if you want missional church, then…

On with the series of posts on the mDNA of apostolic environment; It is worthy to note again at this point that the church in the West is facing a massive adaptive challenge: positively in the form of compelling opportunity and negatively in the form of rapid, discontinuous change. These twin challenges comprise [...]

what kind of leadership is this?

Returning to our series on TFW: I want to take up the theme of Apostolic Environment. But before we go there, let me just touch base with the question that started my journey to writing TFW in the first place. Its all about the remarkable Jesus movements of history. Ones that [...]

interview with christianity today

Here is an interview I did for Christianity Today.

BTW, I apologize for not being able to blog as regularly as I would like to. My life has taken a decidedly busy turn and I find myself unable to get to the small and basic things. Not prouid of it, simply apologizing.

apostolic environment

Just about to switch into the next element of mDNA, apostolic environment. Should be a hoot of a discussion. Lets start it off with these two quites that I hung at the top of the chapter in the book…
Purpose and principle, clearly understood and articulated, and commonly shared, are the genetic code of [...]

church follows mission

By my reading of the Scriptures, even though it is a non-negotiable, ecclesiology is the most fluid of the central doctrines. The church is a dynamic cultural expression of the people of God in any given place. Worship style, social dynamics, liturgical expressions must the result from the process of contextualizing the gospel [...]

living out-carnationally

By living incarnationally we not only model the pattern of humanity set up in the Incarnation but we also create space for mission to take place in organic ways. In this way mission becomes something that ‘fits’ seamlessly into the ordinary rhythms of life, friendships, and community and is thus thoroughly contextualized. Thus these ‘practices’ [...]

incarnation-al: being formed by the story

The Incarnation not only qualifies God’s acts in the world, it must also qualify ours. If God’s central way of reaching his world was to incarnate himself in Jesus, then our way of reaching the world should likewise be incarnational. To act incarnationally therefore will mean in part that in our mission to those [...]

incarnation: the god-dimension of mission

John 1:1-18 forms the central defining Scriptural text narrating to us of the marvelous coming of God into human history. But this text is far from the only one to probe this mystery.  All Christians acknowledge that In Jesus Christ God was fully present and that He moved into our neighborhood in an act of [...]

Making babies is fun

Firstly, it is not hard to see that the reproductive capacities of the church are directly linked to the missional-incarnational impulse. It is not coincidental that this looks awfully similar to the way in which all organic systems reproduce and procreate themselves.  (It looks like a genealogy doesn’t it?) We will explore this further when [...]

reasons to contextualize

In their book on church planting Ed Stetzer and David Putman (Breaking The Missional Code 90-91) affirm the fact contextualization of the gospel is needed in every culture, but that it is a particularly important need for the church in the West today. They quote British missiologist Stuart Murray-Williams who suggests some pretty pungent reasons [...]

submerging

Ash Barker of Urban Neighbors of Hope, a missional order among the poor in Melbourne and Bangkok articulates multiple levels of incarnationality. His structure is intriguing because it highlights the centrality of the experience of Jesus by the host community and not that of the church community itself. He suggests four stages where [...]

m-i v. e-a

From the digram in the last post we can see the ‘sneeze-like’ nature of the missional impulse in the diagram. But the diagram also enables us to see how exactly it is that we have inhibited this outward flowing movement. The Christendom template tends to bolt down this missional impulse by substituting it with an [...]

a theology with missional implications

Because this goes against the grain of our inherited and ingrained practices, it is important to grasp the theological dynamics of the missional-incarnational impulse and how these two intertwined foundations of essential Christian theology inform our practices and behaviors. Firstly we can discuss the missional one.

The Mission of God
Over the last forty or [...]

going out, going deep

Here is a series of statements that will serve to set the agenda in what will be a series of posts on the mDNA of the missional-incarnational impulse.

The purpose in combining these words in The Forgotten Ways, is to link two practices which in essence form the one and the same action.  This is for [...]

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