lifeasmission
exploring the mystery of life and mission as one and the same
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Archive for February, 2010
Tweet Old Post Wordpress Plugin
Here’s the thing I hate most about blogging – it’s all about the now. Doesn’t matter how much time you invested or how much thought you put into that post or series birthed by your creative genius – your precious content is forgotten and buried faster than Superman tweeting on speed!
Enter Tweet Old Post.
I stumbled upon this brilliant wordpress plugin recently that resurrects that old content and brings it into the land of the living.
You select an interval (I’ve chosen twice a day), and BOOM – your old content, selected at random based on the criteria you choose, is tweeted. It even comes packaged with the ability to choose a link shortening service.
One downside – as I have figured out since beginning to use this plugin. If your readers/followers don’t pay attention, they will think that you’re posting new content and ask you if you’re alright after your car wreck (that happened 4 years ago!).
So, my fellow bloggers, hop on over to here and tell Ajay thanks for writing a plugin that helps us repopulate the interwebs with the precious fruit of our labors.
Missional Preaching Part 3: Preaching as a Call for Response
This is the third and final post in a brief series on the practice of preaching in missional communities. I’ve already argued that preaching in missional churches is a communal activity and that it aims at the proclamation of biblical truth. Lastly, I want to suggest that missional preaching calls for and invites a real response from its hearers.
It is a travesty of (quite literally) biblical proportions that we would gather as the Body of Christ, hear from the Scriptures, and not be called – in a meaningful and accountable way – to respond. This is where the theological rubber meets the ecclesial road. When the theological vision of a church is adapted to meet an individualistic and consumer-driven society, the practice of preaching is bound to the fate illustrated by the cartoon above. However, where and when a church embraces a missional theology, it sees little point in the practice of preaching if it doesn’t lead to a meaningful and accountable means of response. By this I don’t mean that we have some nugget of wisdom to try and apply to our lives once we leave, I mean right then and there, we respond. All of us. Not, “Respond if you want to get saved,” but “Here’s God’s truth for all of us to which we are all called to respond. Do it!Typically, at Life on the Vine, we do this through spoken prayer. The preacher will guide us in a way to respond to the truth and everyone has an opportunity to do so. For instance, this summer I preached from Genesis 49 and proclaimed the truth that, “Our hope in the promises of God rests on God’s character, not ours. We all responded to this by praying, “Lord, though I am/have _________, you are/have ___________ and so I pray, __________.” Those who pray conclude with the words, “Lord, in your mercy,” and the entire congregation, if they can, affirms the prayer by saying, “Amen!”
Because our community is an accessible and sustainable size, these responses are quite public, making them all the more meaningful.
Responding to the truth of the text for the morning doesn’t end on Sunday. At the center of our community are what we call “Missional Orders,” groups of couples and singles who are trying to share life and serve together. These missional orders carry the truth with them throughout the week and when we gather we continue to respond to one another by noting the effect the sermon is having on us.
Any thoughts on this? Are there aspects to the way preaching is practices in your church community that get at this vision or embody something different? Are there implications of a missional theology/ecclesiology for preaching that you’re thinking of that I haven’t mentioned here?
2010 Ecclesia National Gathering Reflections
UPDATE: Be sure to check out what other bloggers are saying about their experience at this gathering.
Dave Fitch here and here, Ben Sternke, J.R. Briggs, Todd Hiestand, Drew Hart, and Geoff Holsclaw (not quite real). I’ll add more as I become aware of them.
John Chandler is in.
Here’s Geoff Holsclaw’s real one.
Bob Hyatt provides his reflections here.
Jason Salamun, new to Eclclesia, reviews his time here.
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The missional community Amy and I are a part of, Life on the Vine, is a part of Ecclesia,
a relational network of churches, leaders and movements that seek to equip, partner and multiply missional churches and movements.
Before I offer some reflections on the national gathering that just concluded, I wanted to mention a few of the unique features of Ecclesia that compel me to appreciate this network more than others.
The Kingdom of God. As opposed to one particular understanding of the gospel, Eccelsia finds unity in Jesus’ message of the Kingdom thus making room for those who articulate the good news in different ways.
Relationships/Partnerships. Through and through, Ecclesia is relationally driven. They exhibit no desire for the network to be central, but rather labor to facilitate relationships and partnerships between leaders and churches.
Affirmation of Women. We still have work to do in this area, but especially at this years gathering which featured a husband wife team as keynote presenters, we put on display what I hope continues to emerge as as a stated value for the importance of men and women partnering in ministry.
I could probably add more, but on to the reflections I go.
Dallas Willard and Bob & Mary Hopkins were the speakers for the main sessions. Todd Hunter was supposed to be there as well, but needed to cancel for personal and understandable reasons.
Dallas was brilliant. Wisdom seemed to pour out of this man as he spoke. His main theme through the week was “knowledge.” He wasn’t speaking of the intellectual/factual sort of knowledge, but the relational/experiential sort. His aim seemed to be that we would be known not just for what we do, but what we deeply, personally, and powerfully know to be true about God and life in God’s Kingdom.One of the topics Dallas took up in a break out session was that of religious pluralism. Central to that conversation was the issue of homosexuality. As he so often does Dallas reframed the trajectory of the conversation by commenting,
I think homosexuality is a disastrous lifestyle, but heterosexuality ain’t doing so good either. And if it weren’t for the failings of heterosexuality, homosexuality may not be such a huge issue.
This is what Dallas does best. He brings a frame of reference that just isn’t on the radar for so many people. For Dallas, the main issue is always is our nuanced journey into Christlike character as opposed to simple doctrinal statements or moral judgments.
Bob & Mary Hopkins were equally excellent. Mainly they talked about the functioning of teams and incarnational/contextual issues of church planting and ministry.They shared from their years of experience with church planting and equipping church leaders and teams in the UK.
Everything that Willard and the Hopkins’ had to say was insightful and helpful, but I don’t think it was my favorite part of the week. My favorite part of the week was the consistency and pervasiveness of voices from within the network. A big part of this was the size of the gathering – capped at 200. But more than that, the structure of the gathering featured panel sessions, extended Q&A sessions, and specific opportunities for us to hear, both as a large group and via breakout sessions, from those who are leading local churches within the network.
I may have some more thoughts that surface later, but for now, here’s the twitter stream (#eng2010) from the conference as well as the live blog we used. The audio from the conference should be available soon and I’ll be sure to let you know when it is.
Rozko Update | Feb., 2010
Amy and I are both networkers through and through. Each of us has enjoyed cultivating networks and communities of friends in the various places we have lived across the US and abroad. These are people who have helped, encouraged, shaped, and loved us. Because we want to do what we can to stay in touch with these people (you?), we’ve decided to compile a 1-page letter about every other month that highlights what’s been going on, what’s coming up, matters in which we hope you will rejoice with us, and others in which we hope you will support us in prayer.
We got our first one out in the last few days. If you didn’t receive it, there are 2 possible reasons.
1) We had no idea you might be interested in receiving it.
2) We tried to send it to you, but must have had the wrong email address.
In either case, if you didn’t receive our letter and would like to, leave a comment or drop us an email via the contact page and we will add you to the list of folks that we email these letters to.
Thanks for continuing to allow us to share our lives with our – nothing means more. We’re also hopeful that this might be a pathway to more of you sharing what is going on in your lives as well.
Click the image below to download our first letter.
Missional Preaching Part 2: Preaching as the Proclamation of Biblical Truth
In my last post I was making the claim that given a missional ecclesiology, the practice of preaching is a communal activity. On top of this, I would like to suggest that preaching in missional churches seeks to proclaim biblical truth.
Now, don’t miss this. I don’t mean “proclaim biblical truth” in the fundamentalist, “The Bible says it, so that’s the end of discussion and you’re stupid if you don’t see it” sort of way that’s maddeningly common, but in the, “In faith, we proclaim this to be true about God and life in God’s Kingdom,” sort of way.
Because missional churches seek to shape a people for mission in a Post-Christendom world, every activity of the community, including preaching, is meant to be a formative practice in this regard. As Stutzman says in the paper mentioned previously,
Missional preaching deliberately draws contrasts between the gospel message and the practices and values of American civil religion, aiming for conversion from habits shaped by participation in American democracy to habits formed through Christian discipleship.
In preaching, missional churches seek to proclaim the truth of the reality of God’s Kingdom in the midst of every other competing reality. The point of preaching for missional churches is not anthropocentric/therapeutic - meant to make people feel emotionally better. Nor does it seek primarily to be relevant in order to captivate or entertain an audience. It is not even so concerned with being exegetical or expository – patently cerebral types of communication. Missional preaching is theocentric – it is a practice in which we look for God’s reality to intersect with ours and DO something in us and in our midst.
So, for instance, each and every sermon preached at Life on the Vine features a rhetorical phrase of some sort. This is a simple way to articulate the truth that is being proclaimed from the morning’s text. The rest of the sermon, normally about 20-25 minutes since it’s not seen as more central than any other part of the liturgy, is spent, not unpacking a text, but proclaiming a biblical truth from that text that addresses us and calls us all to some response.
For instance, this summer I preached from Genesis 49 and proclaimed the truth that,
Our hope in the promises of God rests on God’s character, not ours.
The aim in my preaching of this sermon wasn’t mainly to explain the text so that people could understand and try to apply it to their lives, but to proclaim the truthfulness of the text by calling out what it was DOING, namely, calling its hearers to believe, not believe by intellectual assent, but believe by ordering their lives around, this biblical truth.
And the only way to get at this, is to call for a real response. That’s our topic for next time.
Missional Preaching Part 1: Preaching as a Communal Activity
Not too long ago I offered a post on, “Preaching in the Missional Church.” Basically it was an excuse to pimp this awesome paper by Ervin Stutzman of Eastern Mennonite University. Apparently that wasn’t enough for my good friend Wess, who asked what missional preaching looks like
To try and do justice to Wess’ question, the importance of the topic and to make space for better discussion, I’ve decided to divy this up into three posts. I’ve got in mind to describe three unique attributes of preaching in missional churches and then illustrating them by way of examples from Life on the Vine, the missional community Amy and I are a part of. (Dave Fitch, one of the co-pastors of LOV, offers some reflections on this same topic here.)
In missional communities, preaching is a communal activity which seeks to proclaim biblical truth that calls for and invites a real response.
In most churches, the task of preaching is the responsibility of one individual – 9 times out of 10, a man. Not only does the task of preaching often remain unshared, but the scope of preaching does as well. This reality conflicts with the communal nature of missional theology and ecclesiology.
In missional communities, one of the central aims would be for a team of teachers, whose giftedness is affirmed by the congregation, to share responsibility not only for preaching and teaching, but for giving their time and attention to identifying and equipping other gifted teachers in the body.
Life on the Vine is shepherded by a 3-person team of bi-vocational pastors. Not only do they share teaching and preaching responsibilities, but they also facilitate what we call a “College of Preachers,” every summer. This gives those who have (or at least want to discover if they have) the gift of teaching, the opportunity to use and explore this gift in a guided way.
In addition, we follow the church calendar. This means that we are all aware, well ahead of time, of those texts which will be preached each Sunday. Whoever is responsible for the preaching portion of our liturgical service also facilitates a time of teaching and dialogue for an hour or so before the worship service. This time gives the entire body the opportunity to speak to the text for the morning and it gives the preacher the opportunity to (re)shape their sermon in light of the insights, questions, and concerns of the body.
I’ll speak to the issue of missional preaching proclaiming biblical truth next time. For now, what are your thoughts on preaching as a communal activity? Is this important to you? Why or why not? What might be other ways to achieve the same goal in different ways?
Hi There…
Hey, I'm JR - welcome to the blog.
I'm just an average guy trying to shape his identity around God's dream for the world and his place in it. This blog is a place for me (and you!) to reflect on and discuss all that might mean. Looking for a bit more on me? Check out the about me. Peace.
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