mission 21 thoughts - pt 2

Thanks again to Mark for the pic

In the evening (don't worry I’m not going to cover every meeting!!) three ‘traditional’, existing paradigm leaders (AOG, NFI and RCCoG) were in conversation about church planting generally. It was zappy, interesting and encouraging BUT what it illustrated was very much the old paradigm of church and church planting. Much of what they said was just on a different page to what I now see. Not that one is right and the other wrong – it’s just that some of us are now in a different paradigm.

This interweaving of the old and new was sprinkled throughout, though I think most of the workshop sessions were essentially old paradigm thinking. This was part of the reason (I think) why there were so few from the wider emerging church scene present.

What concerned me was that we could have been sitting hearing exactly the same 3 people saying just the same stuff in 1994 – when there was the last national church planting conference; and the result was that we did not see the hoped for movement of church planting.

It was for this reason that Martin and I the following morning presented the research report and focused heavily on what we have discovered is going on out there at the grassroots where over 1 million people have left the existing church structures; we were reflecting that some of this could contain movement potential which is absolutely vital if we are not going to end up going round in another big circle – having tried to create movement through planting churches by addition based on a single church model.

This is not to say that we don’t need these churches, we do; there are still some who will only feel comfortable in this more traditional shape of church. But in order to see something akin to what God is doing around the world we have got to go with the new wineskins He is using.

posted by alexander @ 10:30 AM    0 comments

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