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Yesterday I posted the first part of a review on Ed Stetzer and David Putman’s Breaking the Missional Code. I will briefly wrap up that review today. In yesterday’s post, I celebrated the large amount of missiology that found its way into a book on church renewal and church planting. I had a couple of critiques yesterday as well — the conflation of church marketing with cultural exegesis, and two, the whole church/unchurched typology.

Technorati Tags: book review, Ed Stetzer, missional church, David Putman

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Ed Stetzer and David Putman’s Breaking the Missional Code gives church leaders the tools needed to become a missional presence in their community. In down-to-earth style, the authors take complex missiological concepts and translate them into achievable church practices. The book covers a lot of ground, addressing how to overcome the barriers to mission within existing models of church. I consider Stetzer and Putman’s work to be a valuable conversation partner in all things missional. I couldn’t be more pleased that so much contextualization material made it into a North American church- planting book.

Technorati Tags: book review, church growth, David Putman, Ed Stetzer, missional church

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Allelon just posted a video where Alan Roxburgh interviews me. In this clip, Alan asks me about the missional church, the emerging church, and about the differences between the two. I describe how I teach missional church material, and I also tell a bit of my story as well — how I became involved in the missional conversation.

Technorati Tags: Allelon, alternative worship, Emerging_Church, missional church, video

Bill Kinnon, at Achieveable Ends, wrote a post that captivated the blogosphere. In it, he plays off of Jay Rosen’s The People Formerly Known as the Audience. Titled The People Formerly Known as the Congregation, Bill rants against leadership that leads by 3-point sermons, raises money for building programs, and solicits volunteers to run the various ministries. But more than that, Bill rants against what it means to be a member in a congregation today — he feels ‘used’ and writes that he is no longer going to be a passive recipient of all things church. The tone is ‘don’t do it to me, but partner with me, treat me like an adult — a co-producer of church.’

Bill sparked a number of follow up posts that piggy-backed on his idea, written from the perspective of pastors and others who agree that the system is not really working. Of course, a passive congregation is not particularly the pastor’s fault, the congregants’ fault, or even the seminaries’ fault. Our entire church system is built around a Christendom model of church where we pay a special class of people to do ministry to and for everyone else.

Over the past ten years or so, the missional church conversation centered around the idea of equipping entire congregations to serve as missionaries to their surrounding cultures. They work with churches who embody this Christendom passivity. They look to help them re-imagine what it means to be the people of God.

I believe Bill taps into another dynamic not addressed by the missional church conversation. Bill speaks for those who already left. They couldn’t tolerate being treated as children and opted out. Now located outside “church”, these active (as opposed to passive) Christians create alternative ways to worship God, encourage one another, and witness to their faith.

Bill’s inspired rant describes the depths to which we need to re-think congregational life in a post-Christendom, postmodern context.

Technorati Tags: church, Jay Rosen, Leadership, missional church, Bill Kinnon, seminary

Yesterday I wrote a review of George Barna’s Revolution. Many fear that Barna dismisses the need for local churches. I don’t know if Barna goes that far. What Barna dismantles are particular sociological expressions of church — those of American congregationalism, rather than particular gatherings of believers. “Revolutionaries realize — sometimes very reluctantly – that the core issue isn’t whether or not one is involved in a local church, but whether or not one is connected to the body of believers in the pursuit of godliness and worship." Barna writes that one needs to be connected to a body of believers in the pursuit of God, he doesn’t say where and when, and his readers find that worrisome.

Technorati Tags: church, George Barna, globalization, modernity

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I know this book review is a little late out of the starting gate. Revolution is required reading for my students this quarter, and I thought, if they need to review it, then it is only fair that I review it too! So here goes. I begin with an overview of what I see Barna saying followed by some interaction with his thesis.

Overview of Revolution

George Barna, in Revolution, touts a new form of church that recently developed in the United States. Dissatisfied with local churches, twenty-million “revolutionaries” created forms of spirituality outside organized religion. This spiritual revolution came about because of seven trends in society: the increase of Busters and Mosaics, moral relativism, dismissal of the irrelevant, advent of technology, priority of relationship, participation, desire for meaning.

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He is risen indeed!

(Thanks Jonny, from Grace London, for the picture.)

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From the highly creative Moot Community, London. Wish I were there.

Technorati Tags: Church service, Good Friday, Moot

Last November I was asked the question, what would it take to move an evangelical seminary in the direction of missional church thinking and practice? Writing with my friend Mark Lau Branson, we offered some first thoughts towards an answer. This paper was one of five distributed at the Allelon Missional Schools Project in Dallas, serving the discussions as a conversation starter.

Technorati Tags: Allelon, Mark Lau Branson, missional church, seminary

In February, I participated in the launch of the Allelon Missional Seminary Project, a three-day conversation on transitioning seminaries to a missional paradigm. Twenty-four seminaries participated by sending a team of five people respectively. During the three days, Alan Roxburgh, Pat Keifert, and Craig Van Gelder (among others) invited us to re-imagine our seminaries for life after Christendom. Time was spent in large group lectures, small focus groups, and in-house seminary discussions.

It was quite an ambitious agenda, given the differing starting points of the seminaries. Some seminaries were over two hundred years old, a few were less than five years old. Some were very well versed in the missional conversation over the last ten years, and some didn’t understand the missional conversation at all. There were a fairly diverse set of schools included in the conversation including liberal, evangelical, conservative, Catholic, and Anabaptist traditions.

Five writers were tapped to present discussion papers to get the conversation going. Each of the writers were to write from their particular tradition: one Nazarene, one Evangelical, one Mainline, and one Mennonite. I co-wrote the evangelical paper, and I will share that on the blog tomorrow.

Technorati Tags: Allelon, Leadership, missional church