• Archive of "community" Category

    Northern Seminary & 3DM: Discipleship-Oriented Theological Education (Part 2)

    August 29, 2011 // 1 Comment »

    I mentioned a couple weeks ago that as part of my role at Northern Seminary, I was in Pawley’s Island, SC working w/ the good people of 3DM to flesh out how those who participate in a 3DM Learning Community can apply that experience toward a seminary degree. Let me describe Learning Communities briefly. (check here for more)

    Learning Communities are open to church planters and small (3-5) church staff teams. LC’s are structured around 4 intensives:

    1) Building a Discipling Culture

    2) Multiplying Missional Leaders

    3) Leading Missional Communities

    4) Establishing Centers of Mission.

    During these intensives, church planters and teams have the opportunity to learn from the experience and insight of church leaders drawing on decades of ministry experience in Post-Christian England, work through the details of this teaching for their specific ministry context, and build 6-month strategic ministry plans that members of the 3DM team will mentor and coach them through during weekly “huddle” calls until the following intensive. That’s just a basic sketch, it doesn’t even begin to get into the ways that they intersperse worship and ministry time with social time for connecting and building relationships. It’s really an all-around incredible experience as I’ve said before.

    So, we’ve been working on pairing this existing paradigm of training and formation with additional course work, i.e., books, writing (reflection & research) projects, and assessment exercises, to create something of a “Scholar Track.” Guess what excites me most is that as I have shared this with a number of people, including people who are thinking about seminary, are in seminary, or have finished seminary, the response has been the same, “Man, that’s what all of theological education should look like!” (By the way, if you’re one of those people, drop me a line directly via the contact page and I can share a little more about how you might be part of a growing initiative in this regard).

    On Northern’s end, we hope that new and existing students will want to take advantage of the opportunity to participate in a 3DM Learning Community as way to, on the one hand, bring the issues of discipleship and mission to the forefront of their education and formation, and on the other, to benefit from a learning experience that is rooted in community as well as a local ministry context.

    On 3DM’s end, we are hoping that making this option available will be not just an added incentive to those who are interested in working toward a seminary degree, but will bring a dimension to their experience that proves additionally valuable and formative. In either case, doing so will result in 9 courses that count as…

    1) The completion of an entire Certificate Program
    2) An emphasis of courses that count toward the completion of an MA or MDiv at Northern (or which can be transferred to another school’s program)
    3) The focus section of a DMin degree

    Maybe just me, but I happen to think this is a pretty exciting opportunity. Anyone have any thoughts or reactions?

    Posted in 3DM, christendom, church, community, discipleship, missional, Northern Seminary, post-christendom, spiritual formation, theological education, theology

    Discussing Church, Christ, and Community

    May 14, 2010 // 5 Comments »

    While Amy was away I had the chance to read some books that has been on my hitlist for a while.

    Deep Church: A Third Way Beyond Emerging and Traditional by Jim Belcher

    Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge by Dallas Wilard

    Free for All: Rediscovering the Bible in Community by Tim Conder and Daniel Rhodes

    I plan to offer some thoughts on all three eventually, but I was wondering if there might be some lifeasmission readers out there who have read any of these and were anxious to have some discussion on one in particular.

    (Books link to BetterWorldBooks.com, my book supplier of choice).

    Posted in bible, books, church, community, review, theology, truth

    Missional Preaching Part 3: Preaching as a Call for Response

    February 21, 2010 // 8 Comments »

    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?

    Posted in church, community, corporate worship, liturgy, LOV, post-christendom, preaching/teaching, theology

    Rozko Update | Feb., 2010

    February 16, 2010 // 1 Comment »

    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.

    Posted in Amy, community, family, friends, networking, newsletter

    Missional Preaching Part 2: Preaching as the Proclamation of Biblical Truth

    February 12, 2010 // No Comments »

    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.

    Posted in church, community, corporate worship, liturgy, LOV, missional, post-christendom, preaching/teaching, theology, truth

    Missional Preaching Part 1: Preaching as a Communal Activity

    February 9, 2010 // 10 Comments »

    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.  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?

    Posted in church, community, corporate worship, liturgy, LOV, missional, post-christendom, preaching/teaching, theology, truth

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