The Relational Mission

It seems to me that there are different categories when it comes the missional conversation: Programmatic Community Transformation (Externally-Driven Church by Rusaw) Using Contextualization for Church Effectiveness through cultural relevance (Decoding the Missional Church by Stetzer) The operating around a clear mission for the church (Church Unique by Mancini) Organic, grass-roots church life that has no resemblance to traditional churches (Hirsch, Frost, Cole, Halter) A pure pattern for church life based around pre-Constitinian church life (Hirsch, House Church movement) I believe that the work we are doing at Allelon is seeking to articulate something different than all of these. We building the communication around the theme of developing a people who participate with God in His life which is incarnational in nature. Through this incarnation reality, God enters our world by the Spirit through the practical act of dialogue between the people of God and the context.  This is distinc...

I have just read a couple of books (Externally Fucused Church, The Intentional Church, and the Church of Irresistable Influence. on how churches can have an impact on the community. Two things stand out to me that are in contrast to the approach we are taking at Woodland. First, there is an emphasis on how to get people assimilated into the church events instead of empowering the church to be brought to life in the mist of the neighborhoods. Therefore, the image is that church is something at the center and ministry in the neighborhood is separate from the "real" church. This seems to fall short of an incarnational model of church life.  The second thing is that the ministries in the neighborhoods are programmatically driven. The imagination is about how a church can develop (or work with external programs) programs to meet needs in the context. This seems to be driven by the center of the church organization instead of something that arises out of the context. The church set...

Milfred Minatrea, Shaped by God's Heart: The Passion and Practices of Missional Churches (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004) The imagination that shapes this book is built around a list of nine characteristics of churches that are viewed as missional. While there is nothing wrong necessarily with these nine characteristics, the book implies that if a church develops their ability to do these nine things that they will also become missional. This approach is based upon some assumptions about how churches work and how leadership works in our culture. These assumptions are founded on a modernistic point of view of "analyze, plan, control, and produce." This is a mechanistic view of how churches are developed. But that is not the way things work in the church or in leadership. One cannot attain a list of the top ten characteristics of the most effective companies in America, copy them and then expect to become like those companies.  In addition, I can imagine an attracti...

Ed Stetzer and David Putman, Breaking the Missional Code: Your Church Can Become a Missionary in Your Community (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2006) This book is communicates well, but what it communicates about the missional church is quite misleading. It speaks well to the current church leadership audience because it works within the imagination of that audience. It operates from a realistic understanding of the pluralistic nature of Western culture. However, what the authors do with this understanding revolves around the question of what it means to be a successful church in this situation. All of the churches cited in the book are large. They mentions repeatedly the need for culturally relevant church services as opposed to doing church services according to the preferences of the membership. and there is a focus on doing contextual ministry to grow churches. Two years ago, I would have thought these things good to promote, but now I see the problem. There is nothing h...

The Present Future proposes six questions that the church should be asking. These six questions are set in contrast to six standard questions that are typically asked by churches. The typical questions are: 1. How do we do church better? 2. How do we grow this church? 3. How do we turn members into ministers? 4. How do we develop church members? 5. How do we plan for the future? 6. How do we develop leaders for church work? The proposed questions are? 1. How do we deconvert from churchianity to Christianity? 2. How do we transform our community? 3. How do we turn members into missionaries? 4. How do we develop followers of Jesus? 5. How do we prepare for the future? 6. How do we develop leaders for the Christian movement? While there is much to be stated in the positive for these proposed questions and even for the material written to support the argument, there is a major flaw in the imaginative paradigm that shapes this book. The proposals offered in t...

Roxburgh, Alan. Reaching a New Generation: Strategies for Tomorrow's Church (IVP, 1993). Alan wrote this book about 3 years before I met him in Vancouver. This little book is an incredible introduction to the imagination of those on a missional journey. To be quite honest, I never got this book's message while working with Alan at West Vancouver Baptist Church. I was too arrogant. I thought I knew how the church should operate, how it should work. I had the model down and I assumed that Alan's perspective was just a simple advancement of what I saw as THE biblical way of doing church.  But getting into the imagination of this book has baptized me into a new view of the Gospel and the purpose of the church in this world. This book challenges the arrogance of the church that is based on the assumption that we know that the world needs, that evangelism is giving people answers to questions whether or not they are asking them. We have a package that is wrapped up in mul...

Boersma, Hans. Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004). This is the second book I have read by a Regent College theologian lately with which I find myself in great agreement. This is refreshing, being that this was not the case while I was there. Packer was stuck in the age of the Puritans and Grenz was still quite baptistic while I was there. And they were just both quite boring and non-constructive in their theology. Boersma is quite different though. While not opting for being theologically novel, he is generative and creative. In some ways, in his advocating of all the three historic metaphors of the atonement, he wants to have his cake and eat it too. He synthesizes them around a larger metaphor of the hospitality of God. But this is no the open, unlimited hospitality of the pacifists (Yoder, Hauerwas) or of post-modern thought (Derrida, Levinas). Nor is the "limited hospitality" of the Ca...

It has taken me a long time to set up a blog and write my first one. This is weird because in many things in my life I am an innovator. I had to have the first color Mac laptop. It may have weighed more than my four year old son, and the screen was not much bigger than my phone screen now, but I had it. I remember taking it on a plane with me to London, writing my first thoughts about the nature of biblical community. I am not sure what I wrote at the age of 23. I am sure they were profoundly informed. Ha! Even now I feel I am struggling to find words for the call God has on our lives in the church. I feel like a wilderness wanderer who is no longer satisfied with institutional forms of church life, but is still trying to find the new rhythm of being God's people in this age. At times, I have felt like I had a clear picture of what it looks like, but then I realize there is another piece that is undeveloped.  Recently, I have come to realize how small groups have been used to prop ...