In an effort to deepen our church in personal and communal gospel living, we will be working through Tim Chester’s You Can Change this summer. We have cast vision and trained our leaders on cultivating communities that speak the truth in love to one another. However, it has become apparent that we also need to equip our communities to help one another live in the gospel. When someone shares a pattern of sin or a false belief they need to be encouraged or challenged by someone else in their City Group to believe what is true, to live in the pattern of grace. I believe You Can Change will help us do that. Here are a few reasons why:

1. It is about Gospel-centered change: “The secret of gospel change is being convinced that Jesus is the good life and fountain of all joy.”
2. It heads off Gospel-distorting approaches to change: 1) Proving ourselves to God 2) Proving ourselves to others 3) Proving ourselves to ourselves.
3. Personal Change Project: Every chapter includes Reflection Questions for discussion and a Personal Change Project that helps us identify an area of sin in which we need gospel-centered change. This a powerful process.
4. Ten Key Questions: Each chapter raises an important question that leads us through the process of gospel-centered change. See Table of Contents here.
5. It emphasizes Faith and Repentance as key to change: “We begin the Christian life in faith and repentance, and we continue the Christian life in faith and repentance.”
6. Chapter 7 changed me on the spot: “If you let any of those gods down, they will beat you up. If you live for people’s approval or your career or possessions or control or anything else and you don’t make it or your mess up, then you’ll be left feeling afraid, downcast or biter. But when you let Christ down, he loves you still. He doesn’t beat you up; he dies for you.”

Read chapter five free. Also, Tim and Steve Timmis will be releasing a book on The Gospel-centered Life in about a month. Tim’s newest book Ordinary Hero releases Friday.

Tim Chester‘s book You Can Change is refreshingly simple, biblical, and practical. In it he shows us God’s agenda for change in us through Jesus, an agenda that is far from duty-driven religion, detached spirituality, or placid serenity:

Jesus shows us God’s agenda for change. God isn’t interested in making us religous. Think of Jesus, who was hated by religious people. God isn’t interested in making us ‘spiritual’ if by spiritual we mean detached: Jesus was God getting stuck in. God isn’t interested in making us self-absorbed; Jesus was self-giving personified. God isn’t interested in serenity: Jesus was passionate for God, angry at sin, wept for the city.

Tim explains that God’s agenda for us isn’t religion, spirituality, or serenity but the good and holy life. Noting that we often mistake holiness for joyless moral conformity, he says that “holiness is always good news.” What is holiness?

For Jesus holiness didn’t mean being set apart from the world, but being consecrated in the world…Jesus isnt’ just good for us. He is good itself. The secret of gospel change is being convinced that Jesus is the good life and the fountain of all joy.

Do you believe this good news, that Jesus is the good life and the fountain of all joy? Or is something else competing for your joy today? Look to Christ who not only offers us the good life but also his life, his death, for our joyless living and life-stealing choices. Ask him to change your heart, to show you that he is the fountain of all joy.

I got a U.K shipment today with some great titles:

1. You Can Change, Tim Chester
2. The Busy Christian’s Guide to Busyness, Chester
3. Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision, N. T. Wright
4. Clusters: Creative Mid-sized Missional Communities, Hopkins and Breen

As the Western church becomes increasingly missional, in the social sense, partnerships with non-profits are increasing. There’s a lot of sense to this. However, we must be leery of thinking that social partnerships with non-profits produces missional churches. In fact, we need to be more thoughtful about the “if”and “when” we partner with non-profits, especially if our churches are driven by missional communities.

Tim Chester’s blog entry on “shifting missional foci” is spot on for determining the focus of missional communities. Austin City Life has discovered that if we lock into a strategic social partnership, without being willing to revisit or review our missional emphasis, we run the risk of not following the Holy Spirit. God could  be doing something very significant in an area that we refuse to examine because a MC is already committed in one place. The question that “shifting missional foci” raises, then, is what criteria do you use to evaluate your missional focus? Do you pull out of a long-term partnership? When? Why? How do you do that without offending the non-profit you are working with? These are important questions for both MC leaders and church planters to answer.

To be sure, non-profits often have more wisdom, experience, and legal structures to facilitate effective social mission. However, we have come to the conclusion that working with a non-profit just because you believe in their vision and work isn’t sufficient. For example, if you have to drive 30 minutes to serve you may be neglecting needs in your own community. ACL is in the process of recalibrating our City Group missional foci along increasingly localized lines. By focusing more on “neighborhoods of the city” as opposed to the “city of neighborhoods”, missional communities can more effectively renew the peoples and cultures of your city. For us, this means that we won’t be “non-profit driven”, but will try to follow the Spirit as missionary communities in our own neighborhoods.

So the question is not should we partner with non-profits, but when and where should we partner with them. Sometimes it will be best to not partner and other times it will be best. In all this, I believe the quality of missionaries in our churches needs to go up and default reliance on existing social structures go down. What do you think?

During the Total Church Conference, Steve Timmis shared that The Crowded House does church discipline without church membership. They advocate a culture of “gospeling” that promotes Jesus-centered discipline in little ways throughout the week. Apparently, this happens in their house church communities quite often.

He shared a story of a young woman who called him on the carpet for being impatient and touchy with someone on the telephone. He suggested that, done respectfully, this kind of “church discipline” should be normative in churches. Moreover, he argued that, if this church discipline method was normative, bigger church discipline issues could more easily be avoided. Provided that this is a gospel-centered phenomenon, I see some merit in it; however, I’m not quite ready to jettison church membership. Are you? Why or why not?

For more see the recent 9 Marks interview with Steve.

Tim Chester and Steve Timmis have developed a new narrative statement of faith for the Crowded House. This is something I have been working on for Austin City Life. The Crowded House offers a good one.

Tim Chester offers a great diagnostic list to determine whether our communities are communities of performance or grace:

Josh points us to some incisive comments and questions by Tim Chester on the topic of busyness.

1. Have you ever been irritated because there was a queue at the supermarket till?
2. Do you regularly work thirty minutes a day longer than your contracted hours?
3. Do you check work emails and phone messages at home?
4. Has anyone ever said to you: ‘I didn’t want to trouble you because I know how busy you are’?
5. Do your family or friends complain about not getting time with you?
6. If tomorrow evening was unexpectedly freed up, would you use it to work or do a household chore?
7. Do you often feel tired during the day or do your find your neck and shoulders aching?
8. Do you often exceed the speed limit while driving?

Read more here.

Drew Goodmanson has posted the audio files from all of the plenary and breakout sessions from the Total Church Conference. This was a very good conference. Of all the sessions I attended, these talks stood out the most:

• A Community-centered Gospel Steve Timmis
• Making Disciples for Missional Church – Tim Chester
• Forming a Gospel Community (Jeff Vanderstelt)
• Reaching the Domains of Society (Drew Goodmanson & Caesar Kalinowski)
• Developing Missional Leaders (Jeff Vanderstelt)

Soak it up. Here is the first installment of resources from the Total Church Conference. You won’t agree with all of it, which is exactly why you need it. Timmis’ session on the Community-centered Gospel had a significant effect on me.