Ekklesia, Transition, Leadership and Formation
An Emerging Dictionary is not really a dictionary, but a syllabus and anthology: a collection of thoughts, organized alphabetically by virtue of a particular conversation. The idea for this project emerged, like so many great ideas, from a free-for-all conversation around breakfast one morning. We had a diverse group of people around the table, diverse [...]
I was looking at a diagram for the rhythm of missional community the other day, the old sodalic/modalic rhythm. It hit me that this was really an ontology – it was a reflection of the inner life of the Trinity. God is a perfect community of being. And the overflow of that loving relatedness is [...]
The current issue of Direction (a Mennonite Brethren quarterly publication that goes back to about 1970) is titled “The Emerging Church: Critiques and Applications.” Some great reflections in this issue. I’ll list the articles and authors here and then offer some excerpts. * The Air is Not Quite Fresh: Emerging Church Ecclesiology – Paul Doerksen [...]
The New Testament knows nothing of this language of “church planting.” Huh. That might be a shock for some. A friend sent a document that he has been asked to revise that details the framework of their denomination in church planting. The last revision was 1992. What would you expect to find? The document is [...]
“The reason Christians are formed into communities is because of God’s work to make a people to serve him as Christ’s witnesses. The congregation is either a missional community–as Newbigin defines it, ‘the hermeneutic of the gospel’ (The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 222ff.)–or it is ultimately a caricature of the people of God that [...]
It happens too often. You are speaking to somebody and trying to explain the paradigm shift required to move from church to kingdom, from ecclesiology at the center to the missio Dei. It seems like you connect partially on some things, but you leave with a sense of discomfort — that what you said could [...]
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Anabaptist scholar Stuart Murray writes that the protest movements grew out of a rediscovery of Jesus and the Gospels, long neglected in a Christendom which needed Jesus for salvation, but was afraid of the ethical and political implications. Other principles, apart from the centrality of Jesus, characterized these protest movements: * their conviction that untrained [...]
It struck me yesterday that there is nothing comparable to this Calgary gathering occurring in the United States. Seven hundred people from across the denominational spectrum and from rural, urban, and suburban settings across Canada coming together for a single missional agenda – to impact our country for Christ by seeding missional communities. And it [...]
We ran the first session of AXIOM for the local FORGE hub here last night. Including Anthony, Cam and myself I think we had about 18 people. Quite a diversity: YWAM, Salvation Army, MB, Pentecostal .. Ages from about 27 to 60. This was an introduction to missional ecclesiology as well as a look at [...]
Steve Addison. Missional Press, 2009. 142 pages. (Available in Australia from Koorong Books Study Guide available free. The Forgotten Ways surveyed church history, systems theory, and the practices of adaptive leadership in the context of recovering a missional ecclesiology and missional practice. Movements That Change the World eschews the systems perspective for a social-historical survey [...]
