Articles worth reading

Over the last few weeks I've come across a couple of really good articles that I thought were worth linking to.

Living a Transformed Life Adequate to Our Calling, by Dallas Willard.
I was first exposed to Dallas Willard's writing about eight years ago. He's never been easy for me to understand (he teaches philosophy at USC). Still, I've attempted to read his books, and in doing so have been shaped by them. This is a 24-page article that seems to be his attempt at summarizing his previous works. If you've ever wanted to know more about the Kingdom of God, discipleship, or spiritual formation, this may be worth spending some time on.

We Aren't About Weekends, The Christian Vision Project's interview with Bob Roberts
Bob Roberts is the pastor at Northwood Church in Keller, TX. This church seems to truly understand why they exist. Roberts give a great explanation not only on the role of the church and its members, but also on the tasks of transformation and shaping culture.

Kingdom Workshops

These folks from Florida are experimenting with a new way of training missionaries. Their first gathering is this weekend. Here's an excerpt about these workshops.

A few months ago, T and I had a series of conversations with Chris about the need to expose some of their full-time workers and volunteers to training that would move Urban Youth beyond convert-making and into disciple-building. We struggled with this question for quite some time, not least because I had been resistent to the idea of simply providing information to people without the potential for long-term learning and application to occur. Chris too, frankly, was tired of seeing people go through training programs and then get wrapped up in a culture of busyness that is such an easy path to follow in an active ministry.

So if you've read this far, you're probably interested in what we've come up with: Kingdom Workshops. I've created a little website that will give you all the details so I won't go into everything here. Very briefly, Kingdom Workshops will be 2-day collaborative learning experiences around different values of the kingdom. They will not primarily be informational, but will be aimed at helping us understand and appropriate kingdom realities in our real lives. From the website: "The goal is to create a shared learning environment that enables everyone to participate in the discovery process. In God's world, there are no experts, only explorers." In other words, it will not be myself or T or anyone else getting up and lecturing about the kingdom. There will be some ideas offered, a lot of questions posed - but primarily it will be working out the implications together. The first one will be over Memorial Day weekend on the kingdom of God being the basis for the gospel Jesus preached.

Here's the rest of the post.

Church = A Training Center for Missional People

I read this statement on Dan Kimball's site awhile back. He was quoting Scot McKnight. I've been thinking a lot about this, especially since moving to Memphis. There are many people here in Memphis who were raised in church. Whether or not they had a good experience in church is a toss-up, but the fact that many were raised in church is one of the things that separates this culture from the bay area. This means that there is an awful lot of baggage in people whose church experience was less than ideal. But it also means that there are a lot of people with a good foundation. I think there are many here who have been going to church (or who spent a lot of years going to church), but were never released into the culture as missionaries. I see one of our primary tasks here as empowering and releasing people as missionaries.

So how do we train missionaries? Over the next few months I'm going to be posting thoughts, articles, resources, etc. that will hopefully begin to bring some answers on this question.