Search Results for: organic 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.

Keller on Managing Church Growth

Posted on July 22, 2008

Tim Keller has an article on “Process Managing Church Growth” in the newest issue of Vineyard’s Cutting Edge. In it he offers some very practical advice on how to manage stages of church growth and adjust church culture accordingly. I will summarize some of his points:

  1. Every church has a size culture that goes with its size that has to be accepted. For instance, to impose the small church expectation of lead pastoral accessibility upon the lead pastor of a large church will “wreak havoc on the church and eventually force it back into the size with which the practices are compatible.”
  2. Everyone knows that at some point a church becomes too large for one pastor to handle. The threshold for hiring another pastor varies from context to context, with “white collar communities demanding far more specialized programs”  thus requiring an earlier hire.
  3. With growth comes increasing complexity which requires increasing intentionality in communication. Here Keller emphasizes a lot of “increasings.”
  • Increased growth requires increased communication–informal, grassroots is no longer effective. This requires more deliberate and systematic assimilation; visitors are less visible. More well-organized volunteer recruitment becomes necessary.
  • More planning and organization must go into events. Higher quality is expected in larger churches and spontaneous, last-minute events do not work.
  • More high quality aesthetics must be present. People enter a service without a knowledge of the ungifted singers who are appreciated “because we all know them.” Visitors are looking for a vertical, not horizontal encounter, with a sense of transcendence.

The whole article is well worth working through and can be found online here. I sense a tension between wisdom and convention in this article. For instance, there is no doubt that I need to think much more about intentionality in all the areas Keller mentions as our church grows. Organic, frayed at the edges kind of stuff can only work so long. However, Keller’s advice seems, in places, to assume a largely staff driven church. For instance, if people are sufficiently trained can they not perform a considerable amount of the “pastoring” without lowering the expectation of pastoral accessibility. Can we not change the expectation to expect pastoral care from one another in the context of a gospel-centered missional community? I’ll be reflecting on this article for a while. You can subscribe to a free copy of Cutting Edge here.

How to Grow a Missional Church

Posted on January 9, 2008

Here are four helpful ways to keep an Organic (or any church) on mission, taken from Neil Cole and expanded upon by yours truly.

Practice of Prayer

Don’t rely on your cultural exegesis, persuasive personality, strong leadership, or big vision. Rely on God for growth. Pray for the harvest and for laborers to join the harvest. As one our launch team members pointed out, Jesus tells the 70 disciples he sent on mission to already begin praying for more missional disciples, more organic kingdom laborers in the harvest. Consider having launch team members host regular prayer meetings, rotating from house to house, neighborhood to neighborhood, to contextualize prayer and mission.

Pockets of People

In Jesus’ sending of the 12 and 70 (Luke 9&10), he sent them to houses and with very little (no food, extra clothes, money). The disciples were forced to rely on God and the would-be community of faith to grow the kingdom. Look for people who are connected in your communities and spend time with them, have dinners and parties in their homes, get on board with giving the kingdom away. Identify pockets of people in coffeeshops, clubs, restaurants, etc and spend time there. Avoid heavy-handed leadership and cultivate leadership early on. Cole notes that some of these folks may be unrepentant sinners, but that “bad people make good soil.”

Power of Presence

Expect God to do powerful things. Cole says that “Where you go, the King goes, and where the King goes, people bow” (OC, 177). Exercise faith as you live missionally.

Person of Peace

Look for people who come to Christ to be people of peace, people who lead to new relational and cultural networks through which we can spread the gospel to make our communities and cities better places to live. Whether they have a good or bad reputation, God wants to bless them with salvation and multiply his grace through them. Jesus delivered a demoniac and sent him to ten cities to spread the gospel.