Marks of a Missional Church

This guy is a prof at Fuller Seminary. This appeared in his blog over a year ago, but I just now stumbled upon it this morning (at about 4:30 - I couldn't sleep!)

1. What are the marks of churches (people) who live missionally?
They no longer see the church service as the primary connecting point with those outside the community. Connecting with those outside happens within the culture, by insiders to that culture who express the gospel through how they live.

If that question and response got you thinking, check out the rest of the post.

Confessions of a Reformission Rev

I finished up Mark Driscoll's newest book a few weeks ago. Here are some great quotes from the book.

Characteristics of the emerging and missional church (19-20)

• Missions is every Christian being a missionary to their local culture
• The church accepts that it is marginalized in culture and holds no privileged position of influence but gains influence by serving the common good
• The primary culture to reach is postmodern and pluralistic
• Theology ranges from ancient orthodoxy to heterodox liberalism built on postmodern denials of true truth and known knowledge
• Churches are the people who love Jesus and serve his mission in a local culture
• Churches grow as Christians bring Jesus to lost people through hospitality
• Community means the church is a counterculture with a new kingdom way of life through Jesus
• Pastors need not be ordained or formally educated in theology and are trained in the church
• Pastors are missiologists who train Christians to be effective missionaries
• Lost people are saved by the Holy Spirit when and how he determines
• Faith is lived publicly together as the church and includes all of life
• Worship services blend ancient forms and current local cultural styles
• Church buildings are sacred, as is all of God’s creation

Attractional churches need to transform their people from being consumers in the church to being missionaries outside of the church. Missional churches need to gather crowds to their church so that hard words of repentance can be preached in an effort to expose people’s hearts. Those whom God saves can then be trained to go back out into the culture as missionaries to gather more people to repeat the process. Simply, the goal of the church that is both missional and attractional is to continually follow Jesus’ example so that more people are saved for God’s mission and more influence is spread for God’s kingdom, without rejecting one aspect of Jesus’ ministry in favor of another (27).

One of the greatest inhibitors of keeping a church on mission is the erroneous spoken and unspoken expectations people have for church leaders and their families. In a missional church, the lead pastor is the architect who builds the ship more than he is the captain who pilots it, the cook who washes dishes in the galley, or the activities director who coordinates the shuffleboard reservations. The role of architect is incredibly important because most pastors have been trained how to work on a ship instead of how to build a ship (34).

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.

This "Thing"

This is a great post by a guy wrestling with what this "thing" we call church is supposed to be.

What interests me is this: Intentionally Spirit-led communities of faith wrestling with message of the kingdom. Communities/churches that have really gotten the whole missional "thing" and see the message of the kingdom as the message to live out together. No doubt that I have a personal preference to see these communities be as grass-roots and/or organic as possible. But not because I think that those types of communities have it all figured out. But because my experience has led me to believe that this type of church is the one that is the most conducive to true disciple-making. But that's my preference … I don't arrogate to myself the perspective from which I can declare that one form of gathering is "better" than another … as a rule.

Continue reading here.

The Church as Subversive Community

On Sunday evening I'll be at my parent's church. Mandy and I are going to lead worship, and then I'm going to share about Project Mustard Seed. As I was working on the talk this afternoon, I reread an article that has influenced me about as much as anything else I've read over the past few years. The article is by Mike Bishop, a member of a Vineyard community in West Palm Beach, FL. The article is called "The Church as Subversive Community."

I saw that he had a blog, so I decided to check it out. I came to a post that really got my attention. As we're beginning a new life in Cooper-Young, I think there are some practical points that I need to hear. Here are a few of them:

1. Expect to make mistakes. They are all covered.
2. We need to quit praying from a place of fear. Begin to pray from a place of thanksgiving and then ask, “God, what are you already doing?”
3. Begin practicing awareness.
4. We cannot afford to live in A, work in B, and worship in C.
5. Define your life as a contribution and then live there.

Ed Stetzer on the Emerging Church

This article came out a few months ago, but I just read it today. In it he separates emerging church leaders into three categories:

Relevants - those who are simply trying to contextualize the gospel in their communities
The churches of the “relevants” are not filled with the angry white children of evangelical megachurches. They are, instead, intentionally reaching into their communities (which are different than where most Southern Baptists live) and proclaiming a faithful biblically-centered Gospel there.

Reconstructionists - Here he is referring to those who think the models that have worked for so long but now no longer work. They therefore are trying to get rid of structures that prohibit the gospel from spreading.
The reconstructionists think that the current form of church is frequently irrelevant and the structure is unhelpful. Therefore, we see an increase in models of church that reject certain organizational models, embracing what are often called “incarnational” or “house” models. They are responding to the fact that after decades of trying fresh ideas in innovative churches, North America is less churched, and those that are churched are less committed.

Revisionists - those who, in trying to contextualize the gospel, have moved away from the gospel.
Revisionists are questioning (and in some cases denying) issues like the nature of the substitutionary atonement, the reality of hell, the complementarian nature of gender, and the nature of the Gospel itself. The revisionist emerging church leaders should be treated, appreciated and read as we read mainline theologians -- they often have good descriptions, but their prescriptions fail to take into account the full teaching of the Word of God.


I think this article is very good for someone who is trying to understand why there is so much controversy over the Emerging Church. I'm just not sure if it is this cut and dry. That would be my only hesitation with it. For example, many would not lump the nature of the Gospel and complementarianism into the same "heresy" category. I know he was just giving examples.