All in Missional
The single greatest challenge for Covocational leaders is time. There never seem to be enough hours in the day to accomplish everything. When a church leader is working 30, 40, or even 50 hours a week in the marketplace, it is difficult to create and maintain proper rhythms between family, vocation, ministry, and health.
To plant disciple-making, missional churches, we must change the way we think about God’s mission and the nature of the church. Rethink explores 12 missiological principles to help you rethink church multiplication.
The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and re-learn. ~ Alvin Tofler
One way to recognize that God is a missionary God is to examine what is referred to as the “sending language” in Scripture.
This is one of the very best explanations of the social set theory referred to as Bounded Set and Centered Set. Deb Hirsch graciously applies the concept to the way we typically understand the church and helps us rethink a more missionary way to consider discipleship.
I have thought about the activities and practices that have shaped me the most over the past three decades. These lessons are simply descriptive of my own journey. While some of them may not fit who you are, I wish someone had shared each of these with me many years ago.
In the North American, post-Christian context in which we now live, we can’t plant churches by simply starting a Sunday morning worship gathering. There may have been a day when we could build a cool website, rent a meeting space, send out flyers, put up banners and “launch” a church by starting a Sunday service. But those days are gone, at least in many North American contexts.
“A Missional Community is a committed group of Jesus followers, the size of an extended family (12-25), empowered by the Spirit, to participate in God’s mission of redemption in a particular neighborhood and/or network.”
Many in the church today still believe that Christianity is in a place of influence and significance. Many still operate under the false assumption that Christendom is alive and well. While there may be some parts of the country that still cling to Christian values, the vast majority of the population is rapidly moving away from the things associated with the church.
When bringing about transformative change in the way people think and behave, I am convinced we must start with questions of “why” before considering the practical issues of “how.”
I always struggled with how “non-pastors” fit into the mission and ministry of the church. The only lens I had in my early days of ministry was for “lay-people” to become pastor/teachers (like me and every other pastor), or to be available to volunteer for empty slots in my ministry plan. APEST helped me see that the five-fold gifts are given by Jesus to the body, not simply leaders.
Over the past several years there has been an increasing interest in church planting. As a result of declining attendance and the closing of many existing churches, every major denomination is focusing more resources toward starting new congregations. In the midst of this proliferation of church planting, one of the most significant trends is the starting of new churches by covocational leaders.
