Missional

The Revolution of Jesus

December 19, 2011, by No comments yet

Jesus did not send his students out to start governments or even churches as we know them today…. They were, instead, to establish beachheads of his person, word, and power in the midst of a failing and futile humanity. They were to bring the presence of the kingdom and its King into every corner of human life simply by fully living in the kingdom with him….

Churches — thinking now of local assemblies of such people — would naturally be the result. Churches are not the kingdom of God, but are primary and inevitable expressions, outposts, and instrumentalities of the presence of the kingdom among us. They are “societies” of Jesus, springing up in Jerusalem, in Judea, in Samaria, and to the furthest points on earth (Acts 1:8), as the reality of Christ is brought to bear on ordinary human life.

~ Dallas Willard in Renovation of the Heart

The “Casualness” of Hospitality

December 16, 2011, by 3 comments

In preparation for a new writing project that my friend Lance Ford and I are working on, I have been doing some extra study on the topic of biblical hospitality. I use the adjective “biblical” to differentiate the concept of hospitality from the typical American understanding of “entertaining.” When properly understood, and lived out, biblical hospitality is powerfully transformative on several levels.

Here is one recent quote I found helpful on the topic of the need for hospitality to be natural, or casual.

Jesus’ hospitality to the displaced and distressed was not calculated but casual. It is as though Jesus lived his life as a type of present participle: as he was going. Jesus saw. It is this casualness that undercuts much of what goes by the name of Christian hospitality today. The churches of the country continue to promote program after program, and call committee after committee, to care for the poor, the naked, and the hungry. There is merit, of course, in organization. There is something good to be done by working together. But these efforts, as noble as they are, begin in process of institutionalizing care. When that happens, our ability to see the stranger “as we are going,” is eroded. Clothing and feeding, welcoming and visiting, become agendas. By adopting the vision of Jesus, by seeing as and how Jesus sees, our inclination toward hospitality will become natural and unforced. Hospitality ought to be ad hoc and personal.

~ I Was a Stranger: A Christian Theology of Hospitality  by Arthur Sutherland

Reading the Whole Bible For Mission

December 2, 2011, by 2 comments

Here is a fabulous lecture by Christopher Wright discussing the need to understand a “missional basis of the Bible” rather than a “biblical basis of mission.”

Thanksgiving Prayer

November 24, 2011, by No comments yet

Oh God, when I have food,
help me to remember the hungry;
When I have work,
help me to remember the jobless;
When I have a warm home,
help me to remember the homeless;
When I am without pain,
help me to remember those who suffer;
And remembering,
help me to destroy my complacency
and stir up my compassion.
Make me concerned enough
to help by word and deed,
those who cry out
for what we take for granted.

by Samuel F. Pugh

“For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me… – Matt. 25:35

Meeting The Neighbahs!

November 15, 2011, by 4 comments


This is an article that I wrote a few years ago that I have been asked to repost here, hope it provides some helpful, simple ways to get to know your neighbors.

A few years ago our family moved to a new part of town to plant a church. We were convinced that God placed us in our new home, on our new street, in our new neighborhood, for the purpose of meeting and getting to know our new neighbors. But how do you begin to build relationships with those whom you have never met? The primary key is that you must be intentional. New relationships seldom happen by chance. Instead you must find ways to “rub shoulders” with your neighbors. While your neighborhood situation may be quite different from the one we experienced here are some simple ways we began building relationships with our neighbors.

1. Pray for Your Neighbors.
Someone has said, “We need to talk to God about people, then talk to people about God.” If you have a neighborhood directory use it to identify the names of each family member in your building, on your street or cul-de-sac. Make a list that will help you pray for each family that you seek to build a relationship with. This list will help you move from simply hoping to connect with some nameless neighbor in the future, to specific action aimed at building a new relationship.

2. Be Outside.
After dinner take a walk in your neighborhood with an eye for meeting people. Play with your kids in the front yard instead of the backyard. Some of the best opportunities for our family to meet our neighbors came from playing baseball and Frisbee in our cul-de-sac. Playing ball in the front yard many times acted as a magnate for kids in the neighborhood and inevitably parents would follow.

3. Organize a Garage Sale.
Have a garage sale at your house and ask your neighbors if they have anything they would like to sell. We found in many cases neighbors not only brought over items to sell, but they would spend time “working” the sale and creating the opportunity to begin some brand new relationships and deepen existing ones.

4. Invite People for Dessert.
One of the best ways to get to know your neighbors is to have them over for dinner. However, we have found that inviting people over for dessert is less work and many times less threatening from their perspective. Dessert is less formal and requires a much smaller time commitment.

5. Have a Cookout.
Everybody loves to eat, and few people will turn down the chance to cookout on the grill and sample others people’s favorite dishes. Some of the best-attended get-togethers that we have hosted have been backyard (or front yard) cookouts. On one occasion we had the chance to have one of the local TV stations do their weather from our backyard. We used the opportunity to have a neighborhood cookout and everyone came to meet the weatherman and to be on TV.

6. Ask for Advice.
Everyone has differing talents and areas of expertise. One way of getting to know our neighbors better is to ask for advice in a person’s area of expertise. Having moved from a condominium where the grounds were always cared for, I had many opportunities to ask the more handy men in our neighborhood for advice. Advice on how to operate the sprinkler system, to over-seeding the lawn, to fixing a frozen air conditioning unit.

7. Join a Community Cause.
Find out if your neighborhood has a Home Owners Association. If so, join in on neighborhood workdays, or find an associational committee on which you can be a part. Find out if there is a neighborhood directory, if not, offer to put one together for those on your street.

8. Have an Open House.
One of our first connecting efforts after moving into our new house was to host a “dessert party.” We hand delivered special invitations to more than 180 homes in our housing addition. We simply invited people to a “come and go” dessert party where we had a dozen different kinds of desserts for people to sample. We also found that most people are very open to attending a party around the Christmas season. Take advantage of special times in the year to invite the neighborhood over for food and fun.

9. Watch for Special Needs.
Be on the lookout for special needs. Offer to baby sit or perhaps pet sit. Help to maintain yard work while neighbors are on vacation. Not long after moving in we noticed one of our neighbors preparing to paint their house. We spent part of the day helping them paint and that evening they had us over for pizza and we had the opportunity to discuss spiritual issues.

10. Start a Home Bible Study/Discussion Group.
The most significant and rewarding step to getting to know your neighbors is to discuss spiritual issues with them. After spending several months taking every opportunity to build relationships with those around us we invited our neighborhood to a new “Home Fellowship” that we started in our home one night a week.

Jesus explicitly told us to love our neighbors and that begins by getting to know them. Recognize that there is a cost to building relationships with people around you. It will complicate your life, it will cost you money, and it will certainly cost you your most valuable resource, time. But I hope we will also recognize that the benefits of investing in the lives of others and of being a part of what God is doing in the world, and your neighborhood, far exceeds any personal inconvenience we might experience in the process.

Praying with Ignatius of Loyola

November 14, 2011, by No comments yet

Dear Lord, teach me to be generous. Teach me to serve you as you deserve; to give and not to count the cost; to fight and not to heed the wounds; to toil and not to seek for rest; to labour and not to seek reward, save that of knowing that I do your will.

– Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556)

One Day Gathering with Mindy Caliguire

October 28, 2011, by No comments yet

Join us for a one day seminar on the topic of spiritual formation and mission with Mindy Caliguire on Tuesday, December 6th. Mindy was a speaker at the recent Sentralized Conference here in Kansas City. She is the founder of Soul Care, a spiritual formation ministry, and Director of Transformation Ministry for the Willow Creek Association. Her books include Discovering Soul Care, Spiritual Friendship, Soul Searching and Simplicity, as well as Write for Your Soul: The Whys and Hows of Journaling, with her husband, Jeff Caliguire. The seminar will take place from 9:00am to 3:00pm, meeting at The Parish Center, at 2949 McGee Trafficway, KCMO, home of Midtown Community Church. The cost of the one day is $29, which will include lunch. You can register with Eventbrite here.

The Road to Missional

October 20, 2011, by 1 comment

In the introduction of  The Road to Missional  Michael Frost pushes back on those who suggest that “missional” is simply the latest church buzzword that is quickly losing its usefulness. He writes:

If the missional conversation is over, it occurs to me that it probably hasn’t really ever been had. That’s because “missional” is not a style or a fad. It’s not an add-on, the latest church accessory, the newest cool idea for church leaders. The fact that some are suggesting the conversation is over leads me to think that they weren’t listening in the first place. My call — and the call of may other missional thinkers and practitioners — was not for a new approach to doing church or a new technique for church growth. I thought I was calling the church to revolution, to a whole new way of thinking about the seeing and being the followers of Jesus today. I now find myself in a place where I fear those robust and excited calls for a radical transformation of our ecclesiology have fallen on deaf ears.

I think Frost hits on a key point here, namely, those who think “missional” is a passing fad — whose time has already “come and gone” — simply have not fully grasp the enormity or breath of the conversation. It involves no less than a complete reorientation, or recalibration, of the way we understand the nature of God, church, mission, and the gospel.

Deb Hirsch at Sentralized Conference

October 5, 2011, by 1 comment

Out of all the speakers that presented at the Sentralized Conference last week, Deb Hirsch’s talk on “Refocusing the Family” received the greatest amount of feedback. Deb asked why so many Christian households remain firmly shut to outsiders? Why is it that we find it so hard to open our homes? She stated that many Christians will serve at the church, give money to the poor, and perhaps even go on a mission trip, but when it comes to bringing that “mission” to the home, we flatly refuse.  We unfortunately too often see our homes as our personal, safe space that ought not be intruded upon. Deb passionately argued against holding such a fortress mentality towards our homes. One of the most memorable statements from Deb was when she declared: “when we close the doors of our homes, we close the doors of our hearts.”

Following is an excerpt from the book Untamed, which Deb wrote along with her husband Alan Hirsch. It speaks to a portion of her talk from last week:

Part of the problem is that the church has now taken the family to be the frontier in its stand against the eroding forces of secularizing culture. In many ways this is right — the family is eroding — but the problem is that we find ourselves defending a non-biblical idea of the family! It’s not hard to see how this is absolutely disastrous from a missional perspective. Our families and our homes should be places where people can experience a foretaste of heaven, where the church is rightly viewed as a community of the redeemed from all walks of life. Instead, our fears restrict us from letting go of the control and safety we have spent years cultivating. But as Scott Bader-Saye notes, an ethic based on personal security produces a skewed moral vision. Any sense of personal obligation is tapered down to exclude anything beyond “me and my family.” This culture of fear is totally inconsistent with Jesus’s redemptive vision of the kingdom of God.

The problem is that, by and large, our churches and church leaders are not challenging us to get beyond this captivity. In fact, they end up catering to it by justifying it on biblical grounds. The so-called “family church” usually assumes the very narrow understanding of the nuclear family and gives it theological legitimacy. But the way the Bible conceives the term family and the way we see it are worlds apart.

Later in the chapter, Deb quotes Janet Fishburn, from her book Confronting the Idolatry of Family: A New Vision for the Household of God:

Where a domesticated piety dominates, or where the concerns of the nuclear family become the focus of a church, the conservation of middle-class ideals can blind both leaders and people to the prominent concern for social justice found in the Bible. And even when leaders are committed to seeking social justice, they have not been able to sustain a legitimate critique of poverty and injustice in America because the family ideals of the American Dream continue to be linked to democratic values and economic stability. . . . Uncritical loyalty to “the family pew” makes it very difficult to see or comprehend the plight of the poor and the homeless and the oppression of minority persons, as anything but their own fault.

Question: How would broadening your understanding of the family change the way you live? How would it change the way your church operates? What would it take for you to “open the doors of your home?”

The Benefits of an Incarnational Witness

September 17, 2011, by 1 comment

The case for an incarnational approach to missional witness is based, on the one hand, on the character of the biblical record; that is, the way in which the church’s missionary vocation is shaped by the earthly ministry of Jesus. The emphasis upon the necessary congruence of witness is rooted in God’s way of revealing himself supremely and finally in the incarnation of Jesus. The comprehensiveness of the biblical understanding of witness calls for an incarnational interpretation.

On the other hand, this approach helps us deal with some serious problems in our particular Western context. We see in both our mission history and our current evangelistic practices so much that is contrary to the incarnational character of the gospel. We see a gospel of peace proclaimed in divisive, judgmental ways. We see a Gospel of love conveyed manipulatively, insensitively, condescendingly. We see a gospel of healing obscured by distortions that hurt people and evoke resentment.

Thus we arrive at the concept of incarnational witness as one way of expounding the character of our missionary vocation. In the incarnation of Jesus Christ, God revealed himself as the One who is with and for his creation.

Now, as the Risen Lord sends his Spirit to empower the church, we are called to become God’s people present in the world, with and for the world, like St. John pointing always to Christ. The most incarnational dimension of our witness is defined by the cross itself, as we experience with Jesus that bearing his cross transforms our suffering into witness.

Incarnational witness is, therefore, a way of describing Christian vocation in terms of Jesus Christ as the messenger, the message, and the model for all who follow after him. To speak of the incarnation missionally is to link who Jesus was, what Jesus did, and how he did it, in one great event that defines all that it means to be Christian.

- Darrell Guder in The Incarnation and The Church’s Witness