Donald Wickham’s Blog

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.

Help church members see their existing community involvement, including the work they do for a living, as primary opportunities for ministry.  You will do this by increasing the amount of time you spend celebrating people’s everyday ministry in your gatherings.

Shift the question from “What are our building needs?” to “How can we build buildings that bless our community and then figure out a way for the church to use them?”

We can no longer think and act like club members; we must think and act like missionaries.

“How can we use what we already have to bless the community?”  The typical church has thick policy manuals aimed at keeping the community out of its buildings.  The missional church figures out ways to serve the community with the facilities it has.

Your scorecard for your congregation or ministry should reflect your own vision and values.  It needs to support what you are trying to accomplish and how you are going about getting it done.

The Lord spoke to me.  It was in the form of a question: “Are people better off being a part of this church, or are they just tireder and poorer?”

I realized that I had no way of gauging people’s personal growth; I only had ways to measure their church involvement.

I could tell how busy people were with church but not how their lives were going.

We have operated off the faulty assumption that if people participate in our church programs, they will grow and develop personally.

This shift is a challenge because it moves us to a place where our work is never done!

Developing people requires building relationships, not just delivering a product or service.

This turns our external ministry from being just another program of engaging church people in activity into engaging them with people as God’s partner in his redemptive mission.

God is not more interested in developing people inside the church than those outside it.

We do not share the heart of God with the world because we do not have the heart of God.  This heart transplant does not occur by participation in church activities.  It comes from being in a vibrant, growing relationship with God.

Americans outsourced spiritual formation to the church.

Loving God and loving our neighbors cannot be fulfilled at church.  Being salt and light cannot be experienced in a faith huddle.  Engaging the kingdom of darkness requires storming it, not habitually retreating into a refuge.

Can you even imagine a world where you had to select from only the cars in stock, buy computers off the shelf, figure out when lattes were being served, have to purchase an entire CD to get one song you really want and then sit in front of fixed speakers to hear it, and arrange your life to accommodate the TV broadcast schedule so you can watch your favorite show?  No way!  That world would be archaic, like the 1980s.

It would be kind of like trying to fit your life into the program church.  Or trying to imagine that your life rhythms and developmental preferences would match the schedule and options of church programming.  Truth is, for anyone not already accustomed to this culture, it just doesn’t have an appeal or even make sense.  Bible study available for one hour a week, Sundays only?  With a group of people that someone else chose for you?  Worship confined to a corporate schedule put together by people who don’t have Sunday jobs (except at church)?  And why is it again that I have to wait till September to form a small group or gain permission for a church leader to involve a non-church person in a ministry effort to the homeless?  And participate in only one church’s ministry?  Weird, huh?  But it feels normal to many of us who have spent our entire lives in it.

Post-moderns do not know why they should have to search for God on church time and church real estate.  Nor do people automatically believe that other people know that’s best for them or that one organization can meet all their spiritual needs.

People often ask me, “Doesn’t this customization feed the consumer church economy?”  The answer would be yes if we were trying to sell a product (which the program-driven church often is).  But the “product” and “Purchase” we are after in this case is a Jesus follower who is more convinced and more intentional than ever to pursue the life Jesus wants for the person.  That’s hardly a consumerist outcome!

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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:   community involvement · heart of God · Missional · Missional Renaissance · missionaries · outsourced · Post-moderns · Reggie McNealNo Comments