If the church is going to faithfully rebirth herself in the Western context and cultivate a fruitful missional ethos, she must awaken the five equippers to live as cultural architects who awaken the entire community to join God in the renewal of all things.
What advice would Francis Chan give to you as a leader? In this 2 minute video from a talk at the Verge Conference, find out what Francis challenges us as leaders to be and to do.
"God is not going to sit around and wait on church people to get it, to prosecute His mission." In this short clip from Exponential 2011: On the Verge, Reggie McNeal challenges everyone to begin the shift from church-centric thinking to Kingdom-centric thinking. Check out this clip from the conference and stay tuned for more clips and full sessions from this year's conference!
Check out this clip of JR Woodward during a breakout session from Exponential 2011: On the Verge. In this session he breaks down the skills and gifts of Apostle, Pastor, Evangelist, Prophet, and Teacher, and how these giftings affect the community dynamic.
Jeff Vanderstelt, pastor and leader of SOMA Communities in Tacoma, WA, begins his talk with this phrase, "If you don't know the context in which you are doing ministry, then you are going to be pretty ineffective for ministry." He goes on to unpack the essence of leadership as knowledge, belief, and skill, and explains the biblical principle of making our leadership transferrable.
Innovation is the implementation of missional imagination and to do mission as Jesus does it. The goal in this move is for each individual and church to "do it." The outcome of every Christ follower and church living sent lives on mission is a missional movement.
Not every group is going to experience leading the masses into a relationship with Jesus. Every group should be evangelistically effective at some level though. So, why is it that some groups are ineffective when it comes to being evangelistically missional?
Pastor Brian Jones tells of the response he got from one "nationally recognized" pastor when Brian told him that he hadn't figured out the whole small group thing yet. Brian said the pastor's response was something like this...
We spent several months with leading thinkers and practitioners to answer 7 of the most frequently asked questions about missional communities. Join the conversation!
-7 Questions Series-
Question 7: What are some stories of struggle and success that are common to Missional Communities?
First, I think we have to fight as much as we can against what we would view as success because at the end of the day...
-7 Questions Series-
Question 7: What are some stories of hope and struggle that are common to Missional Community?
The biggest struggle for us has been the whole process of helping our people completely rethink church. We've been on that for probably...
