The Organic Church Movements Conference with Neil Cole and Alan Hirsch will be held next in Ontario on Feb 8-10. Here are a few of the workshops:
Check out this review of Timmis and Chester’s The World We All Want (authors of Total Church). The reviewer highlights three mains strengths to this evangelistic approach: 1) gospel presented in the wider context of the Biblical story 2) emphasis on conversion into community, not making “the church” optional 3) Jesus centered. Here is an excerpt of the review:
I particularly liked the manner in which God’s people are described in session seven as “a waiting community, a proclaiming community, a loving community.” It’s been reported recently that many people on the street are cool with Jesus, but have a problem with the church. TWWAW demonstrates that you can’t have the bridegroom without his bride, nipping that particular problem in the bud.
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
Barna Group has identified four mega trends from the last quarter of 2007: 1) Americans’ unconditional self-love; 2) designer faith with rootless values; 3) the five Ps of parenting; and 4) nouveau Christianity. Click here for explanation.
