the 7

• Author: Brad
• Filed under: church, community, emerging church, missiology, missional church, movies, multi-site, music, prayer, relevintage, theology
• Date: May 30,2008

1. I-Monk once again cuts to the chase regarding the difference between gaining converts and just gaining people in church. Sometimes, bigger isn’t missional…

2. Ever seen a horrible Jesus movie? The Wittenberg Door has seen ten. And #10 may surprise you… [The pics alone are worth a click...]

3. Want an inside look at Saddleback? Bob Hyatt recently visited and unpacked some pithy insights on video venues, Rick Warren’s preaching and use of Scripture, worship segmentation, and church size.

4. This was a very provocative interview by Andrew Jones that got me thinking about how ‘gutsy’ our missional living really is. He interviewed David Pierce, director of Steiger International and No Longer Music, who, as Andrew says, is taking its message of hope to “some of the darkest places imaginable, including closed Islamic countries, terrorist clubs, squatter villages, anarchy festivals, brothels, junkie joints, punk & goth music festivals, Satanist clubs and New Age gatherings.” Wow…

5. Greg Gilbert waxes eloquent on adiaphora, er, the pursuit of many for coolness over faithfulness in a church. Not that they are mutually exclusive, but he pushes us to think about what is most important…

6. If you haven’t been following JVo’s series on prayer, it’s good. I mean really good. Check it out: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9

7. In light of the series I’m doing on the missional church, I found this video very insightful. It comes from Dave Browning of Christ the King Church @ Leadership Network’s Multi-Site Exposed conference @ Mars Hill in Seattle. In it, he talks about growing organic, relational congregations with authentic community that can grow and adapt to their specific sub-culture and yet remain connected to the greater body.

the “sent” church 3

• Author: Brad
• Filed under: church, history, incarnational, missiology, missional church, theology
• Date: May 30,2008

Series recap: Part 1 | Part 2

MISSIO DEI INTRODUCED

In 1934, Karl Hartenstein, a German missiologist, first expressed the notion of Missio Dei. The Missio Dei notion surfaced way before this time, but it emerged in a specific way in 1938 when the International Missionary Council (IMC) gathered at Tambaram (Madras) in India to have one of its most theologically alert conferences.

One of the chief outcomes of the Tambaram conference was the suggestion that “church and mission are one.” And by “mission,” they concentrated on the “sentness” of the church. In his book, Edinburgh to Salvador: Twentieth Century Ecumenical Missiology, T.V. Philip, a church historian and a former professor at the United Theological College in Bangalore, India, explained, “The main conclusion of the Madras Conference was that church and mission are inseparable… It is the church that is God’s missionary to the world.” (1)

THE MISSIOLOGICAL DEBATE: PAST AND PRESENT

According to Ed Stetzer, director of Lifeway Research and Lifeway’s Missiologist in Residence, the dispute about “church and mission” was probably the essential missiological debate of the first 60 years of the last century. (2) The fundamental concern of theses debates has commonly been over the nature of mission. (3) From the late 1800’s, however, the ascent of theological liberalism, the early world mission conferences – i.e. Tamambram and Willengen – and the consequential ecumenical movement began to dilute the Missio Dei beyond Philip’s aforementioned stance that church and missions are inextricable. (4)

Missio Dei is a term still used today in evangelical circles, though not as broadly as in ecumenical conversation and without the loss in focus on the church as the method God has established for His missionary work. (5) But in today’s dialogue, the evangelical rendition of Missio Dei is typically replaced with the word “missional.”

For the remainder of this series, when the term Missio Dei or “missional” is used, it highlights the elemental nature and calling of the church as God’s called and sent people. Charles Van Engen, Professor of Biblical Theology of Mission at Fuller Theological Seminary says it this way:

The genesis of my view of Missio Dei and of “missional” is the Bible…and the “traditional view of mission” that assumes…the nature of the church as being most fundamentally God’s instrument to call the nations to reconciliation with God in Jesus Christ by the work of the Holy Spirit… (6)

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1) T.V. Phillip, Edinburgh to Salvador: Twentieth Century Ecumenical Missiology [book on-line] (Delhi: CSS& ISPCK, 1999; accessed 10 May 2008); available from http://www.religion-online.org/showchapter.asp?title=1573&C=1519; Internet.

2) Ed Stetzer, “Meanings of Missional – Part 1,” EdStetzer.com – A Lifeway Research Blog, 14 August 2007, available from http://blogs.lifeway.com/blog/edstetzer/2007/08/meanings_of_missional_part_1_1.html; Internet; accessed 10 May 2008.

3) Walter Elwell, ed., Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, Second Edition (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2001), 782.

4) Phillip, Edinburgh to Salvador; Internet; accessed 10 May 2008.

5) Elwell, Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, 782.

6) Charles Van Engen, “Meanings of Missional Part 5,” interview by Ed Stetzer, EdStetzer.com – A Lifeway Research Blog, 2 October 2007, available from http://blogs.lifeway.com/blog/edstetzer/2007/10/meanings_of_missional_part_5_1.html; Internet: accessed 10 May 2008.

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the “sent” church 2

• Author: Brad
• Filed under: church, culture, emerging church, emerging culture, history, incarnational, missiology, missional church, pastoring, post-Christendom, post-Evangelical, postmodern, theology
• Date: May 29,2008

Series recap: Part 1

Southern Baptists have become recurrent users of the word. The Assemblies of God Department of U.S. Missions contains this word as one of their four values. The Evangelical Free Church organized a summit built on this word for their leaders in 2007 and they have renamed their church planting leadership to mirror this word. The Nazarene Church’s denomination has embraced this word as their denominational objective. (1)

The word? Missional.

Many individuals within evangelicalism are attempting to classify and analyze this word. Its unclear connotation has brought it to the point that even some of its first and fervent users of the term are becoming restrained to use it themselves for concern of their audience misunderstanding their meaning. But the advocates of the idiom, “missional,” see it as a term set apart from other similar words like “missionary,” “mission,” and “Missio Dei.”

If the patois of the missional church is to become a beneficial way of structuring communities of God’s people in a postmodern culture, then we have to expend the time to comprehend what is at stake in the speech we are using. And if Christian fellowships are truly rediscovering that they must view themselves as a “sent” community, they must fully understand what it at stake so as to better chart a course for the future of evangelicalism.
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1) Ed Stetzer, “Meanings of Missional – Part 1,” EdStetzer.com – A Lifeway Research Blog, 14 August 2007, available from http://blogs.lifeway.com/blog/edstetzer/2007/08/meanings_of_missional_part_1_1.html; Internet; accessed 10 May 2008.

Photo by eye2eye