Category: community

re: Better be living it out

Here are the notes I took from Matt Chandlers message “Vision of a church planter”

a church on mission ::

understands the centrality of the Gospel

committed to the authoritative, infallible, inherent, inspired all sufficient Scriptures

embraces the calling of God as sent missionaries into our own surroundings

– we’re where we are – to engage the world where we are for the purposes of God

actively seeking to be trained and equipped as missionaries

– doesn’t work programmatically
– how do you reach 20-30 year olds? – get the 50 year olds

dependent upon the Holy Spirit to use us to evangelize the entire world

develops relationships with the lost for the purpose of incarnating the lost for Christ

– leaders in missional church must be willing to die. die to self. die to stuff.

humbly helps others to find Jesus in their own timing rather than forcing them to make superficial decisions for their own glory

is committed to practicing faith in community

worships God in a relational, personal authentic way

– “worship is the enemy of evangelism” is not true

a church on mission is a theologically formed, Gospel centered, Spirit led fellowship who seeks to faithfully incarnate the purposes of Christ

the mission of the church is found in the mission of God who passionately invites us participate in Gods redemption of the world

what are you thinking? listen and see what notes you take and then share them. let’s continue the conversation.

Better be living it out…

listening to Matt Chandler at a church planting conference….

“If you’re gonna teach this (missional life) you better be living it out. Because eventually the people are going to look around and say – we haven’t seen any of your neighbors in the water”

– Matt Chandler from Resurgence Conference
Vision of a Church Planter

ouch! a slap in my face.

goes back to the ideas several of us have been talking about as far as what a leader/pastor/facilitator looks like for community groups and/or home churches.

what is a leader ::

a leader takes responsibility to create desire to know God more

how do they do it ::

live out the 6*
assumes the responsibility of others lives
assumes the responsibility of guiding others toward personal priesthood
creates an environment of:
– spaces of grace
– intentional relationships
– relevant truth

*the six (or what we do) ::

celebrating what God is doing (worship)
telling others outside what God is doing (evangelism)
connecting and accepting on another (fellowship)
intentionally guiding one another to Christ and towards personal priesthood (discipleship)
being sensitive to know and meet needs (serving)
living and being transparent and authentic

thoughts? ideas?

The beauty of Twitter

Here’s one of those great articles I wish I had written. From @jontangerine… (HT to @stealingsand)

I like Twitter because…

It reminds me is that human beings are still tribal. As an example, if you check your own address book, or think about your family and friends, they probably number no more than two hundred people. We may have more in the book, but it’s rare for our intimates to be greater than two hundred people. Our networks are geographically dispersed these days. Even if your network is mostly in one location, people are so busy living that it can be difficult to stay in touch. Twitter is a facsimile of living and working in proximity for me, and provides something unique, too

Jon touches on a few things he’d like to see on twitter. I’d ditto those as well and add that I’d like to see easy ways to track physical locations as well. There are other social networks that will track your location. BrightKite will even alert you when other users or friends are in your area. A very cool feature indeed. But there’s not a good BrightKite app for Blackberry yet, so that’s a bit of a bummer for me and will probably keep me from switching anytime soon.

I also find this line from Jon’s article interesting, “but it’s rare for our intimates to be greater than two hundred people.”

I think that’s true in so many arenas of life. I only follow 66 people on twitter (and leave the SMS/txt message updates off for all but maybe 5 people) and while I have over 300 “friends” on facebook I really only keep up with/track half of them (if that). But of course it is nice when something catches my eye from those other 150ers and I can get updates on them as well.

I also see the 200 people limit playing out in churches/workplaces and more. It’s really hard to get to know more than 200 people or so in any regular setting. Even if there are 15,000 people in a room, do you really know more than 200 of them? Can you know more than 200 and build real relationships with them?

I think that’s what I love about online communities like Twitter. I know 10xs more about folks like @Jess_Hays and @sgalloway since they joined Twitter than I ever learned about them just seeing them for a couple hours on Sunday morning. The same goes for folks who constantly fill out surveys on Myspace. I learned tons of things about folks in my tribe thanks to them taking some time to be intentionally open.

What about you? What makes Twitter beautiful for you? Do you agree that it’s rare to have intimate relationships with more than 200 people? Do you think that number is much higher or less?

re: Tribal faith

Listening to Rob Bell share some great thoughts and ideas on Tribes (taken from Phil 3).

A great thought ::

“Sometimes when some people say ‘the gospel’ they’re really talking about tribal identity masquerading as the gospel… and Jesus is bigger than any tribe.”

“Beware of dem dawgs!”

Don’t let the tribe come between you and The Gospel or Jesus.

slides from yesterday

Josh and I spoke/led the discussion at encounter yesterday. Unfortunately the audio didn’t get saved so there will be no podcast this week 🙁 but they did record the audio/video stream over at ustream.tv/encounter (I hear its a bit choppy).

Either way, thought I’d share our powerpoint slides. So you can get an idea of what we discussed ::

authenticity and transparency

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: transparency authenticity)