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Thursday July 29, 2010 ~ 1 Comments
Over the last week, I have had the privilege to speak at three different denominations, Grace Communion International (formerly the Worldwide Church of God), The General Baptist Association of General Baptists, and the United Methodists. The first two involved, but were not solely focused on, church planting. Yesterday, I shared church planting research with the United Methodist leadership. I indicated that I would post my presentations today so that some of the participants could download the research. Also, others interested in church planting might find the presentations helpful. The "State of Church Planting" reports I referred to yesterday are listed below for your convenience. You can download them from the Leadership Network website at the links below. The Christian Post reported on the research. If you haven't seen them already, check out: Church Planting Overview You can also access all the Leadership Network downloads at www.leadnet.org/churchplanting. The NAMB research I mentioned was done at the Center for Missional Research. Here is a rundown of what church planting research you can download. First, is the full report of the Church Planting Survivability and Health study, a study involving 11 denominations and networks. You can download a presentation of that study here. Second, are four articles that came from that study. Part 1: The Survivability and Health Study Third, is a research that looked at denominational "best practices" that led to higher church planting survivability and health. To do this, we did more in-depth analysis of several denominations to look for best practices. When we found a practices that was "statistically significant," we reported it and then I asked representatives to present what they did at last year's National New Church Conference in Orlando. So, you can find the full report here and a PowerPoint of that data here. Finally, you can find my presentation of the best practices research that I recently gave at the NAMB State Summer Leadership Conference. It is a big download, but you can get it here. In that presentation, I combined the presentations of 4 denominational leaders who shared their best practices in the areas we found statistically significant. Each network or denominational leader presented their overall church planting system, then presented their specific best practice as determined by our research. Each of them gave their permission to share their presentation. The presenters were: Steve Childers presented the Presbterian Church in America assessment system. I hope they are a help! Thursday July 29, 2010 ~ 6 Comments
Jason's work has been featured in numerous websites, articles, and magazines across the US and internationally. Having served on staff at churches and with para-church organizations, he is committed to equipping leaders across the globe. Jason also speaks directly into the lives of this generation at churches, conferences, university chapels, and various other venues. Jason's post today is on mentoring. He will be available to interact in the comments.
Quick Note: I wrote my post without knowledge of Ray's post from last week. After looking at it, I just want to be clear - I completely affirm Ray's thoughts and believe that we must consider the processes in how we train those in vocational ministry before we throw them to the proverbial deep end of the pool. With that said, the point of this post is to discuss how we mentor the younger generation within our church body. I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comment section. Wednesday July 28, 2010 ~ 1 Comments
Here's what I had to say:
Conventional wisdom has been that the larger the church, the more effective it is at delivering change to the world and local community. Perhaps this is derived negatively from our "bigger is better" culture. On the other hand, the attitude is born positively from the desire to see constant expansion in God's kingdom on earth. Be sure to get involved with the Transformational Small Church Exchange webcast we have planned by clicking here. Tuesday July 27, 2010 ~ 7 Comments
If you live in or around the Nashville area, you can join us in person on September 7th. For the first time, we will be broadcasting The Exchange where we can have onsite participants. All you have to do is register at www.lifeway.com/TheExchange. (The registration fee is $10 and includes lunch. Seats are limited, so please register early.) Leaders & Coaches: This is a great opportunity to gather pastors you are working with for a no-cost online conference. We have already heard that groups of pastors are gathering with lunch and resources provided, with an opportunity to facilitate discussions while they watch the broadcast live. Keep watching the blog over the next few weeks. We have invited guest bloggers to share their thoughts on a variety of topics related to pastoring a small church: missions involvement, pastoring bi-vocationally, pastoring a rural church, and more. If you plan to participate (online or onsite), give us your thoughts. What topics or issues are the most important to you? Monday July 26, 2010 ~ 15 Comments
Warren Bird and I have an article up at the The Foursquare Church website. It is an adaptation of a section of our new book, Viral Church: Helping Church Planters Become Movement Makers. In light of the significant hurdles that remain before missional multiplication will take off in the United States, we offer some thoughts of what has started to happen, but must continue at a higher and more widespread level to see the multiplication of missional churches in the United States. Below are the highlights. 1. Driving DNA Passion for Church Planting 2. New Measures of Success 3. More Roots in Historic Biblical Discipleship 4. Less Facility-Driven Churches will not cease from having facilities. But we can drop the hyperbolic reliance on the "if you build it, they will come" mentality... 5. Non-Anglo Leadership 6. Less Permanency 7. Multiple Pacesetters We think we're seeing multiple people step up, all sharing the same stage. Lots of good things are happening--but for a church multiplication movement to happen, the small stream has to become an unstoppable rushing river. If more people can decide to learn what God is up to in church planting movements, then we may be blessed to see them populate the continent in the next decade... Head over to the Foursquare Church website to read the entire article, and then come back here to discuss. Sunday July 25, 2010 ~ 0 Comments
We're haven't left the summer season yet, but I want to give you a heads up about two conferences coming up in September and October. The NINES If you can watch videos at YouTube on your computer, you should be able to watch the live stream on The NINES. Just be sure that you have the most current version of flash. Did I mention that this is free? Well, not only is the conference free, but there are upgrading options as well. You can learn more about The NINES here.
The GCM Collective will be hosting their first GCM Conference in Austin, TX this October, bringing together church planters, pastors, and leaders to collaborate on the practice of missional communities. This three-day conference will feature main and breakout sessions under the theme of GOSPEL, COMMUNITY and MISSION. You will get to hear from, meet and interact with leaders who are daily practitioners, living in gospel communities on mission in their cities. This is a unique experience that will present the why, what and how-to of starting, leading and multiplying missional communities. Interactive plenary sessions, breakouts and unique training experiences will fill our days both on-site and off. Big church, small church, multi-site or neighborhood this event is for every church that seeks to effectively expand the gospel in their context. I'm looking forward to be speaking along with Steve Timmis, Jeff Vanderstelt, Caesar Kalinowski, David Fairchild, Drew Goodmanson and Jonathan Dodson. You can find more information and register here. Thursday July 22, 2010 ~ 7 Comments
Today I am flying from Santa Fe, NM to Orlando, Florida, to speak tomorrow at Grace Communion International's 2010 International Conference. Most of you would know it as the former Worldwide Church of God (hence the title). They have recently changed their name to better reflect who they are. I think their story is worth telling as they have become renewed in Christ in amazing ways. Appropriately, the theme of the meeting is "GCI: Renewed in Christ." This is particularly exciting, given the history of this denomination. Grace Communion International was formerly known as the Worldwide Church of God, and was considered by many to hold to unorthodox teachings, but in the late 1980s, they began a process of doctrinal reform on a large scale, and essentially transformed into an evangelical denomination. They also joined the National Association of Evangelicals. In 2009 they changed their name to Grace Communion International, to better reflect who they are and what they teach. You can read their story on Wikipedia here and on their own website here. They describe their journey this way: Jesus Christ changes lives. He can change an organization, too. This is the story of how the Lord changed our denomination from an unorthodox church on the fringes of Christianity, into an evangelical group that believes and teaches orthodox doctrines. The story involves both pain and joy. Thousands of members left the church. Income is less than one fourth of what it once was. But thousands of members are rejoicing with renewed zeal for their Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
I will be doing two main sessions and two breakouts and I plan to make much of Jesus and His mission. Thursday July 22, 2010 ~ 24 Comments
I have had the privilege of knowing Ray in my work with the Evangelical Free Church leadership. Also, Ray and I took a taxi ride through Taipei, Taiwan and discussed how second generation immigrant churches in America can be involved in God's global mission. You can watch that video here. Ray blogs here: Transformissional Leadership: An Inside Look at Leading a Multiethnic, Missional and Multiplying Church. Ray is sharing with us today about the value of ministry internships. He recently completed his doctoral work on the subject and I found it helpful and invited him to share a bit here. He will be interacting in the comments. Creating a Culture of Internship in the Church
There are many factors that contribute to who we are and what we are about. Whether people, circumstances, or books, God can bring various experiences along our paths that shape us and our ministry. For me, 1991 was a one-year experience that served as the profoundly formative experience of my life. Wednesday July 21, 2010 ~ 1 Comments
I know the readers of this blog like books, so I thought I'd point to four recently published ones that are being promoted through Leadership Network or Exponential. They are worth your attention. All four books debuted April 2010 at the Exponential Conference in Orlando, FL. Below are excerpts of interviews with each of the authors. Exponential: How You and Your Friends Can Start a Missional Church Movement
Viral Churches: Helping Church Planters Become Movement Makers
If you haven't read these yet, be sure to check them out. Speaking of books, if you're on Twitter, we've launched four new Twitter accounts -- @TransformChurch, @viralchurches, @SprtlWrfrMssns, and @plntgmsnlchrchs. With these accounts, we're hoping to get out the messages from Transformational Church, Viral Churches, Spiritual Warfare and Missions, and Planting Missional Churches. Link up with Twitter and start following! Tuesday July 20, 2010 ~ 16 Comments
The desire for contextualization is often driven by a hope for clear gospel communication. (I've touched on this a bit in part 1 and part 2 of this series.) However, agreement on our calling to make the gospel known to make disciples will only help us to see the need for contextualization if we define it properly. Contextualization is not so easy to define because people use the word differently in different traditions. Yet, as I did when defining culture, I think it is important to consider how evangelicals define and use a term if we are to have any meaningful conversation in the evangelical community. Thus, we look again to The Evangelical Dictionary of World Missions, where Gilliland explains that contextualization is a tool to "to enable, insofar as it is humanly possible, an understanding of what it means that Jesus Christ, the Word, is authentically experienced in each and every human situation" (Gilliland, Dean. "Contextualization." In The Evangelical Dictionary of World Missions. Ed. Scott Moreau. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2000). There are other variants of that view and I will not try to address each one. For that, I would suggest reading Contextualization: Meanings, Methods, and Models by David Hesselgrave and Edward Rommen. And, it should tell us something that whole books would be written on the subject. Thus, all definitions of contextualization address communication. Gilliland says elsewhere, "Contextualization is, first of all, concerned with communicating by appropriate and understandable means that salvation is in Jesus only." (Cited by Darrell Whiteman in "The Function of Appropriate Contextualization in Mission" in Appropriate Christianity, edited by Charles Kraft. William Carey Library, 2005). Though communication is not all that contextualization includes (as subsequent installments will discuss), it is a central part of the concern. What is Contextualization? Most generally, to contextualize is to place something in a particular context. Thus, I would say that any definition of contextualization must include presenting the unchanging truths of the gospel within the unique and changing contexts of cultures and worldviews. This requires us to retain the nature of the truth and the integrity of the message while explaining and applying such things in the necessarily unique or specific ways that enable hearers to understand and respond. Maybe Pictionary will help me make this point. Most of us are familiar with the classic party game, Pictionary. The "artist" gets a name of a person, place, or thing and he has to draw the picture so that his team can guess it, without ever using any words to help. Imagine if I was playing a game of Pictionary at a party. I am assigned to draw the person President George W. Bush. So, in efforts of simplicity and speed, I draw a picture of a bush. I'm playing with a pretty quick crowd, so they guess it right away. "BUSH!!!" They've partially got the answer, but not all of it, so it doesn't count. So, I start pointing at the bush and make hand gestures, moans, and grunts (but no words). I use my hands to say, "that's right, but more." Again, the crowd is smart, so they can see the clue has something to do with a bush so they start guessing. "Tree!... Plant!... Green!... Photosynthesis!... Oxygen to carbon dioxide!... Krebs Cycle!" (I told you they were smart.) Now, they're getting way off base, but I can't say anything, so I just keep pointing at that bush. I point at it harder and harder and keep gesturing and grunting and, at this point, I'm getting mad. The others never get it. I know what it is. I know they should know it. It is so obvious. But they don't. I get frustrated, and yet, I never gave another clue. Too often, I think this is what many evangelicals look like in the twenty-first century. For example, many today in American culture want to talk about "spirituality," but are unfamiliar with the gospel and not warm to the idea of spiritual absolutes. Some well-meaning Christians hear the spirituality talk and want to move people to the gospel, but the unexplained theological language and the old evangelistic approaches that were targeting a different worldview amount to noise that leaves the hearer in the dark trying to guess. It's like we, as believers, start communicating through our gestures and grunts, but they don't get it. We wind up giving clues that lead them in circles, and not to the truth. We know the answer, and we want them to know the answer, but we just can't make a solid connection. Without contextualization, the words and arguments we use can amount to ineffective clues. We Already Contextualize Let's be clear about this issue of contextualization; everyone does it. Everyone. Whether or not they use the term, all have contextualized, because every presentation of the gospel must be given to a particular audience, in a particular culture. If you share the gospel with others, then you are contextualizing. You either do it properly, or poorly. For example, you do it poorly when you are attempting to share Christ with the unchurched person in front of you, but present the gospel as if you're speaking to someone who is already familiar with the claims of Jesus. You can't just jump into "Jesus died to save you, and his resurrection demonstrates that he is who he said he is" because the person first needs to know about the one true God, their sin before him, and who Jesus is and what he has done. A person must first know they are lost before they will be found. I am fairly certain most of you will agree with the previous two sentences. If you do, you believe in contextualization, which is placing the gospel in a particular context. We may argue about the amount of contextualization, but we cannot argue with the need for such (assuming the definition mentioned earlier). We can also turn the example around. The de-churched southerner who has grown up in an evangelical church where the Scripture is preached might not need convincing that the Bible is God's word, or that he or she is a sinner, but he or she may simply need clarity on the new birth, or how one responds to the gospel (personally via faith and repentance). Contextualized Communication and Clear Gospel Proclamation Contextualization is necessary because while the human condition and the gospel remain the same, people have different worldviews which in turn impact how they interpret themselves, the world and the things you say. People who care about contextualization care because they want a clear gospel proclaimed AND understood. It's one thing to know the gospel, but it's another to make the gospel known. And making the gospel known is more complicated in America today than it was in decades past. Less people today have a general Christian orientation, or even a shared Judeo-Christian ethic. This means concepts (truths) like sin, death and hell cannot be assumed. So when we want to communicate the gospel and deal with categories like God, man, Christ and faith we must not only know them well, but also how to effectively make them known to the people God has sent us. Knowing where to begin and how to explain the truth to particular people are issues of contextualization. We are already contextualizing. Let's do it well. |





































