The Relational Mission

  John Howard Yoder is most known for his theological work in ethics and non-violence. However, from 1964-1983, Yoder taught a class on theology of mission. This book is a editorial revision of the recorded lectures from that class. While the content pre-dates the current missional conversation initiated by Lesslie Newbigin and furthered by the publication of Missional Church , edited by Darrel Guder, et al., it’s message is a prophetic and welcomed voice to the missional conversation. Yoder’s theology interprets mission through the perspective of what he calls “believer’s church.” As is consistent with the rest of Yoder’s body of work, he works through his chosen topic from an Anabaptistic perspective. His contributions add considerable weight to the conversation of mission in the North American context. Some of these contributions include the following. First, Yoder emphasizes the importance of the dynamics of the church as faithful covenant partners to mission in the world....

I really like this book, especially the first half. We need more theological reflection about the mission of God and the church. And Ross has given us a gift to help us along this journey. The strength of this book is found in some of the individual nuggets throughout, especially those that speak to a missional understanding of God's nature. I found myself wanting more for a theology for how this plays out in the midst of culture and therefore a more developed pneumatology, but then the book would have been twice as long. Because my book is marked up throughout, I thought one of the best ways to highlight the perspective of the book is to list some of the quotes I found most helpful. Instead of a normal review, this is an "un-review" but through this, I think you will get a feel for the point of view the book takes.  “The working out of this coinherence of the works of the divine persons in the church will ensure that its mission is reimagined as commitment: to being ...

I read tons of books. Literally. Through the years, I've found that I naturally I put books into one of five categories. Books to ignore. These are just not worth the time. Books to argue with. These help you see that with which you disagree and therefore help clarify convictions. Books to enjoy. I tend to put novels here, but I also find good non-fiction works fall into this group. Books that inform convictions. I have about 20 books to which I return consistently to help guide my thinking. Books to ingest, absorb and allow to shape me.  There are very few that fall in this last group. These are the kind of books one reads, re-reads, and reads again every couple of years. These are books to live with and live out. These tend to speak to the "heart" first and the head second, whereas the "inform convictions" books tend to speak to my "head" first. On my list include books like Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Works of Love by Kierkegaar...

There is a growing plethora of books on the market for small group leaders. Right now, I'm even in middle of writing a new book that will add to that list. Some books speak to the overall health and vision of a small group. Others are great at providing an overview and vision for group life. Different books offer different things. The one thing that group leaders most often want to know—especially those who are relatively new to group leadership—is the answer to this question: How can I lead a meeting well? The book that I've recommended on this question is How to Lead a Great Small Group Meeting by Joel Comiskey. Now I've got an additional title that has some unique, helpful features. It's entitled Field Guide for Small Group Leaders by Sam O'Neal. While the book is not limited to information about leading a meeting, that's where it's emphasis and strengths lie. It is a compelling read as it covers all of the necessary basics that small group leader...

Every church has a culture, a way of life that defines how things are done and not done. A culture dictates those unspoken norms that no one even knows how to talk about. It’s just the way things are. Just as a fish cannot explain what water is like because the water is the world of the fish, so the culture of a local congregation is the world of that congregation. So what happens when leaders discover that they need to change the culture of their church? What happens when leaders have their eyes opened to the fact that their congregation is falling short of being on mission with God? What do leaders do in order to reshape the culture so that they can be more than a church that happens to do “missional” things and actually become a new kind of “missional” culture ? Well, first  start with JR Woodward’s book Creating a Missional Culture . This a a great introduction to how culture works within a church setting. JR provides helpful handles that help you get beneath the surface ...

What does it mean to develop a spirituality that is dispersed into the life we lead seven days a week? What does it mean to move beyond the kind of spirituality that most Western Christians have developed, the kind that Helland and Hjalmarson call “temple spirituality”? In Missional Spirituality , they write, “Temple spirituality is dualistic: Sunday is sacred while Monday through Saturday are secular. Temple spirituality views God as a church-based deity whom we worship once per week, but Jesus was a seven-days-a-week mobile Messiah” (27). Missional spirituality is the metaphorical phrase that the authors use to capture this seven-day-a-week life with God, a phrase that many could easily misunderstand because the term “missional” is being used today to mean so many different things. Everyone, it seems, wants to be missional, but so many can miss the meaning. For instance, it might be tempting to think that this book would be synonymous to something like "evangelistic spritual...

Do we do small groups for community? For the fellowship? To close the "back door?" To get 100% of our people involved? For evangelistic growth? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. And Yes. But might there be a deeper motivation? In her book Community is Messy , Heather Zempel challenges us to go deeper than all of these. She wants us to grow up. She calls us to allow community to shape our lives. She invites us into a life of discipleship that deals with reality. She writes, "Community is messy because it always involves people, and people are mess. It's about people hauling their brokenness and baggage into your house and dumping it in your living room" (24). We offer our messes to one another not to wallow in them , but to grow as disciples together. This is made especially clear in her chapter entitled "Discipleship is Not Linear." She challenges us to think about how people really grow instead of trying to fit people into a one-size-fits-all process. She wri...

The following is the foreword which I wrote for the excellent book Small Group Vital Signs by Michael Mack. For those of you who don't know, he is the guy who founded www.smallgroups.com about 20 years ago. He is an experienced pastor, and he knows what it takes to develop healthy groups. Let me bottom line this: Get this book on small groups and read it. You won't regret it. BTW-You can also take a free online assessment that helps you measure these vital signs in your group: Here's my foreword: Small groups are part of life. I cannot remember a time in my life where there was not some form of small group. From the Kindergarten classroom organization, to lunchroom experience where we sought out the place where “my” people sat, to team sports . . . small groups are everywhere. And from my experience they were always a part of church life too. It just happened in what we called Sunday school. We also had home Bible studies and committees. Because small groups are p...

I've had Missional Communities sitting on my desk for a few weeks screaming at me to review it. I've started reading Reggie McNeal's stuff years ago and have always been encouraged by what he writes. As with the rest, I was not disappointed by this one. The subtitle of the book is "The Rise of the Post-Congregational Church" which might cause some to assume that he is advocating an "anti-congregational" approach to church methodology. Refreshingly, he does not take a contrarian stance. Instead in this book, he acts as an observer of what is going on in forms of church life that intersect "people in the middle of life--in their homes, their workplaces, their leisure pursuits, and their passions to help others" (xx). At the same time, he does contrast this approach to church against the congregation-centric methodologies that dominate our imagination. These points of contrast are helpful for the sake of clarification especially since the t...

In 1993, I started working for Ralph Neighbour Jr., the man whom some have dubbed the Father of the Cell Church. His 1990 book Where Do We Go From Here? sold over 120,000 copies domestically and was translated into numerous languages. In the 1990s the cell church was a huge hit. It was hard for us to keep up with all the work of helping churches develop cell groups. Now in the US, the cell church is viewed as a fad that has passed. Sadly, during the 1990s, cell church got associated with the mega-church/church growth focus and now it has been written off as passe. Overseas, it is a different story. My former colleague, Jim Egli, spent three years writing training modules for church leaders who wanted to transition to the cell church approach. Recently we learned that Robert Lay, the leader of the cell church movement in Brazil is still using that training and will lead 1000s of pastors through it over the next year. While the tendency in America for fad hopping has led church lead...

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 ...

Recently, I read Michael Frost's new book The Road to Missional . I assumed, from its title, that it would be a book about how a church moves along the road to becoming missional. But that's not really the case. I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that the book places a great emphasis on evangelism, specifically sharing the Gospel with unbelievers. For some reason the topic of evangelism from a missional perspective is not been much of a focus. The reasons are many, including the fact that the evangelical church has spent so much time talking about how to talk to unbelievers that we have not spent nearly as much energy on how to "be" the church on mission for the sake of redemption of the world. So during the last decade, there has been much ink spilled over the call of the church to be on mission and not just talk about how to lead people to a point of praying a conversion prayer. In addition, the missional conversation has rightly challenged the individualist...

When I first started working with groups, there were not many resources of small groups or how to oversee an effective small group system. Now, there are so many, it's hard to keep up. Let me suggest six books released in the last year and a website that will help you establish or build your small group system. For Developing Groups that have Missional Focus (Unashamedly, these are both by me.) • Missional Small Groups by M.Scott Boren • MissioRelate: Becoming a Church of Missional Small Groups by M. Scott Boren For Getting People in Your Church Connected in Groups • Small Groups with Purpose by Steve Gladen • Connecting in Communities by Eddie Mosley • Lots of articles on www.markhowelllive.com For Understanding the Group Dynamics that result in Health and Growth • Small Group Big Impact by Jim Egli and Dwight Marable • Make Your Group Grow by Josh Hunt

I read the draft of this book about four years ago. I found myself making another paradigm shift as I read it. As I followed Alan's personal struggle with what it means to be missional, I realized that I had missed what "missional" actually means. I had thought, along with most, that missional is about a new way of being the church. Afterall, the church is our "mother" and God's bride. At that point, I was working with Alan to get this book published. As I pitched the idea of this book to the editor, he said that it sounds like it is "putting mission into missional." This is exactly what it does. It challenges our church-centric focus and invites us to join God in his mission to redeem all of creation. Of course the church has a role in what God is doing in the world, but God's dream is much bigger than just having missional churches. He wants to empower his church for the sake of engaging the world on mission. To do this, Roxburgh invites ...

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...