Marginal Christianity

                          David Fitch August 3, 2015 Missional church is nothing but a Sunday morning service with some justice projects added on. I don’t agree with this statement at all. I do not think this describes what missional church is. Nonetheless, during my travels, a majority of my encounters with self described missional churches can be described in this way. There is a massive disconnect between the practices traditionally described as church – including Sunday morning worship – and life in the neighborhood and communities where we live, where we engage the mission of God as a people. I think this construal of church (Sunday morning services + some add on justice projects) is bad because: It makes justice into a project. When we organize endeavors from the center to reach places of overt need, injustices ...

What do you think? In exploring trends that are shaping or misshaping the church, we might discover several common leadership assumptions that must shift toward a more missional posture: 1. The Right Program Although most would be quite reticent to admit it, we continue to assume that if we can just find the right program and strategy and implement it well, the church will be back on track and ‘succeed’. In fact, some have presumed that ‘missional’ is this next ‘latest and greatest model.’ I confess, I have been there done that. The challenge at hand for the church however is not a problem to be solved, a need to be met or an issue to be addressed with another program or plan.  The challenge is whether we can learn to sit and listen to the other, the neighbour and the neighbourhood where God is at work ahead of us. Residing in this unfamiliar and often uncomfortable ‘space between’ as Alan Roxburgh refers to it, where leading is more about being attenti...

When my wife and I got married 16 years ago we'd already been dating for 5 years prior. We had a winding dating relationship that was stretched by time zones, career u-turns and simple immaturity (mostly mine) but we continued to hold onto each other despite these challenges. Naively I thought our sheer romantic-will-power would be enough to cultivate a vibrant marriage. I was an idealist that needed to experience the school of hard knocks. The first year was filled with beautiful memories but the assaulting arrows of: demanding jobs, fluctuating finances, existential crisis (mostly mine), complicated outside friendships, the intensity of school, and learning to grow up, was an onslaught to our bondedness. Our emotional love for each other was still strong but a significant shift needed to take place if we were going to build an abundant life for the future. We needed new patterns. Organized-Organic All of life is built upon patterns. In the natural world bees form their ...

October 20, 2014 | By: Karina Kreminski 0 Comments     The other day someone told me about a discussion they had with a friend who said that they were leaving their church to join another church. Fair enough I thought, I hear this a lot. What caught my attention however is that the church that this person was leaving, I would describe as being missional and the church that they had decided to start attending  as more of an ‘attractional’ model of church. Why the move from missional to attractional I wondered? When I spoke with my friend further, apparently the missional church was small, met in someone’s home and the regular gatherings were too confrontational for this person. Once again I probed deeper. Too confrontational? I found out that even though the church was small it had managed to become a community of people from various backgrounds and socio-economic status. When time came in their gathering for sharing about their lives, many of those who were ...

http://www.chrismorton.info/2014/07/16/the-cost-of-apostleship/ Chris  —  July 16, 2014 —  1 Comment 3 in Share 4 Email Print “I don’t know how you just talk to people like that, Chris.” This subtly offensive statement was one I have heard a lot. For a little while, I hosted a weekly dinner where I invited some non-Christian friends from a nearby Starbucks to eat with a few from my church. It didn’t go very smoothly. For these church friends, talking to people outside our church community was pretty hard. Some saw it as a challenge to grow. Others saw it as an unattainable “gift” I had. “I just can’t imagine taking the risk of starting something.” This one I hear all the time from pastors and teachers, searching through an ever shrinking pool for the perfect church job. These statements depict the reality of today’s church for so many. We are constituents and employees of the institution. ...

http://www.missioalliance.org/lukes-great-narrative-on-mission/ July 22, 2014 | By: Len Hjalmarson 0 Comments   “One thing is clear to me: The temptation of power is greatest when intimacy is a threat. “Much Christian leadership is exercised by people who do not know how to develop healthy, intimate relationships and have opted for power and control instead. Many Christian empire-builders have been people unable to give and receive love.” – Henri Nouwen, “In the Name of Jesus” +   Luke 10 has become paradigmatic in the missional shift: the disciples sent out before Jesus, sent empty-handed and vulnerable, sent into villages and towns two by two. The great commandment follows: we are to love God with all that we are, and our neighbours as ourselves. Then follows the story of the good Samaritan. Hmm. That shakes us out of our presuppositions that God is with the righteous few and not with the other. So much for a colonial style mission: We go as learners. + ...

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/7/6/sandtown-ccda.html?utm_campaign=ajam&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=SocialFlow Like other evangelical 'relocators,' Baltimore's Matthew Loftus wanted to have a personal stake in fighting poverty July 6, 2014 5:00AM ET by Lawrence Lanahan <img src="/content/ajam/articles/2014/7/6/sandtown-ccda/_jcr_content/mainpar/adaptiveimage/src.adapt.480.low.jpg" alt="Mathew Loftus, left, walks home with his wife, Maggie, and daughter, Naomi" class=""> Mathew Loftus, left, walks home with his wife, Maggie, and daughter, Naomi, after attending Sunday service at New Song Community Church in the impoverished Sandtown neighborhood in Baltimore. Brooks Kraft for Al Jazeera America BALTIMORE, Md. — At the corner of Laurens St. and Fulton Av...

http://thev3movement.org/2014/07/dont-put-the-ecclesiastical-cart-before-the-horse/ 0 in Share I have worked with church planters for over fifteen years. During that time I have spent hundreds of hours providing training, coaching and resources to a wide variety of planters. Regardless of the church planter’s approach to planting, I have discovered that in almost every case the planter moves too quickly towards pragmatism. Planters want to know what “works.” They want to know what other “successful” planters are doing. What strategies or techniques are helping church plants start strong and grow quickly? In other words, they put the ecclesiastical cart before the horse. Instead, I have come to realize that our ecclesiology – especially in a post-Christian context – must flow directly out of serious theological and missiological reflection. Church Planting within the Mission of God As a result of the practical ecclesial questions that most planters ask, ...