I have continued to read “Missional Renaissance: Changing the Scorecard for the church” by Reggie McNeal. Here are more quotes that spoke to me as I have been reading.
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In a church-centric world, our responsibility is to bring people out of the streets into the church. A kingdom-oriented approach seeks to leverage the gospel into people’s lives right where they live, work and play.
People don’t go to church: they are the church. They don’t bring people to church; they bring the church to people.
The church is a connector, linking people to the kingdom life that God has for them. Substituting church activity as the preferred life expression is as weird as believing that airports are more interesting than the destinations they serve.
The role of the church is simply this: to bless the world. In doing this, the people of God reveal God’s heart for the world.
The church has turned evangelism into some kind of activity or program that we train people to engage in rather than recognizing evangelism as a natural by-product of a Jesus follower’s life. When evangelism is a program, it often involves questionable methods that commoditize Jesus and Christianity and frequently involve some ploy to get people to convert to church. People don’t want to do it; if they did, we wouldn’t have to work so hard to recruit them or guilt them into working on their evangelism efforts.
I urge congregations and people to develop a blessing strategy.
We don’t own the blessings of God, and we sure don’t get to decide who deserves them. The clear biblical teaching is that God blesses everyone because that’s just who he is and what he likes to do.
To practice the blessing life, you will need to believe God, not just believe in God. There’s a huge difference between the two.
We have to believe that God has the ability to draw people to himself through these blessing encounters.
Incarnational believers search for ways to connect not just to each other but to the world beyond the church. They look for ways to help people discover and live out their faith in the spaces they already occupy.
In the attractional model, worship easily becomes the show, perpetuating the unwarranted and mistaken notion that what happens when the church gathers represents the vitality of its mission. In reality, the gathering may just be the celebration of a few gifted people exercising their gifts while other people watch, a practice that has led to religious consumerism. The true vitality of a congregation rests in the abundant lives of its participants and in the blessed lives in the community it serves.
The worship gathering, for instance, celebrates life beyond the gathering. Followers of Jesus gather to share tales of God’s work in the world. They bring their stories of how God has shown up and shown off in their own life experience with others. These encounters are trophies of praise to God and expressions of encouragement to others who are on their own journeys of engagement with God and with the world.
The pastor uses their stories to launch into spiritual themes, pointing to the God story behind each of their stories.
It ultimately measures its accomplishments by the quality of life of those in the faith community and the people they serve.
Tell stories in sermons and on your web site about life away from the church and how people bless others.
We’ve spent so much time in the attractional church trying to get the community to connect to us; now we need to learn how to connect to the community.
The missional church is made up of missionaries, who are playing the big game every day. They live their lives with the idea that they are on a mission trip. On mission trips, people focus on the work of God around them, alert to the Spirit’s prompting, usually serving people in very tangible ways, often in ways that involve some sacrifice or even discomfort. Life on mission is more intentional and more integrated. While the concerns of life (family, work, leisure) are pursued, they are part of a larger story being played out for the missionary.
They have that quality of “abundance” that comes only from living a life of an intentional blessing agent of the kingdom of God.
God had a mission in mind that everyone could participate in, a far cry from a member culture that gathers on Sunday to watch a few people exercise their gifts.
The missional church recognizes a different dynamic at work. Missional Jesus followers believe that the way they demonstrate love and service will intrigue people to pursue getting to know the God who inspires such service.
Jesus followers live the truth; they don’t just study it. Because of this, others are invited into truth and life.
The pain comes when reality breaks through that much of what it takes to “do church” has very little to do with Jesus.
Intriguingly, the upshot of this focus was that the socialization process was so effective that most churches could cut people off from their previous relationships within two years, replacing the old ties with a new “family.” Of course, this hurt the church’s chances of evangelizing along relational lines. How’s that for mission?
The missional emphasis involves connecting with people where they live and deploying them as kingdom agents in their natural settings and established relational networks. The connecting and deployment modality also implies an agenda of connecting Jesus followers with each other to engage in an external focus by deploying to serve people in the community.
The point of that group is to be connected to God, to each other, and to the world.
It has a much richer grounding in the biblical notion of worship as acts of honor in recognition of God’s worthiness and in acts of obedience to him. The offering of obedience to bless others as the people of God is considered an act of worship.
Whole families will work together and often with other whole families during the day.
The focus of the gathering in missional communities is primarily to celebrate the work of God in the life of the community, mainly through hearing stories of what God is doing right now in the lives of those present and in their relationships with others.
Worship is seen as the extension of normal routines, not something that is a discontinuity with the rest of the week.
They are covenantal and highly transformational, meaning that the participants are engaged with each other to encourage personal spiritual development and engaged with people around them as blessing agents.
The members of his community make five promises to each other in covenant: to be authentic, to serve a cause greater than themselves, to create community, to be generous and practice hospitality, and to work righteously as a way of being sent by God into the world.
In your personal life as a Jesus follower you need to determine whether or not your life is opened up to the world God wants to bless through you.
Prayer may be the most untapped and underused resource available to the church for accomplishing its mission. Let’s face it, most of the praying that goes on in many ministry organizations and congregations is spent on members and member activities.
I frequently ask spiritual leaders what they are doing that they see God doing. Learning to see God, to hear him is the real object of prayer. Its major objective is not to inform him or bend him to our purposes. The result of praying is to attenuate us to God’s will and God’s work going on all around us. If we ask God to show us what he sees, he will! And it will change us.
I will continue to pass on more as I read.
(Note: I’m reading on my Kindle and it doesn’t have page numbers. These quotes are in the order they are presented in the book.)
Tags: bless · blessing · celebrate God · church · connected to God · connector · evangelism · Jesus · Jesus follower · kingdom · Missional Renaissance · missionaries · praying · Reggie McNeal · worship
