Tag: acts 29

Acts 29 Texas Regional

The upcoming Acts 29 Texas Regional will be a highly strategic meeting for A29 members and candidates only. We will share vision for the Texas region and ask you to participate in pioneering strategic initiatives to “develop reproducing, gospel-centered churches that engage all the peoples of Texas.” If you are A29, I hope you can make it!

Acts 29 Regional | Texas

Monday, May 11, 2009, 9:00 AM – Tuesday, May 12, 2009, 2:00 PM

Title: Acts 29 Texas Region Gathering

Description: A time for Acts 29 members and candidates in the Texas region to gather together to network, fellowship, worship and pray with one another. It will also be a time to discuss the direction of the region and what part each planter plays.

When: May 11th-12th

Where: The Village Church at the Highland Village Campus

Schedule:
May 11th – 9 am to 8 pm
May 12th – 9 am to 2 pm

RSVP: churchplanting@thevillagechurch.net

Pastoral Wisdom w/ Driscoll @ Gospel Coalition

Some of Mark Driscoll’s most recent talks have been packed with pastoral wisdom. Do not miss his talk A Call to Endure which deserves to be heard or watched by pastor and wife together. He calls us to endure: emotionally, physically, spiritually, parentally, spiritually. Some of his insightful points include:

  • The only person that can truly pastor you is your wife.
  • Your personality calcifies as you get older apart from the gospel you will become a calcified version of yourself.
  • The one idol your church will let you worship is ministry. Don’t lose intimacy with Jesus.

In his 1 Timothy address at GC, Driscoll lays out three types of people pastors are called to interact with: positives, negatives, neutrals. He reaches deep into his own experience to bring pastoral empathy and ministry wisdom.

Read his notes here.

A29 Reflections on Preaching and Endurance

The Seattle A29 bootcamp was one of the best I’ve been to. Here are a few highlights:

Preach the Word

With intoxicating passion Matt Chandler exhorted us, text after text, to be the unlikely people who proclaim the gospel and encounter opposition for being faithful to the Word of God. A standby message that can’t be preached enough in an age of theological fads, cultural fascination, church planting tricks, and the very scary American church industry.

He reminded us that when God wants to work, he repeated comes to a man. He met Moses on a mountain instead of dethroning Pharaoh by himself. He likes to use the unlikely to accomplish his redemptive purposes in history. What hope for us. But calls us to preach unpopular messages, like Isaiah’s sensory malfunction message in chapter 6, or Jeremiah’s message to “uproot and tear down,” without very little experience of “building up.”  And it is this kind of embodying and preaching of the gospel of Christ crucified that, though unpopular, actually changes the whole world!

Progressional Dialog

Matt was a little hard on progressional dialog/dialogical preaching. The crux of his point was that the Bible repeatedly shows people “preaching” not “dialoging” the Word and therefore that should be our method too. I think people will probably mishear Matt on some of this. In explaining the progression of dialog Matt summed it up as going from “nothing to nothing.” To be fair, his explanation came from Preaching Reimagined by Pagitt which carries a whole host of theological baggage with it. But I wonder if we can separate the method out and celebrate the dialogical homiletic a bit more? I have friends who use diaological preaching that is robust, gospel-centered, and far from “nothing to nothing.” Matt, do you think there’s room for this method provided the content delivered is biblically faithful?

A Call to Endure

Mark Driscoll’s message on endurance was jam-packed with wisdom for people, pastors, and planters alike. Focusing on the practicals of running the Christian race well and to the end, Driscoll highlighted a number of areas in which we need to endure: spiritually, physically, maritally, parentally, pastorally. His call to “love Jesus not use him” should pierce the armor of self-made ministry significance. Every pastor battles this—significance by ministry—instead of significance by Jesus. He reminded us that: “ministry is the one idol the church will let you get away with.

Additionally, Driscoll’s comments on our wives being pastors to their husbands was rich. People used to scathing Mark for his complementarianism will do well to heed his words on this. Far from bull-headed masculinity and chauvinism, Mark pleaded with pastors and their wives to move together in ministry. How? By a pastor allowing his wife to minister to him emotionally, spiritually, relationally, etc. The calling of a pastor’s wife is not to some fanciful, exalted position of “first lady” but to the all-important place of strengthening her husband. Mark commented regarding this role of pastor’s wife: “everything else can be delegated in the chruch.