Most of you are already familiar with Scot McKnight over at Jesus Creed but here is an interesting three part interview with McKnight posted by JR Woodward at Dream Awakener.
McKnight on blogging – Part I
McKnight on blogging – Part II
McKnight on Jesus
The church is the bearer to all the nations of a gospel that announces the kingdom, the reign, and the sovereignty of God. It calls men and women to repent of their false loyalty to other powers, to become believers in the one true sovereignty, and so to become corporately a sign, instrument, and foretaste of that sovereignty of the one true and living God over all nature, all nations, and all human lives. It is not meant to call men and women out of the world into a safe religious enclave but to call them out in order to send them back as agents of God’s kingship.
Here is a very good post by David Fitch over at Reclaiming the Mission. If you are not familiar with Fitch he is author of The Great Giveaway and pastor of Life on the Vine. I have a short review of the book here.
In this post Fitch discusses the struggles of planting missional communities and the importance of cultivating certain practices in the life of the community to ensure health and longevity. This leads Fitch to reflect on the development of a missional order. Something several of us have been discussing for sometime, therefore I find his common commitments particularly intriguing. Here is a sample of the post:
In chapter 2 of his book Simplicity [Richard Rohr] talks about the pain of seeing so many missional communities start up and then fold within two to three years of starting. He blames various societal pressures and internal character weaknesses that come with the territory of planting missional communities in North America. I too have seen many missional communities fold in the third year of their existence. I have witnessed burn-out, depression, and disillusionment among the leaders in the 3rd year (sometimes sooner but mostly by the end of the 3rd year).
Part of where this comes from is that certain swimming against the stream that every missional community organizer knows. It is the everyday grind against making people happy that comes with engaging the consumerism and narcissism of the average cultural American. But then even worse, there are these expectations that come from denominations and Christian institutions that derive from a Christendom mentality of church planting. Here numbers and attraction become the measures of success and when these things are subtly communicated, the self-worth of the church planters takes a dive. Even if the institutions are supportive (which mine has certainly been), the pressures and expectations of the past age haunt the average missional church planter. It is imperative therefore to have practices that support missional community cultivation!
Thanks to Rick Meigs at Blind Beggar and Andy at not yet finished for the heads up on this video of Michael Frost at the Presbyterian Global Fellowship Conference in Houston. Frost argues that for a church to be missional means that mission must be the organizing principle of the church, and when you “step into” a missional paradigm there will be a fundamental shift in how you see God, the church and the world.
Friends naturally enjoy intimate sharing. Friends make time to develop trusting relationships. Friends enjoy being in the company of each other. But then superimpose a Christian model of friendship over these qualities and you’ll get at least one more non-negotiable characteristic of Christian spiritual friendship:
Spiritual friends help each other pay close attention to God.
Is there a higher calling of relationships in the body of Christ? Not to me! Christians involved in spiritual friendship help each other delight in God and in his word. As a discipline of the Christian life, spiritual friendship is no different than other disciplines in its purpose: To connect friends to God or to be transformed into the image of Christ.
Name 3-4 friends that help you connect with God? Can you name 2? How about 1? Then thank God, you are in the lower 25% of those who minister to God’s people.
I have read that 75% of ministers do not have any intimate friends. Can you imagine going through the hardships and delights of ministry to God’s people without someone to listen to us and help us see God in our ministry? O, to be listened to! What a gift awaits us. Read more →
Today I finished reading a essay titled “Evangelical Conversion toward a Missional Ecclesiology” by George Hunsberger. The essay is chapter four of Evangelical Ecclesiology: Reality or Illusion? edited by John Stackhouse. Dr. Hunsberger is Professor of Congregational Mission at Western Theological Seminary. He is also coordinator of the Gospel and Our Culture Network in North America.
I had the privilege of sitting between Dr. Hunsberger and Dr. Lois Barrett (also a contributor to GOCN) during dinner one evening last year when the GOCN annual conference was in town. I have since grown to appreciate Hunsberger’s insight and try to keep up on his numerous writings.
Here is a extended portion of the essay where Hunsberger presents a helpful summary of the continual stranglehold Christendom has on the church in North America. He then goes on to ask if evangelicalism’s emphasis on “missions” has made it more difficult for the church to grasp the “missional” purpose of why it exists. I urge you to carve out a few minutes to read his thoughts and tell me what you think.
Hunsberger writes:
The Reformers lived in what was still a Christendom world, and they continued to think and respond to issues of the nature and form of the church with assumptions inherent in that world. It should be no surprise that they did so. But it should surprise us that Christendom ways of thinking of the church still persist in our own time. Evangelicalism, no less than any other of the streams flowing from the Reformation, bears the stamp of the reduction of the church of the church to a place where certain things happen.
What was most lost to the church in the period of Christendom was its sense of missional identity. This pervasive eclipse of mission continued to be evident in the Reformational confessions. Wilbert Shenk summarizes (Write the Vision, p. 38):
Ecclesiologically the church is turned inward. The thrust of these statements, which were the very basis for catechizing and guiding the faithful, rather than equipping and mobilizing the church to engage the world, was to guard and preserve. This is altogether logical, of course, if the whole of society is by definition already under the lordship of Christ.
The gradual emergence of Protestant missionary ventures to newly discovered parts of the world (after a couple of centuries!) does not really contradict this assessment. What is new is that missions are organized apart from the magistrate’s initiative and sponsorship. From the time of the Reformation until the eighteenth century, this official direction and support were understood to be chiefly responsible for the evangelization of new regions. Read more →
Here is another excerpt from my favorite chapter of Searching For God Knows What by Donald Miller. In this section, titled “The Gospel: A Relational Dynamic” Miller is arguing that the essence of the gospel is relational rather than the mental ascent to a set of theological statements or an agreement with a list of bullet points.
Miller writes:
It doesn’t make a great deal of sense that a person who went to Bible college should have a better shot at heaven than a person who didn’t, and it doesn’t make a lot of sense either that somebody sentimental and spiritual has greater access.
I think it is more safe and more beautiful and more true to believe that when a person dies he will go and be with God because, on earth, he had come to know Him, that he had a relational encounter with God not unlike meeting a friend or a lover or having a father or taking a bride, and that in order to engage God he gave up everything, repented and changed his life, as this sort of extreme sacrifice is what is required if true love is to grow. We would expect nothing less in a marriage; why should we accept anything less in becoming unified with Christ?
In fact, I have to tell you, I believe the Bible is screaming this idea and is completely silent on any other, including our formulas and bullet points. It seems, rather, that Christ’s parables, Christ’s words about eating His flesh and drinking His blood, were designed to bypass the memorization of ideas and cause us to wrestle with a certain need to cling to Him. In other words, a poetic presentation of the gospel of Jesus is more accurate than a set of steps.
- Donald Miller in chapter 10 of Searching For God Knows What
Here are two quotes from Henri Nouwen that are taken from The Sacred Way by Tony Jones. The first is a quote about spiritual disciplines and the second deals specifically with the discipline of silence and solitude.
“In the spiritual like, the word ‘discipline’ means ‘the effort to create some space in which God can act.’ Discipline means to prevent everything in your life from being filled up. Discipline means that somewhere you’re not occupied, and certainly not preoccupied. In the spiritual life, discipline means to create that space in which something can happen that you hadn’t planned or counted on.”
“As ministers our greatest temptation is toward too many words. They weaken our faith and make us lukewarm. But silence is a sacred discipline, a guard of the Holy Spirit.”
- Henri Nouwen
Guest blogger Georges Boujakly is going to be posting a series on Spiritual Friendship over the next few days. I know you will be encouraged and challenged by Georges’ insight. Here is the first post.
A couple of years ago I attended a week-long retreat called a 5-Day Spiritual Academy. This particular retreat was a ministry of Upper Room Ministries and was held in Wichita at the Catholic Life Center. After the retreat I completed a writing project and received credit for a course in doctoral work I was doing at the time. (They have a two year Spiritual Academy in case you are interested in training in spiritual friendship.)
From that experience I became more aware than ever before for my need of a spiritual director. I asked one of the leaders of the retreat and he recommended a spiritual director where I live. I see this person monthly and am thankful for the help I receive. I now return the favor to several people. Read more →
