Missio Dei Suburbia

You Say Goodbye, I Say Hello

So 2008 has about thirteen hours left before it becomes history and the blogosphere is rife with posts on resolutions and reflections. Here are a few worth your time:

Bible Reading Plans: JT and Tim Chester (this is the one we'll be plugging at Christ Church for '09)

Becoming a Better Man in 2009A New Year's Prayer for 2009

The Top Lists - Jonathan Dodson

What Should We Pray For? - John Piper

Gospel-Centered Praying

The Resolution Solution

Tim Brister's Top 25 Christian Books of 2008

NT Wright on Human Flourishing

Books of 2008 (Leadership) - Todd Hiestand

1,098

So about ten days ago I got some ideas about hope and Easter which led me to some literary rabbit-chasing. A few pages of reading and a week of no blog posts and I rolled out part of what I was working on this morning. Good to be back at the controls this week...

Mission to Suburbia

Steve McCoy has started a new page on his blog (which is one of my favorites) entitled Mission to Suburbia - should provide lots of great resources on doing ministry in suburbia.

The only problem I can see is that he's put this blog up as the first resource. God help us all.

Facebook

I'm on it. And the church has a group page.

Yep, hello Apocalypse. You are upon us.

Catching Up

So, I had this incredible, life-changing post ready to roll after a short hiatus from blogging - but Firefox froze up and I lost the whole thing. So fiddlesticks with that.

I'm back and ready to rock...

Catching Up

I know, I know. I haven't blogged in almost two weeks. But getting ready for and knocking out the first of two weeks of study leave made blogging a luxury I didn't have time for.

The good news is that I did make major progress on five projects we're working on at Christ Church:

1. Close to completion on a new vision booklet that we're hoping to use in different venues.
2. Began shaping this year's One Night Only, a vision-casting environment we're hosting on August 24th.
3. Made some good progress on our comprehensive discipleship plan for the entire church
4. Finished outlining a 4-week sermon series on compassion, beginning August 26th.
5. Finished outlining 12 of 25 sermons for a series on Genesis that will begin in mid-September and end in May 2008 (we'll break up the Genesis series with a couple of smaller series at Christmas, Easter, etc.)

So that's where I've been - I will be throwing up some good stuff I've come across in the past week or so in the next post.

This Week...and Next

So my PC died last week, providing no opportunity to post on here but giving me plenty of opportunity for reading and thinking. Like, I finished six books this week and will be posting reviews on at least a couple of them next week, including NT Wright's 'Simply Christian' and Graham Tomlin's 'The Provocative Church,' easily two of the best books I've read this year.

I'll be flying solo next week while Lindsey and Jonathan are in North Carolina with her family. Plenty of time to hang out with some friends in town, do some more reading and catch up on my Netflix queue.

We've Joined the Dark Side

After the death of our HP Pavilion, this blog is now powered by Macbook.

Busy Bee

Slow blog week - because everything else is going at Mach 5.

Just got back from a one-day trip to Birmingham for some meetings. Nothing like seven hours in the car - I did get to listen to all six sessions of Keller's preaching conference last year at Gordon-Conwell. Really, really good stuff.

Besides starting work on my next sermon series in Nehemiah, I've started reading Alan Hirsch's The Forgotten Ways which came highly recommended and is quite rich and challenging so far - the basic premise is calling the church to a missional rather than attractional approach. He's preaching to the choir with me but is helping me think through what a missional church needs to look like in the suburbs. From where I'm sitting, even the 'evangelistic' churches are only reaching people that are pretty much just like them, and even then most of their growth tends to be transfer growth (by their own admission). I really hope we see a movement that is connecting with and gathering in people on the fringes who are apathetic/resistant to the suburban church in all its middle-class glory. What is it going to take for us to connect these friends to Jesus?

Keep on rockin' in the free world...

Let's See If I Can Remember How To Do This...

So I took a month off...

Didn't plan on it. I did know I was going to not blog on vacation a few weeks ago and then the stack of reading and work waiting for me when I got home put the blog on hold.

And there was baseball season and a couple of fantasy baseball drafts to get ready for.

So I think I'm back. Thanks for continuing to check in.