What is a Missional Church anyway?

I've been posting a lot about Missional Church lately. Here's a little bit of clarification about this model I'm strongly resonating with.

A thought I can't shake...

While listening to a lecture in my youth ministry evangelism course, a short rabbit trail stuck out to me about who our neighbors and friends are.

"When little kids in gym class are told to grab a friend, they reach for the kid's hand right next to them. Teenagers and adults often look around the room and ignore the person right next to them."- Chap Clark

I do the same thing. I hadn't realized how the messages I received from my culture pressured me to ignore my neighbor. At my darkest I look to partner with people who can give me something or promote me or make me feel good. I don't have any profound things to add to that quote, just the image of children in some PE class grabbing their neighbors hand.

What kind of world would this be if we took to heart this notion of friendship? How would we treat our neighbors? our coworkers? our family?

What Will Consume you?

     Our cohort is taking a look at the impact of economics on culture. Of our reading material, I was so interested in the concept of consumption. What consumes you and what do you consume? I appreciate the potential Christians have to speak to this issue. Check out these videos. 

What challenges you about the concept of our consumer culture? 

This week my cohort is looking at economics and social justice issues and we will do some processing together about ways the church can speak to these issues. This is one of the first quotes I came across in my assigned readings.

Mother Teresa said, “The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted, uncared for, and deserted by everybody. We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love.”
Arloa Sutter (2010-09-01). The Invisible: What the Church Can Do to Find and Serve the Least of These (Kindle Locations 448-450). Wesleyan Publishing House. Kindle Edition.

What is a convert?

This semester I'm taking two classes. One of which is with one of my youth ministry heroes, Dr. Chap Clark, Author of Hurt: Inside the World of Today's Teenagers (Youth, Family, and Culture). 

In our first few weeks we have been reflecting on something called Incarnational Witness. The basic idea is that our methods of evangelism should reflect the life and model of ministry Jesus practiced. This model dictates that evangelism should be motivated by the same things that motivated Jesus, like being sent by the Father. We should model our evangelism after Christ's example, leaving our place of comfort to go to the broken, the hurting, and the forgotten.

• These lectures are invigorating my love for youth ministry!
• The course material is also solidifying my belief in relational youth ministry as opposed to creating a class or a program for every kind of problem teens will face. When I look back at my adolescence, it was people who journeyed with me that made the difference and not classes or even sermons! I remember the way my youth pastor and youth leaders listened to me, came to my games, and took my questions. I pray that I can be that for our youth and train others in the same model. 

When you think back to your teenage years or even a recent crisis, what made the difference for you?

Are we welcome?

This past Sunday we had a service where our youth sent in questions via text message and our team took turns answering them. I was struck by one of the questions, "My parents and I used to be Jehovah's Witness and now we've made up our own religion. Are we welcome at Shoreline?" Most of my thoughts were drawn from Shaping of Things to Come, The: Innovation and Mission for the 21st-Century Church

• First off, I posted about our predominant culture's posture towards 'do it yourself' religion and was not surprised to see it show up in our youth meeting. 
• I also spoke to her about our Church's philosophy. Shoreline wishes to engage Austin's culture and to say that they were not welcome to attend our services based on their beliefs of behavior wouldn't sit well with our leadership. We don't make attendance about belief and behavior, however we make no apology for teaching very specific things about how we believe and how our church family should behave. 
• Then, there was almost sadness in the question. "Are we welcome?" That part of the text, as it was read aloud broke my heart. In it I heard a longing for community, for belonging, and for connection. This is so prevalent in our culture, regardless of age. 

How about your experience with church communities? What is your experience with church community?  Are there things that people do or believe that would make them unwelcome?

Is there one way to Heaven?

In a service on Christmas day, our worship pastor made a comment about Jesus being the only way to Heaven. The claim was a little more direct than we usually make, but I thought it was well in the appropriate bounds for a Christian worship gathering. I knew there was a Muslim man attending our service to watch his son perform in our service. I remember glancing his way to see his reaction and I was surprised to see him clapping. Even more so, he came up to me after service to tell me how much he enjoyed worshipping with us and to thank me for mentoring his son.

That's not the first surprise. The people who were offended by the claim were from our congregation. This week, these two youtube videos are assigned viewing in my Contemporary Cultures class at Fuller. 

What do you think of these? Is there one way to Heaven or are there multiple ways? Has Oprah gone off the deep end here? How would you respond to these women?

I'm pretty conservative in my beliefs, but I'd like to know what you think. 

I want to be missional.

I've been a way a while because of work and school, but I have been reading a lot and I'm ready to start posting again. This one is longer than usual, but it encapsulates what I've been chewing on and wrestling with in my life and calling. I hope you enjoy!


The missional church is incarnational, not attractional, in its ecclesiology. By incarnational we mean it does not create sanctified spaces into which unbelievers must come to encounter the gospel. Rather, the missional church disassembles itself and seeps into the cracks and crevices of a society in order to be Christ to those who don’t yet know him.

The missional church is messianic, not dualistic, in its spirituality. That is, it adopts the worldview of Jesus the Messiah, rather than that of the Greco-Roman empire. Instead of seeing the world as divided between the sacred (religious) and profane (nonreligious), like Christ it sees the world and God’s place in it as more holistic and integrated.

The missional church adopts an apostolic, rather than a hierarchical, mode of leadership. By apostolic we mean a mode of leadership that recognizes the fivefold model detailed by Paul in Ephesians 4. It abandons the triangular hierarchies of the traditional church and embraces a biblical, flat-leadership community that unleashes the gifts of evangelism, apostleship, and prophecy, as well as the currently popular pastoral and teaching gifts.

Frost, Michael; Hirsch, Alan (2001-01-01). Shaping of Things to Come, The (Kindle Locations 346-356). Baker Book Group. Kindle Edition.

The Bible and Missions

     Helen Montgomory was more than an author. She was a public offical, missionary, scholar, political activist and preacher (Rochester Regional Library Council 2000). Living at the turn of the 20th century dramatically effected her worldview, especially in the area of justice. I think this plays a large part in her perspective on the Bible and Misisons. She spent most of her life on missional projects and her education, culture, and gender must have made the missioal motifs of justice, God’s heart for the oppressed, and the nations leap off of the page.

     Her thesis is clearly claims that the Bible is concerned first and foremost with God’s mission (Page 7). Her thesis goes so far as to claim that when one reads the scriptures, “the missionary message is inescapable.” (Page 7)

     Montgomory remains true to her predominant modern culture by presenting a well constructed linear presentation to support her thesis. She shows the reader what she will say in outline form (Page 5-6; 52-53) before each chapter. As she begins to unpack her arguments she opens with definitions of various missinal motifs and key concepts (Page 8). Her prose is lively and it conveys the feeling that she strongly believes in what she’s writing.
     Then she gets to work. In he following secsions she highlights in broad strokes the missional motifs in the major sections of the Hebrew Bible. She strengthens her claims by admitting that she cannot mention every motif and every example because there are too many for a brief treatment. This concession only helps her declarations because it makes the reader wonder how many other examples there are to support her thesis. Montgomery repeats the same pattern for the Christian Testament in the second section, organized first by section or genre and stopping at various high points of each book.

     I must respond to Montgomory’s thesis as directly as I can. To put it bluntly, She had me at Goethe. Her diction and writting style was thoughtful, but not too thick to take down. I did make liberal use of the dictionary feature in my PDF reader though. To analyze this book after the ML 520 seminar is not much of a fair fight. I came into this assignment with some strong preconcieved ideas, so I must admit my bias.

     I was particularly drawn to her treatment of Micha where she highlights his distaste for as she calls it “formal religion” (Page 35). Working in a Mega Church causes a tension inside me as I reconcile my weekly activities. I want so badly to make sure that I’m pleasing the Lord, but the seduction of performing or working to make things look good is an easy pattern to fall into. This book is familiar to me, but she highlighted something new to me in the previous sections. I never consicously considred that most the Hebrew prophets wrote about cultures similar to mine. I knew it, but the reality never sunk into my heart in a way that got my attention.Taking Micha’s words to heart, I am asking God to continually “purify” my religion and make it an offering that will please him.

     This book will compliment shifts in living and thinking Marie and I are already attempting to make. We converse about what kind of children we think God wants us to raise and what kind of family God wants us to become. My preaching and teaching topics are also more missional in the kinds of words I use. Many of the topics are the same. However, I approach them from a different perspective of God’s mission. For a while, I will use this book as a resource for preaching. When I’m preaching on a text, I’ll make sure to glance at Montgomory’s comments about it, as to avoid proof texting or justifying my mission (Page 7).

References Cited

Rochester Regional Library Council: Western New York Suffragists. 2000. “Helen Montgomory” http://winningthevote.org/HBMontgomery.html

What is the Bible?

Our ML 520 Biblical Foundations of Misison class is exploring the idea that the Bible is a missionary book. Of all the ways I've heard the Bible explained, (handbook, rulebook, instructionbook, etc) this is the theory I'm most attracted to. I'll post my report soon. Can't wait to dig into this one!

"That Book is not the book of a nation, but the Book of nations, because it places before us the fortunes of one nation as a symbol unto all the rest, because it connects the history of this one people with the origin of the world, and by a series of earthly and spiritual developments, of facts necessary and accidental continues it unto the remotest regions of the farthest eternities." 

-Goethe 

Book Review: Jesus and Community

About the author: Gerhard Lohfink grew up in Germany in the midst of rising national tensions as nations built up to World War II forcing him to move many times. He excelled in the field of academics gaining permission to pursue higher degrees while serving as pastor and chaplain in various posts. His perspective as a German, a priest, and college professor uniquely qualify him to make bold claims with his thesis and to support it with evidence from scripture, early church history, and first hand experience.

About the Thesis: His thesis claims that Christian Community’s form must come from the practices of Jesus that we have in the form of the gospels, which was uniquely focused on Israel, gathering it together so that the world my experience the kingdom of God, bringing God’s reign into the earthly realm, standing out in the midst the dominant culture, and acting as Christ’s agent of change.

About the Structure: He supports his thesis using a 4-section structure. First sections define Jesus’ model of Community as implied by his actions on earth and Old Testament precedent. The final sections outline how Apostles and early followers continued the important aspects of community instituted by Christ. These practices include but are not limited to: praying for the sick, living as a contrast society, bearing the identity of “God’s people,” passively resisting the kingdom of this world, and cultivating a community of equals that serve each other.

Personal Reaction: Lohfink’s repetitious structure aided my understanding of his thesis. With out the repetition of a claim, a scripture, an explanation of the passage, and conclusions, he would certainly have lost me. Thankfully we did not have to read it in German. From my perspective these insights are valuable, but perhaps too familiar. This may be a byproduct of the generation I’m a part of and the generation of people I work with, but I found myself too easily agreeing with Lohfink’s highly authentic, communal, egalitarian, peaceful, and accountable version of Christian community. After reflection, I find myself asking, “Why don’t more people in my stream of Christianity know about this book?”

About Application: As for application to my ministry situation, I think this book will find it’s place in a stockpile I’ll return to in a search to provide Shoreline’s youth an alternative to consumerism. The image I found most vivid was in the introduction. It talked about a priest, a counselor, and physician roaming a city “on call” (Location, 84). This vivid picture illustrates a tension I currently feel in ministry to a large church. We want to help people, but Lohfink challenged my thinking about the way Mega Churches serve congregations. There certainly isn’t anything wrong with serving a parishioner, but what if the structure of a community actually encourages individualism? If Jesus was in charge of my youth group, (a bold thought, I know) what would he say about our programs and the impulses they feed? How would they compare to the picture of Christ’s community provided by Lohfink?

Initially, I think we have a long way to go as a contrast society. We have a gathering, but I wonder about how much of Lohfink’s community we experience. There are brilliant moments that punctuate our program, that come in Small Groups, Retreats, and Summer Camps where young people catch a glimpse of what God’s Kingdom might look like, but this rarely translates into the day to day life of our community. This issue cannot be solved with a sermon series or a small group study. Perhaps I need to look at my own life and ask if I’m buying what I’m “selling?” My gut level hunch is that young people will not do it until they see it, so perhaps what our group needs is a contrast society within our community.

You haven't lived until-

You have tasted Indian Fry Bread!

Last Night Evening program.

We're watching some cultural dances now!

What weather your kids face

We've enjoyed afternoon storms that come off the Sierra Blanca mountain each afternoon. Today is the first day its rained during our workday-creating challenges for crews doing exterior roofing and painting.
Luckily for our crew, we have mostly interior paint on our docket. We made a lot of progress today and are anxious to finish all the work we can for our resident, Tilda.
She told us to come without lunch tomorrow so we can eat her Indian Hamburgers. I'm confident that most of our crews will get a great taste of Appachee Indian culture on their last day.

The Crew.

we just broke for lunch and crew devotions. My crew has people from California, Colorado, Maryland, and Texas. We come from Methodist, Baptist, Catholic, and Presbyterian churches. It gives a sense of what it might be like to work together in heaven. Every tribe, every tongue, and every nation come together and glorify God!

My Work Site

I thought I'd post a pic of the house my crew is working on. It sits at the base of a huge pine covered hill. Beautiful!

Most work sites are surrounded by this kind of no-humidity beauty. It feels like an Austin winter.
Time to get back to work.

View from the work site transport.

100 missionaries go out to work sites on two charter buses. The rest are taken to sites via vans all over the reservation.

All our crews are doing well representing the hands and feet of Jesus to the Mescalero people. This is our second to last day with our residents so please pray that we can encourage them in any way possible. We will invite the residents to a special program for them on Friday night. Please pray for open doors in this area as well! See you after work!!!

Things to do in Alamagordo

I guess dragging your friends behind your bike on a skateboard is fun. These are not our kids. =)

Leaving white sands mall

Time to eat!

Free Time!

If you get a chance, look up White Sands Mall in Alomogordo, NM. That's where we went on our day off. Were passing the time by playing Sardines in a Big K store. (It's the coolest store here) the young people love it!