Resurgence is running a version of an article I wrote a while back—6 Ways to Engage Culture.
Category: Missional Church
Austin PlantR Network
This is a promotional card for the Austin Area Church PlantR Network. PlantR for short! The PlantR Network exists to catalyze a Christ-centered, context-sensitive church planting movement for social and spiritual renewal of Austin and beyond.
PlantR is a trans-denominational network committed to helping church planters plant and reproduce healthy missional churches. In 2009, we will be implementing more of the vision as we seek to catalyze a Christ-centered movement in three primary ways: networking, resourcing, and encouraging planters among all peoples in the greater Austin area.
Network: We are committed to networking planters through monthly meetings, online forums, and annual conferences in order to promote shared learning, resources, encouragement, and the mission of Christ.
Resource: We are committed to resourcing planters through up-to-date demographics, missiology, best practices, monthly speakers and resource swapping.
Encourage: We are committed to encouraging planters by facilitating a community of planters that care for one another through regular prayer and encouragement.
Keep an eye on our website as we increase the content and morph the site in the weeks and months to come.
PS: Design by Ben Hansen and photography by Jen Cota
Church Planting Models
There are a variety of Church Planting Models. If you think you don’t fall into one of these, you’re probably ignorant or arrogant. I wanted to break the mold when I started planting. Then, I realized that God uses all of them. All these models, correctly or incorrectly assume that the planter is gospel focused. My hope is that, by laying these out, you will get a sense of where you are and how you might need to correct in the planting process to plant a better church, to cultivate a more missional people.
- Program-driven: mission by program, by generation
Southern Baptist Churches - Purpose-driven: mission by purpose, by paradigm
Saddleback Churches - Community-driven: mission by people, by relationship
House, Cell, Missional Communities - Seeker-sensitive: mission by profile, by target group
Willow Creek Churches - Ministry-driven: mission by mission, by ministry
Community Development, Evangelistic/Gatherables
Which do you identify with and why? Are all of the models missional? In what sense?
[1] Adapted from The Church Planting Village, North American Mission Board: http://www.churchplantingvillage.net/site/c.iiJTKZPEJpH/b.784555/k.D77/Church_Design_Models.htm
Lewis on Community
He works on us in all sorts of ways. But above all, he works on us through each other. Men are mirrors, or carriers of Christ to other men. Ususally it is those who know Him that bring Him to others. That is why the church, the whole body of Christians showing Him to one another, is so important. It is so easy to think that the church has a lot of different objects – education, buildings, missions, holding services … the Church exists for no other purpose but to draw men to Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became man for no other purpose. It is even doubtful, you know, whether the whole universe was created for any
other purpose. – C.S. Lewis
Not sure how this quote came together, Doug? Part of it is from Mere Christianity.