William Chong

Website: http://www.cession.org.nz; Ph: (09) 279 9332; The Depot, Lloyd Elsmore Park, Pakuranga; Senior Pastor/Speaker: Brett Jones; Sermon topic: “Bland Death Auto Pt 1: It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over”; 21.6.08; 5:45pm.

Rating: nearly AA
(A=return worshipper, AA=excellent and growing, AAA=must be my home church lol)

You’ll like this church if you: like new ways of presenting Jesus Christ in a postmodern generation; seek a balance between youth-centered relevance and timeless truth, have an aversion to fake happy clapping and/or sitting amongst the pew masses, are a Christian looking for an open-minded church environment, want a church where it’s easy to get to know everyone.

You won’t like this church if you: are a true-blue emergent dude/dudette, don’t like holding on to early-church traditions such as Lent and the Stations of the Cross, hold to a more conservative/fundamental approach to church services, would be confused in a dark room on a Sunday evening, like to slip in and slip out of church anonymously.

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Dim lighting and roundtable seating. Bible readings in Klingon. Blogging church elders. Re-enactments of Grand Theft Auto 4 cutscenes. Playstation metaphors juxtaposed with James chapter 1. Yes, this is a church, and a surprisingly faithful one at that.

To me, cession|community is much like the TNIV translation of the Bible. They’re both narrative-driven, gender neutral, very easily accessible to young-at-hearts, with more of the legalistics tucked away in a not-worth-the-conflict box or left open-ended. And much like the TNIV, cession would probably be frowned upon by more conservative folks that don’t believe that the church-wheel ever needs revisioning/reinventing.

This was our first evening church service in a long time, and we arrived just as their “chow” session was finishing up. Senior Pastor Brett Jones himself (oooooh) showed us into a room set out like a dinner show: tablecloth-draped round tables with coffee chatter amongst patrons of Jesus Christ. We were feeling a bit shy and uninitiated to this unique set up and Jones was kind enough to “hide us in a corner”. We sat down in eager anticipation and watched the projected countdown clock behind the stage, well, count down to cession|launch.

Worship: Run-of-the-mill CCM, this would probably be the most “mainstream church” aspect of cession. An energetic and lively six-pack of worship bandies worked with a chilled out of about 40-odd worshippers responding with about the same fervour as café patrons would respond to Norah Jones on the muzak tracks. The music was tight and polished, (“mad awesome riffs” etc), but I liked the sincerity of the songs they chose that night. As a personal note, I’m pretty partial to any song set that includes Brooke Fraser-penned praises.

Teaching: An English-subtitled, Cantonese video of a dysfunctional family took me by surprise first (and was a bit tricky to piece together), but I eventually recognised it as an introduction to struggles and trials in life. Senior pastor Brett Jones then took the stage, sharing clear and eloquent thoughts on a 4-part series on the book of James. As per the out-of-the-box creative core presentation ethos, the teaching is presented within the metaphor of video gaming, if you ever wanted teaching notes with Playstation controller configurations on them, this church will appeal.

Digesting the teaching, I felt that analogy between the decision-making in a video game was pretty effective in illustrating points such as:

• considering the gameplay in life’s trials and whether it’s really about the miserable things
• sharpening up our wisdom/hand-eye coordination/anything by asking for God’s help
• our free will in choosing not to repeat our mistakes and challenging our sin-nature programming.

I also appreciated Jones’s willingness to share real stories and real struggles (including a heart-wrenching ancedote of sexual temptation) to illustrate how tough living the Christian life can get and that even when you’ve slipped up horribly, there’s still The Light at the end of the tunnel.

Church history: Their own history page does it best, but I will add that their name comes from the Latin noun “cessio”, which roughly means one who yields or surrenders. Cession seems to pride itself in approaching Christianity with an open mind about those thorny, divisive theological issues that tear many a church apart. Elder Frank Ritchie in a Wesleyanz article termed this the “radical middle”, being neither conservative nor liberal. If it weren’t for the affiliation with the Wesleyan Methodist Church, one could imagine cession joining the “conversation” of emergent churches (of which I have mixed feelings about). But I’m happy that cession’s not emergent enough that they start�questioning the core truths like Jesus being God, salvation being a global necessity and so on.

Visitor treatment: We had the pleasure of chatting with two churchgoers Katie and Sarah (she sang in the worship team earlier) after the service, who shared that they’ve just started a new service at 10.30am. As I mentioned earlier, the pastor was astute enough to stay clear of any overt jump-and-join approaches, and I picked out a genuine servant heart feel from the congregation present (from the media team to the caffeine technicians).

Other faculties: For those who love free food, cession worshippers make great sacrifices in contributing each week to a cession “chow”, basically a shared meal that begins at 5.00pm before the service proper. Unfortunately this review couldn’t extend into the food options afforded and so on, but it’s a unique and encouraging outreach that works pretty well for the church’s community size. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to dig deeper into the rest of the current teaching series or attend one of their regular Plugging-In sessions for those interested in finding out more.

Ultimately, there is a catch-22 in trying to reach out to the transient, postmodern generation that easily slides in and out of church like its a commodity, or a social event and not something as significant as the Bride of Jesus Christ. On the one hand, cession is a tight group of creative, forward-thinking Christians specialising in presenting a relevant gospel to the young in the area (young people reach young people the best). On the other hand, it doesn’t seem “mainstream” enough to appeal to mums and dads and extended families (no SuperGold card holders at this church, guaranteed), and there’s a danger of only being relevant as long as you’re young, and as Suzanne Paul can testify, people age. To stand the test of time eventually cession may need to assess whether they’ll continue to reach out to lost younguns or whether they’ll need to mature into an across-the-spectrum faith community (perhaps when the leadership team hits their 50s or something!).

Conclusion: A young, thinking person’s counterculture church which gets it right in balancing both being relevant and being true.

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(Disclosures: none at the time of visit, though 1 pastoral teamer is now fb friends.)
Next week: International Baptist Church.

(This review may not be representative of all of the church’s ministries, or their overall teaching. Opinions expressed in this review are that of the author, and may not wholly reflect all aspects of the church or its national body: nevertheless, comments have been humbly made in both truth and love as much as possible. Please contact the church for more detailed enquiries about their services.)