Flip Your Church Step 2: Embrace and Embody the Mission
Churches and church leaders committed to becoming missional must build on five principles. The first, modeling the Christian faith, was covered in a previous post. The second pillar of the missional church is, probably unsurprisingly, embracing the church’s mission. The creation of mission statements really came into its own a couple of decades ago. Since […]
Flip Your Church Step 1: Model Thought, Word, Deed
This post is a continuation of “The Missional Church: The Comet That Killed the Dinosaurs or a Knight in Shining Armor?” “Everything rises or falls on leadership.” John Maxwell wasn’t the first one to intimate it, but he made the statement famous in this generation. In the fairly recent past, leadership was considered more of a […]
The Missional Church – The Comet That Killed the Dinosaurs, or a Knight in Shining Armor?
The 21st Century Strategies Advanced Leadership Forum recently posted this video. Take a moment to watch it below. It sounds so simple. But the question is, as always, “How?” How do you get a church that’s mired in institutionalism, ordained clergy, invitational evangelism, and hobby-based Christianity, to suddenly head out the doors of the church building […]
The Fifth Core Spiritual Habit: Personal Faith Sharing
The fifth core spiritual habit shifts the focus from ourselves and the church, and puts it where it ultimately belongs – on others. Jesus’ last commandment was to make disciples and to be a witness to what we’ve experienced in Jesus Christ (as opposed to what we’ve experienced in the church). In general, the church […]
The Fourth Core Spiritual Habit: Kindnesses Done in Jesus’ Name
With the fourth core spiritual habit, we’ve reached a significant shift. Up until now the spiritual habits have focused either on our relationship with God or our relationship with the church. In other words, the first three core spiritual habits are inward focused. The fourth habit, though, takes Jesus’ command to love our neighbors seriously. […]
The Third Core Spiritual Habit: Intentionally Encouraging Other Christians
I’m a big advocate of “one-anothering”, perhaps because it was practiced so effectively in the early church. One-anothering is how Christians are called (and expected) to treat each another – at least from a New Testament perspective. In the Gospels, Jesus gave us five love directives: (1) love God; (2) love our neighbors; (3) love […]