Occupy

HT Lance Wallnau

What's Your Sending Capacity?

Gaining By Losing: Why the Future Belongs To Churches Who Send, by J. D. Greear - A Book Review

This is a fascinating, compelling book with the thesis that churches and church growth should not be measured by seating capacity (numerical growth) but by sending capacity (church planting). He believes that "the church that sends the most, wins the most," and that every church should be sending out disciples (and releasing proven leaders) to plant new churches, locally and internationally.

Greear is Senior Pastor of the Summit Church in Raleigh-Durham, NC. He and his church are living out the message of this book, in that Summit Church has sent out over 500 people to plant 113 new churches as of the writing of this book. He also brings a unique perspective to the concept of missional living from having previously lived and ministered in a Muslim country.

The book emphasizes that a spiritual culture of sending, and "gaining by loosing," depends on a commitment to not just getting members or attenders, but building disciples. Christian disciples learn to live like Jesus, and Jesus served the Father by giving himself for others. The principle of resurrection, dying in order to live, applies to churches as well as individuals. He believes "our God is a sending God," and that therefore we should be sending people.

The text is structured around 10 "plumb lines,"i.e. culture defining statements about what it means to be a discipling and sending church.The book is an easy read in terms of language, format and style, but a tough read in terms of the challenge it makes to the readers' personal discipleship commitment. It is also a significant challenge to pastors and elders of churches to change their community culture to disciple making and sending. In that way, it reminds me of David Platt's Radical and Radical Together.

Gaining By Loosing is a good read, and I recommend it for your consideration.
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(I received a free copy of this book for review purposes, but that does not influence my opinion. See my book review policy)

Living in a "Post" Culture

This is a very relevant and important article - Posture in Post-Christendom by Tim Brister:

Christendom is dead. For some, this is a time of lament. For others, it is a time of renewal and revival. I want to offer my reflections on the three different phases of Christianity and culture and the corresponding posture for Christian cultural engagement.

Christendom: Synced with Culture

Syncretism is the blending or assimilation of two belief systems into one. There was a time when Christianity enjoyed cultural approval and widespread recognition. When someone spoke of religion, it was rare that anyone thought of another faith beside Christianity. Monuments to the Ten Commandments were erected in the public square. Prayers were offered by teachers in public schools. God Love for God and country were seen in churches who displayed a Christian flag on one side of the pulpit and an American flag on the other. Christianity was synced with American culture.

This syncretism took three primary manifestations: nominalism, moralism, and zionism. Because of its popularity and being somewhat normative in American culture, people identified as being Christian without ever actually becoming a Christian. There were Christian in name only. Identifying with being a Christian without actually becoming one afforded people goodwill in society as they would be seen as virtuous, upstanding, and respectable.

Christianity also assimilated with moralism because many of the identity markers of Christianity were what you did or did not do. Christians do not drink or smoke. Christians did not dance. Christians were dedicated to religious activity. Christianity was not so much defined by what you believed but by how you lived. Christianity was in a way moral gatekeepers for the culture and enjoyed relative success in advocating the law, even when unable to keep it themselves entirely.

Then there was zionism. There is a blending of the American dream with Christianity. This is where it became popular to drape the cross in the American flag. The United States was considered to some degree God’s great gift to the world, the last great hope for humanity. Verses with promises tied to Israel in the Old Testament easily found a home in sermons from American pulpits. Christianity was depicted in particularly American imagery, and American culture was governed by particularly Christian values.

Dying Christendom: Fight Against Culture

Then came the time when Christendom began to fade away as American culture began a shift away from Christianity. This is the birth of the culture warriors, the silent majority, and the religious right. This was the time when the lamenting prophets would cry out, “Let’s take back America” and, due to the contrarian posture, Christians were known more for what they were against than what they were for.

As culture went from bad to worse, increasingly in lawlessness, dying Christendom took a bunker mentality from which to fight. Most notable in this battle plan was the rise of the “one-stop-shop megachurch.” Megachurches were great because you could do everything you wanted to do in the world without ever having go into the world. Dads had their softball leagues. Kids had their own basketball and soccer leagues. Moms had their “mom’s day outs” and aerobics classes. Aside from the cultural commodities in the church, there many more religious goods and services to occupy the time and energy of Christians, effectively keeping them busy and safely removed from the wicked world out there. The megachurch became a breeding ground for religious consumerism in the supermarket of the religious ghettos that protected Christians from the rampant wickedness increasingly on display in the culture now fought by the religious/political special forces.

Another aspect of dying Christendom was the underpinnings of pluralism and postmodernism in both high culture (academia) and low culture (pop culture). Morality that was once standardized by the Ten Commandments had been replaced by “it is not wrong if I don’t hurt myself or anyone else” kind of ambiguity. What was once considered true for all was no longer considered true for anyone. The objective was replaced with the subjective. The universal was replaced with the relative. And John 3:16 was replaced with Matthew 7:1. When you refer to “God” or religion, you no longer had the cultural reference point of Christianity. And the idea that there was only one way to God was considered intolerant and full of bigotry.

Post-Christendom: Re-enters Culture

I believe we are now living in a culture of Post-Christendom. While it may be the death of Christendom, I believe it is also the rebirth of Christianity. All cultural assumptions are now gone. Nominalism is dying off, because Christianity now only has value to those who value Christ above all things. Moralism is dying off, because Christians are returning to the message of Christianity (the gospel). Zionism is dying off, because we are more globally aware of what God is doing in the world and how we play a small part in it.

In Post-Christendom, we have an opportunity to be known for what we are for rather than what we are against. We have an opportunity to bring clarity to our identity as disciples of Jesus Christ, to come out of the sub-cultures and ghettos we have created in the past to live, work, and play to a world where we are called to shine as a city on a hill. We can reintroduce ourselves to our neighbors, coworkers, and playmates with compassion and conviction. We don’t have to seek cultural approval and acceptance because the gospel tells us the only approval and acceptance we need has already been given to us and is sitting at the right hand of God the Father.

The posture in Post-Christendom is to enter in culture in ordinary ways by ordinary people and demonstrate the extraordinary love of God by laying our lives down for the sake of the gospel. It is a posture that recognizes we are dealing with a world where John 3:16 does not make sense to them because Genesis 1:1 does not make sense to them. We enter in with humility and kindness, understanding the posture of our Savior towards us who were once hostile in mind and rebels to His cause of redemption.

Perhaps there has never been a time more exciting and opportunistic for Christians in the United States than right now. May God be so kind to bring renewal and revival to the apostolic faith once for all handed down to the saints as we live, move, and have our being in Him – exiles proclaiming the excellencies of Him who called us out of darkness and into his marvelous light!

Reading the Bible With A Missional Perspective

Interesting article by Robert Lynn at Christian Worldwiew Journal:

Wrong assumptions in our approach to Bible study

What do you do with an overgrown field if you want to plant? If you’re an avid gardener or a farmer, you already know this. However, for the rest of us, a little instruction might be helpful. You have to clear the ground. Out comes the chain saw (or maybe even a tractor) because trees need to be felled. Better have your stump grinder on hand as well. Then there are rocks and boulders that need to be removed. After that, there’s brush to deal with. Lastly, you’ll want to rototill the remaining plant material into the soil to enrich it with nitrogen and other nutrients.

May I suggest that in some important ways our field of Bible study has become overgrown with assumptions and practices that leave us unprepared to do the biblical reflection necessary for engaging God’s mission in the world? The cultural history of the West is such that we’ve spent centuries reading the Bible with a sense of the Church as chaplain to a world that shared our assumptions. However, that world has changed significantly. Consequently, the ground needs some serious clearing in order for us to engage the Scriptures in new ways in a social setting that is more like A.D. 50 than 1950.

The late South African missionary scholar David Bosch, in his book,Transforming Mission, raises an important question, “Did the New Testament give rise to mission or did mission give rise to the New Testament?”[i] We’re inclined to think it’s the former. Bosch rightly corrects us and says it’s the latter. Post-Pentecost, the church has no New Testament but it moves out in mission – from Jerusalem, to Judea, to Samaria and then beyond to the Gentiles. So where does the New Testament come from?  In what context did it arise? It arose in the context of mission, the mission to the nations. The early Christians did not suddenly find themselves the proud owners of a New Testament, study it in isolation for purposes of in-house edification, and then discover to their amazement that, “Wow, one of the really important themes in the New Testament is the mission of God. Let’s go guys!” Rather, as they took the gospel across geographical and cultural borders, they thought out loud about that mission. One form of that out loud thinking was the New Testament.

Reading the Bible with different lenses

How might that shift to a missional perspective change things? Consider, for example, Paul’s letter to the Roman church.  Often I hear it described as Paul’s systematic theology. What it is, in fact, is a missionary support raising letter. Paul is informing the church about his planned mission to Spain and outlines the reasons the Christian community in Rome should get on board and support him (15:14-33). That has to change how you read this pivotal letter. Take the epistle to the Philippians. Whatever you’ve heard about this apostolic missive, for a new perspective, try reading it as the missionary thank-you letter it really is (4:10-20).

It’s easy to think of a letter like Romans as Paul’s ruminations about theological themes divorced from the day to day concerns of mission from the trenches. We’ve become so accustomed to the notion of theology as the musings of those in the academy and seminary, that we’ve come to think that biblical and theological reflection can be divorced from the big picture of the mission of God, His purpose to recapture a runaway planet. And so we read the New Testament as a rather intra-ecclesial document – to the church, for the church, and about the church.

But consider the pattern we see at the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15. What drives this ecumenical council of apostles and elders to study the Old Testament Scriptures? Mission! God’s mission! Reports from the trenches of Gentiles submitting to the Lord Jesus fill this infant Jewish church with wonder and puzzlement.  “What do we make of what’s happening? How do we respond?” And so to the Scriptures they go, wrestling with questions of mission and cultural engagement (they are Gentiles after all) until James declares, expositing Amos, “This is the rebuilding of the fallen tabernacle of David (vv. 12-18).” What this means is that we don’t simply read Romans or Philippians as missionary documents but every New Testament book as a missionary document. In one way or another each book is reflecting on the mission of God and the life of His people as the agents of that mission.

How Jesus read the Scriptures

Let’s step back for a moment to take in the bigger picture. If Jesus is to be believed in Luke 24:13-49, it’s not only the New Testament that is to be read in light of the mission of God but the Old Testament as well. Speaking of Jesus teaching the disciples on that first Easter Sunday, Luke says, “Then he opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures” (45). What Scriptures? The Old Testament Scriptures! And what did he teach them about the message those Scriptures contained? “ He told them, “This is what is written: The Messiah will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day,and repentance for the forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. I am going to send you what my Father has promised; but stay in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high” (46-49). For Jesus, this is the story told in the Old Testament.

So, how might Jesus’ impromptu Easter Sunday seminar on the Old Testament clear the ground and prepare the soil for better Bible study? Take the Torah, for example. It didn’t exist independently of Israel for decades or even centuries. God didn’t happen to have it hanging around so that when He redeemed Israel out of Egypt, He thought, “Wait, I just happen to have a book that might be useful for devotional purposes.” These are books that arise in the context of God redeeming a people to whom he gives a missional purpose. “This,” He says, “is who you are and this is what you are called to do.”[ii] What if, for example, we read the first five books of the Old Testament as the missional identity documents of the people of God, recently redeemed from Egypt in order to be a light to the nations? What might we see if we read Genesis through Deuteronomy as documents that outline the missional life of God’s people who are blessed in order to be the conduit of blessing to the nations in fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham? Not only would we have a better sense of what Moses actually had to say but we’d have a better sense of how these books fit into the larger Biblical narrative as well as the proper launching point for missional engagement of our own cultural moment....

A Missional Solution to the Worship Wars

Has your church been through the "worship wars?" You know, controversies over music styles and service order, usually generational in nature. Here's a concept - Making those decisions based on mission not consumerism. From Ed Stetzer:

...After a few years of "worship wars," many churches decided to create multiple services based primarily on worship styles or worship preferences. As a result, the "Traditional Service," which normally had the backing of the older members (often with those who gave most of the financial support to the church), got the coveted 11:00 AM time slot, while the younger members (with little children) had to drag themselves and their half-dressed, unfed kids to church by 8:00 AM or earlier in some cases.

Over time, this changed and many now have the traditional service early, as it did (generally) experience the growth of a contemporary.

Often times, this was not a change flowing from a missional strategy, but rather one dictated by the consumeristic mindset of the church—we have to keep the customers happy. And, the problem is that it has often proven impossible for us to constantly feed our own preferences and have any appetite left to help the actual needs of those outside the satisfied family.

So, let me start by saying that a church should not be blackmailed into adding worship services by anyone in the congregation. I am not OK with older members saying, "Listen, we want this music and we pay all the bills. We'll let you go have your contemporary service, but we want you to pander to us." Nor am I OK with all the young people saying, "You know, I'm tired of those hymns; we want something cool and hip. If not, we're leaving." Preference pandering only further engrains consumerism in the church.Often times, this was not a change flowing from a missional strategy, but rather one dictated by the consumeristic mindset of the church—we have to keep the customers happy. And, the problem is that it has often proven impossible for us to constantly feed our own preferences and have any appetite left to help the actual needs of those outside the satisfied family...
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.....The wrong question to ask is "What type of music do I like?" That's finding satisfaction in the style and not the Savior.

The right question, the right starting point, is to ask, "What form of music would best suit our context?"

And, if that takes more than one expression, that's OK....

Much more at the link.

Building A Gospel Culture

Interesting excerpt from Ray Ortlund in The Gospel: How the Church Portrays the Beauty of Christ (Crossway; April 30, 2014). He writes this on pages 82–83:

A gospel culture is harder to lay hold of than gospel doctrine. It requires more relational wisdom and finesse. It involves stepping into a kind of community unlike anything we’ve experienced, where we happily live together on a love we can’t create. A gospel culture requires us not to bank on our own importance or virtues, but to forsake self-assurance and exult together in Christ alone.

This mental adjustment is not easy, but living in this kind of community is wonderful. We find ourselves saying with Paul, “For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things” — all the trophies of our self-importance, all the wounds of our self-pity, every self-invented thing that we lug around as a way of getting attention — “and count them as dung in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ” (Phil. 3:8–9).

Paul did not regard the loss of his inflated self as sacrificial. Who admires his own dung? It is a relief to be rid of our distasteful egos! And when a whole church together luxuriates in Christ alone, that church embodies a gospel culture. It becomes a surprising new kind of community where sinners and sufferers come alive because the Lord is there, giving himself freely to the desperate and undeserving.

But how easy it is for a church to exist in order to puff itself up! How hard it is to forsake our own glory for a higher glory!

The primary barrier to displaying the beauty of Jesus in our churches comes from the way we re-insert ourselves into that sacred center that belongs to him alone. Exalting ourselves always diminishes his visibility. That is why cultivating a gospel culture requires a profound, moment by moment “unselfing” by every one of us. It is personally costly, even painful.

HT: Tony Reinke via Vitamin Z 

Big Difference

Click on image to enlarge

From JourneyChurch.org

The Missionary God

"As Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, god is at once Sender, Sent, and Sending. As I've said already, God in His very nature is a missionary God, and therefore His followers cannot participate in Christ without being on mission with Christ in the world."

    -Britt Merrick, Godspeed: Making Christ's Mission Your Own

What a Relief!

"When we see the grand story of God's mission to redeem, restore and heal humanity, it's a massive paradigm shift. We realize that life is not about us or what we want to do - and that's a relief because I'm already sick of myself. Life is about God and His glory and what he is doing. The more we get caught up in that reality, the more we are free to be what God is calling us to be.  The question 'What should I do?' becomes 'What is God doing?' When we view Scripture with an eye toward what God has done, is doing, and will do,all questions of 'What should I do now?' get answered."

      -Britt Merrick, Godspeed: Making Christ's Mission Your Own

Living at Godspeed

"When we understand our mission, respond to our calling, and live as a people sent by God, we become more like Jesus to the world. Following His example, we'll seek, touch, free, and restore the hurting people all around us. The Holy Spirit will work through us to renew humanity for the glory of Christ and the advancement of His kingdom. We will finally live for something bigger than ourselves - what I'll call 'living at Godspeed.'"

             -Britt Merrick, Godspeed: Making Christ's Mission Your Own

On Mission With Jesus

"The first verse of Acts references 'all that Jesus began to do and teach.' This means that Christ is still doing and still teaching today: He is presently on mission in our world. For years the church has said, 'Let's go on mission in the name of Jesus.' What we should be saying is, 'Let's be on mission with Jesus.' You have been put on earth, in this time and place, where you are right now, for Missio Christi. Our goal as individuals and as the gathered church, is to figure out what Christ is presently doing and then do it with Him."

    -Britt Merrick, Godspeed: Making Christ's Mission Your Own

Note: In and among the quotes from the Driscoll book, I'll also be quoting from this great book by Britt Merrick. Because I'm quoting from a Kindle edition, I will not be able to reference page numbers.

10 Things You'll Never Say

Worth a Look - 10 Things I Guarantee You'll Never Say

I especially like number 8.

Black Work Boots

Want to read a great story about service to the poor, availability even when tired, and God caring about a need for black work boots? Read this one by my friend Elysa at Musings From Graceland.

For more info about the ministry where she serves, check out the web page for We Wil Go. I spent some time with them last Saturday, and am always impressed by what Jesus is doing there in inner city Jackson, MS.

Thanks, Elysa! And BTW, you're much more loving than you think you are.

Escape the Lame

"Over the years, we have run into people who think the city in which they live is lame, their job is lame, their church is lame., their neighborhood is lame. Everything...lame. How different would they feel is they knew that God had called, equipped  and set them free to be part of His mission of reconciliation in their own workplaces, neighborhoods, cities, and churches -- the very things with which they're so very discontent!"

    -Matt Chandler, Creature of the Word: The Jesus Centered Church,  pages 89
   

Sinks & Faucets

"There are two kinds of Christians. 'Sink Christians'  view salvation as they would a sink. The water of salvation flows into the sink so that Christians can soak up all the benefits: eternal life, assurance in the presence of God, and strength in times of trial. Those who adopt this mind-set concentrate solely on what the Bible says God has done and will do for them. 'Faucet Christians' view salvation differently.  they look at the world as the sink and themselves as the faucet. The blessings of salvation flow to them in order to flow through them out to the wider world. They rightly see that the Bible describes salvation as something that God not only does for them, but also through them."

        - Trevin Wax, Holy Subversion, page 50

A Missional Psalm

I was reading Psalm 67 this week, and noticed that it is a poem about missional living.

1 May God be gracious to us and bless us

and make his face to shine upon us, Selah

2 that your way may be known on earth,

your saving power among all nations.

3 Let the peoples praise you, O God;

let all the peoples praise you!

4 Let the nations be glad and sing for joy,

for you judge the peoples with equity

and guide the nations upon earth. Selah

5 Let the peoples praise you, O God;

let all the peoples praise you!

6 The earth has yielded its increase;

God, our God, shall bless us.

7 God shall bless us;

let all the ends of the earth fear him!

Psalm 67 - ESVBible.org:

The term "missional" is a popular buzzword in some circles, and I am not usually a fan of buzzwords, because they can easily lose meaning. Basically, to be missional is to live in an intentionally outwardly focused way, based on a conviction and consciousness of joining God in the the work and mission of reconciliation and redemption in this world.

This psalmist ask God to bless him, not just for his own benefit, but so that God's ways will be know on earth and so that all the people will praise Him  His focus is on "all nations," "the peoples," and " all the ends of the earth."

Do you pray like that? Do I?