Deb Hirsch, wife of missiologist Alan Hirsch, recently gave a talk on Seven Obstacles to Engaging in Mission at an Organic Church conference.
Tag: Organic Church
How to Grow a Missional Church
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.
Alan Hirsch: Organic Systems
My earlier critique of Alan Hirsch’s book, The Forgotten Ways, was incomplete and imbalanced. Though there is too much self-coined jargon to wade through, making it a frustrating read, after the first half of the book there are some real gems. So while my earlier praise and critique stand, Hirsch is due more praise, especially from a church planter’s perspective.
The chapter on “Organic Systems” is very helpful. He nicely sets traditional churches in contrast to organic churches:
Planting a new church, or remissionalizing an existing one, in this approach isn’t primarily about buildings, worship services, size of congregations, and pastoral care, but rather about gearing the whole community around natural discipling friendships, worship as lifestyle, and mission in the context of everyday life. (p. 185)
Hirsch then proceeds to lay a theological foundation for why Organic, which is primarily rooted in allusions to the biblical doctrine of creation, especially as it pertains to the church. Noting organic metaphors such as living temples, vines, bodies, seeds, trees, etc. he argues that this imagery is not haphazard but latent with are intrinsically related to the essence of the church (180). Next, he rightly tethers this creation imagery to the triune Creator noting that “an organic image of church and mission is theologically richer by far than any mechanistic and institutional conceptions of church we might devise” (181).
After laying this foundation for Organic church, Hirsch develops insights based on his research and reflection on the nature and function of organic systems. I will briefly list them here: 1) Innate intelligence: trust the organic nature of the church 2) Life is interconnected: follow this impulse in community 3) Information brings change: free and guided information flow is vital to growth. 4) Adaptive change: constantly adapt and react to your environment.
In turn, he advocates building relational networks that have “viruslike growth.” More to come…
Organic/Incarnational Recommended Reads
My church planting coach, Mark Moore, recently recommended the following books (w/disclaimer that he doesnt agree with everything in them). I’ve read a couple and now have more to read! I’ve linked a couple to personal blog reflections/reviews.
The Shaping of Things to Come (Frost, Hirsch)
The Forgotten Ways (Hirsch)
Radical Renewal (Snyder)
Houses that Change the World (Simson)
Organic Church (Cole)