I really like how Dwight Smith talks about incarnating the gospel. His call to do so in Columbia is an call to do some around the world.
Jesus Eyes?
What are you focused on? What are you looking at? What do you see? Are your eyes clear? Do you see what Jesus sees when you look at your self and others. Do you see Jesus, His Kingdom (His Story) and Righteousness? What you see will tell you what you are seeking. What you see will tell you where you are investing your heart treasure (Matt 6:20,21). My eyes tell me if it is darkness or light that is guiding me. Matthew 6:22 says “If your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light” . The light refers to all things righteous. Jesus is saying in Matthew 6:22 that how and what you see impacts everything else. Jesus saw clearly and His whole self was full of light. Jesus saw His Father and didn’t do anything unless he saw His Father do it. My prayer this morning is that I wouldn’t do anything unless Jesus is doing it. These questions will be with me today: What do I see? What is Jesus doing?
Why Corporate Church Wont Work – By Mike Breen
Why corporate church won’t work
NOVEMBER 29, 2011
The past few weeks I’ve been working with the 3DM Content Team on material for our new book on how to multiply missional leaders (coming out in April, 2012). I wanted to share a little preview of some of the things we’ve been discussing.
You see, I am absolutely convinced that 100 years from now, many books will be written on the phenomenon that is the late 20th Century/early 21st Century American church. And I am fairly certain that it will be with large degree of amazement/laughter that people, in reading about it, will say to each other: “You must be joking! Seriously???! People actually thought it was a good idea to structure the Church as if it were a business? Honestly?!”
Perhaps we don’t have the perspective necessary to see how funny or strange this really is, but I promise you, if you run your church like a business, it’ll never be a family and families are what have changed the world. Bill Hybels was right about the local church (as the Body of Jesus) being the hope of the world…just not as we are currently seeing it.
Efficiency has replaced effectiveness. Many churches are organizationally efficient, but we aren’t affecting the lives of people the way in which Jesus imagined a family would do.
We’ve created a corporate America-like church, somehow buying into a false dichotomy between a Leadership Culture which produces leaders and a Discipleship Culture that produces disciples. Here’s what I mean: In American businesses, it’s about moving people from A to B, but has nothing to do with making people. We have one guy with the vision and a culture of volunteerism to help that one guy get his vision accomplished. It’s the genius with a 1000 helpers. So while churches may claim to have “leadership development programs,” what they really have are “volunteer pipelines” that are run by managers, not leaders.
In doing so, we run the campus, but don’t expand the Kingdom. We’re keeping the machine of the church running (which, much to some people’s chagrine, I think is needed if done in a lightweight/low maintenance kind of way), but doing practically nothing to expand the Kingdom.
This is what we’ve created:
Clearly there isn’t quite the black and white dichotomy as this matrix illustrates, but I still think it serves the point. Often we have churches that are great at making disciples, but not terribly effective at mobilizing these people into God’s mission in the world (yes, I’m overgeneralizing). Or, on the other side, we have churches that are great at moving people to do things, but are pretty poor at making disciples, creating a culture of volunteerism, implemented and run by managers of the leader.
What we need is a way of making and moving people so that as we make disciples, we release them into their destiny of pushing into new Kingdom-frontier.
Corporate church doesn’t do this. Strictly organic church doesn’t do this. I would argue that in the whole of church history, there is one thing that does this, but is largely lost to us in Western culture.
EXTENDED FAMILY.
The Oikos.
A group of people, blood-and-non-blood, about the size of an extended family, on mission together, often times networked with other extended families.
Why the extended family?
- Because it’s small enough to care, but large enough to dare.
- Everyone gets to play.
- Sociologically, people locate their identity within the extended family size (known as theSocial Space). We’re hardwired for it.
- To function well, it’s a beautiful combination of both the organic and the organized
- It’s the perfect training ground for future leaders
I believe, with everything in me, that until we embrace this reality, we will continue to struggle to be the fully functioning Body of Jesus.
Why might this be so difficult for overachieving Americans?
Because as J.S. Bryan has said, Many men can build a fortune, but few men can build a family.
The crisis facing seminaries + theological education
by Mike Breen
Undoubtedly there is a crisis facing the institutions that train our leaders for work in the church. Students leave seminary with crippling amounts of debt, leave feeling unprepared to lead the people of God in discipleship and mission in an increasingly post-Christian world and a staggering number of them will have left the ministry entirely within 5 years. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
However, the predominant thought is that because we’re shifting from Christendom to post-Christendom, our seminaries simply need to adjust to that cultural change and do a better job making seminary more affordable and accessible (which they definitely do) and probably change some learning styles (this is a gross-oversimplification, but these are probably the biggest ideas on their part). But what if there is something much bigger happening that we’re not seeing? What if we are missing the forrest for the trees? What if we are the ones who created the crisis we’re in and not a shifting culture we must catch up to?
3DM and The Order of Mission are launching an initiative exploring some of these questions and offering a couple of preliminary steps forward (I say preliminary because it is impossible for one or two entities to fix all that ails the world of theological education, it will take a movement of various entities). We have written a formal whitepaper on this subject as well as a video to spark this much needed discussion.
Both can be viewed at: TheFutureofTheologicalEducation.com.
But here is the video that’s kicking it all off! Feel free to embed it anywhere you’d like to push the conversation out.
The Spirit Filled Church
A wonderful video from a writer who understands that church is more than a building and a meeting. Click link to get a sense of what we believe at MiddleCross Church.
http://theresurgence.com/v/6h7ebizu4i38
The Church’s Little Secret
Looking Into the Church’s Dirty Little Secret – Mike Breen
Published August 18, 2011 Sentralized: Behind the Session Leave a Comment
Tags: dirty little secret, Mike Breen, missional, Sentralized, St. Thomas
I’ve started to say it quite a bit. Perhaps you’re already sick of reading it. But I think itʼs one of those things that really hasn’t hit home yet.
We don’t have a leadership problem in the church in the United States.
We don’t have a missional problem.
We have a discipleship problem.
If we make disciples like Jesus made disciples (i.e. the way weʼre supposed to!), we get more leaders than we can handle and more vision and action for mission than we will have ever seen.
Thatʼs the way Jesus did it.
Thatʼs the way his disciples did it.
Thatʼs the way the early church did it.
Thatʼs the way every missional movement has done it.
And yet we are in a full-fledged discipleship crisis in the United States. The churchʼs dirty little secret is that we arenʼt really doing the last thing Jesus commanded us to do and the only thing that breathes life into a missional movement: Make disciples.
markdyoung.wordpress.com 