Category: Missional Church

What Does a Gospel-centered Church of Missional Communities Really Look Like?

Posted on January 5, 2010

One of the dangerous things about publishing and writing online is that you can get an exaggerated presence. People begin to inflate your ideas, your church, your leadership well beyond their actual capacity. I think this is a real danger among church planters. We’re all “trying to make a mark for God” by employing the latest missional thinking. We comb the web for innovative ideas, best practices, and training in order to make the “best mark for the glory of God.”

I want to deflate any exaggeration that might be out there about Austin City Life or my own leadership. Not just to deflate, but to bring balance and realism into the picture. A lot of young church planters are captivated by methodologies and best practices. These methods and practices are often downloaded without any effort to rethink them for their own vision and context. That, too, is dangerous.

At the risk of promoting more uncritical downloads, and with the hope of bringing realistic balance to what I write, I thought I would point to some actual stories of Gospel, Community, and Mission told by our own people on a Sunday morning. We often bring people up to share about how God is working in their life during a SUnday gathering. We do this, not to be cool, but to a) As the psalmist says “tell of the works of the Lord b) to reinforce that church is a family not an event c) to encourage others.

This past Sunday was a vision/story-telling Sunday. I brought three people up from our community, who are not leaders, to share how they experienced God’s goodness in 2010 in the areas of Gospel, Community, and Mission. The stories are earthy, inspiring, real. They are not canned. And because of that, I hope you’ll find them helpful. They are little windows into an imperfect church, clinging to a perfect Christ, that is trying to live by the gospel, in community, on mission.

Syncretistic Missional Ecclesiology: The Failure of Missional Church

Posted on December 30, 2009

Missional Church is in full swing. In classic American fashion, we’ve created a whole industry around it—Networks, Conferences, Books, Blogs, Seminars, Schools, Workbooks, Degrees, and so on. Missional is becoming common parlance among American evangelicals. But at the end of the day, the proof is in the pudding. What kind of impact is missional church making?

Ed Stetzer reported a disappointing trend in 2008 of continued decline in conversions, church growth, and church starts. Church plants are popping up everywhere, but not faster than established churches are closing their doors. It appears that The Next Christendom isn’t returning to the shores of the West anytime soon. In fact, according to Gallup, cultural Christianity is on the decline. Are we to then assume that the missional church movement is a failure, a fad?

There are several reasons why Missional Church isn’t working. Here I will focus on one reason—syncretistic missional ecclesiology. Syncretistic missional ecclesiology (SME) is the fusion of missional church with institutional church. In other cultural contexts, syncretistic ecclesiology combines Christian church values and practices with other religious institutions like Buddhist temple life. Here we are concerned with the American context, the resurgence of missional church and its unhealthy integration into the institutional church.

Institutional Missional Church

Although many leaders and churches have embraced missional language and theology, they are still having trouble translating mission into their own communities. Why? Because church plants are fusing missional ecclesiology with their prior experience of institutional church. The nature of missional church requires more than cosmetic adjustments to our inherited forms of church. Missional ecclesiology requires an entirely new way of thinking about church, from the bottom up. Church plants and established churches have failed to recognize this important point. As a result, they have created a syncretistic ecclesiology, blending institutional church with missional church. This syncretism is both theologically and practically defective. Sometimes the blending of institutional and missional church is only functionally defective, prone to failure. Other times it is theologically defective, prone to heresy and correction. Here we will primarily focus on functionally defective SME.

Syncretistic Missional Church Practices

How do you know if you are approaching mission institutionally? Here are a few ways:

  • Institutional mission relies on preaching, teaching, and writing to implement missional ecclesiology.
  • Institutional mission adopts a program of mission during a set season of the year to implement missional ecclesiology.
  • Institutional mission focuses on evangelistic and social justice events to implement missional ecclesiology.
  • Institutional mission sees mission as a line item in the church budget, not mission as the whole budget.
  • Institutional mission views mission as an implication of the gospel, not as part of the gospel.

While these institutional approaches are not bad, they are not enough. Church leadership and practices must be consonant with the nature of mission. The nature of mission is Spirit-initiated not man-made, organic not institutional, training not just teaching, relational not programmatic, gradual not instant. What we need is not institutional mission, but intuitive mission

Intuitive Missional Church

Intuitive mission relies on the intuition of the Spirit through the guidance of the Word to embed a gospel that is missional. It is not primarily concerned with implementation but with cultivation of DNA (see Hirsch’s Apostolic Genius). Intuitive mission is soaked in the Spirit’s guidance. It discerns missional leadership patterns in Scripture. It understands that mission is gospel-centric. It approaches mission as something to be cultivated. Here are some ways to know if you are practicing intuitive mission:

  • Intuitive mission relies on Spirit-led prayer that begins with repentance over the sins of institutional, individualistic Christianity in neglecting the mission of the church and diminishing the glory of Christ.
  • Intuitive mission discerns missional leadership patterns from Scripture instead of uncritically implementing business models of leadership.
  • Intuitive mission cultivates missional DNA through personal and communal forms of training instead of relying primarily upon professional, monological communication.
  • Intuitive mission spends lots of time with people not programs, so that we have networks of relationships in which we can authenticate the gospel we preach.
  • Intuitive mission does “everyday things with gospel intentionality”, instead of seeing mission as either an evangelistic or social justice event.

If missional ecclesiology is to sufficiently permeate our churches and change our point in history, then we will have to do a better job of spotting our institutionalism. We will need to rigorously weed out unhealthy syncretistic missional ecclesiology. Throw out institutional mission while retaining our rich traditions. Cultivate intuitive mission practices that remain faithful to the gospel and force a gracious, deliberate, and discerning reworking of institutional mission. It is a difficult process. I fall back into my inherited patterns of ecclesiology all the time, so pray for me. I welcome your help. Let’s push mission all the way through our churches, by the grace of God, to see his gospel permeate every aspect of life.

Preaching: PowerPoint or Bibles?

Posted on December 27, 2009

In recent research Ed Stetzer examined 450 sermons, with the help of a team, and asked some interesting questions. In particular, he posed: “Do you start [your sermons] with the text or the [listeners] context?” 37% of preachers said they start with context to connect with their audience first, but at closer analysis it was actually over 50%.

Which is Better: Text or Context?

There are pros and cons to starting with either text or context. When we start with text, we reinforce the centrality of God’s word over the preacher’s opinion. We can call people to open their Bibles and follow along. When we start with context, we connect with the listener right away, at a felt need level, and can lead them to the relevancy of the Bible.

Does PowerPoint Reduce Dependence on the Bible?

I typically introduce my sermons with a brief connection to the listener’s context, pray, and then start the sermon. While I think this is good, Stetzer’s comments regarding PowerPoint enriched some of our recent thinking about sermon delivery. Stetzer has almost stopped using PP. Why? People begin to depend on it, not their Bibles.

People at Austin City Life don’t bring or follow along in their Bibles enough. I’m not sure why, so I started an online survey to find out. I think they depend on PowerPoint. I’m glad that some people don’t bring their Bibles because they aren’t even Christians. The fact that they are reading the Bible on a screen is better than not reading Scripture at all. But, there are other ways around that.

I may start using PP less and less. At the start of 2010 we are making a very clear point about the necessity of bringing Bibles to our gatherings, not to be religious but to be reasonable, to reason through Scripture yourself, and not just ping single texts off of a screen. Reading your Bible during a sermon can help you in several ways:

  1. Focus on the sermon.
  2. Understand the Bible.
  3. Read the passage in its larger context.
  4. Test the pastor’s message against the authoritative message of Scripture.
  5. Allow you to cross reference what he says with other portions of Scripture.

But a lot of people don’t bring or read their Bibles during sermons. Marshal McLuhan is famous for saying: “the medium is the message”, and I believe one of the unintended messages traveling through our PP medium is you don’t need to read your Bible. Isolated texts on a screen is good enough. That is an awful message, one contradicted by the message of Scripture itself (Ps 19, 119; 2 Tim 3:16).