Category: Church
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Missional Shift
In his book The Present Future, Reggie McNeal reveals and contrasts different ways leaders can think about the church and its ministry. McNeal reflects upon the different paradigms that pastors can have as they lead and conduct ministry in the church. Being missional is a shift in thinking about the nature of the church. Once…
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Traditional Conservative & Missional Values
One of the fundamental principles of being missional is contextualization. In short, contextualization simply means to take into consideration the context where one lives and serves. With all the noteriety that missional practitioners serving in clearly post-Christian areas have gained, it seems some, desiring to follow the example of these leaders, all too readily foresake the principle of contextualization. It is…
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Unity, Liberty, & Charity
I was disappointed recently when I read an old post on the Aquila Report, You Will Hear Crickets. The author, Anthony Bradley, is a professor of Ethics at Kings College in New York City, and apparently has some aversion to the missional church movement. Bradley opens his article: So I’m beginning to wonder if it’s…
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Art of Our Discontent
Trevin Wax asks these questions: How do unbelievers know we are Christians? By the fish symbols on our car? By our bumper stickers? By our voting patterns? By our church attendance? No. Jesus tells us that the outside world will know we are Christians by the way we love one another. (John 13.34-35; 1 John…
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Living Together as the Church
The late theological statesman, Edmund Clowney observed: “If we lack interest in the church we lack what was for Jesus a consuming passion. Jesus loved the church and gave himself for it (Ephesians 5.25).” Jesus’ love for his church is evident throughout the pages of the New Testament. In Matthew 16.18 Jesus promises to build his…
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What Makes a Good Church?
Steve Erickson of Pointway Church in Baxter, Minnesota serves up some up beat thoughts to the question: What makes a good church? “What makes a good church? If all the… …Lazy folks get up …sleepy folks wake up …Discouraged folks cheer up …Gossiping folks shut up …Dishonest folks fess up …Estranged folks make up …Depressed…
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Shallow Small Groups
OK… This might make some folks cringe a little – especially some Small Group junkies… But this is just too funny!
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Organic Church
You will observe that I am not merely exhorting you “to go to church.” “Going to church” is in any case good. But what I am exhorting you to do is go to your own church – to give your presence and active religious participation to every stated meeting for worship of the institution as…
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Being a Transforming Presence
As followers of Jesus it is as imperative for us to fight every inclination toward dualism as it is to fight against legalism. While legalism is widely recognized as relating wrongly to the Law, the error of dualism is not as widely acknowledged in our Evangelical circles. Simply put, dualism is like split vision, seeing…
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The Presence of the Kingdom
Jacques Ellul offers a profound insight about how we, as Christians, are to adopt as a priority an Incarnational approach to ministry. Incarnational ministry literally means: In the flesh. It means going where people are, and understanding their real situations, rather than primarily trying to draw them to us with various forms of entertainment and…
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Distinct, Not Separated
John Stott offers a reminder of the task and the tension we, as Christians, must continually navigate when he uses the phrase: “spiritually distinct, but NOT socially segregated.” And here is a quote expanding this perspective: Your business and mine as Christian people is to be in the midst of this world and its affairs,…
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Get the Gospel Right
If pressed for a quick summary of my philosophy of ministry, I would probably express it something like this: Get the Gospel Right Get the Gospel Out Get the Gospel Out Right Without a message there is no mission. Unfortunately, it seems, many are so zealous to get about the mission that they make little…
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A Case for Institutional Church
No doubt an “Organic” church is much more appealing than an Institution. Yet even Brian McLaren, in his book Church on the Other Side, recognizes that any church that includes more than a handful of people needs some level of organization, and the larger a church gets the more organization it requires. While the notion…
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No Need to Reinvent the Church
Let me just say it straight, up front: I see no need to reinvent the church. What I do see is the need for God’s People to act more faithfully as Christ’s Church. I like what Kevin DeYoung has to say in the Introduction to his book, The Good News We Almost Forgot: No doubt the church…
