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.