Category: Missional Church

Missional Church Refresher

Posted on September 23, 2008

The most helpful, readable introduction to missional ecclesiology I have found is Craig Van Gelder’s The Essence of the Church. Many readers were grateful for my partial review of his book The Ministry of the Missional Church. In The Essence of the Church, Van Gelder explains what the church is, its historical development (pros and cons), articulates a clear missional ecclesiology, and charts a way to organize the missional church.

I am currently working on a master document that re-roots our functional ecclesiology in biblical theology, while also outlining a long-term vision of mulitiplication and growth. I forgot that Van Gelder does some of this in Essence. I went back to Van Gelder for a refresher and have been wonderfully refreshed. He describes the church as “a people of God created by the Spirit to live as a missionary community.” Though this description doesn’t include the gospel, it captures the missional nature of the church very well. He certainly is gospel-centered and warns us that “Failing to understand the anture of the church can lead to a number of problems. Defining the church functionally—in terms of what it does—can shift our perspective away from understnading the church as a unique community of God’s people.” A good word. A good book, for that matter.

Partners not Members

Posted on September 23, 2008

Some churches do members classes; we have a Partners Class (we took this name from the Austin Stone Church). The reason we call it a Partners class is that we believe the church is a partnership of Spirit-led disciples who follow Jesus. The church isn’t a country club bound by exclusive membership; it’s a missional community bound together by the gospel.

Read about it here.

Erwin Raphael McManus: Gospel Lite?

Posted on September 23, 2008

Justin Taylor cites from Phil Johnson on the gospel-lite writing of Erwin Raphael McManus:

. . . my fundamental quarrel with McManus is not about whether he repudiates this or that label. It’s not even about the menagerie of high-flown titles he does load his resumé with. It’s this: clear gospel truth is almost impossible to find in the material he publishes and posts for public consumption. And in that regard, I don’t see a whole lot of difference between Erwin McManus and Joel Osteen. He’s Osteen with blue jeans and an occasional soul patch rather than a shiny suit and a perpetual grin.

Am I being too hard on McManus? I expect we’ll get lots of commenters (including the usual suspects and some first-time drive-bys) who will insist that I am. McManus seems to have lots of passionate devotees online. To them I say: Welcome to our blog. Convince me. It should be easy to do if I’m wrong. Simply show me a few places where McManus makes the gospel plain and clear for his audience, with straightforward, biblical explanations of sin, atonement, and justification for sinners—including a distinct and compelling summons for sinners to repent.

Urban Insight from Harvey Cox

Posted on September 22, 2008

Harvard Professor and author, Harvey Cox possesses some of the most penetrating cultural and urban insight I have found. His most recent book, When Jesus Came to Harvard: Making Moral Decisions Today, contains some great insight on finding common moral ground among religions. However, it lacks a gospel-centered approach. Harvey’s Secular City, published in 1965, became an international bestseller and was selected by the University of Marburg as one of the most influential books of Protestant theology in the twentieth century. This book challenged me to think deeply about urban life, social norms, and the complexity of urban renewal.

In the Secular City, Cox works out the insight that Christianity uniquely facilitates the emergence of cities. He notes that the “universality and radical openness of Christianity” detribalizes people; it enables them to bond on something universal as opposed to local. Athens, he argures, never became a true city, in part, because it was so tribalized; the gods were all localized, unopen to outsiders. He writes: “Only after the beginning of the Christian era was the ideal of an inclusive metropolis conveivable, and even then it took nearly two millennia to relize it.” To a significant degree, Christianity is inclusive; it rules no one out on ethnic or cultural grounds. In fact, if you believe that Christians will ultimately be represented from “every tribe, tongue, and nation,” then Christianity reaches the height of inclusive without the theological vacuum of universalism. Not only does it include people; it reconciles them through Christ. Christians should not be useless citizens or angry neighbors. The gospel, then, should compell us to engage the peoples and the cultures of the city and the world in a way that renews, not ignores or exploits, urban life. I go back to it again and again and have not come close to exhausting Cox’s  insight for church planting and urban ministry.

Today I picked up his The Seduction of the Spirit: The Use and Misuse of People’s Religion, published in 1985 and look forward to gleaning from his understanding of religion, it’s blessing and curse. So, I thought I would recommend Cox. Note: He is not bedtime reading. His mental rigor and inter-disciplinary thought is both inspiring and challenging, but its worth the struggle.