anglican monastic community - was substantially the "Little Rule for Beginners" created by Benedict of Norcia (pictured left)  in the 500s AD. We were later struck by the very significant parallels with the 1611 "Declaration of Faith" the first manifesto of Baptist Christianity, penned by Thomas Helwys (1611) (pictured right) These parallels were reached initially not through deliberate emulation but through the life of a community making a similar journey and drawing similar conclusions.

Baptising, Anointing, Foot-washing and various l'Abri Sundays

By keeping church apparatus small, simple and relational, the Travellers Guide shaped a rhythm of life that centred on relational and hospitality-based ministry, maximising time and energy for reaching, befriending and discipling not gathered congregations, but people among the 95% who might never attend a church venue, meeting or program. Accordingly JGen never once ran a "church service".

 A JGen group in Australia

Our common life was expressed in sharing food together, dixcovering the amazing pastoral and evagelistic power of receiving people into a hospitable Christian home. As an entree into our common life we hosted a number of what we called l'Abri Sundays. These days consisted of quiet reading, making and eating lunch, then letting the blokes do some hard yakka on the land and the girls enjoy some girl time. We found these great settings to bring friends to who wanted to check us out.

Paul with Ps Sengh Li of Singapore's Faith Community Baptist Church in the 1990s
and with some catalysts of Amazonia's ecclesiogenesis at the Regional Pastoral Institute
in Belem, Brazil in the 1980s

JGen's spirituality is one centred on an active Jesus at work in the world among those beyond the churches. Much of this insight was sparked by early input (in my story) from the catalysts of Amazonia's "ecclesiogenesis" (a word meaning the spontaneous generation of grassroots church) in the 1980s and from cell-church pratitioners in Asia in the early 1990s.

But it was the study of exemplars through church history that originally sparked Jesus Generation into life. After a period of tremendous church growth in Portsmouth UK I was seeking the Lord to know how to disciple people at a deeper level. With the members of my then group-household I found answers to such questions from the Celtic Apostles, Aidan, Fursa, Columba; the first Benedictines, Francis, Clare and the first Mendicants; Wesley, Whitfield and the first Methodists; William Booth and the first Salvationists; and later the story of Francis and Edith Schaeffer became significant to us. JGen as a network began when i invited boarders in one of my group houses to share my own rule of life - embracing aspects of the promises made by Anglican clergy at ordination, and the Articles of War of the Salvation Army.

A JGen River Baptism!