Sojourn guys are live blogging the bootcamp here.
Category: Missional Church
Missional Network Gathering & Savvy Core Team Training
I am off to the Missional Network Gathering in Kansas City tomorrow with Brad Brisco as my host. I’ll be speaking on two main topics:
- Planting to Movement: Forming City Networks
- Best Practices of Missional Communities
Afterwards, I will be coaching the Watershed Church Planting team on Missional Core Team Development. They have developed an interesting approach, really savvy, as I have reflected on it. This team invited me to do customized coaching and teaching for their church plant. Here’s why I think they came up with a savvy idea:
- Contextualized Training: Instead of generalized training at a bootcamp, they get both general and specialized training, for their context.
- Method-specific Training: They get to select a particular church planting model and go deep into it with an experienced planter.
- Cost Effective Training: They save a little money by not paying for hotel, airfare, meals for the whole core team or leaders. They just pay the trainer/coach.
Mission is More than a Command
“Since the advent of Protestant missions, the dominant motivation for missions has been an appeal to the “missionary mandate.” Thus, missions became a response of obedience to a particular set of commands, most notably those texts commonly referred to as embodying the Great Commission. In contrast, Lesslie Newbigin has pointed out that in the New Testament we witness not the burden of obeying a command, but rather a vast “explosion of joy.”[1] Jürgen Moltmann described it as the joyous invitation to all peoples to come to a “feast without end.”[2]…
Harry Boer in his Pentecost and Missions rightly points out that none of the key figures in the book of Acts ever makes a direct appeal to any of the Great Commission passages to justify their preaching, even when questions are raised about the emerging Gentile mission. He further points out that the earliest believers who took the initiative to preach the gospel to Gentiles (Acts 11:20) were very likely not even present at any of those post-resurrection commissioning events.”
Read the rest of Tim Tennent’s fine post.
Creation Project Writing
For those who aren’t aware, I also blog at Creation Project, where I try to think and reflect Christianly about life and culture. I also recently updated my Article Archive, which lists various writings under subject headings such as: Discipleship, Culture, Community, Church, and so on.