The GCM Collective Conference

GCM Collective Conference 2010: The GCM Collective will be hosting their first GCM Conference in Austin, TX this October, bringing together church planters, pastors, and leaders to collaborate on the practice of missional communities. This three-day conference will feature main and breakout sessions under the theme of GOSPEL, COMMUNITY and MISSION.

Speakers: Ed Stetzer, Steve Timmis, Jeff Vanderstelt, Caesar Kalinowski, David Fairchild, Drew Goodmanson and Jonathan Dodson.

More breakout and conference details coming very soon! Keep an eye on the site for updates!

The Porterbrook Network

The Porterbrook Network has launched a two year program for local churches to train up leaders. Porterbrook Learning helps Christians learn how to serve Jesus and his people better — whether they are church leaders, church planters, or simply Christians wanting to become more mission-focused. The course is flexible and has been designed to be integrated with your whole Christian life in whatever context you’re serving. It’s not theology for theology’s sake: the course is written by practitioners for practitioners.  http://www.porterbrooknetwork .org/

Check out the new website: www.gospelcentereddiscipleship.com!

This is just the beginning of a discipleship resource site. We will be adding new books and resources this year. It currently features Fight Clubs, a way to promote grace-driven discipleship in your life and church. Some of the current features include:

• Blog, Twitter, and Resources page that include articles, audio, & video.
• An IN CHURCHES page that links to examples of other churches implementing Fight Clubs.
• Preview the Book, order a Sign, or check out the FAQ.

The missional leaders of Soma Communities, Jeff Vanderstelt and Caesar Kalinowski, have helpfully distinguished missional communities from various other church structures by stating what they are not.[1] In their helpful document, “Building Missional Communities” they state that a Missional Community is NOT primarily:

• A Small Group
• A Bible Study
• A Therapy Group
• A Socially-Minded Small Group
• A Weekly Meeting
• A Cell Group

This is both clarifying and intriguing. What then is a missional community? While missional communities contain aspects of these types of groups, they are not defined by one of these characteristics alone. Missional communities do study the Bible, often reflecting on a sermon or a passage of Scripture. They do provide gospel-centered counsel (not therapy) for one another. They are socially minded and socially active, frequently engaging the social needs in their part of the city. They do meet numerous times a month for a more formal gathering, but their community is not restricted to a meeting. Like a cell group, City Groups are evangelistic; however, they practice evangelism within a much larger understanding of mission and nature of the church.

What then is a missional community? A Missional community is a local community that gathers and scatters throughout the week to share and show the gospel of Jesus Christ in their cities (towns, villages, or suburbs). They are where the church can be the church to one another and the city. Missional communities are shaped by three primary elements—Gospel, Community, and Mission.[2]

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[1] Vanderstelt and Kalinowski, “Building Missional Communities.” I have adapted their list. See www.gcmcollective.com/resources for more.

[2] This post is an excerpt from the chapter, “What is a Missional Community?” in my forthcoming book on this topic.

This is a guest post from Nate Navarro, Director of Missional Community at Austin City Life and Co-Director at Music For The City.

The second time I ever met my friend Jonathan Dodson it was at Austin Java over a good cup of coffee. He was telling me that he was starting a church where Christians and Non-Christians would be in community together and would work together for the good of the city.

I was intrigued to say the least. Here’s a story to show how this vision can unfold…

Dylan is cool. He is good looking, has the right tattoos, and has the attention of the ladies. He is a fast living Austinite who waits tables for a living.

Dylan was raised  in Dallas and tells stories of growing up in a church where he felt left out, judged, and unloved. As soon as he graduated high school he packed his bags and moved to Austin.

I met Dylan a year ago on a Sunday afternoon and invited him into the house for a beer and to watch some football. He stayed all day long and kept coming back every Sunday night for dinner. On Sunday nights we open our home for dinner. Folks bring their own beverages, and a different person every week cooks up a meal. Some nights there are 10 people, sometimes 20, once we had 35.

After about a month he started asking who all these people were that came over for dinner on Sunday nights,  and “when can I come to this church everyone is talking about?”

What he didn’t realize is that he had been visiting the church, every Sunday night for a month, in our home.

Now it looked more like a chaotic dinner party with lots of food, loud kids running around, and a few empty beer bottles. In reality it was a group of very imperfect Christians, living life together, on mission to love Austin. Soon after that my friend Dylan began to drop in on our Sunday morning gatherings. He occasionally meets me for lunch, and serves alongside me at the nursing home in our neighborhood.

Last month I shared the Gospel with Dylan over a turkey sandwich. We have been friends for more than a year.

I told him that although we are all more broken than we dare admit, in Christ we are more accepted than we could ever imagine. I pleaded with him to see that Jesus offered him perfect love that one night stands could not.

Dylan is skeptical.

My best guess is that he loves our community but does not yet love Jesus. I pray that he will see through the inconsistencies in my life, and in the life of our church, and see how good and perfect Jesus is. I am thrilled to be part of a Christian community where people like Dylan, who struggle to believe, feel welcome, loved, and respected.

And for those reading this and looking for a practical application:

Stop inviting people to your church and start inviting them into your life.

To Be Continued……..

As we settle into our cities or as our churches grow, it can be easy to assume we have “a handle” on the culture of our city, suburb, or town. However, a good citizen-missionary never “arrives” in cultural exegesis but is always knowing, exegeting (studying & interpreting) their culture. To that end, here are some general and specific suggestions for continuing cultural exegesis:

(1) Ask your neighbors and fellow citizens lots of questions. Don’t interrogate them but show sincere, intentional interest in them and the info they possess. Anecdotal information about your city and fellow citizens is unbeatable. Ask them the what, how, and why questions: What do you think is broken in our neighborhood or city? What gets you excited about life? What do you think should be done about economic decline in our city? why do you drive across town to do X? why do you dislike traditional Christianity. Feel free to add to this in the comments.

(2) Read local, independent publications. Very often the stuff that looks like a waste of time contains some of the most clear voices from within your culture. Get local (not just national) opinions and reviews on movies, books, culture and politics. For Austin: Statesman, The Chronicle, Misprint, Austin 360 blog, the Austinist, etc. Feel free to add to this list in the comments.

(3) Gather historical information on your city and neighborhood. How did your city come to be the way it is? What political and cultural and economic issues have shaped the ethos and beliefs of your city? Read local authors and histories. Austin: Writing Austin’s Lives, History of Austin DVD, Bob Bullock History Museum, Neighborhood Assns, etc.

(4) Participate in local art, music, and business. Learn to love your city, celebrate its strengths, learn from her citizens, love her citizens! Support local business, go to art shows, listen to local music, eat local food. Examples are endless in Austin.

Conversion to Christ: This message deconstructs the dualism of American Christianity in order to reconstruct a whole Gospel around Jesus Christ as Lord.

Conversion to Church: This message demonstrates the communal character of the Gospel, unpacking very practical ways to cultivate “steady state community.”

Conversion to Mission: This message shows how mission is not optional but essential, and spends considerable time talking about how to live “everyday life with gospel intentionality.”

Psalm 37:4 reads: “Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart.” You want to be married, you want a better job, you want to use your creative gifts, you want better health, you want people to like you. What’s wrong with all those desires? Why isn’t God keeping up his end of the promise? Probably because these are man-centered preferences not God-centered desires. It’s critical that we make the distinction between “preferences of the heart” and “desires of the heart.” Preferences are self-entitlements. Desires, in Psalm 37, come from God.

For the sake of the Gospel, many people are called to lay down “the preferences of their hearts” in order to cultivate a heart that desires God’s greater mission. If we love God first, we may find ourselves doing what we want, not second or third, but fourth or fifth. In my church, we have well-educated entrepreneurs setting up chairs, husbands serving in Kids ministry, people helping with media who aren’t “media geeks”, people running PowerPoint who could be leading worship. We also have some people serving in their natural gifts and strengths.

Using Gifts for the Mission

In the missional church, there should always be seasons of sacrifice and re-alignment of our hearts desires through serving in areas that we are not “comfortable.” Gifting and calling doesn’t lead to comfort but it does lead to joy. As small churches and missional churches grow, people will be able to move into places where they have gifts. This will bless and strengthen the community and mission of the church. It will allow the diverse body to be unified in the mission of Christ, pushing the gospel into a harmonious community that brings the sound of the gospel into every domain of the city. However, if they move into these natural places without the heart of a servant, then they can end up sabotaging the mission through “burn out”, or hurting the church through a demanding heart.

Our service stands and falls in the heart, where the gospel must be applied daily so that we can love God first and then do what our heart desires. The challenges is to so truly love God first that, for a season, you may serve out of sacrifice and the “gift of the gospel” than out of your heart’s preferences. In fact, your gifting will inevitably taking into the heart of suffering. Was Jesus “gifted to be the messiah”? Absolutely. Did it remove discomfort, inconvenience, and suffering? Quite the opposite. The further we move into God’s calling, through obedience and mission, we will discover there is a discomfort in discipleship that must be embraced. It will be embraced, even enjoyed when we have put aside preferences for desires. Not all our natural, even good desires are fulfilled this side of the new creation. Remember the condition on this promise: “delight yourself in the Lord…” What you will find is that the deeper you delight in him, the more your desires will change. This change will include a valuing of Gods mission that runs so deep in our hearts, it will displace former desires. Despite the cost, it comes a profound, deep joy of serving in the strength that God supplies so that in all things Jesus Christ may be magnified (1 Peter 4:11).

Religion	Gospel	Post-Religion
Moralistic	Christ-centered	Relativistic
Narrow-minded	Heart-focused	Open-minded
I do	Jesus does	I don’t (care)
Be good	Be yourself in Jesus	Be authentic
Obey therefore accepted	Accepted therefore obey	Disobey find acceptance elsewhere
Identity in works	Identity in Jesus	Identity in self
Moral/Bible Questions	Heart Questions	Intellectual Questions
Concerned with Truth	Concerned with Truth in Love	Concerned with Love
God is hard to please	Jesus pleases God for us	God is obstacle to pleasure
Compares morals	Considers cross	Compares worldviews
Salvation – of course me	Salvation – why me?	Salvation – why not everyone
Motivated by fear	Motivated by Joy	Motivated by freedom
Results in pride	Results in humility	Results in indifference
Church=self-righteous	Church=imperfect saints	Church=backwards
Good	Repentant	Bad

ViralHope is a book that compiles expressions of the gospel from around the world. I contributed a chapter from the vantage point of Austin. All the words in this video were taken from entries in the book. You can pick one up locally at Austin City Life at the Highball on Sundays or ViralHope available at Amazon and the Ecclesia Press.