The Relational Mission

God did not call us to be heroes. He did not challenge us to be zealots. And he did not invite us to be radicals. Instead he renamed us. He called us "saints," that is holy or set apart for him. Think of it this way: to be holy is a bit like those special dishes that were passed down to your mom that you only used once a year at Christmas. They were distinct from the everyday. They were treated with special care. God's church, God's people, are his group of saints, God's advertisement to the world. Of course we don't look like saints. And by the way, neither did the people in churches during the first century, but Paul addressed them as "God's holy ones" nonetheless.  However, we live with the myth that the success of the church depends upon us. And since we are far from looking like saints, the clarion call to heroic Christianity, to zealous discipleship and to radical mission looks so appealing to serious Christians. Being that the av...

Over the last couple of posts , I’ve been reflecting on the parable of the wine and the wineskins. In Luke’s version, there is a sentence not found in either Matthew or Mark. It reads: “No one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the new wine will burst the skins; the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, new wine must be poured into new wineskins. And no one after drinking old wine wants new, for they say, ‘The old is better.’” (Luke 5:37-39). The final sentence is unique to Luke and for this reason it deserves special attention. On the surface, it seems to confused the issue because the ending is not about new wineskins but about the wine. And it's saying that the old wine is better. The final sentence of a parable like this is crucial to understanding it. It’s a bit like the punch line of a joke. If you skip it, the meaning changes. For the longest time, I concluded that Jesus is contradicting himself since he said that the new wine is less...

In the last post , I discussed Jesus' comments about putting new wine into new wineskins. Here, I want to continue this conversation because the issues concerning the way of life in a church (wine) and the structures of the church (wineskin) are much more complex than they might appear or than we like them to be. I've found that most of us prefer a plan, a method that has proven effective elsewhere, and if we learn how to make that method (the wineskin) work then I will get similar results. For instance, we might read a book like Reggie McNeal's Missional Communities and survey the various new ways that churches are grouping in order to promote creative forms of community and mission. We pick the one we like the best and then try to copy their methods. We can learn much from experiments and creative structures that have been developed in other churches. In fact, one of the best ways to help people catch a vision for a different of being the church is to observe it ...

When I was in my early twenties, I started working for an organization that helped pastors wrestle with questions about how we experience community and mission in the church. More specifically, we focused on how we need to rethink the structures of the church in order to help the church see different results. In those days, my focus lay on castigating old church structures in order to make a way for newer, more flexible, more organic forms of church life. Over the last 25 years, there have been many who have promoted different structural options for how we can organize the church differently. Some include: cell church, meta-church, church of small groups, the post-denominational church, organic churches, movement churches, and post-congregational churches. All of these options have at one point or another claimed that the old way of doing church is dying and this new structure is "the" way of the church's future. Along the way, the school of hard knocks has taught me a ...