Mark your calendars for an event coming up this September in Kansas City. We will be hosting a conference titled “Turning the Church Inside/Out” with Reggie McNeal.

The conference will be on Tuesday, September 14th from 9:00am to 5:30pm. McNeal will lead three main sessions focused on helping church leaders understand the cultural shifts taking place in North America and how to best maneuver the necessary missiological and ecclesiological changes. There will be special emphasis on the importance of developing and deploying church members as missionaries in local neighborhoods and work places. There will also be six breakout sessions offered that will assist participants in making personal application in a local context.

The conference fee is only $30, which will also include lunch. For additional information on the conference, including location, lodging and a detailed schedule check out the conference website here. If you have further questions about the conference leave a comment or send me an email at brad.brisco@gmail.com

Here is the new Switchfoot video from their song The Sound (John M. Perkins’ Blues). If you are not familiar with John Perkins check out the wiki page on Perkins, or better yet, go to the John M. Perkins Foundation for Reconciliation & Development (JMPF.org).

I really like this short video of Michael Frost talking about the importance of developing new “measuring sticks” or “scorecards” for the church. He emphasizes the need to find new ways to measure where the rule/reign of God is flourishing. What sort of things can we “measure” that will illustrate evidence of the Kingdom?

This video made me reflect on why we are apparently quite good at measuring church stuff; such as buildings, butts, and bucks, yet seemingly struggle with identifying measurables for activity outside of church life. I am afraid it boils down to the fact that as church people we know very well how to live in the church, but struggle mightily with knowing how to live in the Kingdom.

(ht)

Over the past few months I have had an increasing number of conversations with pastors and church leaders about moving existing churches in a missional direction. I have been asked what key issues or topics need to be considered when attempting to transition a traditional church. The following list is certainly not conclusive or comprehensive, but here are nine elements that I believe need to be considered when making a missional shift:

1. Start with Spiritual Formation

God calls the church to be a sent community of people who no longer live for themselves but instead live to participate with Him in His redemptive purposes. However, people will have neither the passion nor the strength to live as a counter-cultural society for the sake of others if they are not transformed by the way of Jesus. If the church is to “go and be,” rather than “come and see,” then we must make certain that we are a Spirit-formed community that has the spiritual capacity to impact the lives of others.

This means the church must take seriously its responsibility to cultivate spiritual transformation that does not allow believers to remain as adolescents in their spiritual maturity. Such spiritual formation will involve much greater relational underpinnings and considerable engagement with a multitude of spiritual disciplines.

One such discipline should involve dwelling in the word, whereby the church learns to regard Scripture not as a tool, but as the living voice of God that exists to guide people into His mission. If we believe the mission is truly God’s mission, then we must learn to discern where He is working; and further discern, in light of our gifts and resources, how He desires a church to participant in what He is doing in a local context.

2. Cultivate a Missional Leadership Approach

The second most important transition in fostering a missional posture in a local congregation is rethinking church leadership models that have been accepted as the status quo. This will require the development of a missional leadership approach that has a special emphasis on the apostolic function of church leadership, which was marginalized during the time of Christendom in favor of the pastor/teacher function.

This missional leadership approach will involve creating an apostolic environment throughout the life of the church. The leader must encourage pioneering activity that pushes the church into new territory. However, because not all in the church will embrace such risk, the best approach will involve creating a sort of “R&D” or “skunk works” department in the church for those who are innovators and early adopters.

A culture of experimentation must be cultivated where attempting new initiatives is expected, even if they don’t all succeed. As pioneering activities bear fruit, and the stories of life change begin to bubble up within the church, an increasing number of people will begin to take notice and get involved.

3. Emphasize the Priesthood of All Believers

Martin Luther’s idea of the priesthood of all believers was that all Christians were called to carry out their vocational ministries in every area of life. Every believer must fully understand how their vocation plays a central part in God’s redemptive Kingdom.

I think it was Rick Warren who made popular the phase “every member is a minister.” While this phrase is a helpful slogan to move people to understand their responsibility in the life of the church, God’s purpose for His church would be better served if we encouraged people to recognize that “every member is a missionary.” This missionary activity will include not just being sent to far away places, but to local work places, schools and neighborhoods.

4. Focus Attention on the Local Community

As individual members begin to see themselves as missionaries sent into their local context the congregation will begin to shift from a community-for-me mentality, to a me-for-the-community mentality. The church must begin to develop a theology of the city that sees the church as an agent of transformation for the good of the city (Jeremiah 29:7). This will involve exegeting each segment of the city to understand the local needs, identify with people, and discover unique opportunities for the church to share the good news of Jesus.

5. Don’t Do It Alone

Missional activity that leads to significant community transformation takes a lot of work and no church can afford to work alone. Missional churches must learn to create partnerships with other churches as well as already existing ministries that care about the community.

6. Create New Means of Measuring Success

The church must move beyond measuring success by the traditional indicators of attendance, buildings and cash. Instead we must create new scorecards to measure ministry effectiveness. These new scorecards will include measurements that point to the church’s impact on community transformation rather than measuring what is happening among church members inside the church walls. For the missional church it is no longer about the number of people active in the church but instead the number of people active in the community. It is no longer about the amount of money received but it is about the amount of money given away.

A missional church may ask how many hours has the church spent praying for community issues? How many hours have church members spent with unbelievers? How many of those unbelievers are making significant movement towards Jesus? How many community groups use the facilities of the church? How many people are healthier because of the clinic the church operates? How many people are in new jobs because of free job training offered by the church? What is the number of school children who are getting better grades because of after-school tutoring the church provides. Or how many times do community leaders call the church asking for advice?

Until the church reconsiders the definition of ministry success and creates new scorecards to appropriately measure that success, it will continue to allocate vital resources in misguided directions.

7. Search for Third Places

In a post-Christendom culture where more and more people are less and less interested in activities of the church, it is increasingly important to connect with people in places of neutrality, or common “hang outs.” In the book “The Great Good Place” author Ray Oldenburg identifies these places of common ground as “third places.”

According to Oldenburg, third places are those environments in which people meet to interact with others and develop friendships. In Oldenburg’s thinking our first place is the home and the people with whom we live. The second place is where we work and the place we spend the majority of our waking hours. But the third place is an informal setting where people relax and have the opportunity to know and be known by others.

Third places might include the local coffee shop, hair salon, restaurant, mall, or fitness center. These places of common ground must take a position of greater importance in the overall ministry of the church as individuals begin to recognize themselves as missionaries sent into the local context to serve and share.

In addition to connecting with people in the third places present in our local communities, we need to rediscover the topic of hospitality whereby our own homes become a place of common ground. Biblical hospitality is much more than entertaining others in our homes. Genuine hospitality involves inviting people into our lives, learning to listen, and cultivating an environment of mercy and justice, whether our interactions occur in third places or within our own homes. Regardless of our setting, we must learn to welcome the stranger.

8. Tap into the Power of Stories

Instead of trying to define what it means to be missional, it is helpful to describe missional living through stories and images. Stories create new possibilities and energize people to do things they had not previously imagined. 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 life transforming 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; and Luke 10:25-37.

9. Promote Patience

The greatest challenge facing the church in the West is the “re-conversion” of its own members. We need to be converted away from an internally-focused, Constantinean mode of church, and converted towards an externally-focused, missional-incarnational movement that is a true reflection of the missionary God we follow.

However, this conversion will not be easy. The gravitational pull to focus all of our resources on ourselves is very strong. Because Christendom still maintains a stranglehold on the church in North America – even though the culture is fully aware of the death of Christendom – the transition towards a missional posture will take great patience; both with those inside and outside the church. Many inside the church will need considerable time to learn how to reconstruct church life for the sake of others. At the same time, the church will need to patiently love on people, and whole communities, that have increasingly become skeptical of the church.

This past weekend I had the privilege of attending the launch of Forge America in Chicago. It was a great time of networking and hearing how God is moving in various contexts around the world.

It was also fantastic to hear from Deb and Alan Hirsch as they shared the heart of their new book Untamed: Reactivating a Missional Form of Discipleship. I am more excited than ever to begin reading the book later this week.

The most challenging time for me, however, was the last session of the day on Saturday. Micheal Frost shared on how the church must “step into” the way of mission as exemplified by Jesus. I was once again reminded of Frost’s prophetic voice, raised up to push back on the safe, consumerist culture of the American church. Now two days later, Frost’s words continue to challenge me deeply.

A portion of Frost’s talk focused on John 20:21, a passage very popular in the missional conversation. However, Frost’s emphasis was not on the ever so familiar second portion of the passage – that we are “sent” by Jesus – but instead his focus was that we are sent “just as” Jesus was sent. And how, or to whom, or better yet, into what was Jesus sent?

Frost contends, Jesus was sent “into the crap of life.” He was sent to the broken, the homeless, the lost, the lepers, the prostitutes, the oppressed, the outcasts. Frost’s point was that the church loves to focus on the second part of John 20:21. We love to talk about how we are sent. We are a sending church. We are a sent people. (If you are not convinced of the sending nature of God and His church you can check out this page!) But as helpful as it is to recognized that we are a called and sent people of God, we do not really “step into the mission of Jesus” if we are not sent into the broken parts of the world, “just as the Father” sent Jesus.

This means, at least in part, that we must moved beyond proximity (which is certainly a start) to a place of “presence.” We must “move into the neighborhood” (Jn 1:14, MSG), not just geographically, but with our hearts. We must embody the Gospel among the people that we have been sent to.

What else does stepping into the way of mission as illustrated by Jesus do for us, and to us? Here is another short video where Frost speaks of how mission is the catalyst for genuine community and worship.

(ht)

While there are several classic McNeal nuggets in this 30 minute conference session from earlier this year, there was one particular metaphor that stood out that I had never heard/read from Reggie before.

He uses a helpful technology metaphor when speaking of the differences of extracting oil out from under the sands of Saudi Arabia (“as easy as sticking a straw in the sand and sucking the oil out”) and pulling oil out of difficult areas such as western Canada. He contends that alternative technologies must be used to make contact with the difficult to reach, embedded pools of oil. He then moves to say that he wants to challenge the existing church “to sponsor these alternative and parallel technologies that are going to reach deeply embedded pockets of our population that are never going to be church people, no matter what we do with church.”

By the way, we will be hosting Reggie McNeal for a one-day conference here in Kansas City on September 14th. If you would like to know more about that conference shoot me an email.

Here are two additional sessions from last month’s missional church conference. In these two sessions Eric Swanson speaks to the topic of community transformation. The final 30 minutes of session one includes the audio of an animated short film titled The Man Who Planted Trees. The film is the story of a solitary sheperd who patiently plants and nurtures a forest of thousands of trees, which single-handedly transforms his desert surroundings into a thriving oasis. The film sparked a very good discussion around the topics of focus, forbearance, and investing for the long-term. You can purchase the film and read multiple reviews here.

Here are the first two audio presentations from the Kansas City Missional Network Gathering.

In session one, Eric Swanson, author of The Externally Focused Church, shares the characteristics of EF Churches. These characteristics include:

They believe that their communities can’t be healthy without the church.
They believe Christians don’t grow until they begin serving.
They understand the power of service.
They lower the thresholds to service.
They partner with other entities.

Swanson’s presentation is replete with excellent illustrations and examples of churches that are impacting their communities as they learn fresh ways to serve their cities.

In session two, Swanson spends time discussing the crucial importance of combining good deeds (that create good will) with good news.

Why focus on the city? In the United States, more than half of the population now lives in just forty cities of a million or more people. In the past twenty-five years Las Vegas exploded with 250-percent population growth, while Houston grew by 140 percent. Cities are magnets pulling the hopeful across any barrier, and they endure any hardship. They are twenty-four-hour-a-day catch basins for the vulnerable. But some cities are losing population as old industries die. We are in the beginning phases of the most massive migration, both in and out of cities, the world has ever known. And it is ramping up.

Why focus on the city? Today’s cities, even more than nation-states, influence economic systems, political alliances and social movements. This makes cities a strategic investment: what influences the city influences the world. The city needs a growing cadre of young leaders – both college and graduate students as well as those already in the marketplace – who will link their skills, their privileges and their sense of well-being to the well-being of the city. In today’s globalized world, to shape the city is to shape the way people experience life itself.

Why focus on the city? While for some the city is the normal context of faith development, part and parcel of what it means to follow Jesus and the stage where the drama of life before God has unfolded, for many others the city represents a huge question mark. Is it a place where faith can thrive? Is it a place of blessing, or evidence of a curse? Is the city a spiritually fertile place where a person can sustain a vibrant relationship with God? For many whose faith was nurtured in the womb of a gated suburban community or in the calm rhythms of small town America, there’s a lot of doubt about the answer.

While books on ministry in cities, on community organizing, on urban evangelism or simply on how to serve people in cities abound, there are very few resources that view the city as a place to grow your faith and discover a meaningful life, as a place that transforms you or as a place where your own transformation can have an effect.

- Randy White in Encounter God in the City: Onramps to Personal and Community Transformation