thought exercise on The Missional Church

its simplest form, the term “missional” is the noun “missionary” modified to be an adjective. Missional churches do what missionaries do, regardless of the context. They can parachute-drop into a vill...

James Brownson describes what he calls a “missional hermeneutic” as observed throughout the New Testament: I call the model I am developing a missional hermeneutic because it springs from a basic obs...

In smaller congregations any growth is usually highly prized, but wise pastors realize that not all growth is good growth. Also, missional pastors know that the best growth is conversion growth. A hea...

What is the place of the church in relation to God’s mission? Pastor John Stott offers some crucial thoughts, For the church lies at the very center of the eternal purposes of God. It is not a div...

Leonard Sweet shares an interesting story in the introduction to Neil Cole’s book, Organic Church , about a parish pastor who lived in a Scottish village near Edinburgh called Davidson’s Mains. ...

The Church was the one institution whose mission depended on galvanizing attention; and through its daily and weekly offices, as well as its sometimes-central role in education, that is exactly what i...

I sometimes wonder (although I exaggerate in order to make my point) if it would not be very healthy for church members to meet only on Sundays (for worship, fellowship and teaching) and not at all mi...

A Frontier Fellowship mobilizer once met a Chinese monk while leading a vision trip. Through a translator she said to him, “We are all followers of Jesus. Do you know Jesus?” The friendly monk replie...

I was taking a tour of the Church of Scotland’s beautiful Glasgow Cathedral, which is technically the High Kirk of Glasgow. It is estimated that over 50,000 university students live within walking dis...

I was in London browsing one of the ubiquitous British tabloids and an advertisement for a new health club grabbed my attention. The picture was of a magnificent gothic church sanctuary that had been ...

[Jesus] sends us into the world as he was sent into the world (John 17:18; 20:21). We have to penetrate other people’s worlds, as he penetrated ours: the world of their thinking (as we struggle to und...

”Paul and his band were “released,” not sent. Let’s get the exegesis right. First, the operative agent here is the Holy Spirit, not the local church or any other human entity. Second, what those aroun...

Culture is like gravity. We never talk about it, except in physics classes. We don’t include gravity in our weekly planning processes. No one gets up thinking about how gravity will affect their day. ...

A documentary about Ernest Shackleton’s early twentieth-century exposition to the South Pole shows the classified ad Shackleton put in a London newspaper: Men wanted for hazardous journey, small wa...

Tom and Angela had lived in their neighborhood for about twelve years without really getting to know many people. They lived in a cul-de-sac of eleven houses and had limited communication and interact...

When I was growing up, my dad was a farmer, not a Christian. He had little interest in faith, having been told by his father that the Bible was a fairy tale. But then a local pastor took an interest i...

The very first word of the Rule of St. Benedict, that famous text that has guided the life of monastic communities since the sixth century, is listen . I want for us to put listening back where i...

A man named Jim Haynes died last year at 87 years old, in Paris where he’d lived for decades. Jim Haynes was known as the “man who invited the world over for dinner.” Why? Because for more than 40 yea...

Lamin Sanneh, the African theologian who would be pivotal in the development of missional theology, was raised in an orthodox Muslim household in Gambia. He found himself drawn to Christianity after e...

The Federal Aviation Administration once developed a cannon-like device to test the strength of windshields of airplanes. They actually shot a dead chicken (I’m serious) into the windshield at the app...

Rick Warren, perhaps the most famous missional code breaker, surveyed his community and found why people in his community did not go to church. He found that there were four primary complaints about c...

A missionary family who has started organic churches in some of the most dangerous fields in the world once returned to the states for furlough. On the first Sunday back, they visited a large Baptist ...

I had just finished presenting much of the material in this chapter [on the role of the Church helping the poor] to an audience in Africa. A very tall and muscular African man in the audience approach...

The Church is not a clean, well-lit place where everything runs smoothly and actions automatically match ideals. It is, in the words of the Gospel, a field of chaff and wheat growing up together and b...

As the center of Christianity shifts from the West (North America and Western Europe) to the Global South, grinding poverty is on the front doorstep — and in the front pews — of the church of Jesus Ch...

I’ve served on staff at a few different churches throughout Silicon Valley for the last decade and a half, including a medium-sized church, a young church plant, and a multisite megachurch. At each, w...

The disgraced megachurch pastor Mark Driscoll once described his church’s growth by saying that there was “a pile of dead bodies behind the Mars Hill bus.” As if that wasn’t bad enough, he added, “and...

R.W. DeHann wrote of a missionary who, shortly after arriving on the field, was speaking for the first time to a group of villagers. He was trying to present the gospel to them. He began by describing...

If we are honest with ourselves, for many of us who celebrate the sacraments on a regular basis, at times we take them for granted. We lose sight of their nature to inspire and remind us of our covena...

From the outside Calvary Church in Holland, Michigan, looks like a typical large church that many Americans attend. The church developed the typical way: it started small and then began to grow. As th...