The Relational Mission

"The mission of the Church is to be understood, can only be rightly understood, in terms of the trinitarian model. It is the Father who holds all things in his hand, whose province upholds all things, whose tender mercies are aver all his works, where he is acknowledged and where he is denied, and who has never left himself without witness to the heart and conscience and reason of any human being. In the incarnation of the Son, he has made known his nature and purpose fully and completely, for in Jesus "all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell (Col 1:19). But his presence was veiled presence in order that there might be the possibility of repentance and freely given faith. In the Church the mission of Jesus is continued in the same veiled form. It is continued through the presence and active working of the Holy Spirit, who is the presence of the reign of God in foretaste. The mission of the Church to all the nations, to all human communities in all their diversity and in ...

Last week I posted a video that was developed by The Table in Minneapolis. They developed this for a retreat I am doing for them in October. This week I wrote a study guide to go with this video. Click here to watch the video and download the study guide. Might I suggest that you use this video and study guide this way: If you want your group to take new steps to join God in his mission, use these as for the discussion time during a meeting. And if the group wants to explore this further after that discussion, you can use the Study Guide for Missional Small Groups . All of this is free.

Recently, I realized that this marks the fourth time that I have moved to Houston and the third time that I have lived in this specific area of West Houston. It hit me how I need to reengage this local environment, to pay attention to the specific life of this neighborhood. This is a challenge because life in modern society is not usually lived locally. With the web, Twitter, global news, franchise restaurants, etc., life is anything but local. While reflecting on this, I've been reading a book by Wendell Berry. In it he wrote, "Because they [early Americans] belonged to no place, it was almost inevitable that they should behave violently toward the places they came to. We still have not, in any meaningful way, arrived in America. And in spite of our great reservoir of facts and methods, in comparison to the deep earthly wisdom of established peoples we still know but little." (The Art of the Commonplace, 11) This is a reflection on how the early Americans treated t...

Once while sitting in a pediatric doctor's waiting room, I read an article that a baby will have his or her diaper changed an average 3700 times. This means that by the time all four of our kids are out of diapers, we will have changed about 15000 wet and stinky, mushy wads of fiber. Ugh! In a sermon I preached a few weeks ago, I spoke on Making a Difference .  I was making the point about how our everyday, mundane choices make a difference, that we can advance the Kingdom of God in what we might assume as insignificant. I was trying to confront the myth that only the big choices make a difference. While I was preaching I said something like, "My attitude while changing a diaper makes a difference." This statement was not in my notes. It just came out of my mouth and I almost had to stop myself while preaching and think more about what I was saying. I can choose to have a complaining attitude while serving my children or I can use this act as a prompter to pray for them...

“We look at what has been given to us in our Scriptures and in Jesus and try to understand why we have a church in the first place, what the church, as it is given to us, is. We are not a utopian community. We are not God’s avenging angels. I want to look at what we have, what the church is right now, and ask, Do you think that maybe this is exactly what God intended when he created the church? Maybe the church as we have it provides the very conditions and proper company congenial for growing up in Christ, for becoming mature, for arriving at the measure of the stature of Christ. Maybe God knows what he is doing, giving us church, this church. (Eugene Peterson, Practice Resurrection , 14). I love this passage from Peterson but I also have a distain for it. He brings us as leaders into the realm of sober reality while not leaving us to settle for reality as we know it. Too many writers and speakers about the church are in the business of talking about an ideal utopia. They pull on ou...

Well, we have landed in H-town. And besides the heat, we are settling in quite well. We have done the normal things: Unload moving truck and put all in storage. Find preschool for kids. Register kids in elementary school. Try to make the kids feel secure in the transition. Try to feel secure in the transition ourselves. Do paperwork and more paperwork. Finalize some details on our house which will be ready in September. This week, Shawna started her job at the church. I start my part-time role as an Equipping Pastor next week when the kids go back to school. I'm getting my Fall consulting/training schedule organized. And I'm developing a phone coaching process where I set up monthly hour-long conversations to work with pastors and help them either with the implementation of a missional church strategy or with the development of small groups. Everyday life stretches our faith in God but it's during times like this that my faith gets stretched. What is stretching you to...

I've been asked to write a blog post where I share something innovative in small group thinking, some idea that will help churches advance small groups in new ways. I am excited to contribute an idea. I do have a few. However I find myself fighting with myself as I write about innovative small group ideas. King Solomon once said that there is nothing new under the sun. Every time I read a book or blog that promotes some kind of new idea that will revolutionize small groups, I'm quite cautious. I've yet to find any new small group idea that is really new. I'm even cautious about my own new ideas. What I have found is that most of the small group fruit that I have experienced is the result of some very basic principles that are as old as Moses. Groups flourish in an atmosphere: of prayer, which causes me to ask if churches today depend upon programming more than they do upon prayer. of life together, where people connect in healthy relationships, but most people a...

I must admit that baseball is my favorite sport. Sometimes I wonder if circumstances had been different if I could have made it in the sport. But alas, I am just an admirer of the game and those who stumble along to excel at this difficult game. Recently, I realized how the game of baseball is a kind of parable for how the Kingdom of God is manifest. Here are some reasons: Baseball games happen almost every day, as opposed to less frequently in most other sports. It's not about huge up times followed by long periods of down times. Baseball is comprised of tons of small, almost imperceivable actions stacked on top of one another. Games are won and lost based on these small things, not on big huge, spectacular moments. Success in baseball depends upon those who can deal with failure the best. Think about it: if a hitter is successful 1/3 of the time, he will be in the Hall of Fame. Baseball allows individuals to stand out and contribute their unique talents in obvious ways. ...

I'm doing some training in October with a church in Edina, MN. The funny thing is that the church is only about 30 minutes from where I used to live. Anyway, The Table is the name of the church and they are holding a retreat for which they developed a video to promote. I was so impressed by their promotion which you can view here that I asked them if they would do some slight modifications to use. The first time I saw this, I cried. I was moved by the fact that the Spirit was revealing a missional imagination to these leaders. Explore the More from Jeff D. Johnson on Vimeo .

“The fact that Christian faith becomes increasingly a matter of personal decision can be misunderstood to mean that Christianity is concerned only with the narrow range of personal moral problems. When this happens, there is a grave danger that the Gospel may be mistaken for a mere offer of individual and private salvation, like the mystery religions which were its rivals during the first centuries of its mission. … The Gospel is concerned with something greater, with the redemption of the world, including precisely those realms of human life which are being so drastically secularized in our day. (Newbigin, Trinitarian Doctrine for Today’s Mission, 60). This sounds good. It resembles things we have heard in the Bible. But if truth be told, it is hard for most Western Christians to even begin to think about the Gospel and salvation in these terms. Salvation is most often seen as a personal experience that we have so that we have a personal relationship with Jesus, deal with our moral p...

“The difference is that these churches must now ‘package’ their spiritual ‘values’ in accordance with the dictates of the market, which means that they must effectively vacate the specifically Christian content of their life and language.             Under the terms of this agreement, whatever it means to be a Christian can no longer be tied to the practices that constitute the church as a social body visibly, publicly manifesting the intrusion of God’s apocalyptic regime into the world, but must be limited to mattes of the soul, leaving the body to the authority of the powers and economic principalities of the age. Christian identity and church authority are thus disembodied, relegated to a separate sphere of private life, transvalued into ‘religion,’ that is, habits and practices that are useful for both depicting the mysterious and invisible whole taht is the body politic of the modern state and global market, and also for c...