M » mission http://theimn.com A gathering for future-oriented, Christ-following leaders Sun, 05 Feb 2012 03:26:07 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1 The Wisdom of Teams http://theimn.com/churchplanting/the-wisdom-of-teams/ http://theimn.com/churchplanting/the-wisdom-of-teams/#comments Thu, 05 Jan 2012 18:30:49 +0000 alex http://theimn.com/?p=3014 A Church Planting Essential:

The Wisdom of Teams

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Two of Kensington Community Church’s founding trio, Steve Andrews and Dave Wilson, introduce future church planters and spiritual entrepreneurs to the power of teaming with others.

One of the distinctive features of Kensington’s ministry is their team leadership. Check the website, as I did, when researching the church, and you’ll notice that there is no celebrity extended to the lead pastor.
Kensington is not only multi-site in structure, it is also plural in its leadership paradigm. To say Kensington tends towards decentralization may not be going far enough. Kensington is a multi-localized community with a plurality of leaders.

]]> http://theimn.com/churchplanting/the-wisdom-of-teams/feed/ 2 Church Planters Chat (part 1) http://theimn.com/churchplanting/church-planters-chat-part-1/ http://theimn.com/churchplanting/church-planters-chat-part-1/#comments Wed, 04 Jan 2012 14:40:29 +0000 theimn http://theimn.com/?p=3006 Every church planter you know must watch this video. Pass it forward.

The night before the 2011 M conference we gathered church planters from across the country and talked about their experiences. This first conversation includes church planters whose launches were supported by the church planting movement that has emerged out of Kensington Community Church. Much thanks to Kensington Community Church for their generosity in hosting this event and Vision 360 Detroit for sponsoring this event.
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]]> http://theimn.com/churchplanting/church-planters-chat-part-1/feed/ 3 How To Start A Movement http://theimn.com/featured/how-to-start-a-movement/ http://theimn.com/featured/how-to-start-a-movement/#comments Wed, 18 May 2011 16:53:17 +0000 alex http://theimn.com/?p=2155

It used to be that young church planters talked about starting a new churches. If they were ambitious, and they all were, they wanted it to grow and grow big, grow mega.

The people I talk to today all want to start a movement. Everyone’s a movement leader now. I remember about a decade or so ago a young guy emailed me and wrote, the movement has begun. Well, one guy with an idea is not a movement, but my point here is that there has been a shift in our imagination.

Why the shift? I first heard the term “church planting movements” in the early 90′s when Dave Garrison of the International Mission Board gave a speech on the subject at The Church on Brady in East Los Angeles. Of course, we were delighted by the rapid reproduction of churches in China and wondered how our own frameworks might be hindering the rapid spread of the gospel in the US.

The conversation among leaders working overseas was all about movement…church planting movements. And, because The Church on Brady (now known as Mosaic) was deeply embedded in overseas work, our language and practices were movement oriented. (Asbury Professor George Hunter wrote in his book, Reaching Secular People, that The Church on Brady was the most apostolic — read “missional and cross cultural” — of the churches he had studied.).

They say ideas take about 20 years or so to break into the public imagination. Somewhere in the last 20 years, I have experienced a shift in the language between that of the last generation of young leaders and a new generation of young leaders. Perhaps the things that God had done overseas has somehow spilled into the consciousness of American church planters. Perhaps the rise of the West as a mission field has permitted new ways to think and go about mission in our context.

Whatever the case may be, one of the questions still our our minds at M is “What hinders or prevents the rapid spread of the gospel in any context?”

Here are a couple of reasons.
(1) For the gospel to spread it must be believed. So many Christians know church but not the gospel. They may know doctrine but not Christ. Leaders must help people understand the essence of the Christ following story and how it intersects with their lives and the world as a whole.

(2) For the gospel to spread it must be shared. The first believers “gossiped” the gospel around the Mediterranean. Personally, I despise gossip. This is the one exception.

(3) The gospel must be understood (reason) and felt (emotions) but it must also challenge the will (heart) and expand the imagination.

(4) Lastly, I want to contribute another line to our conversation about movement leadership. The leader matters, but how important is that first follower? The first follower is what “turns a solitary nut into a leader.”

Are you a nut?

Recruit or somehow attract and then embrace your first follower and let the movement begin.

See the 3 minute and 10 second video here:

==================================

Barbaric, Apostolic Movement at M
M. Sept 28-29
Motown (aka Detroit)
Join Erwin McManus (Mosaic, Los Angeles), Vince Antonucci (Verve, Las Vegas), Steve Andrews (Kensington Community Church), Dave Nelson (K2 The Church), Lorenzo DellaForesta (River’s Edge, Montreal), Nick Boring (Vision 360), and Rex Miller (Author, The Millennium Matrix), at M.

 

 

]]> http://theimn.com/featured/how-to-start-a-movement/feed/ 0 Mission and the Future http://theimn.com/featured/mission-and-the-future/ http://theimn.com/featured/mission-and-the-future/#comments Wed, 06 Jan 2010 16:02:36 +0000 alex http://theimn.com/?p=518 Thinking about the “future of  mission” (or of anything for that matter) requires imagination.

future_1A couple of decades ago I began to collect ideas and images of the future. One of several descriptors I used to paint portraits of the future was this:The future is violent.

This seems more obvious today than it was 20 years ago, but it was obvious then too. The attacks on New York of September 11 made imagination less necessary to picture a violent future. And, given the fact that there were more terrorists attacks in 2009 than in any year since 9/11, I see no reason to project anything other than that the future is still violent.

But I’m not writing about violence today. I am hoping to provoke your imagination about the possibilities for creating a different future. It is the act of embodying this imagined future in the concreteness of “now” that makes for leading a missional life and adventure. Because of the huge space between the world “as it is” and the world as it will be, it is impossible to think about the future of our mission without thinking about the role of imagination.

The faculty of imagination is at the center of what it means to be human, and is often overlooked in our churches. In fact, more often than not, we consider the imagination the source of heresy, a playground for the the things that haunt the soul. I suggest that perhaps the imagination is also where we engage with God.

Think about it like this. The Bible is a book for the imagination and only the imaginative can begin to comprehend it. It describes a world that no one of us has ever seen. In that future world the lion lays down with the lamb, instruments of war are converted into agricultural tools, there is a harmonious community of nations, an Earth Tribe, so to speak, and God and man sit at the same table.

Imagination is the power to create space for the new, to see connections where there are none, and to act as if worlds not-yet-born are a fully functioning reality.

Religions are forged in the imagination.

Civilization is conceived in the imagination.

The future is born in the imagination.

Walt Disney is famous for the idea that “if you can dream it, you can do it.” He understood the power of the imagination. So must we. The people who follow Christ are an “imagine”-”nation”, a nation, a clan of imagineers, of seers. Like the characters in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, this nation is moved by compelling visions that are not fully realized but are fully imagined. In our traditions and in our churches we often value reason, intuition, sobriety. I think we should also value those who are inebriated with imagination that shapes the world towards the kind of future and world none of us has ever seen.

What do you think?

The art for this post is from Larry Price Art — http://www.larrypriceart.com/

]]> http://theimn.com/featured/mission-and-the-future/feed/ 4 Only Human? http://theimn.com/uncategorized/onlyhuman/ http://theimn.com/uncategorized/onlyhuman/#comments Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:53:13 +0000 alex http://theimn.com/?p=453 michaelangelo The gospel within human frameworks — We tend to use the term “human” in the negative: “Well, he’s only human.”
But what if we added to our mental vistas of humanity a positive idea of what it means to be human.

I know this is a stretch for many of you because we so often think of humanity as the problem. But what if being human is not the problem but the goal.

We strive to be less human and more divine. But what if the quest to become human was in our eyes (and in God’s) a very good thing. After all, God embedded His divine image upon the human. He declared his creative act of adding humanity to the whole of creation as “very good”. Humanity is not something good. It is very good. For the ultimate expression of this remember Jesus.

When Jesus calmed the winds and the waves, the disciples asked, “What kind of man is this?”

Now be honest, how many of us, at one point or another, have spoken to nature? I don’t know about you, but I speak to nature and usually nothing happens.

So, we turn to an episode like the one in which Jesus speaks to the winds and they obey him and tend to say something like, “Well, he’s the kind of man who is God.” For us, this explains why the wind obeys him.

But what if Jesus converses with the winds because he is human, like we are designed to become?

The Genesis story tells us that humankind is an embedded part of the natural world. We are created in God’s image to oversee this world of which we are a part. This function is what being made in the Image of God is for, according to the story.

Humans are a part of nature and designed to be a force of nature on behalf of God. The way Luke, one of the gospel writers, tells the story of Jesus, Jesus was a human characterized by an ultimate and intimate communication with God. He was the one upon whom the creative spirit rested and through whom the creative spirit works.

Jesus was not “only” human, he was The Human. In him we see what we were designed to be and what we will be: creatures living in intimate communication with God.

It’s not true of you that you are “only” human. That’s nonsensical like saying you are “only an ultimate mystery”. You are human — a creature capable of contact and communication with God, the creative force behind the universe.

So speak with the winds.
Anticipate what it is that in Christ we are becoming.

Are we becoming more like God?
Are we becoming human?
And, are these two questions ways of asking the same thing?

What do you think?

See you in the mystic…

]]> http://theimn.com/uncategorized/onlyhuman/feed/ 3 Opaque vs Transparent Strategies – 1 http://theimn.com/featured/opaque-vs-transparent-strategies-1/ http://theimn.com/featured/opaque-vs-transparent-strategies-1/#comments Sun, 12 Nov 2006 16:38:41 +0000 alex http://alexmcmanus.org/?p=203 Welcome back. You belong here.There is a spectrum of approaches for creating community with and among unreached people. Let’s draw from the world of technology for an anology.Technologies exist on an opacity/ transparency spectrum. [Hat Tip to polymath and wordmaven Dean Sharp for the find].An OPAQUE technology is one in which the technology being used is cumbersome or is”in the way.” Posting a photo to your website using HTML is opaque. The HTML standsbetween you and the task you’re seeking to accomplish. In a sense, you can’t “see” throughthe technology to the photos you want to post. Opaque technologies require skills and capacities that do not come naturally to the user. For a more TRANSPARENT technology, think of using “Point to and click” technology to drag the photo of your choice into the page you’re creating. Using your finger to point is more natural to the user than typing HTML.A transparent technology is one in which the technology is invisible.Opacity and transparency exist on a spectrum and not necessarily across a divide.

OPAQUE < ======>TRANSPARENT

In the world of community building and/or church planting, approaches will be somewhere on the Opacity/ Transparency spectrum. An opaque strategy would be one in which the following words, images or practices — church, cross, services, programs, worship, fellowship — combine with any of the following words contemporary, postmodern, alternative.An example of an OPAQUE church planting approachwould be this billboard I recently saw:Pastor XYZ invites you toxyz churchprograms for all agesRocking worshipSunday’s at 11″this is not your father’s church”This is obviously communication from Christians to Christians. Within churched circles thiscommunique is somewhat transparent. For the outsider, this communication is OPAQUE. All they might know for certain is that their father didn’t go there.An example of a more transparent church planting approach would be:invite an unreached person to join you for dinner at a local restaurant.Throw a party and include your unreached neighbors on the list.Go to parties with your unreached friends.You get the idea. The transparent approach puts relationships on the forefront.The opaque approach hides them behind programs, worship, church services, etc.A “party” is transparent. An excuse for people to get together, have fun, build friendships. Not of all us like parties, but the intent is obvious. You can “see” through it.One of the the first steps in effective evangelism is becoming normal again. Social again. Transparent again. Reaching people may be easier and scarier than we thought. Easier because we don’t need a budget, a building, a core team, or a seminary education. Scarier because there is nothing stopping you.See you in the mystic…AlexInto the Mystic Updates:

]]> http://theimn.com/featured/opaque-vs-transparent-strategies-1/feed/ 24 Mega Church or House Church Networks: Part 2/ Heart and Hospitality http://theimn.com/leadership/mega-church-versus-house-church-networks-part-2-heart-and-hospitality/ http://theimn.com/leadership/mega-church-versus-house-church-networks-part-2-heart-and-hospitality/#comments Mon, 30 Oct 2006 01:00:22 +0000 alex http://alexmcmanus.org/?p=196 Welcome back. You belong here.In PART ONE of this Two Part post titled, The Mega Church and Home Church Networks: Twin Trajectories and Why We Need Them Both, I wrote the following:
The first [Mega Church] trajectory needs excellence and resources to launch and heart and hospitality to succeed. The second [House Church Network] needs heart and hospitality to launch and resources to succeed. [More on this in my next post].

One of the reason corporate leaders and corporate churches don’t get mission to the emerging culture is because they have resources and a need for a certain kind of excellence. Google guru, church planting advocate, and friend, Mark Weible, told me of a church that wanted to get onto the Myspace band wagon.So far so good.But, he told me, they wanted to hire a designer to really make their MySpace look good. You know, “Excellent”. I know that a lot of you reading this are chuckling as I’m sure Mark wanted to. I can”t remember the rest of the story but I think Mark was able to gently explain that this would lack the “authenticity” Myspacers have come to expect. The social networking hub, Myspace, doesn’t work because of professionally designed sites. Myspace is 16 year olds going crazy with self expression. Not a Madison avenue advertisers trying to sell a product.If you’re a slick advertising company smart enough to use the tool, we won’t know it ’till you already got us. On the contrary, social networking works because of, well, social networks, not slick looks.One question I ask leaders of Christ following communities and Church Planters is this: If you wanted to reach 20-50 people this year or month without reference to your budget, building, membership or staff, how would you do it in your context?In the end, it will always come down to remembering how to build relationships again. We need to learn how to become a part of the world of friendships again. This is the primal sphere of:How to take a villageHow to create opportunitiesResourcefulness versus resourcesPassion verses budgetRisk taking versus excellence(Luke 10. Acts 16, 19)This trajectory requires heart and hospitality. I think this is where both Mega Churches and House Church Networks need to go. It’s not just Mega Church leaders that can hide behind “busyness” (a heavy counseling schedule, mapping the assimilation process, preparing a big mailer, etc). House Church leaders hide too –just behind a smaller desk, a heavier “secular” work load, and fellowship activities. It isn’t the resources or lack of them nor the need for excellence that keeps both Mega Church and House Churches from reaching people. We fall inward on each other because, while we’re busy “fellow-shipping,” we forgot that there are other people out there that matter to God.As you know, the word hospitality comes from two words: stranger + love. Hospitality is the love of strangers, of the outsider, the alien. I once asked a group of leaders of a very small church what kept them from fulfilling their self-identified calling to reach the outsiders, those who’ve not yet followed after Christ. “We’re so busy doing church stuff,” they said, “that we just don’t have time.”So, as an experiment, we canceled “church things” to create the space for reaching the unreached. Nothing changed. Why? Because with the extra time, the men all began to do the chores around the house they had been neglecting. They cleaned their yards, organized their garages, etc. Their wives domesticated them with ease. The lesson seemed simple. Reaching unreached people was on their minds but not their hearts. Or maybe, the unreached were on their hearts, like they are on the hearts of so many Mega Church Leaders and House Church leaders. Our lives just aren’t wrapped around them yet.The point here is that structure isn’t the fundamental problem or solution with regards to reaching the west. The fundamental issue is what and who do we love? Here’s a very practical processing question: How do we wrap our lives around those we most want to reach? That’s a question we all need to wrestle with regardless of whether we populate a mega-church of 100,000 or a house church of 8. It is not a given that either one of these structures wrestles with this question better than the other. What do you think? More to come…See you in the Mystic,AlexInto the Mystic Updates:

]]> http://theimn.com/leadership/mega-church-versus-house-church-networks-part-2-heart-and-hospitality/feed/ 61 Mega Church and Home Church Networks: Twin Trajectories and Why We Need Them Both http://theimn.com/evangelism-2/mega-church-and-home-church-networks-twin-trajectories-and-why-we-need-them-both/ http://theimn.com/evangelism-2/mega-church-and-home-church-networks-twin-trajectories-and-why-we-need-them-both/#comments Mon, 23 Oct 2006 00:30:49 +0000 alex http://alexmcmanus.org/?p=195 Welcome back. You belong here.There seem to be two leadership trajectories in the west. The first seems to be characterized by the recent phenomena of mega churches in the world. The majority of church conferences today are focused on this reality. The essence of these conference experiences seems to be a kind of corporate leadership guide for aspiring Executives of Corporate churches. Each conference introduces a new inductee to the role of mega church pastor-hood.The excitement this type of environment creates for some makes others yawn.Don’t misunderstand. I’m an advocate for mega churches. Why would anyone in their right minds be opposed to something that people enjoy and prosper in? In fact, Mega-churches often grow because they’re friendlier, smarter, and more outward oriented than churches that don’t grow. They grow because they meet needs smaller churches that don’t grow can’t meet. They tend to raise the leadership standards to a higher level. They are able to produce programs and experiences with excellence. Mega-churches have everything going for them except the stuff required to touch and reach the west for Christ. Mega churches are big, just not big enough, strong enough, fast enough.Let’s look at a second trajectory. A friend of mine ( a Political Science prof at the University of Michigan) tells me that a striking characteristic of Mormonism, the fastest growing religious movement since the primitive Christ following movement, is that their “churches” are not led by clergy but by “lay” people. [I've still to check the sources on this, but my argument here doesn't hinge on this fact]. If true, this striking characteristic of Mormonism would be a commonality with the early Christ following movement as well.The fast growing early church had no or few “church buildings” . They met in homes or where they could. The had no budgets of the kind with which we are familiar. They didn’t have an Employer Identification Number or Tax Exempt Status issue from Rome. They didn’t have seminaries or seminary profs. They lacked clergy and celebrity pastors. They didn’t have corporations with departments and programs. Ok, sure if you want to get picky, they didn’t blog.Let’s look at this the correct way. The early church did NOT have
church buildingschurch budgetschurch programs (a children’s department? a youth program?)church officespulpitstax exemptions for churchesseminaries to train clergyclergy

And that’s when we grew the fastest. Their churches tended to be small but they proliferated around the Mediterranean on the heels of converts to the Christ following faith. Unlike today’s simple and organic churches, they had the power, vision, and ambition of mega churches. They didn’t revel in being small, simple, and organic.For me this means that we need to celebrate when a ministry succeeds to the extent of the Mega-churches. Really celebrate. But should we now seek to crown the mega-church model with the particular competencies of Mega-Church corporate leadership as the basic training set for emerging apostles, evangelists, pastors, and church planters? If our goal is to grow churches big — and I think we should shoot for this when the gifts and talent are present — then maybe. But, If our goal is to set western culture on fire again with the gospel of Jesus, then no. Preparation to lead a Mega church is not the model and training that will win the west and the world again. This model won’t even win the church in the west much less the world outside the church.The second trajectory, is more simple. The future of the kingdom advance is far more dependent on the charism, the gift, of servant leadership and missional community than it is on a budget granted from a denomination, a corporate leader, or corporate church structures and programs. The first trajectory needs excellence and resources to launch and heart and hospitality to succeed. The second needs heart and hospitality to launch and resources and drive to succeed. [More on this in my next post].Rather than taking on an “either/or” posture about structure, we may need to take on, in this instance, a “both/and” posture. New communities of faith are like those little turtles that are buried to hatch near the ocean’s edge. When they break through the sand the predators await them. Thousands and thousands of them hurry to the immediate safety of the water. Hundreds will perish. Many will make it. They will populate the oceans and propagate their species. Some of them will go one to be old and large sea faring creatures. By analogy, in order to recolonize the west for Christ, we need hundreds of thousands of gals and guys that will move from zero to sixty, from no budget, no backing, no training to community via the conversion of people to the Christ following faith. And we’ll celebrate with them. Sure, some of these guys will go past sixty, a few past 200, a fraction past 1000 and we’ll celebrate with each of these leaders too. And, sure, then “one in a million” of these guys will become a mega church pastor. Finally, the “one in a million” will show up as a guest speaker at a conference. Maybe even one of mine. But, while we laugh and celebrate how the great story of Jesus has been lived out in this mega church pastor’s life and ministry, all of us will also know the truth about how the west will be won.See you in the Mystic,Alex

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]]> http://theimn.com/evangelism-2/mega-church-and-home-church-networks-twin-trajectories-and-why-we-need-them-both/feed/ 45 Should we”go to church”? http://theimn.com/featured/should-we-go-to-church/ http://theimn.com/featured/should-we-go-to-church/#comments Fri, 13 Oct 2006 17:47:08 +0000 alex http://alexmcmanus.org/?p=194 Welcome back. You belong here.Alex,I need your advice. I have a friend who is going to another extreme.He feels that all churches teach legalism, all pastors have their ownagenda and churches should not have walls but “engage the darkside”.For this reason, he has decided to not attend church at all. He has noplans or possibly even no desire to seek out a church to be a part ofbut he realizes he needs a mentor and he needs community, fellowshipwith other believers.However, his idea of fellowship is e-mailing me and other Christianfriends and talking about spiritual topics. He listens to people on theradio and TV (and I know this is probablyconfusing him more).I see you and Erwin as my mentors although I have never met you. I probably have learned more from you than from my current pastor but I don’t separate myself from my local church.Could this be considered going too far?Could his desire to be missional lead him to a dark side that will bringlong-term effects? How can I encourage him to join a group of believerswho have the same passion for lost people as he does? How can I makehim realize that he needs to be part of a community of Christ’sfollowers?Dear Reader,In some ways, your email reflects the mood of the age. There is among many a deep sense of angst and dissatisfaction with the whole idea of “going to church”. Some have grown tired of “going to church” and listening to campaigns to build bigger buildings. Others feel a loss of a sense of mission and community in the local church. Still others feel a disconnect with the institutional church and the celebrity Pastor.This reflects a conversation that is going on today regarding the nature of the church. This branch of theological inquiry, called Ecclesiology, has many practical, challenging and relevant aspects for where we are today.Personally, I’ve always told my kids that “going to church” is impossible because we are the church. If we “go” anywhere it’s “into all the world” or “to the nations”.However, it is important that as we go, that we go together as much as we can. Unfortunately, your friend may have, in some ways, substituted one form of dead religion for another. However, the solution for him may not be “finding a church to go to”. For him, the solution may be to find like minded friends to join him in his quest. He seems to know he needs community. If he does this, maybe he can show the rest of us how it should all be done. Certainly complaining about how bad the church and her leaders are is not a solution. Sure, it’s fun to poke fun at others, but then what? In the end, it’s just whining. The real solution is for your friend to develop friendships that are like minded and missional, and then do something to make the world a better place in the name of Christ.About his use of email and the internet…As you know, this is an age of connectivity. We are now all in the matrix of cyber culture and this reality offers both dangers and opportunities for the church on mission. Yes, there are new dimensions of relationships available to us via the net. We’re all feeling our way forward here. But still, courtesy and relational intelligence dictate that one cannot presume a relationship just cause we can send an email. Before the internet, I would occassionally meet guys who would say something like, “I belong to all churches”. How stupid is that? In the same way, we can confuse “feeling” connected with “being” connected. Your friend may be making this mistake. At least it sounds like he’s seeing you as part of his community and you’re seeing him as imposing a relationship on you that doesn’t exist. You are not his church.In some ways, I share your friend’s feelings about “going to church”. I don’t like going to church either. Regardless of how great the show, I eventually get bored. Being the church, however, is an entirely different thing altogether. There isn’t anything more subversive and exciting than being the church.I hope that helps. See you in the mystic,Alexps register for HUMANA 2.0 before November 15 and enjoy that early adopter discount.

]]> http://theimn.com/featured/should-we-go-to-church/feed/ 22 What is a church? http://theimn.com/featured/what-is-a-church/ http://theimn.com/featured/what-is-a-church/#comments Tue, 08 Nov 2005 05:05:12 +0000 alex http://alexmcmanus.org/?p=127

Part of my search for the mystic is a quest to reconstruct meaningful ways to be and build kingdom community in this new world. To do this I think we need to experience a

I’ve got more thinking to share on each of these and some ideas on a couple of new categories as well. Stay tuned. But I want to make sure that we stay true to the essentials. So today’s question is:

What is a church?

Is two or three gathered by the calling of Christ to reach people (Mission), who share the Lord’s Supper (Missional Community), and baptize converts (Missional Activity) a church? What more than this is necessary? Or is this too much? Or is it something other than these elements?

What do you think?

Blog posts of note…

For an excellent conversation that references my post on a Reversal of Kingdom Capital see Anne Jackson’s (aka “flowerdust”) post titled,money, money, money.

For an outstanding application of what we discussed on my post Fiesta for God , check out Kristi Cornwell’s post titled, The Party . Her story comes complete with a blazing fire, a barn and line dancing.

Ladies, hats off to you. Excellent stuff. Thanks for leading the way.

into the mystic…Alex McManus

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