Discontented Towards God's Way

Steve Andrews, Lead Pastor, Kensington Community Church has said: I planted my church, and God grew it big. We've done externally-focused, church planting, and multi-site, and we'll keep doing them. But there are not enough years left in my life to simply keep growing this thing bigger. 

I'm interested in something more viral. I'm interested in changing the conversation from 'where is our next one' to 'how do we release 250 of our members to take our city?'

I quite agree - and I think, so does Scripture.

Whether large or small, the missional purpose (and strategy?) of the Church (and each local congregation) should be not so much about getting people into church (i.e. building, our programs, etc.) but more about training, equipping, encouraging and releasing God's people that they may be missioners in their community. 

It's not about getting people to come; it's about getting God's people to go - or just to return to where they live and play, work and work-out, daily, Monday through Saturday.

After people are introduced (by being shown and told) to Christ, they will then want to come together into the community of God's People. But that is not where mission and evangelism happens; that is rather where the fruit of such witness gathers. We have mistaken where to fish, where the harvest truly is and where the harvesting is primarily to occur.

On the Verge

In their book, On the Verge: A Journey Into the Future of the Apostolic Church, Alan Hirsch and Dave Ferguson argue that " the church is on the verge of massive, category shifting, change. Contemporary church growth, despite its many blessings, has failed to stem the decline of Christianity in the West. 

We are now facing the fact that more of the same will not produce different results. Our times require a different kind of church---an apostolic, reproducing, movement where every person is living a mission-sent life. 

Many of the best and brightest leaders in the contemporary church are now making the shift in the way they think, lead, and organize. Motivated partly by a vision of the church as ancient as it is new, and with a driving desire to see Biblical Christianity establish itself in Western cultural contexts, we are indeed seeing a new form of the church emerge in our day. 

Hirsch and Ferguson call this 'apostolic movement' because it is more resonant with the form of church that we witness in the pages of the New Testament and in the great missional movements of history. 

In this book, Hirsch and Ferguson share a rich array of theology, theory, and best practices, along with inspiring stories about leaders who have rightly diagnosed their churches' failure to embrace a biblical model of mission and have moved toward a fuller expression of the gospel. 

On the Verge will help church leaders discover how these forerunners and their insights are launching a new apostolic movement---and how any church can get involved.

-- Amazon Review

They Won't Come; We Must Go

Today’s church has a strategic problem and a missionary problem, say Dave Ferguson and Alan Hirsch, authors of On the Verge: A Journey Into the Future of the Apostolic Church. 

“Most churches are built on a model of people coming to our churches and us offering a positive church experience,” Ferguson says. “The good news is that about 40 to 50 percent of the population still wants that. The bad news is that the other 60 percent are not looking for that at all.”

The Church on Mission

We know that there are certain realities in being missionaries. We have sent our best – our best people, our children, our money and resources; we have sent up to our Lord prayers on their behalf –but we have perhaps thought inwardly: ‘Thank God, I don’t have to go.’

I submit that if we don’t think and act missionally, deeply and profoundly through our lives here ‘at home,’ our churches will die. In many places throughout North American, such deaths are all too frequent.

We are called to live missionally each day and in every aspect of life on this planet. It is our creaturely and New-Creaturely responsibility and possibility, now, in Christ. ‘There is not one inch of our Heavenly Father’s Creation about which He does not say, ‘that is Mine!’ (thank you Abraham Kuyper)

Missional Priests

Martin Luther and the Reformers recovered the Bible’s teaching concerning the priesthood of every believer, so that each Christ-apprentice in each and every aspect of life, whatever their vocation and wherever lived, can be said to be a minister of the Gospel.

Further Biblical reflection reveals that while each believer indeed is to be a minister, we are to be missioners as well, for we have been called into ‘the Missio Dei’ – the Mission of God.

God calls a People, a universal (and locally) congregated Body. To it, every Jesus-follower is called, individually and together to join in the mission of God, announcing and showing the already-present Rule of God and setting up sign posts to its future, full manifestation on planet earth.

God so loved and so loves the world, the cosmos, that He sent His Son . . .

God is on Mission and He is calling persons to be His People, joining God’s reclamation of this planet and all on it, bringing back to God’s self and purposes the People, Places and Things He so loves.

Gospel Living IS Integral Mission

It is a joy to examine the many aspects and all there may be of the scope of life on this planet. Hence too the goal of our Christ-following involvement in mission-shaped living and ministry in introducing people to it, showing and telling, and looking to the Gospel and to God’s Spirit to enable people to live it, giving them the original and the new potential to be free, whole and fully human again, as is God’s intent.

We may call it “word/deed” or “integral mission.” We may stress the call of the Gospel and the inherent need for many, many mission-shapes in its introduction and expression in our world. We may witness to the need of all persons for a balance of the demands of the inner life (of soul and spirit) with those of the outer person (health, food, community). But the fact that we have to talk clearly about balancing humanity’s social needs and spiritual needs arises out of the Church’s failure, historically and often still, to hold it all together – to think and act holistically and integrally in all of life.

We have had to recover and/or rediscover the biblical mandates and many balances (including paradoxes) inherent in the Gospel. The split that developed into the fundamentalism of both ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’ (making it into ‘either / or’ rather than a biblical ‘both / and’) at least in its most recent historical manifestations, began to take shape after the US Civil War, towards the end of the 19th century. Prior to that separation between the social and the spiritual was not as much evidenced in the West.

A certain eschatological escapism beginning to be popularized at that time held that it was more important to feed the soul than to feed the body, for instance, for even if the person receiving such ministry died of starvation, at least they’d get to Heaven. One popular evangelist put it: I do not have time to polish the lamps on a sinking ship; the ship is sinking and God has given me a life-boat, and I intend to save all of the sinking souls I can before the end comes. (That same evangelist, wonderfully inconsistent, visited wounded soldiers in Civil War camps and hospitals, caring for their whole persons as well as sharing the way of Love and Salvation of Christ.

But we have indeed had to rediscover biblical balance – what John Stott called the two wings of the airplane – the necessity of the social AND the spiritual, if the message of the Gospel is to fly in each generation. I prefer terms that don’t allow for either/or distinctions but, rather, that explore and enter intothe ways in which each area of life may take shape and be lived out under Biblical guidance and Gospel influence. This includes each and all of the 360 degrees of the fully-human existence and potential that surrounds us – all aspects and spheres of creaturely life on this planet.