mission 21 thoughts - pt 1
(thanks to Mark Berry for the pic)
Now the dust has all but settled here are some of my thoughts on the whole thing.

4-500 gathered for 3 days on the Philadelphia campus in Sheffield. The purpose: to take a pause to reflect and converse about where things have got to in church planting in the UK since the decade of evangelism.

To start with there was some frank and honest reflection on the nineties which was definitely needed; also some honouring of individuals and work that has been done by some faithful people over the last 15 years. That’s always a good thing.

Gerald Coates kicked us off in his usual pithy style. He kept it short which I appreciated! His observations included a reminder that when we set ourselves to plant churches we have to be extremely intentional about it as 101 things will immediately come to distract us. His desire for the younger generation is that they learn to live not just for the ‘moment’ but for movement. We shouldn’t spit on what others are doing, especially if they don’t see things the same way we do. For example, whatever else you may think about Hillsongs, each week they are seeing around 150 people come to the Lord. And finally he made a plea for the existing church to be supportive and caring of emerging forms of church.

Graham Cray then gave us a theological underpinning for the way ahead. It was excellent and thought provoking stuff. I was excited to see that his whole message focused around the Mt 9 version of Luke 10 – the harvest is plentiful; we need to pray for labourers to be sent out. I believe this prayer to be foundational for the whole organic movement.

He observed that for the C of E things have moved up a gear and he is now running to keep up. He sees this period of cultural change as a moment of grace, a moment of divine initiative; God sees the sheep without a shepherd and has compassion on them.

He urged the church to prioritise its resources on the 40% of the population who are completely non-churched. To do this we desperately need labourers. We need to see what God is doing and join with that; be willing to leave our own culture and invest ourselves in someone else’s in order to reach them; a transferable DNA is needed at the heart of each one of these new expressions!

He left us with 2 major challenges one of which was how were we going to make disciples in our culture and that the new churches we form must primarily be disciple-making communities.

I was very encouraged by what he said, especially as I felt it had great relevance to the emerging, grassroots, organic movement that I see happening now in the UK. Whether he had that in mind or not I don't know (I suspect not!) but I referred to what he said in my presentation the following morning.

posted by alexander @ 7:14 PM    0 comments

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