In the beginning was the Word…

I enjoyed a Durham Bulls baseball game last night with a few friends, and as often happens with Divinity students, the conversation turned to theology, in particular, Stanley Hauerwas’s view of communal ethics.  Since I’m only a causal reader of Hauerwas, I am in serious danger of misinterpreting him, but I thought our discussion was [...]

Imagine a Missional movement

Confronting Idols and Making Disciples

There are no douche bags

Is Good Strategy Enough?

With a number of proposals being presented at Virginia Conference this year, I’ve been giving some thought to “strategy.”   The delegates at this and other annual conferences are being asked to consider responses to various challenges that our denomination is facing:  membership decline, underfunded pensions, closing some churches and starting new ones.  As this quote [...]

A New Type of Monasticism

The renewal of the church will come from a new type of monasticism which only has in common with the old an uncompromising allegiance to the Sermon on the Mount.  It is high time men and women banded together to do this. –Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The Importance, and Danger, of Counting Things

Methodists are good with numbers.  We’ve got books filled with all kinds of numbers – baptisms, professions of faith, worship attendance, giving, you name it.  We’ve been ably tracking statistics ever since John Wesley gathered his preachers together for the first “annual conference” over two hundred years ago.  Wesley applied his superb organizational genius to [...]

How to Kill a Movement

Check out this interesting list from Sam Metcalf, at Under The Iceberg: How to Kill a Movement 1. Require education for the leadership 2. Demand conformity of methodology 3. Refuse to provide administrative help and let it suffocate under it’s own weight 4. Get spooked by supernatural phenomena outside your paradigm 5. Make no room [...]

Ed Stetzer and Alan Hirsch on Missional Theology

A great conversation between Alan Hirsch and Ed Stetzer, talking about the theological foundation of the missional conversation, the importance of recognizing the missionary nature of God, how missiology must inform our ecclesiology, and how existing congregations can begin to make a missional transition.

Missional Community… Simple

Missional Community… Simple

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