Category: Missional Church

The inaugural GCM EveryDay training is off to a great start with Steve Timmis addressing us on Church in the Margins.

Church on the Margins

He’s delivering a sobering message about the decline of the church in America. We are moving towards 60% unchurched. Christianity is increasingly marginalized culturally, politically, spiritually.

This is a prophetic wake-up call to the American Church, a prescient message from the post-Christian UK to the US.

Steve Timmis Quotes

• I don’t like the term postmodernity but prefer hypermodernity. We don’t live in a secular society but in a pluralist society- an increasingly plurality of different beliefs and convictions in America, of people who will not come into our buildings!
• Don’t mistake religion for biblical faith. We need to show people biblical faith.
• We can no longer assume people want to find God and will go to a church.
• The church isn’t incidental to the purposes of God but central to the purposes of God.
• Jesus did not just die for me; he died for a people.

Resurgence is running a post I wrote on Church Planting Movements called: Why Comparisons are a Mistake. I list four reasons NOT to compare our churches to church planting movements and three ways TO compare ourselves to non-Western church planting movements. An excerpt:

As good Westerners, we gravitate to the numbers in CPMs and decry the slow resurgence of the gospel in the West. We mine these movements for compelling strategies instead of learning from the mundane stories of perseverance that constitute the history of CPMs.

Read the rest.

Jeff Vanderstelt shares how to train missional people by pressing the Gospel through the rhythms of everyday life. Quotes: “Missional people party like crazy! Bring the better wine!” “Christians should be the most playful, rested, refreshed, joyful people on earth.” Watch the video to see how Jeff connects the gospel to things like drinking, eating, & playing.

Jeff Vanderstelt: Rhythms [VERGE 2010 Main Session] from Verge Network on Vimeo.

Be sure to check out all the great videos at the new Verge Network website.

When Christians come together for weekly gatherings, we create a unique context for sharing life and truth. Unlike any other cultural gathering, this time allows people to combine the following elements: celebrate life, eat together, enjoy one another, and share the truth in love.

Gather to Share the Gospel

Missional community gatherings are not a time to check off the spiritual list or to be a wallflower. Rather, the Christian community gathers together to share common and uncommon struggles with a common hope in the truth of the gospel. It’s an incredible opportunity to pause in the middle of a busy week and remind ourselves that we are the church, an imperfect people clinging to a perfect Christ, being perfected together by the Spirit.

City Group gatherings are intended to foster substantive community and priestly ministry to one another. We should view them, not with dread but anticipation, adjusting our attitudes during our drive to one another’s homes, eagerly hoping to give and receive the gospel from one another. It is a time to be encouraged in Christ by one another. Graham Benyon puts it like this:

“We are to be teaching each other the gospel, to be correcting each other about the gospel with all wisdom, to be singing about the gospel with gratitude and so letting it dwell richly among us. When we come to church on a Sunday, or to our small group meeting during the week, we should come saying to ourselves, ‘I hope I will be reminded of the gospel in this meeting. I hope I will be taught about it and corrected in my understanding of it. I hope we will sing about it.”

– God’s New Community, 119.

This is precisely what sets Christian community apart from any other gathering in our week. It is a gathering, not around rules, or goals, or ourselves at the center, but a gathering around Jesus. We huddle, not around our sin or success, but around our Savior. City Group gatherings are a time of Jesus-centered or Gospel-centered community.