Blog Archives
holistic community engagement
The following is a post I wrote for The Greenhouse Effect, a church-planting blog run by Churches of Christ in NSW. It’s fairly general compared to my regular posts, but hopefully you get something meaningful out of it.
The Church is meant to engage with the community that it finds itself in – most would not doubt such a statement. But how are we meant to go about such engagement?
Many church planters begin with a desire to ‘grow’ a church. Such church’s community engagement becomes necessarily characterised by a need to convince people to attend a program. Not only do people in a community tend to see through such shallow motives and relationships, but also this is not how God calls the Church to engage culture. Keep Reading
community confusion
“…so how do we go about creating kingdom communities?”
It’s interesting looking at the history of the church-planting movement over the last couple of decades. It seems that many planters have gone out to build new church communities in order to simply “grow” in numerical terms. This has usually been the result of an unsaid partnership between church-planting and church-growth paradigms. However, such a measurement of growth (numbers) is not necessarily what the Kingdom of God is about (Jesus, after all, said the kingdom looked like daily bread and forgiven debt, not packed out Colosseums).
The question above (italics) was one that I asked a friend of mine in a phone conversation about a week ago. Not happy with the idea of simply starting new churches believing this would not necessarily lead to the kingdom coming to the world, my thinking was that we needed to create kingdom communities. These would look different to “churches” in their lack of institutional structure and more organic organisation, as well as their existence being about God’s mission, not institutional survival.
But in reflecting on that conversation, I’d missed a simple reality. Keep Reading…
