Category: Missional Church

How Big is Your Gospel?

Posted on March 13, 2009

In Seattle Steve Timmis gave us three sessions on “Total Church”. The first was on the Gospel, the second on Community, the third on practical training for developing gospel-centered communities. One of the things I love about Chester and Timmis is the way they allow biblical theology to drive their ecclesiology, and not in an academic way. Consider the following definition of the gospel which accessibly incorporates the biblical-theological themes of: monotheistic christology, substitutionary atonement, imputed righteousness, christus victor, new creation, inaugurated eschatology, and the gospel of grace:

Jesus, God’s promised Rescuer and Ruler, lived our life, died our death and rose again in triumphant vindication as the first fruits of the new creation to bring forgiven sinners together under his gracious reign.

This is a big gospel. This is not the individualistic, works-based, escapist gospel of much of American evangelicalism. It incorporates the whole world, person, and Jesus. It forces us to move beyond decision-based conversions to following Jesus as Lord. It calls us beyond Christianity as private religion into Christianity as public, communal gospel. It’s not a pocket-sized gospel. The gospel is bigger than we think. Now, if we can just lead our churches into renewal, revival, and repentance towards living out a big gospel, a gospel as big as the city, as the world, as the whole of history.

How is this big gospel impacting your church, your leadership? Are you doing anything differently in your church because of the size of this gospel?

A29 Reflections on Preaching and Endurance

Posted on March 12, 2009

The Seattle A29 bootcamp was one of the best I’ve been to. Here are a few highlights:

Preach the Word

With intoxicating passion Matt Chandler exhorted us, text after text, to be the unlikely people who proclaim the gospel and encounter opposition for being faithful to the Word of God. A standby message that can’t be preached enough in an age of theological fads, cultural fascination, church planting tricks, and the very scary American church industry.

He reminded us that when God wants to work, he repeated comes to a man. He met Moses on a mountain instead of dethroning Pharaoh by himself. He likes to use the unlikely to accomplish his redemptive purposes in history. What hope for us. But calls us to preach unpopular messages, like Isaiah’s sensory malfunction message in chapter 6, or Jeremiah’s message to “uproot and tear down,” without very little experience of “building up.”  And it is this kind of embodying and preaching of the gospel of Christ crucified that, though unpopular, actually changes the whole world!

Progressional Dialog

Matt was a little hard on progressional dialog/dialogical preaching. The crux of his point was that the Bible repeatedly shows people “preaching” not “dialoging” the Word and therefore that should be our method too. I think people will probably mishear Matt on some of this. In explaining the progression of dialog Matt summed it up as going from “nothing to nothing.” To be fair, his explanation came from Preaching Reimagined by Pagitt which carries a whole host of theological baggage with it. But I wonder if we can separate the method out and celebrate the dialogical homiletic a bit more? I have friends who use diaological preaching that is robust, gospel-centered, and far from “nothing to nothing.” Matt, do you think there’s room for this method provided the content delivered is biblically faithful?

A Call to Endure

Mark Driscoll’s message on endurance was jam-packed with wisdom for people, pastors, and planters alike. Focusing on the practicals of running the Christian race well and to the end, Driscoll highlighted a number of areas in which we need to endure: spiritually, physically, maritally, parentally, pastorally. His call to “love Jesus not use him” should pierce the armor of self-made ministry significance. Every pastor battles this—significance by ministry—instead of significance by Jesus. He reminded us that: “ministry is the one idol the church will let you get away with.”

Additionally, Driscoll’s comments on our wives being pastors to their husbands was rich. People used to scathing Mark for his complementarianism will do well to heed his words on this. Far from bull-headed masculinity and chauvinism, Mark pleaded with pastors and their wives to move together in ministry. How? By a pastor allowing his wife to minister to him emotionally, spiritually, relationally, etc. The calling of a pastor’s wife is not to some fanciful, exalted position of “first lady” but to the all-important place of strengthening her husband. Mark commented regarding this role of pastor’s wife: “everything else can be delegated in the chruch.

Two Great Principles for Gospel Community

Posted on March 10, 2009

Last night Steve Timmis taught on Gospel Communities at Mars Hill Church in Seattle. After establishing a solid biblical theology of the centrality of Jesus for missional communities, Steve shared some key training points for MCs. Below are my summaries of his teaching. I have placed Steve’s direct words in quotes.

  1. Community is not for girls. Don’t here what Steve is not saying. Very often community is percieved as a feminine practice. Its where you get in touch with your emotions, where you go around affirming one another, touchy-feely. But this is not biblical community. True community is a response to the Jesus who is Lord. The true Jesus is neither anemic nor hypermasculine, atrophying in weakness or bulging in strength. He is the Lord who “lived our life, died our death and rose as the first fruits of the new creation” and is gathering a community of grace that is to be a foretaste of eternity. As that community of grace, we need to look to Jesus as the center of community, who lives in us and reigns over us, compelling us to be a community that speaks the truth in love, not merely swaps emotions or confessions. Community is for Jesus.
  2. Just because we have communities that are honest and open about their sin doesnt mean we have gospel-centered communities. We may very well have communities that mistake confessing sin for living in the gospel. Confessing our sin in community is only part of the task of living in the gospel together. We mustnt linger there but complete the process through repentance and faith in Jesus. Confession must lead to repentance and faith, not under the weight of legalistic demands but as a response to how ravishing Jesus us. We need to lead our communities into seeing the beauty and glory of Jesus and allowing that to motivate true change, true repentance, such that we say: “Oh, brothers and sisters I see how sweet and ravishing Jesus is and I want you to pray for me in ______, hold me accountable and prod me to live in the gospel not in _____.

Look for the forthcoming video and audio on this Total Church Community Training on Resurgence and Acts 29 blog.