You are currently browsing the monthly archive for December, 2007.
President of Biblical Seminary, David Dunbar, has some great insights in the periodic Missional Journal. Sign up for e-letters here.
Here are some recommended CP manuals on the nuts and bolts of planting.
Gary Rohrmayer has planted tons of churches and wrote a helpful course called First Steps: Missional Church Planting. First Steps is strong on the nuts and bolts and guides the planter through six stages of the first year of missional church planting. These stages include:
- Relating to God and Others
- Networking and Gathering
- Building a Launch Team
- Designing Worship Services and Ministry Strategies
- Launching Public Services
- Establishing the New Community and its Ministries
Another one of its strengths is that it is principle, not model driven. So, it accommodates a variety of models and encourages contextualization. Though the course is launch driven, some of the templates for budgets, position descriptions, financial accountability, etc are helpful jumping off points. You can also purchase a membership at CoachNet that allows electronic access to the entire workbook and PDFs and take the course.
Redeemer Planting Manual
Tim Keller’s Redeemer Church Planting Manual is incredibly strong on missiology and philosophy of ministry. If you really want to know how to become lead missionary that cultivates a church of missionaries, follow Tim’s approach. At times, it is overwhelming (and I have background in Anthropology!), but there are a lot of riches to be found in this manual.
Church Planters Toolkit
Bob Logan’s Church Planters Toolkit is a standby that offers a lot of pracitcal helps and is used by the Evangelica Free Church. Logan has actually transformed some of his personal convictions about methodology and is now planting more organically. He co-wrote an expensive book on this with Neil Cole called Beyond Church Planting.
Dynamic Church Planting Handbook
Dynamic Church Planting Handbook is built around strong theological and pastoral foundations, but with modern methods. I found myself continually challenged to rely on the Holy Spirit, plant in spirtual health, and plant for the Glory of God when reading this manual. Some of the nuts and bolts were disappointing, however.
January 28-31 I will be heading out to TEDS for Acts 29 Coaches Training and church planter assessment. I am excited about learning how to coach others in this incredibly challenging task of planting churches. A noteworthy resource made available to coaching candidates is Coachnet. Check it out.
And for an potential church planters reading this, there is a A29 bootcamp that week featuring Mark Driscoll, Ed Stetzer, Mark Dever and Darrin Patrick, and potentially D.A. Carson.
I am increasingly influenced by Lamin Sanneh’s work on gospel and culture. In his new book, Disciples of All Nations he well frames the gospel and culture issue as it relates to nationalism:
How can Christianity maintain its commitment to culture, insofar as culture embodies faith in a concrete way, while avoiding the sort of cultural idolatry that fuses truth claims and exclusive national ideals? How is cultural commitment compatible with religious openness? The history of Christianity, it has to be admitted, demonstrates an uneven record in balancing cultural specificity and theological normativeness, and the field is littered with failed attempts at reconciling Christ and culture.
This is particularly apropros during the Xmas season, when so much of Christmas is associated with national-cultural values and practices, straying far from the faith and truth of the gospel. How do you retain theological normativeness within our culture while avoiding idolatry?
NY Times published a MegaChurch map.
HT: JT
The Organic Church Movements Conference with Neil Cole and Alan Hirsch will be held next in Ontario on Feb 8-10. Here are a few of the workshops:
- Organic Church Urban Strategies PaTransition or Transfusion: Conventional Churches Moving to Organic ChurchCoaching Organic Church Leaders
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- Organic Church and the tough Question of the Gay Community
- From the Campus to the Marketplace: Organic Student led Movements Bridge into the Workforce
- Church planting Movements in a Postmodern Context
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Check out this review of Timmis and Chester’s The World We All Want (authors of Total Church). The reviewer highlights three mains strengths to this evangelistic approach: 1) gospel presented in the wider context of the Biblical story 2) emphasis on conversion into community, not making “the church” optional 3) Jesus centered. Here is an excerpt of the review:
I particularly liked the manner in which God’s people are described in session seven as “a waiting community, a proclaiming community, a loving community.” It’s been reported recently that many people on the street are cool with Jesus, but have a problem with the church. TWWAW demonstrates that you can’t have the bridegroom without his bride, nipping that particular problem in the bud.
Sure, there all kinds of ways to plant a church–traditional, missional, hive-off, or some mix of the three–but it is the missional church that I am particularly trying to plant. As a result, what we do and how we do it do not fit traditional paradigms, like forecasting numbers and certain types of goal-setting, which tend to force missional ecclesiology into a traditional, measurable mold.
Alan Roxburgh’s recent work articulates my particular struggle to plant a missional-incarnational church within a modernist-traditional atmosphere:
Alan Roxburgh says: “…leaders who want to cultivate missional communities in transition must set aside goal-setting and strategic planning as their primary model. Leadership in this context is not about forecasting, but about the formation of networks of discourse among people. It’s about the capacity to engage the realities of people’s lives and contexts in dialogue with Scripture” The Sky is Falling?! (89).
HT: JR
Barna Group has identified four mega trends from the last quarter of 2007: 1) Americans’ unconditional self-love; 2) designer faith with rootless values; 3) the five Ps of parenting; and 4) nouveau Christianity. Click here for explanation.
We hard-pressed to find a better missiologist in our day than Andrew Walls. Though Walls has not written prolifically, he makes up for it in the profoundity of his work. He has written two landmark books that explore the relationship between history, missions, and theology: The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in Transmission of Faith and The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History along with a number of articles.
Former missionary to Sierra Leone and Nigeria, Walls later served as director of the Centre for the study of Christianity in the Non-Western world, at the University of Edinburgh. In an article appearing in IBMR 2004, Walls explores the difference between proselytes and converts in the Early Church.
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