Missional Leaders Forum Notes

As always Earl brought some great wisdom and insights. Here are the notes that I took on my lap top. I might scan in the index cards and put the pictures in at another time.

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Earl Creps Missional Leaders Forum
Possible Topics
Emerging/Emergent
Permission to not embrace Boomer Church
Missional Movement
Insight: Best prophets don’t always know they are being used.

Emerging/Emergent

(map of emerging ministry diagram on note card)

Implication Feelings towards Proclamation
Implication people going to proclamation churches feel like they went to theater.
How do we deconstructed the Proclamation model and invite people to join us to find the answers, instead of pushing the answers on them.
If we try to sway a conversation it becomes a sales pitch instead of a dialogue
Answers are a dead end faith is a living thing. The mess is the point. It’s not about having all the answers.
Communal: Relationships
reconcile with one another
Institutional: Structures
Debate
Community is not homogeneity.
People will find their preference everywhere in the Bible. It’s not cut and dry everywhere.
What we provide may communicate things that we do not intend. Because people will be looking at it from whatever angle they come from.
Liking lost people is more than love. Affection is more powerful because love is obligatory. No one can pay you to like someone.
Missional Ministry — Interprets the ministry of the kingdom of God to those who are spiritually disabled. Someone has to help them get it. Needs to be a core reality. It needs to become natural. How can we do this?
Missionality can die with the first big change in programming or facility.
Q: Does missionality ebb and flow? Is it like a tide that we need to be ready for? Or is it something that we need to be constantly driving.
Infrastructure is wanted and needed but it can become a cruel task master.
The Institutions have to exist as an interpretive vehicle.
We are interpretting culture but Culture is also trying to interpret us.
Our organizational architecture needs to communicate what we believe about the community of God. It should move people like a good building moves people emotionally
The Pastoral team needs to model a way to do Christianity in a way that might make people want to copy it.
People from the outside see us trying to be something that we are not. We need to look inside ourselves. And ask.
Who is Jesus?
Who am I?
Who is my Community?
These are the most important questions that will help us keep balance in our lives.
To a missional person its missiology (why questions) first and ecclesiology (how questions) second.
(After 1st Break)
Why Did the Father Send Jesus?
Missional Diagram on index card.
The only thing that counts is pound for pound.
If you have 200 people and you water baptize 10 people a year — You are as effective pound for pound as Willow Creek.
We need to be happier than we are, the lost can see our discontent and agenda. It’s contagious and as soon as they see it they bail.
They see ambition and discontent and they don’t want to be like us.
We need the tension to be content with where we are at being faithful to what God has called us to and wanting to reach our community.
There needs to be a gap between calling and obsession.
Know your boundary. Don’t sell yourself out to be something that other people want you to be. (be like Jesus)
Does our vocabulary give us an obsession to fit the buzzwords. We need to be us and find the way that God wants to utilize us.
We can’t differentiate between the people that we are called to and the people that we live with. It needs to be graceful because it is who we are at the very core.
You don’t do evangelism to others.
We need to own the mission and let it bubble out of us, it’s not a suit that we put on when we go into “pro mode”
We need to figure out a way to be ourselves but in a group of like minded selves.
Church is wherever we are!
how do we capture this lightning in a bottle.
What is the difference between what we do and what the smartest atheist in town does?

Intersection of ministry and culture (Diagram on card)

Something inside of me needs to die in order for us to be on the right path.
We need to believe who Jesus says we are.

Case Studies
First Assembly Little Rock, Arkansas
Young Adult ministry 0-huge in no time and just attracted christians. They eliminated the ministry and started over.
They launched a new ministry at the church, which is smaller but they are growing with people converting to Christ.
1. Part of the Process is determining what needs to be Crucified.
For new things to live sometimes old things (even “successful” things) need to die.
Sometimes the enemy is the stuff that is working

Life in Deep Elum – Dallas, TX
Party City
Successful church plant in a bar attracted Bible College Students — Shut it Down
Restarted – Bought a Coffee shop that neighbored a sex shop. The Coffee House was very successful. You could feel a love that wasn’t out in the streets.
2. Common Wall Holiness — We can share a common wall with the world without being corrupted by it. If we have no common wall then we just have Barriers.
they launched a 3million dollar Community Center, and instead of being an outsider in the community they became a Center Piece.
Reneisance Church North Providence AG/ RI
8 of 24 A/G churches planted by this church.
As they grew they would grow to 200-250 and plant churches from their growth.

3. Apostolic Impulse — Church plant that plants other churches.

4. Perpetual Church Plant — Refused to give up on the Church Plant mentality.

What story do we want to show, the me story or the God Story.