As church leaders it can be difficult to read the books we need to read. We are often overwhelmed with emergency reading—reading in areas of the church where we are deficient (e.g. children’s ministry, church discipline, missional church, counseling, best practices). We scour blogs...
In recent years we have been offered all sorts of options for church: organic church, messy church, simply church, total church. Let me (with tongue in cheek) suggest another: slow church. There is a slow food movement that extols the merits of hand-cooked food made from local ingredients...
A review of Neil Cole, Organic Leadership: Leading Naturally Right Where You Are, Baker, 2009 . Neil Cole is the author of Organic Church and, as the title suggests, in Organic Leadership he takes the approach of Organic Church and applies to leadership and training. Cole begins by...
A review of Timothy Keller, Gospel in Life: Grace Changes Everything DVD and Workbook , Zondervan, 2010. In January I claimed that Tim Keller’s The Prodigal God DVD and workbook was my resource of 2009. I’m pretty confident that his new Gospel In Life DVD and workbook will my...
The GCM Collective Exists to Promote, Create and Equip Gospel Communities on Mission. A gospel community is a group of believers that lives out the mission of God together as family, in a specific area and to a particular people group by declaring and demonstrating the gospel in...
Some people are quite excited by the idea of ‘missional community’. They have high ideals. They want to recreate something of what was going on the New Testament or at least revive some of the dreams they had when they were young. For others ‘missional community&rsquo...
Recognising our missional context means we can no longer assume the church understands the culture. We need to get to know our neighbourhood, its people, their stories, values, worldview and culture. We also need to recognize that, while many communities are still defined by geography, they may...
Tim Keller identifies the following characteristics of a missional church (in ‘The Missional Church’, June 2001). I’ve found them very helpful in encouraging groups to recognise what it means to engage with their neighbourhoods in a missional way. Keller says: A...
Jesus said: ‘A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.’ (John 13:34-35) We need to be communities of love and we need to be seen to be communities of...
We have found it helpful to make a distinction between proactive and reactive intentionality. As a team we may have agreed a specific missional focus. But this does not mean we should not take other gospel opportunities as they arise. Our lives (work, neighbours, school and so on) will bring us...