Alan Hirsch at Exponential Conference

He has a Red Bull addiction It’s just over 9 minutes. Enjoy.

Missional vs. Seeker Churches

Giving Back

I admit it, I’m a fan of American Idol. And tonight was the second year of “Idol Gives Back”. I saw videos of rock stars touching people in Uganda, Reese Witherspoon in New Orleans at after-school programs in depressed neighborhoods, and Billy Ray and Miley Cyrus visiting depressed parts of Kentucky.

And I asked myself again, Where’s the Church?

American Idol raised over $70 Million last year. They may top $100 million this year.

If the percentages from 2006 hold to form, Southern Baptist churches will give $557,226,488.89 to the Cooperative Program this year. If, on average, each church gave 5% to the Cooperative Program, that means Southern Baptist churches will take in $11,144,529,777.80 during 2007-2008. Folks, that is over eleven billion dollars. That means that churches will KEEP $10,587,303,288.91. There are 44,223 churches in the SBC. Know how much that is per church? Drum roll please… Read more

Missional Sunday School?

What the?  You read right folks.  The good folks at Lifeway are working to train people in “The Missional Sunday School.”  Ed Stetzer (why is his name coming up so much today?  Maybe it’s the calf fries.) and Bruce Raley, Director of Leadership Ministry, will speak on it during the two Sunday School training events this year.

The press release states:

“Missional” is a fairly new term used in recent years to describe some churches, para-church ministries and organizations…These churches study and learn the language of the culture and community. They strive to become part of the culture while proclaiming the gospel. They understand how to contextualize biblical life to the culture in which the church resides. In short, the missional church functions as a missionary to its community. Just as a foreign missionary determines how to take the gospel to a group within a culture, a Sunday School class or ministry can be designed to do the same.

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“The Missional Sunday School” session will explore ideas and means for Sunday School to become a missionary force, impacting the church community. Stetzer will focus on research findings of missional churches, characteristics of missional leaders and the top factors and challenges of becoming a missional Sunday School.

I’m not saying anything negative about this.  I actually think it might work.  If small groups become missional, then maybe the church could.  My fear is that few will buy into it.  But that’s not a problem of strategy.

But I think they need to change the name to something like Missional Communities.  Sunday School?  Nahh…Hey guys, change the name

Disctinctives of a Missional Church

Dr. David Dunbar, President of Biblical Seminary in Hatfield, PA has a Missional Journal. In the entry entitled, “A New Imagination”, Dr. Dunbar gives Distinctives of Missional and Missional Churches.  Here are some snippets from the article.

1. Missional is not McChurch
Missional practitioners recognize that the principle of contextualization applies equally to churches in the West. From region to region, city to city, neighborhood to neighborhood, we see a kaleidoscope of cultures. One size will not fit all. Franchising is usually unsuccessful. Missional therefore means a local, culturally-specific application of the message.

2. Evangelistic/attractional → missional/incarnational
It is missional because it is “an outwardly bound movement from one community or individual to another. It is the outward thrust rooted in God’s mission that compels the church to reach a lost world. Therefore, a genuine missional impulse is a sending rather than an attractional one. The NT pattern of mission is centrifugal rather than centripetal” (The Forgotten Ways [Brazos, 2006], pp. 129-30).

It is incarnational because it understands God’s action in Christ as the model for the life of the church. “If God’s central way of reaching his world was to incarnate himself in Jesus, then our way of reaching the world should likewise be incarnational. To act incarnationally therefore will mean in part that in our mission to those outside the faith we will need to exercise a genuine identification and affinity with those we are attempting to reach” (Forgotten Ways, p. 133).

As the church confronts wide-spread cynicism about the Christian message, the gospel displayed will give credence to the gospel declared.

3. Cultivating spiritual discernment
In the culture of late modernity many churches adopted a corporate model for leadership, decision-making, and planning. Pastors became CEOs, elders (or deacons) transformed themselves into corporation directors, and top-down, vision-driven planning became the order of the day.

It is a sign of biblical-theological health that this paradigm is being questioned in the missional church movement. Here is a good place to begin “re-imagining” the nature and function of the church for a post-Christian and postmodern era. What is there about the decision-making and planning process of the church that makes (or should make) it distinctively Christian? Or, to ask the question differently, what is missing from the older model?

The short answer is sensitivity to the leading of the Spirit. Or, in the words of Craig Van Gelder, “An essential dimension that Christian leaders must attend to in the midst of a discernment and decision-making process is how to keep God in the conversation” (The Ministry of the Missional Church [Baker, 2007], p. 99).
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The point is that missional churches need to cultivate what for many of us is a forgotten art–the ability to discern what God is up to in our world (or neighborhood). This is best accomplished in a community of believers who are able to listen prayerfully for what the Spirit is saying in Scripture, in and through the voice of the congregation, and in the specific context where the church is located.

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