evangelism as missional

• Author: Brad
• Filed under: Christianity, Gospel, church, evangelism, incarnational, kingdom of God, missio Dei, missional church, missional living, post-Christian, relationships
• Date: Jan 16,2009

Brother Maynard, in a recent entry entitled “Missional Conversation for 2009,” waxes on what he believes will be at the forefront of the missional discussion this upcoming year. One of the things he says should be at the center is evangelism. And it should be…

In light of the recent hubbub over the issue of “conversion” and the “fruit” of the missional church via Dan Kimball, et al., there is no question that those of us in the missional conversation must wrestle with the issue of evangelism as it relates to conversion.

On the one hand, David Fitch is right when he says that in the post-Christian culture, “converting” the truly unchurched – as opposed to the dechurched, who have some Christian memory – will be a much slower process that will take extreme patience. The world knows a bait-and-switch when they see it and we have to honor the process, discerning our part on the spectrum of one’s spiritual journey. We may be the seed “planter,” “waterer,” or “harvester.”

On the other hand, as we are “compelled by love” to engage in relationship with unbelievers because we believe their greatest need is on the soul level, we will have to discern if and when our job is to “harvest” and be ready to lead others to Christ and not, for the sake of offense, be so hesitant to do so because we are so intent on going “slow.”

There is no question that evangelism has been subsumed into the “mission” at various points historically, many times in the name of the missio Dei. When it has done so, “conversion” was no longer important. Rather than explicitly share the Gospel, one must merely express “solidarity” with an oppressed people group for Christ to “save” them. No proclamation of the Gospel, just presence. In this paradigm, as Stephen Neill has said, when everything is mission, nothing is mission.

In other words, if a narrower definition of mission is sharing the good news of Christ, then “sharing” may be a part of the equation depending on our role in the process. Expressing oneness with someone alone will never lead anyone to Christ. It may be an excellent gateway, but cannot be equated with what historically has been understood as evangelism.

I believe the fruit of the missional church will be seen in our ability to live in the creative tension of earning trust and credibility with the lost, going slow and discerning the Spirit’s leading to our “role” in their spiritual journey and if given a window of openness to the Gospel, boldly and lovingly, leading our friends into the Kingdom.

stetzer & fitch: a missional conversation 1

• Author: Brad
• Filed under: Bible, Christianity, Gospel, New Testament, acts, church, community, contextualization, emerging church, emerging culture, evangelism, incarnational, kingdom of God, ministry, missio Dei, missiology, missional church, missional living, missions, post-Christian, post-Evangelical, postmodern, relevintage, sacred space, theology
• Date: Jan 7,2009

Shot in Chicago in November of ‘08, Part One of this 45 minute conversation features Ed Stetzer and Dave Fitch discussing what they each mean by the term “missional”. They also spend some time discussing attractional vs missional – and whether missional church, as it seems to be presently framed is “interested in converts.”

A very good conversation between two PhD’s, who are also church planters, teachers, authors and missional instigators in their own right.

This video was produced by Toronto’s mkpl.tv – Producer, Imbi Medri. Director/Editor, Bill Kinnon. It is made available under a Creative Commons License – Attribution – No Derivative Works. Copyright Holders: Medri Kinnon Productions Limited, Ed Stetzer, David Fitch.

top 8 missional blogs of ‘08: #1 – ed stetzer

• Author: Brad
• Filed under: Christianity, Gospel, church, church planting, contextualization, evangelism, incarnational, kingdom of God, missio Dei, missiology, missional church, missional living, missions, orthopraxy, research
• Date: Jan 2,2009

1. Ed Stetzer – edstetzer.com

Ed Stetzer, President of Lifeway Research, Lifeway’s Missiologist in Residence, on the faculty of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and Southern Seminary, prolific author and blogger, multiple church planter and ministry trainer, is my #1 missional blog of the year.

So I’m a little biased here, but as many of you know, I’ve had the special privilege to work under Ed through my master’s level work at Liberty Theological Seminary this fall/winter. I’ve witnessed first hand his heart to help and serve people at all levels of ministry understand the missional conversation and practically move them towards it. And this heart for mission, the church and God’s people shines through on his blog.

Check these:
The Meanings of Missional series
Speaking of Jesus and Justice
Simply Missional
When the Mission Gets Lost in the System
Missional Living

Top 8 Recap
8. J.R. Woodward | 7. Jonathan Dodson | 6. Neil Cole | 5. Drew Goodmanson | 4. Bob Hyatt | 3. Alan Hirsch | 2. David Fitch

top 8 missional blogs of ‘08: #4 – bob hyatt

• Author: Brad
• Filed under: Christianity, church, church planting, community, incarnational, leadership, ministry, missio Dei, missiology, missional church, missional living, multi-site, pastoring, postmodern, relationships, social justice
• Date: Dec 30,2008

4. Bob Hyatt – bob.blog

One of my favorite blogs of the last few years also happens to be thick in the missional. Bob Hyatt, pastor of Evergreen Community in Portland, is a “heart-on-the-sleeve” blogger who gives us a unique window into his ministry. I appreciate Bob’s humility in sharing the journey with the rest of us. He is particularly savvy in relating the challenge of maintaining a missional mindset amidst a church culture that is increasingly becoming ingrown. Pithy, pithy…

Check these:
Kimball’s Missional Misgivings
Truly missional…
Missional Leadership Development…

scattering the gathering

• Author: Brad
• Filed under: Christianity, Gospel, church, community, evangelism, incarnational, missio Dei, missional church, missional living, relationships, relevintage, social justice
• Date: Dec 17,2008

Bob Hyatt, lead pastor of Evergreen Community in Portland, has quite possibly synthesized the ethos, motivation, and vocation of the missional church in his entry, “Sentness and Alongsideness: Missionality 101,” better than anyone I’ve seen. It’s so good, I had to reprint it here in its entirety:

“God sent His Son into the world, not to judge the world, but to save the world through Him.” -John 3:17

“Just as You sent Me into the world, I am sending them into the world.” -Jesus praying in John 17:18

For us, everything begins and ends with the person of Jesus- the Sent One who then sends us.

Our fundamental identity as a community is not only gathered, but sent. Gathering is a necessary prelude to being sent. Why did Jesus spend so much time with the disciples prior to sending them? To teach and equip them. To change them and to prepare them. It’s in the context of being gathered around the person of Jesus, of leaning into and learning from Him together that we are changed, sharpened, refined and made ready… The problem with the whole church thing is, we rarely seem to get past the gathered part.

At the end of the day (that’s for you Dustin), the whole purpose of Evergreen is not to gather on Sundays in a pub. We come together to do that which we can’t do as individuals (worship together, pray together, be in community), but our purpose as community is not just coming together- it’s going. A community following the Sent One is by definition a sent community. We say we are a “missional community” and that means we are a “missionary” community. A people who follow the God who left- who left comfort and privilege and went to live among those whom He wished to love and save.

“So the Word became human and lived among us…”John 1:14

Of course, there’s more than a sentness to Jesus. There’s an alongsideness as well. In other words, Immanuel, God With Us, came to be with us. Not against us. Not over us. But with us.

But for too much of the Church, the countercultural claims of the Gospel get lost in a people who don’t see the alongsideness of Jesus, who don’t follow His incarnational and serving example, and who then don’t see the power of the Gospel working itself out in their communities in the way they dream of it doing so.

The real power of the countercultural Gospel is found when it comes from along side, from someone who is with someone else and speaking out of a friendship, not the adversarial relationship (or worse, the unconcerned, practical apathy towards those around us) we in the Church too often cultivate.
Until we see our primary identity wrapped up in sentness AND in alongsideness, we may be countercultural, but we’ll just be speaking to ourselves.

When we truly grasp who Jesus was and what He did, it propels us out into mission and it changes how we live as a people structure our community. In that order. (This is something we’ll talk about over the next couple of weeks…)

And more: it’s in holding up the person of Jesus and following Him in mission that we find our meaning- as individuals and as a community. And that purposeful, meaning-filled, Christ-centered communal life is about the most attractive thing a church community could ever do.

A little harder to propose to the “Evangelism Committee,” but infinitely more effective and satisfying…

the 3 “now” words of the church

• Author: Brad
• Filed under: Christianity, Gospel, church, community, history, missio Dei, missiology, missional church, missional living, missions, post-Christian, post-Evangelical, postmodern, social justice, theology, world issues
• Date: Dec 13,2008

In his blog entry entitled “Church of the Now,” Bob Roberts outlines the three “words” that defined the church of the last two decades and waxes on the “now” words of the 2000s. Here it is in a nutshell:

1980s: excellence, relevance, anonymity
1990s: belonging, real, community
2000s: spiritual, global, activism

Bob believes, “…if Jesus were to identify more with the church of the 80’s, 90’s, or 2000’s – I think it would be the 2000’s – they seemed to define his ministry more than the other 3 categories…”

I think Bob is on to something, although I’d carry over community into the 2000s – as in small, intimate, life-on-life bands of missional “communities” sustaining local churches as the catalyst through which a spiritual, global, activist Gospel mission is instigated.

And instead of the word global, I would use Bob’s almagamation, glocal, to describe the importance of the missional church keeping both local and global mission in creative tension (note: Bob uses this word much more expansively in his books).

Bob wisely warns us of our overemphasis, though, on spirituality, global mission, and activism:

The downsides to this, in time we will see …spirituality becomes too associated with emotion…global if not seen in the light of the local can be too overwhelming and lead to the massiveness of the worlds problems causing people to do nothing. We could become activist driven more by people’s pain than God’s love – and that would be a tragedy.

The historical trajectory of missio Dei theology in the late 1900s is an example of Bob’s last comment on activism. Some believed if Christians expressed “solidarity” with the oppressed, salvation for the oppressed was a given. Soteriology no longer included justification. And proclamation of the Gospel was no longer necessary. Everything was mission. Everything was salvation. That is a problem.

My prayer is that we can see that the Gospel is the impetus first, for individual and then, societal conversion. We should be both/and activists; engaging in both proclamation and presence activism.

Read the entire entry here: Church of the Now

francis dubose on missional

• Author: Brad
• Filed under: Bible, New Testament, missio Dei, missiology, missional church, missional living, missions, video
• Date: Dec 13,2008

In my studies with Ed Stetzer, one of the interesting individuals he has introduced to me is missiologist Francis Dubose. You can read Ed’s thoughts on Dubose here and here.

According to Ed, Dubose is the first person to use the word missional in the adjectival sense we use it today in his book, God Who Sends: A Fresh Quest for Biblical Mission (1983). Dubose was a professor at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary where the Francis M. DuBose Award for Excellence in Kingdom Missions is given in his honor.

Ed believes that Dubose roots his idea in the “sentness” of a “missionary church” which impacts at least one stream of the missional conversation which he calls that the “missionary” stream.

Recently, Andrew Jones had the opportunity to sit down with Dubose, who is 85 and living at a retirement “hotel” in San Francisco, and asked him about his thoughts on his impact on the current missional conversation.

[HT: Andrew Jones]

thick in the missio Dei

• Author: Brad
• Filed under: history, missio Dei, missiology, missions, theology
• Date: Oct 28,2008

Sorry for the absence. I’ve been wrapping up term paper #2 under Dr. Ed Stetzer’s direction through Liberty Theological Seminary. Not much will change over the next month because I’ll be working on a third term paper for him during that time. So this is a preemptive apology for my potential lack of posting…

All that aside, the direction Ed wanted me to go with paper #2 was to go deep into missio Dei theology. I’m really excited where I’m headed. The title of my paper is:

I am using four main sources:
1) The Mission of God by George Vicedom
2) Transforming Mission by David Bosch
3) ‘Missio Dei’: An Examination of the Origin, Contents And Function of the Term in Protestant Missiological Discussion by H.H. Rosin
4) “God is a Missionary God: Missio Dei, Karl Barth, and the Doctrine of the Trinity” [dissertation] by Paul Flett.

I’ll be supplementing with texts and articles by Newbigin, Guder, Hesselgrave, Hunsberger, Van Gelder, Van Engen, and Glasser.

I will most likely share what will be three papers on the blog in the near future. Ed has mentioned the possibility of cross-posting on edstetzer.com. All of this will hopefully coincide with a big transformation of the blog before the end of the year. Stay tuned…