Throughout history God’s people have used various ways of commissioning people into ministry. In the Old Testament you got given a special outfit and sprinkled in the blood of a sacrificial animal. Traditional Christian denominations get a Bishop to lay hands on you in a line of apostolic succession going all the way back to Jesus’ first disciples. In the 24-7 Prayer movement (of which the Order of the Mustard Seed forms a part), you get crowd surfed.

The ecclesiology of crowd surfing is beautiful. It’s a visual act of prophetic prayer in which the person is literally held up before God as an act of dedication, and the thousand or so people involved symbolise their commitment to continually support them in prayer and encouragement. It’s wild and edgy, which captures something of the essence of the OMS. And as Pete Greig also points out: “it’s fun”.

Having experienced it during my commissioning into the role of Global Convenor at the recent 24-7 gathering in Stuttgart, I can confirm that that sense of being upheld and supported is real and incredibly humbling. I can also report that it’s not at all scary or uncomfortable; it’s more like floating on water and being carried along in a current of goodwill.

If I do have any concerns about crowd surfing as a means of commissioning, it is that the person involved gets to look a tiny bit like a rock star. That was never the model of leadership which Jesus taught or exampled, and Count Zinzendorf (the leader of the original OMS) firmly rejected it as well. In the 1740 rules he wrote that “Every member of the Order is equal in status. When someone is acting as the ‘secretary’, they are there to be a contact point and to handle correspondence but not to take authority.”

The day before we had a slightly more conventional moment of commissioning in which a group of elders and leaders laid on hands and prayed for me… after which I was invited to ride round the room on a somewhat undersized bicycle which happened to be on stage as part of a visual installation depicting the call to go and take the gospel into Europe. Equally prophetic, equally fun, but not quite so cool. And together they probably summarise our calling: to be true, to be kind, and to go, whether the world considers it cool or not.