lifeasmission
exploring the mystery of life and mission as one and the same
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Archive of "conference" Category
Discipleship in a Missional Context
I’m excited to be gathering tonight and tomorrow with some pastors and leaders from around the Chicagoland area and a bit beyond to talk about discipleship in a missional context. We’re gathering in Hyde Park where some friends from Life on the Vine are in the process of moving into and exploring how the Kingdom might take shape.
I think this is a topic that a great number of us have at the front of our minds, but aren’t always able to speak to as directly as we’d like so I am looking forward to the conversation and stuff the Spirit surfaces.
So, since everyone has been so gracious in offering input on my doctoral considerations,
I’m wondering what you might want to say or ask related to this issue of discipleship in a missional context – ie. how do we think of and go about discipling people to participate in God’s mission in the world.
I’ll chance in periodically and add your comments and questions to our discussion.
We’ll also be trying to pound out some of the details for the next Missional Learning Commons. Stay tuned for more details on that.
The Role of the Bible in Society
As Christendom continues to unravel and the Church loses its privileged role within culture at large, we live in an increasingly biblical illiterate society.
– Quoting Scripture will mean less and less.
– Bible stories will be increasingly misunderstood or forgotten altogehter
– And the battles that Christians wage with one another over the objective nature of Scripture will continue to damage our reputation in a broken world.
For these reasons and more, there is an incredibly important conversation to be had regarding the role of the Bible in society.
In contributing to that conversation, here’s a 40 minute panel discussion from the recent Q conference here in Chicago between Tim Keller, Alastain McGrath, Dempsey Rosales-Acosta, and Brian McLaren (you can find brief bios on all these panelists here) on that topic. I’m anxious to see what kinds of responses others might have to the questions and discussion here.
(For those reading in a feed reader, the video is flash and may not come through, so you might want to click through to the actual post to view or download.)
NT Wright and the Emerging Church
I had the opportunity to catch some of The 19th Annual Wheaton Theology Conference this past weekend.
N.T. Wright was the keynote speaker and the name of the conference this year was, “Jesus, Paul, and and the People of God.”
Bishop Wright was spectacluar as usual, but one of my favorite talks was given by Jeremy Begbie, Research Professor of Theology at Duke Divinity School.
The title of his talk was, “The Shape of Things to Come: Wright Amongst Emerging Ecclesiologies.” I offer this (40 min) talk to you here, but you can also go here to download or watch the rest of the excellent talks from the weekend.
Begbie begins by noting 5 features of Wright’s theology and ecclesiology that have immediate resonance with those who identify with the Emerging Church.
1. Intrinsic – The Church is intrinsic to the vision of the purposes of God and the fabric of salvation. God’s vision of putting the world to rights involves, at its heart, God forming a community.
2. Eschatological – Thinking from God’s future to the present, providing a pneumatological vision of worship and mission.
3. Cosmically Situated – God’s putting the world to rights involves creation-wide, Christological, reconciliation.
4. Material – Shunning the ideas of the Church as a disembodied ideal and all the material/spiritual dichotomies of modernity.
5. Improvisatory – Combining obedient responsibility to Scripture with flexibility to cultural and contextual circumstances.
After offering these, Begbie suggests 3 features of Wright’s theology and ecclesiology that many Emerging Churches would do well to pay more attention to.
1. Ascension – Christ is not localizible, but is universally accesible through the Spirit. Failure to recognize Christ as universally reigning over the Church can lead to strident triumphalism on the one hand or painful disillusionment on the other.
2. Israel – Gounding of Trinitarian enthusiasm in the history of God’s mission in and through Israel.
3. Catholicity – Refusing to allow consumer choice to become the defacto foundation of church unity by rallying around the cross as the focal point of unity in God’s Kingdom.
This was an insightful talk that I would commend to anyone seeking to get a better handle on the Emerging Church and its resonance with the theology of a professor and church leader who lives and ministers in a context where the Church is all but extinct. Here, emergence, far from being a fad, is the only choice the Church has if it wishes to participate in God’s mission.
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.
Reflections on the Missional Learning Commons
Amy and I had a great time at the Missional Learning Commons in Ft. Wayne two weekends ago.
The theme of the weekend was,”Deeper Church.” Essentially what that meant was having discussions about certain topics which surface when we stop thinking about church as a worship service with a host of corresponding programs and begin to embrace church as a way of life in which we are joining God in his mission of reconciliation and the restoration of all things. Some may want to try and explain how these are really two ways of saying the same thing, but for the vast majority of people who have been involved in this conversation for any length of time, the differences are too real and too important to dismiss with semantic gymnastics.
On Friday night there were maybe 30 people in attendance to discuss Soong-chan Rah’s book, The Next Evangelicalism: Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity. This conversation was continued as the topic of the final session on Saturday. Both conversations were engaging and helpful. While the book had clear shortcomings and oversights, it served as a springboard for us to ask the question, “Why are missional congregations so white?” We see this as a problem because implicit in missional theology is the value for listening to voices from the margins of society – something which should be a no-brainer to those of us who regard Scripture (a book authored by those speaking from the margins of society!) as our guiding text. Those who live on the margins of society have much to teach those of us who don’t and the longer our congregations remain socio-economically and culturally homogeneous, the more the Body of Christ, and by implication, the world to which we testify of an alternative reality, suffers.
In light of that, we had discussions about the practices of deeper churches, what sharing the gospel means and looks like for deeper churches, and whether or not these deeper churches should have paid staff. This session was led by a 3-person panel: Matt Tebbe one of the pastors of Life on the Vine who is bi-vocational, JR Woodward, who raises all of his support, and Bob Havenor, who was advocating for an up-paid approach to church leadership.
Thanks to Ben Sternke who put the missional commons site together, you can find audio from all of the sessions here.
If you are in the midwest and interested in the missional conversation, I hope you’ll consider joining us next year – details TBD.
Missional Learning Commons
This afternoon Amy and I are joining about a dozen others from our church community as attenders at a Missional Learning Commons in Ft. Wayne, IN.
At the invitation of Dave Fitch (who has blogged about this gathering here), I attended my first one of these in December of 2007 before Amy was in Chicago. Last year Amy attended without me as I was in Kenya. So, especially since we have committed as a couple to helping cultivate a new missional community in the next year, I am really excited for us to get to participate in one of these together.
Here’s what I love about this event.
A) It’s free. And that’s not because it sucks. It’s because the “business” of Christian resourcing needs to die.
B) It’s local. The people who attend these every year have a real chance to stay meaningfully connected.
C) It’s not about personalities. Those who speak, are more like conversation starters. There is much more time given to dialogue than monologue.
D) There’s no hype. No book sales, no t-shirts, no vendors.
It’s just a band of brothers and sisters who are trying get on the same page about the implications of a missional ecclesiolgy as Christendom continues to crumble here in the midwest. It’s a living example of what I meant when I blogged about “The Power and Promise of Regional Gatherings for the Equipping of Missional Churches.”
Looking forward to a great weekend of connecting, discussing, dreaming, and praying.
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