From Planting to Movements

Posted on February 6, 2009

This Saturday I will be co-presenting a workshop at the Missional Community Leader Conference on moving:

From Planting to Movements: The Role of City Networks

The purpose of the workshop is to explore and narrarate the role of city networks in facilitating a movement from church planting to a movement resulting in city renewal. We will share from theory and practice in order to inspire and equip people to think beyond their own church plant into movement ministry.

I will post our workshop notes after the conference.

Piper's Potential Writing Projects

Posted on February 6, 2009

  1. Make a serious beginning on a longer book on divine providence, perhaps called something like Sightings of the Sovereignty of God. The idea here is to encompass all of Scripture and show from it the hundreds of ways God reveals his absolute sovereignty over all things. This would probably take more than one writing leave.
  2. Write a shorter book called perhaps Reasoning with Jesus: Thinking for the Glory of Christ.I have most of the raw material for this already on paper in several messages. The idea would be to provide a plea, perhaps especially to younger people, to devote their best mental efforts to understanding and living out the Christian faith.But it would be for everybody and would be different from lots of books about the intellectual life in that it would be largely expositions of Scripture. What does it mean to love God with our minds? How important is education (which is not the same as “school”)? What are people doing with their minds today that makes Jesus angry?
  3. Preparing the Ruth cycle of Advent poems for publication without Christmas endings so that in the next year we can put together a suite of materials on Ruth including the book I just finished (Ruth: A Sweet and Bitter Providence) and a set of video messages on the book to be recorded next December.
  4. I dream of writing a children’s book. It may be as small as one of the old Arch Books, retelling biblical stories in poetry form. Or it may be a little longer and more substantial in parabolic form.
  5. There is churning in me a book on issues of race and ethnicity in the church and in America. If I live, it will be done. It’s a matter of timing. I never feel qualified to write it. But, as with marriage, I may just have to do it anyway and let the chips fall where they may.
  6. I might be stirred to do one more book on justification.What needs to be done to complete the picture I have drawn in the first two books (Counted Righteous in Christ and The Future of Justification) is a biblical exposition of how “works” function in relationship to justification. This would involve a treatment of the nature of the faith that justifies, and how it relates to works.
  7. Make a serious beginning toward publishing the Romans sermons in four volumes, possibly editing one volume per year for four years.

Read the whole thing here.

Ken Myers: After Evangelism

Posted on February 5, 2009

Ken Myers of Mars Hill Audio will be speaking on: After Evangelism: Discipleship and the Cultural Life of Churches at Gordon-Conwell’s campus in South Hamilton, Massachusetts on Tuesday, February 24, 2009. Wish I could attend. Myers is as robust cultural critic and apologist. His thoughtful Mars Hill Audio program turns out volume after volume of diverse, well-researched, and engaging interviews and theological reflection.

Here is a Description of this Event: Since pastors are eager to reach many people with the message of the Gospel, they are often encouraged to adopt conventional cultural forms so as to reach people “where they are.” But the Gospel is not just a message to be accepted, but a way of life that is often out of sync with the way of life our culture extols. In this seminar, Ken Myers will offer a framework for assessing the common cultural practices and sensibilities, arguing that discipleship requires a more prophetic stance toward the culture around us than many churches seem willing to embrace.

Specific topics include…
(1) Wise Shepherds or Winsome Cruise Directors? Lessons from Titus on Cultural Ecology
(2) Consumer Goods: How Commodification Undermines Authority
(3) Idol Pursuits: How Celebrity Corrupts Identity
(4) A Way With Words: How Aliteracy Threatens Wisdom

Speaker Information: Ken Myers is the host and producer of the MARS HILL AUDIO Journal, an audio magazine exploring the dynamics of contemporary culture. He is a graduate of the University of Maryland, where he studied film theory and criticism, and of Westminster Theological Seminary. Formerly a producer for National Public Radio, he has worked on publishing projects with Charles Colson and Richard John Neuhaus. He is the author of All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christian and Popular Culture (Crossway, 1989), and is working on a book entitled After Evangelism: Discipleship and the Cultural Life of Churches.