Missio Dei Suburbia

Tim Keller on Preaching, Cities, and Culture

Adrian Warnock blogged Tim Keller's talks last week at a Newfrontiers event. Videos of each talk are located here:

Preaching to Change Them in Their Seats

Why Cities Matter

Relate to the Culture

Being Missional Is Trendy

Some really great stuff from The Resurgence:

Attractional and Missional by Tim Chester

The problem with a lot of attractional churches is not their missiology, but their ecclesiology. Church is seen as a meeting. Attracting means attracting people to an event or even a performance. But biblical mission is about a community life, ordinary life, lived under God’s Word that attracts people to God.

What's In a Name by Steve Timmis

The idea of missional communities has become trendy. This enables larger churches to devolve the routine stuff of church life to smaller groups throughout the week while retaining a central teaching session, usually on a Sunday. But why call them “missional” when we have a perfectly good word at our disposal in “gospel”? Gospel communities is exactly what they are: communities that are all about the gospel because they are formed by the gospel and exist for the gospel.

Gospel & Community at Work by Jonathan Dodson

Although some vocations are not as sociable as others, the gospel compels us to work for community and reconciliation. To honor, serve, and love those that are different from us, even the employees that get on our nerves. What if you became an agent of reconciliation and community in your workplace? Company morale and output would likely increase, and so would the glory of God in your life. Perhaps some repentance from go-it-alone work is in order. The rural wisdom of work swapping could take us a long way in cultivating better work, better relationships, and better communities. Wouldn’t it be great if Christians led the way?

Matt Chandler - Amen

What Michael Hutchence Couldn't Do

'Everything is necessary that he sends. Nothing can be necessary that he withholds.' John Newton

(HT: Of First Importance)

Tim Chester - Gospel and Community Intersect in Church Planting

From The Resurgence:

The guy I first started church planting with used to tell the story of the first time he attended a church business meeting. He’d recently been converted and was looking forward to plotting the downfall of Satan with the other members of the church. What a letdown! They spent the meeting talking about the restrooms in the church building. Somehow churches have a tendency towards maintenance mode.

The great thing about church planting is that it puts mission at the heart of church. When you’re eight people meeting in someone’s front room—as the Crowded House was once—then you can’t help but be about mission.

But church planting also puts the church at the heart of mission. So much evangelism today is about me doing my thing with my friends. We have evangelistic ministries divorced from the church. This is not the New Testament way. New Testament mission was church planting.

Mission at the heart of church. The church at the heart of mission. Welcome to church planting.

God's Goal is Your Pleasure

From 'Divine Support' in The Valley of Vision

Keep me walking steadfastly towards the country
    of everlasting delights,
    that paradise-land which is my true inheritance.
Support me by the strength of heaven
    that I may never turn back,
    or desire false pleasures
        that wilt and disappear into nothing.
As I pursue my heavenly journey by thy grace
    let me be known as a man with no aim
    but that of a burning desire for thee,
    and the good and salvation
        of my fellow men.

Why is this the land of pure delight? Because there is where we come face-to-face with the God who satisfies every desire (Psalm 16:11).

Ordinary Lives With Gospel Intentionality

Two of our core values at Christ Church are gospel and community - the book Total Church has been really helpful in shaping how these come together for us with this idea of people living ordinary lives with gospel intentionality. Over at the Resurgence blog, Tim Chester (one of the authors of Total Church) talks about the idea.

Christianity sans Coercion

'...no one gives himself freely and willingly to God's service  unless, having tasted his fatherly love, he is drawn to love and worship him in return.'

John Calvin, The Institutes of Christian Religion, 1.v.3

Putting the Happy Back Into Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is miserable for those who spend the day feeling judged by family who barely knows us. Our hope and delight and joy and happiness is recovered and experienced when it sinks in that the Judge who knows us better than we know ourselves finds delight and joy and happiness in us.

'There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.' (Romans 8:1)

The Middle

Hey y'all - greetings from Room 228 at the Red Roof Inn in The Hill neighborhood of St. Louis. I've been up here for the LEAD Conference hosted by Acts 29 and it's gonna take me awhile to grab hold of the words to describe how good it was for me. I came up here to encourage our A29 planters and to help assess 25 new planters and there's no way they'll get more out of these past few days then I have.

Now that doesn't mean I'm not ready to get home to Lindsey and my boys and to all of you. I did want to check in with you and talk for a minute about something I've noticed over 12 years of ministry.

Something happens somewhere around the end of October and early November that I call 'The Middle' because it usually hits around midterms for students and is kind of a breather for people out of school before the holidays hit full force. Basically, The Middle is kind of a break, a respite, a siesta, a time out from the normal routine of life.

Now The Middle is a good thing - God created us to rest and for many of us, we've burned the candle at both ends long enough to feel like we're getting to the end of our wick. So I'm glad that we get to take a break, get away for a few days, recharge and get ready to finish 2008 on a sprint and not a crawl.

But something else happens during The Middle that jacks people up every year. For lack of a better image, we throw out the baby with the bathwater and in our attempt to take a break end up fracturing our own soul.

Here's how it goes down - you get a few days or a couple of weekends away and in your desire to mix up your routine, you drop everything including your life with God. So it's not uncommon for you to go days without time in the Scriptures and prayer and weeks without being part of a worship gathering. I have yet to meet a single person where that ends well for them.

So I know you need a break - I'm taking a week off from preaching in November to recharge - but I want to encourage and warn you with all the love I've got to not take a break from the rhythm of your life with Jesus. So if you're out of town the next couple of weeks, insist on showing up at a worship gathering on a Sunday morning wherever you're at - I know that's weird and nobody else does that but you're different. You belong to the King and he has a standing appointment to meet with you every week.

And if you think you can replace gathered worship with throwing on your favorite CD or listening to somebody preach on a podcast, I'm telling you that you can't. Personal worship or worship with a couple of friends is a good thing during the week but not on Sunday morning. The God of the Universe has set that day aside as time for you to gather with other believers to renew our vows to each other and to God as he reminds us of his love for us.

What I'm saying is that in ways we don't entirely get, we need that time together - to be with other Christians and to be with God. This is part of a normal rhythm of life and rhythmic irregularities are never good - especially when they can be avoided.

I've gotta pack and assess church planters from Regina, Saskatchewan and Columbus, Ohio so let's shuck the corn down to the cob - if The Middle takes you out of town this year, take five minutes to find a gospel-saturated church near where you'll wake up on Sunday morning (if you have a hard time deciding on somewhere, let me know and I'll help you out). Coordinate your travel schedule so you'll have time to gather for worship. Show up expecting to bless and be blessed in ways you can't imagine.

Will God love you if you don't show up? Yep - but you'll miss an opportunity he created just for you to hear and see his love for you.

Because I love you more than you'll ever know-
Matt