Missio Dei Suburbia

Shoot 'Em or Save 'Em - The Decisions We Face as Missional Churches in the Deep South

Yep...

From Jared Wilson:

To the cultural Christian, there is nothing attractive about a small church that expects relational community, practices regular neighborhood service, highlights the cost of discipleship in every message, has a minimalist menu of programs to partake from, and gives most of its money away (precluding a "nice" facility and assorted bells and whistles). But I want to reach them. All Christians are family. I love the big-C Church dearly.

There are some who would say the missional communities should just write off their attractional brothers and sisters and focus on reaching the lost. I defy false dichotomies. And while I never poach (I've never invited members of other churches to mine before they themselves have first expressed interest in visiting), I pray and preach AND BLOG and try to live a life of witness so that my churched brothers and sisters will begin to crave the gospel and gospel-centrism in their congregations.

The more churched converts gospel-centrism receives -- we're talking about revival here, by the way -- the greater impact for the kingdom among the lost and "least of these" there will be, in the Bible Belt and beyond.

Read the rest here.

Scott Thomas on Replanting

Christ Community Church is a replant - an organic description of a process that mechanically can feel like taking a machine apart piece-by-piece, discarding the parts that are unsalvageable (and no, I'm not talking about people), cleaning up what can be repaired and building out a church that gets the job done.

I spoke on replanting at an Acts 29 boot camp in Dallas last year - and almost ten months later, I get calls about replanting every week. Some men intentionally walk into a church knowing it needs this kind of work; more often it's not until someone has been part of a particular church and its particular culture and processes that they discover a church that needs to die and experience ecclesiastical resurrection.

Scott Thomas is the director of Acts 29. He also has experience in replanting churches - and he's writing a five-part series on replanting that's well worth your time. The truth is, we need patient, compassionate, courageous, persistent men who will love dying churches well enough to help them die well and experience new life.

Rethink Mission - Gospel-Centered Churches

Jonathan McIntosh has launched Rethink Mission, an initiative to inspire gospel-centered missional churches. I met Jonathan a year ago at an Acts 29 bootcamp in St. Louis and benefited greatly from both his preaching and hospitality. We've had the opportunity to interact a bit since then and this is a guy I want to continue to listen to and learn from - I'd encourage you to do the same.

Here's a blurb from the Rethink Mission site on gospel-centered churches:

A movement has begun among a diverse group of evangelical churches. Simply, one by one, pastors are coming to the realization that they are not preaching the gospel.

Pause.

Christian churches that do not preach the gospel? Wait. Are they teaching anti-Christian doctrine? Satanism? Snake-handling? Neo-shamanism? (I don’t really even know what neo-shamanism is, but it sure sounds cool.)

Often, it’s not that these churches have fallen into some gross heresy. Most likely, it’s just that over time, they’ve let the gospel slip in favor of another way to try to draw people and change people.

A few of the most prevalent things I’ve seen that can crowd out the gospel:

Moralism – using fear, rules, and commands as the basis for discouraging sin and encouraging holy living, which sadly results in increased self-righteousness among rule-keepers and absolute despair in those who are unable to live up.

Pragmatism – when in an effort to reach new people, church leaders spend more time teaching helpful techniques or useful principles than actually pointing people to the only thing that has real power to change both hearts and lives.

Political agendas – out of a desire to get involved in the public square and to influence policy, Christians of every political stripe often begin to equate the spread of the gospel with the growth of a specific political party or platform.

What’s tricky is that usually these –isms start with a noble aspiration: a desire to help people change & grow, a desire to reach out to people far from God, a desire to use influence to change the way things are done.

Unfortunately when something other than God is our primary goal, no matter how good that goal is, we will eventually start taking short cuts to get what we want accomplished.

A gospel-centered church understands that change or transformation of any kind, especially authentic heart-transformation, cannot happen apart from the gospel of grace.

A gospel-centered church roots and keeps the focus of all its activity – teaching, worship, outreach, social activism, and discipleship – honed in on the gospel: the riches of the grace of God available through of the sacrificial death of Jesus for sinners.

Because of this, a gospel-centered church is committed to:

• Reading & teaching the entire Bible in light of the gospel.

• Preaching the gospel to believers, not just unbelievers.

• Leaders applying the gospel to themselves first; church leaders are the first repenters.

• Cultivating a leadership culture marked by ever increasing “gospel astonishment.”

• Being known for an atmosphere of grace; gospel-centered churches are safe places for seekers, skeptics and those outside of the faith.

• Producing people who don’t just know the doctrine of the gospel but who love the person of Jesus Christ.

These are the themes that we are committed to fleshing out together in greater detail at Rethink Mission.

At the end of the day, grace isn’t just something we “get” and the cross is not just some object in time. These things hinge on a person. At the center of it all is a person.

Jesus.

In an age when his name is easily tossed around or relegated to some minor point of doctrine used to win arguments and manipulate people, we long for the day when Jesus is seen for what he is: the hero of the story.

Christ Community Church - Tribe or Mission?

The next few months are going to determine the identity and rhythm of life for Christ Community Church - will we embrace and live out our existence as a tribe or a mission?

From Tullian:

There’s a radical difference between tribal and missionary mindsets. The highest value of the tribal-minded is self-protection. Since these people feel safest around those just like them, they ask, “How can I protect myself from those who are different?” They intentionally surround themselves with those who think the way they think, like the things they like, and despise the things they despise.

We all seek out sameness, as John Seel notes: “We cope by settling into our safe intellectual cliques—our favorite blog, cable channel, or e-zine—where our own views are reinforced and applauded. Without really trying, we can easily lose sight of the wider horizon and fail to listen to those who do not think as we do.”

As a result, tribally minded people live with a sense of superiority, looking down on those who are unlike them. This is the “fashionable” posture of our culture.

In contrast, the highest aim of mission-minded people is not self-protection but self-sacrifice. Mission-minded people exist not primarily for themselves but for others. They’re willing to set aside personal preferences in service to those with different preferences. They’re willing to be inconvenienced, discomforted, and spent for the well-being of others.

Total Church Conference Audio and Video

From Jonathan Dodson:

Soak it up. Here is the first installment of resources from the Total Church Conference. You won’t agree with all of it, which is exactly why you need it. Chester’s session on the Community-centered Gospel had a significant effect on me.

Educating and Preparing Pastors

Al Mohler: I emphatically believe that the best and most proper place for the education and preparation of pastors is in the local church.

That's coming from the president of one of the most influential seminaries in the country.

This is why we're thinking through ways to connect with other churches to help equip and raise up men to plant and pastor Reformed, missional churches.

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.

When Transformation Is Dangerous

Mark Dever had this to say in a recent Baptist Press article:

"I would like to suggest that the most fundamental problem in the church is not that we are not relevant enough in relation to the world, but that the church is not distinct enough from the world. Our churches must reflect the character of God," said Dever.

"Church leaders should channel their energy toward maintaining purity in the church instead of spending great amounts of time and ministry on relating to the culture," Dever said.

"The problem with the seeker-sensitive model, emerging church model and even the traditional model that say, 'Get as many people into a room as possible and share the Gospel with them,' is that they view success in light of visible fruit," he said. "All three of these approaches say, 'Change your techniques and let's get some numbers.'

"Instead of being directed by [visible] success, we should be directed by faithfulness. We should say, 'If the Lord doesn't like our product, we will change the product.' We shouldn't take the idea that if we don't have X number of conversions in our church, then we must be doing something wrong. I am glad Jeremiah didn't think that. And I am glad that Jesus Christ didn't think that. Let us remember that we are following the One who was crucified as a revolutionary."

I thought this was worth posting because of a question I was asked earlier this week about whether making 'transformed lives' the measure of success for a church is ever dangerous. And while we certainly believe that the Gospel transforms and puts broken people back together, I think there are several cautions we should heed when it comes to the emphasis we put on the change we see in people:

• Transformation is not limited to the sphere of the gospel. Both religion and culture sell people on the hope of change. What religion doesn't have examples of people whose lives are radically different because they're following their teachings? What episode of Oprah or which magazine can you pick up and not hear testimonies of how following Lauren Conrad's tips for dating has revolutionized someone's life or how using Ronnie Coleman's workout plan has added two inches on their biceps size?
• Christianity is not behavior modification. Emphasizing different behavior as the measure of success cuts against the biblical emphasis on our need of an entirely different motivational structure. Not only do our actions need to change; we need a new heart.
• Christianity is not pragmatism. For many people in our world, religion is valuable and desirable only if it works. I'll follow Jesus if it makes my life better. Sadly, when life gets difficult or when something else comes along that promises more than Jesus can offer, I'll give up on Christianity in the name of something that works better for me. Pragmatism makes for sorry Christianity.
• God sometimes works in lifetimes rather than days. We love stories of dramatic change and rapid growth. And while God can and does work that way, it is neither normative nor should slower change or growth be looked upon as deficient. One of the reasons why megachurches grow while the percentage of Christians remains fairly static is because people bail on their (usually smaller and slower in growth) churches to go to where the excitement is. Sometimes the move is both good and necessary when people leave churches that have abandoned the gospel. Unfortunately, far too often moves are not made in the name of gospel faithfulness.
• God has bigger goals than transformation. As Dever states above, the biblical examples of Jeremiah and Jesus and numerous examples in the history of the church remind us that while God is always at work, sometimes his work is one of hardening rather than healing. To emphasize changed lives as the barometer of God's work in this world denies both the process of salvation (which is sometimes slow) as well as the reality of common grace.

Please don't hear me saying that change and transformation is not important. We should have great confidence in the power of the Gospel to change and heal and repair and renew and transform anyone. And as a church that is seeing healthy growth and real change taking place in the lives of people, this isn't about me crying over spilled milk. But I do believe that the church in the American Southern Suburbs is slowly abandoning Jesus in the name of religion and culture.

In other words, not everything that grows is healthy. And healthy things do grow, but not always in the way or at the rate we want or expect them to grow.

Church Planting and Revitalization

Tim Stafford at Christianity Today has posted an article on church planting in which he states that planting has become the cutting edge tool in evangelism, replacing the crusade model and even usurping personal evangelism. This morning, Al Mohler responds to Stafford's article in a mostly positive way, while at the same time encouraging us to not forget the need for revitalization.

Having walked into and now serving as lead pastor in a church that our presbytery considered a work of revitalization, I'm thankful for Mohler's encouragement to not abandon existing churches. But the reality is that these works are extremely difficult - no church accidentally finds itself in need of revitalization. There are times in which a church struggles because it finds itself in a stagnant economic situation or a position in which people are moving out of the area (a problem that has historically faced many urban areas). But most of the time, churches find themselves needing revitalization because they have become overly focused on themselves, missing the necessity of engaging in God's mission, lacking a cohesive plan for ministry and leadership development, and expending so many resources on themselves in terms of time and energy for programming and exhausting financial resources on staffing to maintain the internal culture of the church. And while I certainly fit in the 'young pastor walking into an existing church' model and have been blessed by an amazing amount of unity among our leadership, getting there was not without its headaches and our story is not typical as I talk with other guys who have tried to pull this off.

I don't want to abandon any church - if any church wants to reorient itself to live out a biblical perspective on being the church, I would hope every effort would be made to make that happen. But when local churches cease to function biblically and have no desire to change, I see no reason why we should exhaust and frustrate ourselves to stack greased bb's.