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.

However, the fact that people are no longer willing to let others, including and especially the church, script their spiritual journey doesn’t mean that they are unwilling to be coached.  People will accept help in shaping their spiritual path.  In fact, they welcome it, especially from people they respect and trust, who seem to have their best interests at heart.

When it comes to offering spiritual direction, the person we are engaging actually matters.  We start with the other person’s problems, dreams, needs and receptivity and then work to shape an individualized path toward personal development and maturation.

In the program-driven church, you begin with programs and look for people to make them happen.  In a people development-driven culture, you begin with people and then use established programs or whatever else it takes to help them grow.

Maturation is messy.  It takes time.  It doesn’t occur linearly.  Maturation occurs in an atmosphere where accountability is expected and practiced.  In this environment, people are coached, challenged, and celebrated in their journeys.

The truth is that people need help debriefing their lives.  They need to examine their experiences to learn from them.  The goal of debriefing is to help people make sense of what is going on in them and around them.

Life debriefing requires an environment that is very differently shped than one crafted to focus on the delivery of information.

I am afraid that for years, I helped people learn how to resist the Spirit!  How?  Not intentionally, of course.  I did it by not letting them declare anything about what they were going to do with the truth.  As a result, I helped them develop immunity to being accountable with what God as showing them.  They could “amen” with their heads and plan not to d anything differently with their hearts or their hands.

The practice of life debriefing will also have the spiritual benefit of helping people see that God is active in their lives every day in every sphere.  This is fundamental to helping people live more intentional and more missional lives.

(The teacher-dominated, information focused…) It turns out well-informed people who can be adept at avoiding key issues in their personal development.  Giving people information without providing means for application and accountability for their behaviors turn them into knowledgeable but disobedient people.

The program-driven system favors a culture that creates church customers, not followers of Jesus.  It makes people who can spout off al the right answers but live unaccountable to the truth.  The missional church, by contrast, dares to move into the arena of life development by meddling with peoples’ behaviors.

Separating lip service from life inspection is spiritual suicide.  Genuine spirituality lives and flourishes only in cultures and relationships of accountability.

In a curriculum-based approach, we study the Bible rather than allowing the Bible to inform us.

If you help people examine their lives, figure out what’s going on, and distill out the issues, you’ve prepared the seedbed where learning and application can occur.

The missional church assumes that service to others is the first step, not some later expression of spirituality.  We all know that we grow the most when we are helping ans serving others.  Service is the threshold where many of us learn the most about ourselves and come to see God at work in the world.

A people-development missional agenda that is life-centered and service-oriented and practices ongoing life debriefing promotes an integrated life.  In this approach, spirituality shows up at home and in the marketplace as well as anywhere missional followers of Jesus find themselves.  This includes all life relationships, which are treated as kingdom opportunities.  All life activity is considered kingdom investment.

Spiritual formation, outsourced to the church now for decades, must and can be reclaimed by families as something central to their life together.

It is not possible to promote a people-development culture without an intentional focus on relationships.

People do not exist apart from relationships.  This come to be who they are in relation to others.

People-development becomes the core activity of our community engagement.  The implications of this push us beyond drive-by blessings into serious and intentional efforts to develop the people we serve.

God is not confused about his intentions.  He fights against everything that diminishes life.  He has spared nothing, not even his own son, to secure a better existence for humanity.  The missional church ventures into the world as partners with God on his redemptive mission.

The people-development approach reflects an understanding that the church in its essence and highest expression is incarnational, not institutional.

It is unfortunate that so many people think only of prayer as a spiritual discipline.  It is this but so much more.  It is breathing to a Jesus follower, the lifeblood of staying connected throughout the day to the heart of the missional God.

We all know that people’s use of their money reflects their core values.  We also know that people make decisions in this area that lock them into living contrary to those values.  Our financial decisions often become the tail that wags the dog…

To change a culture, you have to change the conversations.  This is true in businesses, in politics, in a family, and in a spiritual context.  This is why consultants help business leaders re-vision their work, why political advisors worry so much about spin, and why counselors spend so much time helping clients find new language to talk about their problems.  This reality should cause spiritual leaders to think long and hard about the culture we are creating by what we say and how we say it.

Monitoring and shaping conversations is never more important than when we are leading a significant or directional change.

Many people have never made the connection that what they enjoy doing just might be the way God wants to bless people through them.  Having these conversations helped many people see that God could use them in their everyday lives, doing the things they love doing, to expand the kingdom.

“Where do you see God at work right now?” One of the goals of spiritual formation is to help people see God at work in their lives.  This question was designed to help people learn to look for God in their children, their neighborhood, the office cubicle next to theirs, wherever.

“What would you like to see God do in your life over the next six to twelve months?  How can we help?” This conversation allowed people to talk about the things that were most on their mind, which is the entrée for most people to talk about their personal development.  And of great importance, the question signaled to people that they, not church program success, were the new scorecard.

“How would you like to serve other people?  How can we help?” This question pair capitalized on the truth that most people grow the most through service and also helped some people figure out how they could bless people through what they enjoyed doing.

“How can we pray for you?” The conversations ended with prayer informed by the person interviewed.

Helping people get a life is the hardest word God does.  That’s true for us as well.  Partnering with him on this mission signs you up for disappointment, challenge, pain, grief and loss as you deal with people.  But it also sets you up for exhilaration, joy, hope and abundant life.  That’s life.  And that’s the point.

The biblical idea that followers of Jesus are called to live out his mission in the world became replaced by the substitute agenda of church members expressing their religious devotion through church activities superintended by clergy.

Missional leaders are business owners and community leaders who have determined to be missionaries in their primary sphere of influence.  They don’t want church roles or too many church program responsibilities.  They are too busy ministering to the people who work with them every day.

Most North American church leaders have been equipped to serve as institutional representatives for faith that people already have.  The challenge is to connect with a culture that is unacquainted with the good news of Jesus.

Just as viruses look for any way to gain entrance and infect a host, these kinggom leaders look for any way they can to gain entrance to people’s lives to “infect” them with God’s love for them.  They may try airborne techniques (preaching, teaching), but they are not limited to these.  They will look for human contact (caring, coaching) and even brokenness (mercy, compassion) as opportunities to demonstrate the kingdom.  They are not stymied by opposition:  they respond to challenges by looking for new ways to become even more potent kingdom agents.

(Note:  I was reading on my Kindle and it doesn’t have page numbers.  These quotes are in the order they are presented in the book.)

Tags:   church · God · Jesus · kingdom · Missional · missions · people-development · prayer · program-driven · serve · Spiritual formation1 Comment