Lead into the Community

Charles Van Engen has been quoted in the Swedish Missiological Themes talking about this. Evangelism invites into a community sui generis with no other limits than the whole human race – a community based on a human belonging more encompassing than any existing form of political or biological connectedness. The missionary movement of the Churches claims to be relevant to women and men of all stripes and walks of life.

"By witnessing to the possibility of a common life sustained by God’s creative breaking of existing frontiers and showing that creative authority in the pattern of relation... (it fosters), the building up of
Christ-like persons... The Church’s good news is that human community is possible; the Church’s challenge is in its insistence...that the relations constituting Christ’s Body neither compete with nor vindicate others, but simply stand in their own right as the context which relativises all others... The Church's primitive and angular separateness... is meant to be a protest on behalf of a unified world, the world that holds together in and because of Jesus Christ."

Seeing our leaders willing and able to thrive in the world and in the Church is empowering and offers the opportunity for others to do the same.

 "Alan Roxburgh, (2006, 12-13) proposes a paradigm of leadership that contrasts the operating models of a typical pastor with that of a missional pastor who functions in an apostolic way. He also asserts (Roxburgh 1997, 62) that “discipling and equipping require a leadership that demonstrates encounter with the culture in action. This is the role of the apostle.” “Pastor, as apostle, is foundational to all other functions.”

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Lead with Sensitivity

Scripture references with words like patience, long-suffering and steadfastness portray a sense of quality in relationships.  As the Christian community lives out through the lives of ordinary people, leadership sensitively nurtures the diversity of such a people, both the coming and the going.

Leadership needs to discern when they can push and when they need to back-off.  They need to also discern which battles need to be fought and which ones do not.

The sensitive ministry will have a vision for long-term possibilities and will create an environment that will experience growth and depth.

Lead with your story

Don Posterski shares his own stories from what he has seen in the make up of churches as he has travelled across this country.   He does share on he likes - Future Faith Churches.  The good news is that some churches in every denomination and religious tradition have found ways to embrace faith that is both personal and social. They consistently invite people within the range of their influence to personally experience the living Christ in their lives as well as motivating them to respond compassionately and practically to people who have specific needs. They are high on soul care and high on social care churches.

Focus Group Interviewer: "How are you different because of the influence of this church? How have you changed?

Response: "What do I say? I think it is that now I have a relationship with God which I could not have said seven years ago. Or at least I'm developing a relationship. And I can say that out loud too. But I couldn't have seven years ago."

Gordon MacDonald shares these thoughts -

If you want to think through the subject of the life God blesses, go then to the soul, to the deepest parts of “inner space” where God is most likely to visit with a person, whisper His secrets, establish connections, heal spiritual wounds, generate hope and courage.

The soul is the deeper part of all of us that others cannot see. It is the quiet part where people are most apt to connect with God. In that deeper, quiet place of spiritual geography there was, in biblical times, and is today, dialogue with heaven, events of repentance, praise and worship, and the formation of intentions to life and knowledge that enable people to become what I like to call kingdom-builders.

  Lee Bolman and Terrence Deal (co-author of the classic Corporate Cultures — the 1982 book that popularized the idea of organization culture) conclude, "The signs point toward spirit and soul as the essence of leadership." 

 

It would seem that this kind of leadership style is more rooted in character development than learned technical skills.  Our inner development is focused on integrity, honest, humility, courage, commitment, sincerity, passion, confidence, wisdom, determination, compassion and sensitivity.

http://youtu.be/lGajLG3s0CY
 

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Community

Here are some comments on the role in the community for the Church....

Darrell Guder - "Seen through the lenses of the gospel, the world is desperately in need of reconciliation. Certainly
we would confirm that diagnosis—the news reported in any daily paper would document humanity’s need to be reconciled. But the human diagnosis will not identify the problem as our need to be reconciled with God. We focus upon the brutal divisions that make nations, tribes, religions, and cultures into each other’s deadly enemies. We struggle to find human resources to bring about the reconciliation for which we all long. The gospel defines creation’s distress as the result of our separation from God. It is not merely a matter of human resources but of divine intervention. So, the gospel announces that God has intervened. Our separation from God and each other has been overcome, the chasm bridged, the opposing factions brought together. Our message starts with the assurance that in Christ there already is a new creation. The work of reconciliation was accomplished at Calvary, Easter, and Ascension Day. Thus, our calling to the role of ambassadors is a consequence of what God has already done." 

Robert Webber -  "The calling of the church in every culture is to be mission. That is, the work of the church is not to be an agent or servant of the culture. The churches’ business is not to maintain freedom or to promote wealth or to help a political party or to serve as the moral guide to culture. The church’s mission is to be the presence of the kingdom. . . . The church’s mission is to show the world what it looks like when a community of people live under the reign of God.”

Kirsteen Kim - "Mission in the sense of missio Dei, that is commitment to God’s loving concern for the world is an antidote to relativism in theology."

Lesslie Newbigin - "the missionary task of the church to make known the gospel where it is not known must remain an indispensable aspect of the church’s mission. In a time when missionary resources are being scandalously allocated, and when the task of taking the gospel to areas where it is not known remains a vital part of the church's calling, this distinction continues to hold before us that the missionary task of the church is to the ends of the earth."

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What is this Community like?

Imagine pinpointing the poorest community in your neighbourhood and creating an incarnational presence there.

It is there, in that one act, we no longer are people who have said things, we are people who display those words and what they mean in the way we live and worship.  Of course, once displayed, they cannot be denied, only rejected or entered into.  So the persuasion if you will are living displays of truth, not rational one-on-one arguments.

The seeker-sensitive church was an interesting approach, but it was a marketing approach and did not shape itself around the church and its mission.  We can be influencers in our community as the church by being the Church.

Cardinal Avery Dulles, in his book, Models of the Church, presents some interesting thoughts along these lines.  Take a look by following this link, http://www.buildupourparish.com/home.php?page_id=62

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"Called Out"

Let me share with you some thoughts expressed by Robert Munger, a professor at Fuller Theological Seminary - these are not new, but they are his...

"The time soon came for us to pray. About a dozen of us knelt in a circle. Would I share my condition? Would I admit my desperation? Did I dare pray publicly for God to give me a special anointing and infilling of the Spirit of God, even though it might mean a radical change in the direction and association of my ministry? I had covenanted in writing before God in that crisis night that I would do anything, everything, go anywhere.
   It was a kairos (crisis) moment. Finally it was my time to pray. I told the gathered Christian brothers that I needed to be filled with the Spirit and asked them to pray for me. They did — earnestly, lovingly and with warm faith. Then I prayed, reminding God from Scripture of our covenant relationship and what he had already promised to give me for his glory.

   When I finished praying, the brother next to me, a big man whom I did not know but whose loving concern I could feel, put his arm around me and said, "Lord, help Bob's unbelief!" That was a bit hard to take, but I took it! I had often told inquirers that we receive Christ not by feelings but by faith in his person and promise. Now, suddenly, my own faith came alive. With a holy boldness I told God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit that I was now receiving all of him and all that was meant in John 7:37-39. I thanked God that he was doing what I had asked of him. Now I knew for certain he would glorify Jesus Christ somehow even in me."

 http://youtu.be/Jyxlo64cOCw

Tinkering and Reworking

Leonard Sweet, considered one of the church's most provocative thinkers, said the old model of church is "killing the West," at a conference at Baylor University's George W. Truett Theological Seminary, according to the Associated Baptist Press.  http://www.christianpost.com/news/old-church-model-killing-the-west-25670/

That is a pretty big paint brush to be painting with.

I think the early church believed that knowing Christ also meant taking on the missio dei, the redemptive mission of God to the whole world.  But I am not sure how that happened as I am sure that the cost of ones life, with Paul running around throwing everyone in prison, meant this was something everyone just "did."  Right now I am thinking about those in the church through the Middle East and North Africa and in other eras, China and Russia.  So what mission look like then and there?

According to David J. Bosch, "mission is not primarily an activity of the church, but an attribute of God. God is a missionary God.  Mission was understood as being derived from the very nature of God…sending the church into the world…a movement from God to the world…. There is a church because there is a mission, not vice versa.  Mission [is] understood as being derived from the very nature of God. It is thus put in the context of the doctrine of the Trinity, not of ecclesiology or soteriology. The classical doctrine of the missio Dei as God the Father and the Son sending the Spirit [is] expanded to include yet another ‘movement’: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit sending the church into the world”

That might mean that we know our neighbours, our politicians, our local business establishments.  We share in the community activities and are recognized by the agencies that work there. So our presence is not just through our buildings but their our social networks.

The last thought comes from Samuel Escobar,  “’Mission’ means ‘sending.’”  “The mission to which God sends those he chooses is always a ‘mission impossible, possible only because God will act in order to accomplish his purpose.”

 

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Discoveries on the Journey

"The role of the church is to cultivate a people who can risk being peaceful in a violent world, risk being kind in a competitive society, risk being faithful in an age of cynicism, risk being gentle among those who admire the tough, risk love when it may not be returned, because we have the confidence that in Christ we have been reborn into a new reality."
- Darrell E. Guder, editor, Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America

Found this quote on a church website and fell in love with it because these are the things that were found in the early church and what turned the world upside right - these were the things that were found in the Roman Empire that moved them from persecuting Christianity to opening the transportation system to the good news be shared to the then conquered peoples of the world.


A missional church intentionally pursues the mission of Jesus for His glory among all peoples by engaging the culture with the gospel.  Then I found another quote from the same new friend I mentioned above...

"Mission is not just a program of the church. It defines the church as God’s sent people. Either we are defined by mission, or we reduce the scope of the gospel and the mandate of the church. Thus our challenge today is to move from church with mission to missional church."

The church that has been our home church over the past 11 years is right now stuck in a "come to" our church framework and it is becoming more and more painfully obvious that this is inadequate as a missional operation in the community.  Do not get me wrong, every Sunday, both day and evening services, there are calls made for decisions to be made and they are made.  Friends bringing friends is the "come to" approach, but I know what the community at large is saying about our church and it hurts.  Their perception is the view of the love of Jesus that we show them by not showing up in the community and therefore they want no part of that kind of love.

I read this blog - http://nakeddoggy.wordpress.com/2008/04/09/come-to-us-strategy/ - and did not realize that maybe the emerging church was trying to change their brand from emerging to missional - but that is not the case.  There is a very big difference between the two functions.

What we do need to realize is that the unchurched, those who have never been to church, and that might not be very much of the adult population, but it must account for a predominantly large percentage of our older teens and young adult population, would no more drop into church for a casual visit than you or I might drop into a mosque or a gay bar for a casual visit.  Either way, we wouldn't quite know how to behave and may wonder what other people are thinking.

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Crossing Over

There is a Hebrew expression for this word - abar - which defines the experience of not being able to go back to the familiar nor being able to stay where we currently find ourselves.

 " to pass over or by or through, alienate, bring, carry, do away, take, take away, transgress"

You are going places where you have not gone before.

The journey has such a decisive edge to it.

The critical point has taken place and now we find ourselves in the middle - this is where it gets hard - how do you describe to anyone who asks how you got there and where are you going?

This has become not a time to consider how to survive or a problem to solve.  It is time for God to make something new.

Read these words from Jonathan Wilson:

Choosing Life. How we live in relationship to other people and the world around us is often called “ethics” in Christian teaching. Because all of us have to make decisions every day about what we are or are not going to do, ethics is often portrayed as decision making, especially in extreme situations. We often think ethics is about whether Christians should fight in war, have sex outside of marriage, practice invitro-fertilization, or “pull the plug” when a loved one is at the end of life. These are, indeed, ethical considerations. But if we are to make these kinds of decisions “in Christ,” it is more important for us to know the peculiar way of Christ in a community of peace than it is to think hard about what we would do in an extreme case.

In this regard, actual extreme cases sometimes make the point best. In the midst of World War II, when Nazi Germany was committed both to the extermination of Jewish people and to expansion in Europe, a village in occupied France quietly harbored hundreds of Jews, sparing their lives. Given the lack of resistance in so many places—and the high cost that so many resisters paid—it was a heroic act. Yet, when asked why they did it, most of the villagers simply said, “We never thought of not doing it.” For years a priest named André Trocmé had patiently Andre Trocmetaught Jesus’ example of forgiveness and nonviolent love at the village church. Over time, these people had become a community of peace. When the extreme case happened, the way of Jesus was an unquestioned habit.

“If anyone is in Christ Jesus,” the apostle Paul wrote to the early church, “there is a new creation.” Yes, the patterns of an old and broken order continue, causing a great deal of suffering and frustration. But the advent of a whole new world is the basis of New Testament ethics. The “old nature” that Paul calls us to battle against is part of the old order that is passing away. It is the set of habits that humans developed in a world where violence had the last word. In Christ, however, we are raised to a new reality. Because this reality of new creation re-defines how we see the world, it re-frames our habits of social engagement. Disciples take up their cross and follow Jesus not because they have learned to make the hard choice in an extreme case, but because they can’t imagine acting differently in light of the good news they have heard and seen. Their habit of choosing life is one they have learned by getting to know the way of Jesus among the people who are Christ’s body. It is, for the most part, slow and undramatic work. It is also how God chooses to engage our world in love.

Compass Point

I was asked at a dinner party once, "Who are the top ten preachers in Canada?"

There must have been a list of these at one time or another because it was not the first time I had heard of this "desire to know" question.

I suppose if your name was on the list, you pretty much have arrived.

But I have a funny feeling that is not the case today.  Most people do not believe that an amazing preacher makes the day any more.  Church is more about personality than "best preacher," more about community than about any one individual, and for those who are older and still asking the question - no one else younger than you is asking the question anymore.

Our question today is more along the lines of how do I be a follower Christ and reflect my faith in this world?

More and more, the answers keeps coming back to "church."  The body of Christ sharing their experiences, sharing the victories and shame, sharing the attempt to sing a song in a world that doesn't want you to sing - and recognizing and knowing that this is not an easy task. 

The journey takes place outside the church, the strength, encouragement, love, refuelling takes place in the church.

May we not get lost at looking at who is best or better, but may we be ever mindful of being conscientious and effective followers of Jesus, being honest and transparent as we impact our culture and our community.

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"as you are going"

I think we stress ourselves out to much with planning.

Jesus words are more clearing recognized when the sense of making disciples didn't come from a planned evangelistic campaign, it came from life, from giving.

So when he was among the prostitutes, He showed them what true love was like, when He was among the religious establishment, He showed them what true love was like, when He was at work, He showed those He worked with what true love was like.

I do not think you have to "get involved" in your community to show love, you probably already involved.  While you are in your community, show the love of God because they surely think they know it, but how can one understand the emotional feelings of adoption, of finding a home, brothers and sisters, taken off the streets, hugged every day - unless we invite them to come and be adopted into the family of God.

Then you realize that the bread you are feeding them with, the water you are sharing to quench their thirst is just that, bread and water.  Life is in Jesus - as you go - give Jesus.

The link here is a advertisment, but I think it really shows what I mean by, "as you are going"
http://youtu.be/o6kresN_wBI

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