Tag Archives: missional

Values Based Business

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The development of Seventh Generation’s global imperatives began with a question: What is Seventh Generation uniquely able to do that the world most needs? It’s a question that lies at the heart of our beliefs about the purpose and possibility of business.

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mugscafe Values Based Business
While that may seem reaching for a new church plant looking to open a coffee shop. But is it?

Read more HERE about the imperatives that drive us. Let us know what you think in the comments.

What are the imperatives that guide you as a follower of Jesus in your vocation?

Little Rock Sister Cities

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cityoflr logo lrscc Little Rock Sister CitiesChangchun, China
Hanam City, South Korea
Kaohsiung, Taiwan
Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK
Pachuca, Mexico
Ragusa, Italy

Not places one usually thinks of when they hear “Little Rock.” Yet these are her sister cities.

According to the Little Rock Sister Cities Commission’s web site:

The Little Rock Sister Cities Commission works to foster relationships between Little Rock and its Sister Cities to promote mutual cross-cultural understanding and exchanges. The commission will cultivate this environment by serving as a conduit for potential business and educational collaboration and offering unique experiences in international arts and culture.

Now imagine local churches engaging in this natural rhythm of relationships in order to develop long-term global partnerships.

Marketplace leaders in your church participating in economic development and cultural exchange.

Educators engaging in the marketplace of ideas.

Artists walking with other artists fostering conversation around beauty and the gospel.

Youth traveling to one of these cities to serve as an ambassador.

Billy Mitchell on The Upstream Collective blog puts it this way:

Put practical feet on this great concept by finding those in your city who are passionate about a laser-focused, long-term global partnership with a city for the Kingdom’s sake. This might start with people in your church family, but does not need to be restricted to them; this is about the church of your city advancing the Kingdom in a global city.

All too often, we look at the sea of need in the world and become overwhelmed and do nothing or attempt to do everything and thereby accomplish nothing. Therefore, why not simply participate in the established rhythms of global engagement in your city.

Click HERE for a directory of sister cities organized by state.

Incarnational Presence

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Eucharist media 141692 2 590x395 Incarnational Presence

We do not relate to God as a person on the first floor of a building relates to a person on the second floor. Rather, in the incarnation, God has written himself into the story of this world. In the incarnation, God left the culture of heaven to enter the culture of man, to bring redemption and restoration. We are called to do the same.

In John 17:15-19, we see Jesus pray three things in His high priestly prayer: (1) Do not take them out of the world, (2) keep them from the evil one; sanctify them in the truth, and (3) send them into the world. Most believers readily grasp the idea of Jesus being sent to the world. The fact that Jesus was the “sent one” is one of the most fundamental identifications of Jesus. The issue is to realize that as Jesus was “sent,” His prayer is that we would also be “sent.” The concept of a missional church is recognition that God is a sending God and we, the church and individual believers, are to live sent. Our sent and sending identity is connected with the very existence of the church.

The old adage was this: If you preached to believers, you were called a “pastor.” If you preached to non-Christians in your own culture, you were an “evangelist.” If you needed a passport to get there, you were a “missionary.” This is not helpful. All Christians are missionaries or they are not Christians. The only kind of Christian there is, is missionary.

Jesus had to be God to be able to lift us out of our sin, but had to be fully human to create the right conditions for such redemption to take place. It is from inside the human condition and experience that God fulfills his own requirements for the salvation of the human race. The incarnation embodies an act of profound identification with the entire human race. In an act of unspeakable humility, God actually takes upon himself all the conditions, even the limitations, the struggles, and doubts of humanity.

To identify incarnationally with a people will mean that we must try to enter into something of the cultural life of a people; to seek to understand their perspectives, their hurt, their real existence, in such a way as to genuinely reflect the act of identification that God made with us in Jesus. Furthermore, the coming of God among us was in Jesus constituted a “dwelling” among us (John 1:14) and geography itself took on a sacred meaning. Jesus became Jesus of what? Nazareth. Geography matters. If we want to incarnate the Gospel in a particular setting, we will have to think about “dwelling” in that setting.

Incarnation implies a sending impulse rather than one of “extraction.” In other words, we cannot and should not seek to extract people from their social circles in order to become a part of the church community. God is a missionary. He sent his Son into our world, into our lives, into human history. Incarnation implies some form of sending in order to be able to radically incarnate the various contexts in which we live.

Missional Bible Study Questions

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question mark 393x590 Missional Bible Study Questions

“The questions one asks will define the answers one gets” (Treasure in Clay Jars, p. 71). If so, we need to look carefully at the sorts of questions we ask when we study the Bible. If we grow in the direction of what we ask questions about, then what and how we study will shape both how we experience the world and how we interpret Scripture. The Gospel and Our Culture Network has been experimenting with a different set of questions to guide personal and small group Bible study. They suggest that an alternative approach is necessary since “it is possible to be biblically centered, to expect and to experience biblical preaching, and not to be a church that acknowledges, much less practices, its missional calling. This is the crisis and the dilemma of much of the Western church. It is possible to study the Scriptures in such a way that its central emphasis upon formation for mission is missed” (p. 60).

The following are the five questions which can be raised and addressed in order to help us shift to a missionally orientated approach to a specific biblical text.

A. CONTEXT: How does this text read us and our world?

There has been considerable emphasis in recent years on what the reader brings to the text, and on the reader as interpreter of the text — it is now common to have readings of Scriptures from various angles of “social location” (eg., from the vantage point of ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation). This question reverses the logic by NOT asking how we read the text, given our assumptions, but rather, how does the text read us and our assumptions! What does a given text have to say about us, our assumptions, our values, our culture, our world? How do we see ourselves if Scripture is the story of God and God’s truthful dealings with the world? How do we locate ourselves within this story?

B. GOSPEL: How does this text evangelize us with good news?

The assumption here is that all of Scripture is the story of God’s good news, and that the Gospel principles of God’s initiative in grace to bring all nations under the reign of God permeates both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament. This means that, without convoluted and forced exegesis, we should find Good News in the whole Bible. This assumes that the role of the Bible in personal and corporate life is to speak Good News to us, day after day, week after week. This does not reduce to an altar call at every Sunday service!.

C. CHANGE: How does this text convert us in personal and corporate life?

The assumption here is that all Christians are called as disciples to ongoing transformation as disciples, and GOCN writings sometimes use the metaphor of “continuing conversion” (1) to speak of this process. Note that the question is framed in terms of personal AND corporate life. My observation is that most evangelical preaching aims at applications that are private or individual, rather than corporate. A key assumption here is that the church itself needs to be converted to the gospel — not just non-churchgoers — to become a Gospel-centered community.

D. MISSION: How does this text send us and equip our witness?

Assumes that the Bible is a text designed for the purpose of forming communities for mission, and assumes that God is a missionary God who calls and empowers a people to himself so that they would be his witnesses. Assumes that the Gospel sends us, as individuals and communities, to be witnesses in word and deed — and that to be equipped for this task we need to be transformed by the Gospel (cf. Eph. 4).

E. FUTURE: How does this text orient us to the coming reign of God?

Assumes that central to God’s mission is the establishment of his Kingdom, a righteous rule that establishes reconciliation, justice and peace. The Kingdom is already underway but not yet consummated. Assumes that God’s people are already participants in the distinctive ways of the Kingdom, and will become partakers of its full expression in God’s time. This question deliberately opens up the eschatological horizon of Scripture, and helps us to see texts about the fulfillment of God’s purposes.

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1. This discussion is best seen in Darrell L. Guder, The Continuing Conversion of the Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000).

Planting Missionaries

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argentacommunitytheater Planting Missionaries

The most common questions I get as a church planter are: (1) Where is your church? and (2) When do you meet?

While there is nothing inherently wrong with these two questions, they make me cringe. And with all the respectable Christian politeness I can muster I usually respond with: “Church planting takes a long time and we just moved into the neighborhood in October.”

A few weeks ago, David Fitch wrote a helpful post that helped me flesh out our modis operandi in planting The Church @Argenta.

THE GOAL

We seek to plant a missionary community in the Argenta Arts District of North Little Rock that will result in a fresh expression of church sprouting.

Over against the patterns of franchise church planting where churches are either competitive, ordered towards extending a particular brand of church, or revising the church for relevancy, all of which caters to already existing Christians, we propose to embed missionaries to plant churches that will reach people outside of Christ with the gospel of the Kingdom. We believe all people are ultimately lost until they are reconciled to God and living their lives as life with God and His mission.

WHAT WE NEED

The planting of our leadership team in our context.

We know each other, our respective gifts/callings, and how they work complementarily. We will continually learn how to submit to Christ through submitting to each other as a model for discerning life with God in His Kingdom.

Funding for two years of salary.

During this time, we will seek to be an incarnational presence in the neighborhood while working toward opening a coffee shop. In two years we expect to be viable and sustainable without the need further support. The goal is not to have a financially self-sustaining church organization in 3 years. The goal is to have 3 financially sustainable missionaries/missionary couples inhabiting a context in 2 years.

We will then do the following:

Exegete. We will get to know relationally the nooks and crannies of this context by listening; by cultivating friendships; by learning to know where the hurts/needs are. We will be immersed in our context as a rhythm of everyday life.

Begin Inhabiting our Neighborhood. By building strategies of living life with gospel intentionally.

Begin Rhythms of Mission. Having located places of hurt/need, we will join in. We shall be prepared to proclaim the gospel when the Spirit leads. Note: This could take years.

Begin a Rhythm of Discipleship: We will cultivate a discipleship practice among us.  We will work with and contextualize the Missio Life curriculum as means of developing a discipleship culture.

Begin Rhythms Together: We will practice the rhythms of blessing each other and our neighbors, eating with one another and our neighbors, listening to the voice of God together, learning together, and living sent as a way of life.

Start to Gather and Relate: We seek a renewal of the church as a whole by getting to know other church leaders in our context so as to work in concert with them. We refuse to take other followers of Jesus from their church home unless they have been specifically called by God and sent by their church to Argenta. However, we will invite other local churches to join in with various mission engagements we are doing.

I firmly believe that all of the above is to be carried out as a sustainable way of life, not as an excessive work of human effort that consumes and destroys people’s lives. Each leader is to order his/her life so that he/she can work in our coffee shop a minimum of 35 hours a week so that we cross paths with our context 7 days a week.

For these leaders there must be a commitment to live in the Argenta Arts District for ten years. If the leadership is committed to this, there will be a fresh expression of the church in this locale until the Kingdom is consummated in Christ’s return.

9 Game Changers in Global Mission

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Nine Game-Changers for Global Missions gives insight into trends shaping the future of mission, including:

■ The importance of cities

■ Mutuality

■ Partnering

■ Investing in leaders

■ Financial accountability

■ Focus

■ Combining good news & good deeds

■ Technology

■ Business as Mission

To read the full article from Eric Swanson click here.

I have written about the need for solidarity in global mission calling for many of the changes listed above in a paper for a class at Fuller which can be downloaded here.

Below is a video from Swanon

The Mission of the Church

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Like Almost M. This makes me tired.

I have not read DeYoung and Glibert’s book What Is the Mission of the Church?: Making Sense of Social Justice, Shalom, and the Great Commission and probably will not anytime soon.

With that said, much is going around the interwebs about this particular book.

Ed Stetzer has a lengthy review here, a list of other reviews here, and a response to a response to his review.

I’m getting tired.

Again, I have not read the book, but have read all of the reviews, summaries, and the like floating around the blogosphere, so I feel as if I can write, what you will read next.

The church does not have a mission!

The mission of the church is first and foremost God’s mission!

We simply join in what God is already doing in the world. Which by the way does not take a church or even me or you to accomplish.

Therefore, when I read statements like “The mission of the church, is to go into the world and make disciples by declaring the gospel of Jesus Christ in the power of the Spirit and gathering these disciples in churches, that they might worship the Lord and obey his commands now and in eternity to the glory of God the Father” (the thesis of the book) alongside “Is it the church’s mission to do city renewal, to do neighborhood revitalization, to eradicate poverty, to eliminate hunger, to raise the global standard of living? Of course, we all want to see this happen. But should we always expect to see this happen? Is this why God gathers weak and weary sinners into churches?” I want to stand up and scream at the top of my lungs. Because if God’s mission in the world is simply to gather people into churches then I quit!

If my own personal redemption and subsequent freedom from 10 years of hardcore, whiskey swillin, LSD dropping, freon huffing, weed smoking, cocaine snorting, shoving needles loaded with heroin into my arms addiction was to gather me into a Sunday morning service so I can listen to some guy preach, then I’m done!

The implications of the Gospel are so much more.

The purpose of the Church is so much more. Simply because a Church is present in a community, then YES the world around it should be substantially different than before it existed.

Because of my own encounter with the Gospel in 2001, I stepped away a completely different person. So if I can now join God to also see others encounter the Gospel so that they may see renewal, revitalization, and eradication of that which has them imprisoned, sign me up!

The schematics of the chicken or the egg do not matter when the eternal destinations of people are at stake.

30 Days of Good

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The GOOD blog is known for its challenges to simply do good. For the month of September, the GOOD Challenge theme is “Connect with People.” Past challenges implored readers to do one thing for a whole month.

The twist this month his is that it involves one new task per day such as saying hi to strangers, giving high-fives, and more. “The goal is to remind you not only of how tight-knit communities can be, but also how big the world is.”

The list so far….you can find each post/challenge HERE

1. Send Someone a Postcard
2. Have a Conversation with a Service Employee
3. Share an Old Photo with a Friend
4. Ask a Relative What They Did Today
5. Coordinate a Group Event
6. Get Coffee With a Co-Worker
7. Buy a Friend a Gift Under $5
8. Email a Twitter Pal
9. Video Chat with a Faraway Friend
10. Feed a Homeless Person
11. Do Something Nice for a Neighbor
12. Give Five High-Fives
13. Call Someone You Haven’t Talked to in Years
14. Say Hi to Three Strangers

The Sending Church Story

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My friends with The Upstream Collective have been collectors of stories for years. The Sending Church Story (excerpt below) is a sampling of their collection. “The story has begun. What it will look like 10 years from now is unclear. How will you influence it?”

quote e1313851594867 The Sending Church Story The Sending Church story is not a story from bad to good, but from good to better. It is a story of a rethink in missions where the bride of Christ humbly takes ownership of the Great Commission—the Commission that Jesus gave her to be about. In a sense, this is a story of the Proverbs 31 woman that takes responsibility for caring for those she loves and has in her charge. Here the bride takes ownership of the command she has to be a blessing to others by her own hand.

The sending church is seriously rethinking what a lifestyle of mission looks like for the disciples that comprise her.

This is your story and the story of the one next to you. It is the story that already has been and yet is alive again today. The unfolding of this story will continue until the bridegroom returns.

The vignettes contained here are from different gatherings across the country involved in cities and nations around the world. Together these glimpses begin to comprise a holistic representation of the fuller body of Christ being a blessing to the nations—being the church on His mission.

Be sure to read the rest HERE.