Notes on Church

How people's shame is responded to by a group and its leaders will determine how deep they or others will feel safe to go. What would make it safe to share issues of shame in the first place? Group leaders set the tone. When leadersare in touch with their own brokenness and can talk openly about it because they have received help and healing, they create space for others to do the same. If people are not bringing up realstruggles of the heart, could it bethat they do not feel safe because it has not been modeled in the group? We have been talking about shame over who I feel I am. But there is also legitimate shame over what I know I've done. It is not the goal of the group to talk people out of either kind of shame. Both expose what I am allowing to define me. In both cases, I have lost awareness of who I really am in Christ. Fortunately, once I have identified what is going on, I have the opportunity to go to the Cross and confess what I have believed. It is a beautiful thing when a group can go there together with one of their members, pour out their heart in confession, and, in exchange, have the righteousness of Christ poured out on them.

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Small, indigenous churches are getting lots of attention, but where's the fruit?

I hope I am wrong. For the past few years, I have been observing, listening, and asking questions about the missional movement. I have a suspicion that the missional model has not yet proven itself beyond the level of theory. Again, I hope I am wrong. We all agree with the theory of being a community of God that defines and organizes itself around the purpose of being an agent of God's mission in the world. But the missional conversation often goes a step further by dismissing the "attractional" model of church as ineffective. Some say that creating better programs, preaching, and worship services so people "come to us" isn't going to cut it anymore. But here's my dilemma—I see no evidence to verify this claim.

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Conversations on Emergent, Missional and Monastics

Len Hjalmarson wrote a informative article on Missional, Monastic, Emerging: A Traveler's Guide in the August 2008 issue of Next-Wave Ezine.

It’s helpful to characterize the four conversations as Sine did, with four streams denoted by emerging, missional, monastic and mosaic (Find Andrew Perrimann’s summary HERE). It’s even more interesting to observe the convergence of these energies, all birthed by the Holy Spirit. Each brings their own renewal dynamic to the broader church, and I’m convinced that the convergence zone is where some of the most creative experiments will occur. Convergence is evident in places like Life on the Vine, where monastic is meeting missional and emergent, or in kingdom initiatives like ALLELON, where a similar dynamic is at work...

After these observations I was left running a structural taxonomy in my head, so I created it in PaintShop. What this requires is some kind of consensus on essential characteristics of each stream...

Worthwhile to read the whole article.

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New Wave: Ten Years of the Emerging Churches

As Next-Wave turns ten years old with its January 2009 issue, it provides a good opportunity to look back over the short history of the emerging church in North America. Next-Wave, after all, is the publication most closely associated with the emerging church conversation and many of the movement’s most prominent leaders have contributed articles to the online journal over the years.

Ten Years Out: A Retrospective on the Emerging Church in North America
By Stephen Shields

Brian McLaren – Named by Time Magazine as one of The 25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America and often considered the father of the emerging church, Brian’s books A New Kind of Christian and Generous Orthodoxy are considered by many to be two of the most important books published within the conversation.

Jordon Cooper – Canada’s Jordon Cooper is an influential emerging church blogger. Jordoncooper.com, which Jordon began in 2001, was an important early clearinghouse of emerging church information.

Tony Jones – Tony, the author of The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier, until very recently was National Coordinator of Emergent Village and has been engaged in emerging church conversation since the famous Dallas Pappasito’s Cantina meeting in August of 1998.

Scot McKnight – Scot, an author who serves as the Karl A. Olsson Professor in Religious Studies at North Park University in Chicago, is a prolific blogger who has been participating in the emerging church conversation for many years. Scot also serves on the Creative Team of The Origins Project.

Andrew Jones – Andrew is a New Zealander pastor and missionary who currently lives in the United Kingdom and serves as Director of the Boaz Project. An A-list ec blogger, Andrew was an early leader in Emergent Village and spent several years ministering in the United States.

Dan Kimball – Dan, who serves Vintage Faith Church in Santa Cruz, California as their Pastor of Mission and Teaching, wrote The Emerging Church. Dan’s also one of the founders of The Origins Project.

A Retrospective on the Emerging Church in North America Pt. 1
By Interviews by Stephen Shields

A Retrospective on the Emerging Church in North America Pt. 2
By Interviews by Stephen Shields

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Alan Hirsch on Defining Missional

Evangelism

Defining Missional
The word is everywhere, but where did it come from and what does it really mean?
Alan Hirsch posted 12/12/2008

It has become increasingly difficult to open a ministry book or attend a church conference and not be accosted by the word missional. A quick search on Google uncovers the presence of "missional communities," "missional leaders," "missional worship," even "missional seating," and "missional coffee." Today, everyone wants to be missional. Can you think of a single pastor who is proudly anti-missional?

But as church leaders continue to pile onto the missional bandwagon, the true meaning of the word may be getting buried under a pile of assumptions. Is it simply updated nomenclature for being purpose-driven or seeker-sensitive? Is missional a new, more mature strain of the emerging church movement?
It's time to pause and consider the origin and meaning of the word that is reframing our understanding of ministry and the church. This tree diagrams the roots of the word missional and how its reach has expanded into different areas of ministry. Alan Hirsch, a self-described "missional activist," also provides a concise definition of the ubiquitous term.

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From Entertainment to Disciplemaking

"Showtime!" No More
Could our church shift from performance to mission?
Walt Kallestad posted 11/26/2008 11:49AM

Entertainment evangelism: The concept came together for me while standing in a line at a Dallas Cineplex waiting to see the Batman premiere. The only way to capture people's attention is entertainment, I thought. If I want people to listen to my message, I've got to present it in a way that grabs their attention long enough for me to communicate the gospel.

It was an epiphany, a breakthrough understanding for me. So our church strategy revolved around the gravitational force of entertainment for evangelism. We hired the best musicians we could afford; we used marketing principles and programming specialists—for the gospel's sake. Attendance skyrocketed. More people meant more staff, more programs, more facilities, more land, and of course the need for more money. We became a program-driven church attracting consumers looking for the latest and greatest religious presentations.

For us, worship was a show, and we played to a packed house. We grew by thousands, bought more land, and positioned ourselves to reach even more people. Not that any of this is wrong in and of itself—people coming to faith in Christ isn't bad. I told myself it was good—I told others it was good. But now I was beginning to wonder if I'd led my church down a wrong path.
The show was killing me.

Attracting consumers was consuming me—not in the way vision consumes a leader. It was the opposite of that—I was losing sight of the vision. Our church was a great organization. But something was missing. We weren't accomplishing our mission; we weren't creating transformed, empowered disciples...

In the old days, we protected people's anonymity; today we thrust them into community, doing life together. We used to invite them to attend church; now we invite them to be the church. I used to ask, "What can we do to get more people to attend our church?" Now I ask, "How can I best equip and empower the people to go be the church in the marketplace where God has called them to serve?"

read more

Personal sharing from a megachurch pastor. The mission of the church is disciplemaking, not entertainment.

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from Christianity Today

Missional Misgivings
Small, indigenous churches are getting lots of attention, but where's the fruit?
Dan Kimball posted 11/26/2008 11:51AM

I hope I am wrong. For the past few years, I have been observing, listening, and asking questions about the missional movement. I have a suspicion that the missional model has not yet proven itself beyond the level of theory. Again, I hope I am wrong.

We all agree with the theory of being a community of God that defines and organizes itself around the purpose of being an agent of God's mission in the world. But the missional conversation often goes a step further by dismissing the "attractional" model of church as ineffective. Some say that creating better programs, preaching, and worship services so people "come to us" isn't going to cut it anymore. But here's my dilemma—I see no evidence to verify this claim.

read more

Dan Kimball raised some hard questions about the missional churches

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