I’ve just got back from Orlando in Florida where I attended the Exponential Conference – On the Verge. This was a huge Church Planting conference with four thousand people attending from around the (mostly) Western world.
In the next few weeks I’ll add further reflections to my blog as well as the Mission and Ministry website.
The Conference started with a member of the Exponential Band setting the stage with a stirring version of Bob Dylan’s anthem, The Times They Are A-changing. Verses two and three are particularly prophetic for our times:
Come writers and criticsWho prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'.
Come preachers and pastors [sic]
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.
In truth the Western Church finds itself on ‘the Verge’. Either we are on the verge of complete extinction – or we are on the verge of a new movement of God. Taken as whole, the decline of Christianity and the church in western contexts continues a-pace. More of the same is not likely to achieve significantly different Kingdom results; so something different is needed.
My first reflections of the Conference:
1. I believe that we are beginning to get it! For the first time at a large gathering, including senior ministers from U.S. large churches – the call I hear is that it’s no longer about building bigger, centralised, gatherings-focussed churches, but sending our people out as ‘missionaries’ into neighbourhoods that will never come to us. I recall Francis Chan the Senior Pastor of the Cornerstone Community Church telling about visiting poor and persecuted Christians in India and describing to them about how we do church in the middle-class West, and hearing them laugh-out loud in disbelieve at how ludicrous it sounds! Says Chan: "You go to a building, someone gives you a bulletin, you sit in a chair, you sing a few songs, a guy delivers maybe a polished message, maybe not, someone sings a solo, you go home ... When you read the New Testament, you see the Holy Spirit was supposed to change everything so that this gathering of people who call themselves Christians had this supernatural element about them..." Francis has moved on from pastoring this very large church to focus on building and releasing sacrificial followers of Jesus to live amongst their unchurched neighbours. 
2. I believe that God is raising up leaders for the future: I was struck by how many passionate, articulate and competent leaders there were in their 20s and 30s leading and sharing to their generation from the front. My generation needs to heed the words: “Come preachers and pastors, please heed the call, don't stand in the doorway, don't block up the hall.” New movements will often find greater resistance amongst the gatekeepers of what was once the movement, than from the world outside. Barton Stone as only 29 as a leader of the Cane Ridge Revival! Thomas Campbell wrote the Declaration and Address when he was in his mid-40s and Alexander was just 21. John Wesley was 32 when he began his work. Martin Luther was 34 when he nailed the Ninety-Five Theses to the Wittenberg Cathedral. Samuel Wilberforce was 21 when elected to parliament; and Mother Teresa was 19 when she arrived in India. Doug Nicholls was 29 when he started at the Gore St. Mission Centre.
3. It’s not about ‘Church’ planting: Our future will not be about duplicating the thing we’ve done for the last few hundred years. Reggie McNeal and many others made the point that he gets very nervous if someone says to him: “I’m called to plant a church.” The reason is that because alongside our other social silos like politics, commerce, sport, home, justice, education and so on, we Christians have added a new silo called ‘church.’ This is where people come to ‘get’ personal religion; ‘do’ worship and ‘find’ religious succour. We need to re-imagine our role as being salt and light across all the other silos rather than being a new and separate silo. Says Reggie: “We have too many ‘church’ planters - we don’t need more church planters, but sowers of Kingdom across our cities. We plant Jesus and His Kingdom (Neil Cole) into the arenas of politics, commerce, sport, home, education, and every other field of human endeavour to be transformed. The people alongside us are not ‘church members’ attending to find fellowship - but a ‘band’ of subversive missionaries changing people and culture – who happen to discover koinonia as they serve. I wonder what would it look like to train and send out Jesus ‘agitators’ from our congregations?
4. Our shape needs consideration: Many speakers, such as Mike Breen from the 3DM network talked about ‘Missional Communities’. Mike was for many years the vicar of St Thomas Sheffield in the UK, where he pioneered what he calls missional communities, that is, mid-sized groups of 20-50 people on mission together. Mike talked about early British church history. In the early 5th century, Romans returned as missionaries. The first archbishop of Canterbury, Augustine, built the great Canterbury cathedral. Roman philosophy was attractional: “If you build it they will come.” But the Celtic missionaries, who came a little later, took a different view: “If you go you will reach them.” They got into their coracles and sailed out across North Sea, to northern Europe and beyond. Later as Roman and Celtic philosophies collided – they evolved into the ‘Minister’ movement – which transformed Europe. They melded together the ideas of large monastic or support centres for healing and formation, BUT these centres then send out missionary teams. Like strawberry runners they contextually infiltrated the villages and towns for Christ. Attractional and incarnational melded together. Several speakers spoke about the vitality of small-groups, house-churches and intentional missional communities of 30-50. These are mobile, highly relational and highly adaptive teams that can infiltrate the many new neighbourhoods and fluid networks that mark our 21st century world. My sense is that our larger churches are going to need to learn to become ‘minsters’ that send and sustain a score of smaller and varied ‘parishes’. How will we learn and adapt in our context?
5. Our measurements will need to change: Our language and our measures become a map that sets us in a particular direction. Language like: “Bringing our friends to church,” or “Going to church,” or “Church attendance was down last week,” or “ We go to Pastor so-and-so’s church,” or “We do outreach at our church,” or “Come to our church’s community programmes,” paints a mental image of church as a location and agency in which things happen. Here we measure attendance numbers, baptisms, age-spread, giving, building-capacity, technological excellence, mid-week groups, pastoral care satisfaction and sizes of church services. What if our language and measures changed? Rob Wegner who serves as a teaching pastor at Granger Community Church is working alongside Alan Hirsch in an innovative coaching program called Future Travellers is helping mega-churches become missional movements. “... We are not a church against the community. We are not a church that simply exists within the community. We are a church FOR the community. God told his people while in exile in Babylon to not simply live in the city, but to love it and work for its welfare. The actual word used is shalom. Shalom doesn’t just mean peace or a cease-fire of hostility. Shalom means universal flourishing. God’s people are to work for the economic, social, cultural, and spiritual flourishing of their city ...”. What if we began to measure: (1) the authentic friendships the church members were forming outside church programs, (2) the felt needs of the neighbourhood as expressed by them, (3) the identity of the disempowered and marginalised groups in our town, (4) the local agencies our people network with, (5) the actual issues people tell us they would like solidarity and help with, (6) the number of non-church people who share in forming our responses, (7) the daily prayers for our community, (8) the birth of faith communities indigenous to our neighbourhoods, and so on. You get the idea – our agenda might look quite different – but, it would be exactly the same as any good cross-cultural missionary’s usually is!
Over the next few weeks I will be publishing further articles that talk about different aspects of church planting. The next one will be: Why on earth plant more faith communities in Australia - of all places? The one after that: How to begin! How you too can be a 'missionary' in your own neighborhood.
These can also be found on the Mission and Ministry 'Articles' page.
These can also be found on the Mission and Ministry 'Articles' page.
