Missio Dei Suburbia

Whole Church, Whole Gospel, Whole World

Helpful article by one of my favorite writers, Christopher Wright, - '...we must believe, live, and communicate all that makes the Christian message staggeringly comprehensive good news.

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.

Making Choices: Campus Ministry or the Local Church

JD Greear lays out a very helpful path for college students trying to figure out whether to focus their time and energy on campus ministry or the local church:

Some students will, from the beginning, know they want to minister to kids, seniors, the poor, etc., and that being involved in the ministries of their church will be a better fit for that. That should not be discouraged or looked down upon! On the other hand, some students are designed and called by God to focus more of their ministry on their peers. They may always keep their Bible study and ministry focus on campus and this is fine as well. This is how i was: not only for all my years of college, but several years afterward as well, I led Bible studies and ministry on campus. Students should be given freedom to explore their ministry callings and plug into the ministries that best fit them.

Read the rest of the post 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.

Bibliophile - Deep Church

Steve McCoy reviews Jim Belcher's Deep Church - a book Tim Keller calls 'an important book':

I think the bottom line is that Deep Church is about the roots of the traditional church, the helpful questioning and critique of the emerging church, and better answers than many in the EC could deliver. You could say that Belcher (as one in the EC) finally found the answers to the EC's questions while staying thoroughly biblical and theological, solidly traditional and historical. These are the answers so many of us have been looking for and only finding in bits and pieces along the way. They aren't new answers. But they have never been explained better as they pertain to the emerging church and the traditional church.

Dance Steps

I've been heavily involved in or around campus ministries since 1993 - Arsenio Hall was still on TV and Beavis and Butthead were a cultural phenomenon. So I've seen a few things change since then - but one thing that hasn't changed is the annual tension that flares up between churches and campus ministries in university settings as a new semester begins.

Last month, Steve Lutz laid out the primary issues that feed this tension:

• Are church and parachurch partners, or should they have “sphere sovereignty”?
• Regarding parachurch, is there something inherently illegitimate about its existence?
• Regarding church, should it defer to parachurch’s unique calling and equipping for on-campus ministry?
• How can the local church most effectively serve and reach out to students?
• How actively should parachurch ministries be making local church involvement a priority?
• In the age of house churches, what IS a church, anyway?

Steve's entire post on ecclesiology is helpful - and at the end he lays out this perspective: A missional campus ministry approach utilizes the strengths of parachurch ministries to empower the local church to take its place on the missional edge.

There are two things that keep this kind of partnership from happening:

• Churches who insist on creating a rhythm of life for students that consistently pulls them off of the campus and out of their mission.
• Campus ministries who insist they have the same authority in the lives of students as the local church.

One way forward - and we're seeing this happen through our relationship with Campus Outreach at The University of Georgia - looks like this:

• Churches who encourage and equip campus ministries to do what they do best - incarnating gospel, community and mission in a context where most people in a church do not fit and honestly don't belong (I'm talking to you, Mr. I'm-45-and-wear-my-Auburn-War-Tigers-jersey-every-Saturday).
• Campus ministries who structure their missional rhythms to move students into the life of the local church. Figure out how the church trying to grow students and grace and don't hamstring the church by scheduling events that overlap with those events (NOTE: it helps if churches have a clear and simple pathway of corporate discipleship for students).

I love being able to encourage and equip the men and women who have shaped their entire lives around the mission of Jesus on campus. And as we continually wrap our collective gray matter around these central themes of gospel, community and mission, we're finding a great deal of overlap and the opportunity to give up control and free up students to live out a healthy pattern of life involved in both the local church and the particular work of campus ministry.

In the end, students belong neither to the church nor campus ministry XYZ. They belong to Jesus - and Jesus loves the local church and the local church can join him in his mission on the university campus by raising up and releasing missional tribes on campus.

It's all about learning to dance, boys and girls.

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.

Total Church Study Guide

There have been several books that have radically reshaped my thinking, values, and behavior - the most recent has been Total Church by Steve Timmis and Tim Chester. When I first read it a couple of years ago, it turned just about everything I thought about church on its head. The result has been a methodical process of working with our leaders to follow the leading of the Holy Spirit, resulting in a church that intends to live and function as missionaries in community empowered by the gospel.

A few weeks ago, another A29 church produced a study guide to help people walk through Timmis and Chester's book - here's more information:

The Resurgence:

An A29 church has created a free study guide to go along with the Re:Lit book Total Church, by Tim Chester and Steve Timmis. The well-designed 32-page study guide is available for free PDF download here. We’ve talked with Steve Timmis, and he’s excited about this free resource.

For more related resources:

• View video and audio from the Total Church Training at Mars Hill.
• Read the Total Church blog series.
• Get Total Church in the Re:Lit library.

(HT: JT)

NT Wright on Everyday Life

Short interview with NT Wright on how individuals and churches honor God in everyday life.

You must always come back to prayer, worship, and Bible study. Make sure that Christians are not going hollow in the middle individually or corporately.  But, then let it flow out. First, focus on mission. Second, grow leadership. Third, encourage discipleship.  Then, act collaboratively. That means the church helps the local education authority, the local housing committee, the police force, whatever it may be. Let’s work with everyone who we can. 

You can read the entire interview here.

Engaging the University

Very helpful post by John Stackhouse on how the church - and by extension, campus ministries - should seek to engage students on the university campus.

From the conclusion:

Much campus ministry over the last century has merely been an extension the local church work of basic disciple-making onto a nearby campus. Should it continue? Perhaps it should, especially with international students and others who might need extra time to integrate into local churches. But to offer a “spiritual kindergarten,” I suggest, is not the central mission of campus ministry. It is the main responsibility of the local church, and campus ministries instead should do what they are peculiarly situated and, I trust, equipped to do.

Evangelism on campus? Of course that should continue. That’s “on the job evangelism,” which every Christian ought to do. And with a special “people group” in view—namely, university students and professors—one can tailor apologetical and evangelistic initiatives to their distinctive needs. When people do respond positively to such initiatives, then campus ministries must connect them with local churches and their helpful programs in basic Christian life: with Alpha programs, small groups, Sunday School classes, and the like.

Without this clear sense of what they are to do versus what the local church is to do, campus ministries neglect their particular work. Thus they compound the problem by competing with local churches: “Why even go to a local church? It’s so much less interesting than this student group”—which in the nature of the case is tailored to and includes only this nicely homogeneous demographic! Thus campus ministries in effect train students in a “non-local-church” paradigm, which devastates them upon graduation as they must, in fact, make their way into local churches or flounder alone.

I'm thankful for the students and the campus ministries we're connected to on the University of Georgia campus. We're engaged in some really fruitful discussion about how the church can partner with these ministries to help students grow and thrive as missionaries to the campus, living in community, empowered by the gospel.