Here is a great quote from The Missional Leader.

Today, we give up on congregations that we declare are out of touch with the culture. We run to big, successful places with marquee-name leaders to find out how to be successful. In so doing we are going in exactly the opposite direction from everything we see in the Biblical narratives.

We have forgotten that God’s future often emerges in the most inauspicious places. If we let our imagination be informed by this realization, it will be obvious that we need to lead in ways that are different from those of a CEO, an entrepreneur, a super leader with a wonderful plan for the congregation’s life. Instead, we need leaders with the capacity to cultivate an environment that releases the missional imagination of the people of God.

The Missional Leader: Equipping Your Church To Reach A Changing World  by Alan Roxburgh and Fred Romanuk (ht)

How can we cultivate such an environment?

I believe we can capture the “missional imagination” by sharing what other faith communities are doing and illustrate what it looks like to connect with people in third places, cultivate rapport with local schools, and build relationships with neighbors. Moreover, we can reflect deeply on biblical images of mission, service and hospitality by spending time on passages such as Genesis 12:2, Isaiah 61:1-3, Matthew 5:43; 10:40; 22:39; 25:35, Luke 10:25-37 and others.

What else would you recommend?

This quote speaks to the need to cultivate a sacred rhythm in our lives.

Godly discipline is different to the rules and regulations of bureaucratic organizations. The answer to legalism is not a vacuum, but clarity about our priorities. To live authentically means that I choose my lifestyle, I do not succumb to the lifestyle others foist upon me. It means that I use my time, money and talents according to my deepest convictions.

In the changed circumstances of the third millennium, the person in the street needs a Way. Technology and mobility give us so many choices that our lives, without a framework, become driven by external stimuli and unsifted expectations.

Ray Simpson in A Pilgrim Way: New Celtic monasticism for everyday people, (ht)

Read this excellent story by Rick Reilly from ESPN titled There are some games where cheering for the other side feels better than winning. (ht) 

The next missional network gathering will be Thursday, January 22nd from 12 noon to 3:00pm. (There will be free food for lunch!)

For at least the first two meetings in 2009 we will be examining ReJesus: A Wild Messiah For A Missional Church, the new book by Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch.

In addition to discussing the book during our network times, we will create opportunities on the blog to dialogue on a chapter by chapter basis. You can download the introduction and chapter one here and here. 

Here are a couple of excerpts from the introduction that will provide a bit of the book’s flavor:

What ongoing role does Jesus the Messiah play in shaping the ethos and self-understanding of the movement that originated in him?

How is the Christian religion, if we could legitimately call it that, informed and shaped by the Jesus that we meet in the Gospels?

How do we assess the continuity required between the life and example of Jesus and the subsequent religion called Christianity?

In how many ways do we domesticate the radical Revolutionary in order to sustain our religion and religiosity?

And perhaps most important of all, how can a rediscovery of Jesus renew our discipleship, the Christian community, and the ongoing mission of the church?

And

So this book is dedicated to the recovery of the absolute centrality of the person of Jesus in defining who we are as well as what we do. As hard as it is to truly follow him, we assert that we must constantly return to Jesus to authenticate as well as legitimize ourselves as his people. We have no other Archimedean point by which to set our coordinates or any other touchstone by which we can assess the abiding validity of our faith and to see if we are authentically Christian.

The love of Jesus, and our commitment to live in conformity to him, is in effect an inbuilt spiritual mechanism at the heart of the church’s theology and experience that provides an instrument for our ongoing renewal. It seems to us that a constant, and continual, return to Jesus is absolutely essential for any movement that wishes to call itself by his name.

Kansas City Missional Network

Thursday, January 22nd
12:00 – 3:00pm
Kansas City Association
8745 Ballentine
Overland Park

In response to the last post on the history of the missional church conversation, Brian McLaughlin asked a great question regarding differences in the missional conversations that were taking place in the U.S. in the mid 1990s with those that were going on in the U.K. under the influence of Lesslie Newbigin. In other words, if the U.S. version of the Gospel and Our Culture Network was birthed out of the influence of Newbigin, were (or are) there any differences in the missional ecclesiology of the two?

I believe the best place to look to answer this question is a wonderfully insightful doctoral dissertation by Michael W. Goheen titled “As the Father Has Sent Me, I Am Sending You”: J.E. Lesslie Newbigin’s Missionary Ecclesiology. A pdf file of the nearly 500 page paper can be found here.

Following is an extended excerpt (with a few added links) of chapter ten, The Nature and Relevance of Newbigin’s Missionary Ecclesiology, where Goheen addresses the above question:

The book Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America (Guder 1998) presents an opportunity to examine the relevance of Newbigin’s ecclesiology in the North American context. The book is clearly indebted to Lesslie Newbigin. The co-ordinator of GOCN/NA and one of the authors of this book, George Hunsberger, wrote his doctoral dissertation on Newbigin (1987).

Newbigin’s thought is also clearly influential in Darrell Guder’s Be My Witnesses (1985). The authors of Missional Church explicitly acknowledge that debt early in the book (Guder 1998:5). Their ecclesiology can be seen as an attempt to take the insights of Newbigin and formulate them in the North American setting. Moreover, this book represents what might be called an “official ecclesiology” of the Gospel and Our Culture Network in North America. It is co-authored by six leaders of that movement.

Three central features characterize the ecclesiology of this book: it stresses the negative legacy of Christendom, it emphasizes the communal witness of the church, and it accents the critical side of the church’s relation to culture. All three of these features are important in Newbigin’s writings. Newbigin believes that Christendom is one of the primary factors that cripples a missionary consciousness in the church. He also emphasizes the communal dimension of mission: “The central reality is neither word nor act, but the total life of a community enabled by the Spirit to live in Christ, sharing his passion and the power of his resurrection.” The importance of a critical stance toward culture is captured by numerous phrases he employs: discriminating nonconformists, radical dissenters, radical critics and misfits with a relationship of conflict, dissenting otherworldliness, and radical discontinuity with its cultural context.

While all three of these ecclesiological features are found within Newbigin’s writing, a comparison between Newbigin and Missional Church reveals differences at each point.

First, Newbigin’s analysis of Christendom is much more ambivalent than that of the authors of Missional Church. The evaluation of the latter is entirely negative while Newbigin sees many positive features in Christendom. He believes that the Christendom settlement was a worthwhile attempt to translate the universal claims of Christ into social and political terms. Through this thousand-year period the gospel permeated many aspects of social, political, moral, personal, and economic life and western culture continues to live on the capital of that period. Undoubtedly it was his missionary experience in a country where the gospel did not have a lengthy history that enabled Newbigin to evaluate the Christendom experiment much more positively.

For the writers of Missional Church Christendom necessarily distorts and even eclipses the church’s mission. Acceptance of power contradicts the posture to which the church is called. For Newbigin Christendom posed many dangers to the church’s mission — dangers that were unfortunately realized. Nevertheless Christendom provided an opportunity for the church to work out the claims of Christ’s Lordship in its mission. He believes that faithfulness to the mission of the church demanded that it not refuse responsibility for the public order. Faithfulness to Jesus who was Lord of history and culture required the church to bring politics under the authority of Christ in spite of the dangers and temptations. Part of the history and legacy of Christendom is what Oliver O’Donovan calls the ‘obedience of the rulers’, the fruit of which remains in the West to the present day (O’Donovan 1996:212-216). Missional Church leans toward an interpretation of Christendom that neglects important emphases in Newbigin’s writing.

Read the rest of this entry

As part of my doctorate of ministry project I recently chronicled the history of the “missional church conversation.” In doing so I reviewed and summarized the influences of the International Missionary Council (IMC) conferences, Johannes Blauw, Lesslie Newbigin, the Gospel and Our Culture (GOC) program in the UK, and the eventual emergence of the Gospel and Our Culture Network (GOCN) in the United States.

Furthermore, I created a list of each of the publications to date in The Gospel and Our Culture Series as well as other significant books that have contributed to the conversation in the past decade.

Well this week I was delighted to receive Craig Van Gelder’s latest edition, “The Missional Church & Denominations” which includes (in the introduction) a brief historical summary of the missional conversation that nicely parallels my work. (Although it would have saved me a significant amount of time if Van Gelder’s current work would have been available about four months go!)

Here is an abreviated sampling of Van Gelder’s very helpful historical overview with added links to each of the publications mentioned:

The Influence of Lesslie Newbigin

In returning home to England from the foreign mission field in the 1970s, Newbigin took up the challenge of trying to envision what a fresh encounter of the gospel with late-modern Western culture might look like. He focused on this issue perhaps most sharply in his book Foolishness to the Greeks, where he posed this question: “What would be involved in a missionary encounter between the gospel and this whole way of perceiving, thinking, and living that we call ‘modern Western Culture?”

A movement that tried to address this issue emerged in England in the 1980s and comes to be known as the Gospel and Our Culture (GOC) conversation. While the GOC discussion first surfaced in England, it soon spread to the United States, where it was taken up by a new generation of missiologists who were focusing their attention on addressing the North American context as its own unique mission location.

Newbigin’s missiology was largely shaped by the mission theology that was born within the International Missionary Council (IMC) conferences of the 1950s through the 1970s. This was a Trinitarian understanding of mission, or what is commonly referred to as the missio Dei, the mission of God.

Influenced by the biblical theology movement of the 1930s-1940s, this Trinitarian foundation for mission theology began to take shape at the Willingen Conference of the IMC in 1952 and was later formulated as the missio Dei by Karl Hartenstein. Johannes Blauw then gave it fuller expression in his 1962 book The Missionary Nature of the Church.

Lesslie Newbigin articulated his own expression of this mission theology in The Open Secret  (1978). Central to his understanding of mission is the work of the triune God in calling and sending the church through the Spirit into the world to participate fully in God’s mission within all of creation. This theological formulation understands the church to be the creation of the Spirit: it exists in the world as a “sign” that the redemptive reign of God’s kingdom is present; it serves as a “foretaste” of the eschatological future of the redemptive reign that has already begun; and it serves as an “instrument” under the leadership of the Spirit to bring that redemptive reign to bear on every dimension of life.

The British GOC Programme

The British version of the GOC movement that developed during the 1980s came to be known as a “programme,” and it was shaped largely by the writings of Newbigin during that period: The Other Side of 1984 (1983), Foolishness to the Greeks (1986), and The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (1989).

The GOC Network in the U.S.

As the British programme began to gain public recognition, a U.S. version of the Gospel and Our Culture conversation also began to emerge. Several consultations sponsored in the mid-1980s by the Overseas Study Mission Center stimulated interest in the question Newbigin had posed in the Warfield Lectures at Princeton in 1984 (later published as Foolishness to the Greeks).

A network began to take shape from these early events in the mid-1980s; by the early 1990s, under the leadership of George Hunsberger, the Gospel and Our Culture Network was publishing a quarterly newsletter and also convening a yearly consultation. By the mid-1990s, the movement in the United States had begun to find its own voice beyond the influence of Newbigin, and the Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company began to publish a series of books under the moniker The Gospel and Our Culture Series. To date the following volumes have been published in this series:

George Hunsberger and Craig Van Gelder, eds., The Church Between Gospel and Culture: The Emerging Mission in North America (1996).

Darrel L. Guder, ed., Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America (1998).

George Hunsberger, Bearing the Witness of the Spirit: Lesslie Newbigin’s Theology of Cultural Plurality (1998).

Craig Van Gelder, ed., Confident Witness — Changing World: Rediscovering the Gospel in North America (1999).

Darrel L. Guder, The Continuing Conversion of the Church (2000).

James V. Brownson, ed. StormFront: The Good News of God (2003).

Lois Y. Barrett, ed., Treasure in Clay Jars: Patterns in Missional Faithfulness (2004).

This literature has focused on understanding North America as its own unique mission location and the church as being missional by nature, and it continues to stimulate a very important conversation.

There are a number of other books from several different publishers that have also contributed to this conversation, which include the following:

Craig Van Gelder, The Essence of the Church: A Community Created by the Spirit (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2000).

Richard H. Bliese and Craig Van Gelder, eds., The Evangelizing Church: A Luthern Contribution (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2005).

Alan J. Roxburgh and Fred Romanuk, The Missional Leader: Equipping Your Church to Reach a Changing World (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006).

Patrick Keifert, We Are Here Now: A New Missional Era (Eagle, ID: Allelon Publishing, 2006).

Craig Van Gelder, The Ministry of the Missional Church: A Community Led by the Spirit (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2007).

Craig Van Gelder, ed., The Missional Church in Context: Helping Congregations Develop Contextual Ministry (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007).

Richard W. Rouse and Craig Van Gelder, A Field Guide to the Missional Congregation: A Journey of Transformation (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2008).

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For additional publications that I believe have added to the missional conversation check out the Reading List link at the top of the page.

Here is a very good article on characteristics of a church planter by Acts 29 Director, Scott Thomas. In addition to the summarized list of questions below, Scott elaborates on each point with a short, but helpful discussion.

1. Am I a Christian?
2. Am I passionately in love with Jesus?
3. Do I believe His word and does it affect my life deeply?
4. Am I Spirit-filled, Spirit-directed, Spirit-led and Spirit-controlled?
5. Am I qualified as an Elder?
6. Do I love the local church as the expression of a gospel community?
7. Am I a missionary to the city?
8. Do I have a clear vision for this new work?
9. Am I willing to pour myself out in obedience to the vision?
10. Am I healthy? Physically, emotionally, financially, relationally?
11. Am I the kind of leader many people will follow?
12. Can I preach effectively?
13. Can I guard the doctrinal door with Biblical clarity?
14. Can I architect a new work with entrepreneurial skill?
15. Am I called to plant a church at this time and in this place?
16. Have my church leaders commended me for this calling?
17. Am I a hard worker? Am I persevering?
18. Am I adaptable to new people, places and concepts?
19. Can I raise the funds needed for my family’s needs?
20. Am I humble enough to learn from others?

“Church planters under 30 whom I’m meeting don’t seem interested in planting churches that will become megachurches. Rather, they want reproducible small churches–which, incidentally, matches what’s happening in the business world.

Leadership guru Warren Bennis’ The Future of Leadership speaks of elephants and fleas: The elephants get all the attention, but the new ideas mostly come from fleas.”

– Eddie Gibbs (ht)

In conjunction with World AIDS Day (December 1st), MSN celebrated the launch of (RED) WIRE, (RED)’s new digital music magazine designed to help eliminate AIDS in Africa. To learn more about (RED) WIRE go here.

If you are a U2 fan then you must check out yesterday’s (RED) release of their cover of “I Believe in Father Christmas” orignially written by Greg Lake of “Emerson, Lake and Palmer” fame. What is especially interesting about U2’s rendering is a very subtle yet thoughtful change in lyrics. What was originally:

“They sold me a dream of Christmas, They sold me a silent night, They told me a fairy story, Till I believed in the Israelite.” Becomes; “But I believed in the Israelite.”  Enjoy!

(ht: u2sermons)