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Author: Jonathan Dodson
Set Aside your Strategic Plans and Goal Setting!
Sure, there all kinds of ways to plant a church–traditional, missional, hive-off, or some mix of the three–but it is the missional church that I am particularly trying to plant. As a result, what we do and how we do it do not fit traditional paradigms, like forecasting numbers and certain types of goal-setting, which tend to force missional ecclesiology into a traditional, measurable mold.
Alan Roxburgh’s recent work articulates my particular struggle to plant a missional-incarnational church within a modernist-traditional atmosphere:
Alan Roxburgh says: “…leaders who want to cultivate missional communities in transition must set aside goal-setting and strategic planning as their primary model. Leadership in this context is not about forecasting, but about the formation of networks of discourse among people. It’s about the capacity to engage the realities of people’s lives and contexts in dialogue with Scripture” The Sky is Falling?! (89).
HT: JR
Review of Keller's The Reason for God
Click here for my first post on Keller’s book re: secularism and religion.
Publisher’s Weekly has given Tim Keller’s book, The Reason for God, an great advance review Here is an excerpt:
In this apologia for Christian faith, Keller mines material from literary classics, philosophy, anthropology and a multitude of other disciplines to make an intellectually compelling case for God…One of Keller’s most provocative arguments is that “all doubts, however skeptical and cynical they may seem, are really a set of alternate beliefs.” Drawing on sources as diverse as 19th-century author Robert Louis Stevenson and contemporary New Testament theologian N.T. Wright, Keller attempts to deconstruct everyone he finds in his way, from the evolutionary psychologist Richard Dawkins to popular author Dan Brown.
The New n +1
The new n + 1 is out. A twice-yearly print journal of politics, literature, and culture, this issue has:
“We have a masterly novella by Caleb Crain; we have a history of the cubicle, that wretched device, born, it turns out, in the revolutionary maelstrom of 1968; poems by our favorite Russian poet, Kirill Medvedev; pieces on the new ideology of indie bookselling; post-apocalyptic novels; and five years of Gawker.com. There is a symposium on the left-wing “politics of fear.” And finally, the centerpiece of the issue, a very powerful essay on Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech shooter, by Wesley Yang.”