The Relational Mission

And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. —Eph 3:17-19  The summer after I graduated from Texas A & M, I was helping my dad on a construction job. He was purchasing a piece of machinery that would dig holes in solid rock. The salesman spent some time with us as we tested out the machine. During our conversation, he asked what I did. After I told him that I had just graduated from college, he responded, “Oh, no experience. There is nothing like experience.” Luckily, I’m not the type that is easily offended by direct words. And I knew that I was green. I knew that I needed experience, but I was not afraid of being young either. I just did not realize that graduating with honors and all of the knowledge floating around in my ...

I'm reading Scot McKnight's latest The King Jesus Gospel . I love this book already and I'm only a 25% through it. Because I think that what Scot is saying is so crucial for the Evangelical Church if it is going to advance down the missional road, I'm going to blog as I am reading it, rather than waiting till I complete it. Thus far the strength of Scot's argument is to give us some new language to understand ourselves as evangelicals. Don't worry, he is not attacking the need for having a salvation/conversion experience, he is instead challenging the idea that the Gospel=Salvation. Since the word "evangelical" has its roots in the Greek word for "gospel", we can easily assume that we practice church in an gospel-centered way. Instead he invites us to consider that we are really a "salvation culture" instead of a "gospel culture." Because of our myopic focus on the salvation/conversion experience, we have stripped the ...