Therefore let us leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity, not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God, 2 and of instruction about washings,  the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment.

Good post from Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church (Seattle) after a snowstorm led to significantly lower attendance at their church

After more than 12 years at Mars Hill I have found days like today are great learning opportunities and I want to share them with you before I log off and start to focus on the holidays:

1. We learn who sees Mars Hill as a calling and who sees it as a job.
2. We learn about our own heart.
3. We learn about the deep love some people have for our church.

I pray that my desire to gather together and worship with my brothers and sisters in Christ would result in a similar desire to get to church regardless of the weather.

And don’t get me started on the unfortunate habit of churches canceling services when they conflict with Christmas. I mean duh, canceling the corporate worship of our God around the time when He sent His son so that we can open presents? Please.

Good review of Jesus for President by Shane Claiborne. Much of what the book talks about is hinted at in this interview with Claiborne, Chuck Colson (Watergate and Prison Fellowship) and Greg Boyd (open-theism and Christus Victor)

In Jesus for President Claiborne wants Christians to disavow their country and all civil governance in favor of exclusive allegiance to a nonviolent Jesus whose chief mission is resisting “empire.” But Claiborne’s interpretation of Jesus, his few selective quotations from early church fathers notwithstanding, is largely divorced from the universal church’s understanding of the Savior. Instead, Claiborne insists on a narrowly reinterpreted Jesus as distilled by Yoder and several others in 20th-century America for whom Jesus is more social critic than Resurrected Redeemer.

Interesting article from Skye Jethani about the benefit to the church if we participated out of our core time and not just when we have free time.

1. It would mean helping people see the missional dignity of ordinary work; communicating that their jobs matter to Christ and his kingdom, not just what happens within the walls of the church.
2. It would mean elevating the role of family and household relationships as vehicles for spiritual growth and missional engagement. Yes, raising children and caring for aging parents honors God and advances his kingdom just as, if not more, than institutional church programs.
3. It would mean not extracting people from their lives and communities to engage in church programming or committees unless absolutely necessary, but equipping them to live in communion with Christ within the context he has placed them.
4. It would shift the focus of Sunday worship away from mission and outreach to a time of celebration and encouragement for Christians who are engaged in mission the other six days of the week.
5. It would mean deploying church leaders outside the institution to engage members in their native contexts; mentoring and coaching on their turf rather than ours.
6. It would mean a radical adjustment in what the church celebrates-not institutional expansion or programmatic growth, but stories of ordinary people incarnating Christ at home, at work, at school…everywhere life happens.

A church built upon people’s core time rather than leisure time will not only maximize its missional impact, but it will also be far less susceptible to the unstable foundations of our debt-based economy. It would mean fewer churches fearing economic recession because they’ve build their missional strategy on the foundation of ordinary life rather than institutional programs, buildings, and staffs.

Powerful words from Penn (of Penn and Teller), an admitted atheist. This is just the type of challenge that I need. Too often I worry what people will say about my faith instead of sharing out of love and concern for their eternality.

HT: Darryl Dash

A missional church takes the global worship of the triune God as its purpose, the Spirit-empowered gospel as its power, and Christ-imitating contextualization as its plan. A missional church is a church that anchors its purpose, power, and plan for mission in the missio Dei. In short, to be missional is to participate in the activity of the triune God to redeem all peoples, cultures, and creation for his glory and their good.

Excellent definition of a missional church from Jonathan Dodson’s How Missional is Your Church? Keeping the Global in Missional

From Ligon Duncan, on the Together For The Gospel blog, comes a great summary of a book I read over the summer, Mark Dever’s The Gospel and Personal Evangelism

In Mark Dever’s The Gospel and Personal Evangelism, he helpfully identifies five things that keep us from sharing the Gospel with others. Here’s my spin on these reasons from Mark’s chapter on “Why Don’t We Evangelize?”

1. Fear – of rejection, of offending
2. Ignorance – don’t know what to say, don’t know how to say it
3. Inexperience – haven’t seen it done, haven’t done it
4. Attitude – that’s just not me, leave it to the experts
5. Lack of true love – we don’t really care about the lost and their eternal destiny

In response, Mark suggests that we do twelve things:

1. Pray – for a desire to witness to Christ, and for the opportunities.
2. Plan – to witness (who, when, how).
3. Accept- you are a witness.
4. Understand – how God uses his witnesses.
5. Be Faithful – be more concerned to be faithful to God, than for people to like you.
6. Risk – something! – invite to a meeting; share a book; befriend someone.
7. Prepare – that’s what this course is all about.
8. Look – keep your eyes open for God’s opportunities.
9. Love- cultivate a genuine love for lost people.
10. Fear – God, rather than man.
11. Stop – and realize the logic of sovereignty – “God is sovereign, therefore I’m responsible.”
12. Consider – the greatness of his love to you.

Get the book here. Or read it online, here.

We will be most effective in bearing witness to Christ if we cultivate: (1) a joyful fear of God; (2) a biblical knowledge of who we are in Christ and what the Gospel is; (3) fellowship with people who have a passion for the Gospel, and for showing and telling it; (4) a proper attitude toward the task – not a drudging “I have to share the Gospel” but a joyous “I get to be a part of God’s work of salvation;” (5) a genuine Gospel love for the lost, because of God’s Gospel love for us.

On and off for the past 3 years, I’ve been thinking of pastoring / planting a church in Ann Arbor. In fact, it’s one of the reasons that we moved back to Ann Arbor. I feel that God has been laying this very heavily on my heart for the past year, working on me and molding me. What makes the decision to plant a church difficult is the fact that I have very few godly men close to me to provide direction, advice, and prayer about whether God has made me with the gifting and skills to plant vs. the gifting and skills to pastor. Those are definitely two different types of people and I want to seek God for His will for my life. Here are some helpful articles related to church planting.

From Scott Thomas, Director of Acts 29 Network

20 Characteristics of a Church Planter

1. Am I a Christian? (John 3:16)
2. Am I passionately in love with Jesus, and is He the Lord of every area of my life? (Personal spiritual dynamics is the second most important area.)
3. Do I believe His word, and does it affect my life deeply?
4. Am I Spirit-filled, Spirit-directed, Spirit-led, and Spirit-controlled? (Acts 1:8)
5. Am I qualified as an Elder? (1 Timothy, Titus)
6. Do I love the local church as the expression of a gospel community on mission? (Matthew 28:18-20)
7. Am I a missionary to the city? Am I sent for the advancement of the gospel in the city? (John 20:21)
8. Do I have a clear vision for this new work? (Nehemiah 1:3-4; 2:11-18)
9. Am I willing to pour myself out in obedience to the vision? (Phil. 2, Romans 6)
10. Am I healthy—physically, emotionally, financially, spiritually, relationally, maritally?
11. Am I the kind of leader many people will follow? Have I served as a church leader successfully? (1 Tim. 5:22; 3:6)
12. Can I preach effectively?
13. Can I guard the doctrinal door with Biblical clarity and tenacious confidence?
14. Can I architect a new work with entrepreneurial skill?
15. Am I called to plant a church at this time and in this place? (Acts 17:26; 1 Peter 5:2)
16. Have my church leaders commended me for this calling? (Acts 11:22-26; 13:1-4; 16:1-2)
17. Am I a hard worker? Am I persevering? (2 Thes. 3:10; 1 Tim. 5:17-18; 2 Tim. 2:3-6)
18. Am I adaptable to new people, places, and concepts?
19. Can I raise the funds necessary for my family’s needs? (1 Tim. 5:8)
20. Am I humble enough to learn from others—particularly those who have gone ahead of me in different areas?

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From Jonathan Dodson, posted at TheResurgence.com. He also blogs at Church Planting Novice

First Steps

Gary Rohrmayer has planted tons of churches and written a helpful course called First Steps: Missional Church Planting. First Steps is strong on the nuts and bolts and guides the planter through six stages of the first year of missional church planting.

These stages include:

• Relating to God and Others
• Networking and Gathering
• Building a Launch Team
• Designing Worship Services and Ministry Strategies
• Launching Public Services
• Establishing the New Community and its Ministries

Another one of its strengths is that it is principle-driven rather than model-driven. It accommodates a variety of models and encourages contextualization. Though the course is launch-focused, some of the templates for budgets, position descriptions, financial accountability, etc are helpful jumping-off points. You can also purchase a membership at CoachNet that allows electronic access to the entire workbook and PDFs and take the course.

Redeemer Planting Manual

Tim Keller’s Redeemer Church Planting Manual is incredibly strong on missiology and philosophy of ministry. If you really want to know how to become a lead missionary that cultivates a church of missionaries, follow Tim’s approach. At times, it is overwhelming (even to me, and I have a background in Anthropology!), but there are a lot of riches to be found in this manual.

Exploring the Land

Exploring the Land focuses on understanding your target people and culture. This book was written for reaching unreached peoples, which is why it is so helpful for domestic church planting. It forces us to ask questions that we think we already have answers for, forcing you to do the hard, loving work of contextualization.

The Church Planter’s Toolkit

Bob Logan’s Church Planter’s Toolkit is a standby that offers a lot of practical helps and is used by the Evangelical Free Church. Logan has actually transformed some of his personal convictions about methodology and is now planting more organically. He co-wrote an expensive book on this with Neil Cole called Beyond Church Planting.

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From Timmy Brister, blogging at Grace Planting Center

The church planting section of the Leadership Network has some helpful articles and resources to browse through. Be sure to check out their resources such as downloads, books, and podcasts. I should mention that I do not agree with some of the methodologies and approaches to church planting offered on LN; nevertheless, this is a good place to see where church planting has been, where it is going, and things we can learn (both how and how not to plant churches). Their four main article are worth downloading (PDF):

Church Planting Overview
Funding New Churches
Improving the Health and Survivability of New Churches
Who Starts New Churches?

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From the Acts 29 Network website , a summary of Mark Driscoll’s recent talk on the Mission and Vision of Acts 29 Network . You can listen to the talk here

Mission and Vision:

1. Our first mandate is the Great Commission
   Our vision is to have 1000 churches with an average of 250 people each. That would be a quarter of a million people worshipping Jesus in A29 affiliated churches. This could be accomplished in under 7 years.
2. Church: what is it?
   (from Vintage Church) “The local church is a community of regenerated believers who confess Jesus Christ as Lord. In obedience to scripture, they organize under qualified leadership, gather regularly for preaching and worship, observe the biblical sacraments of baptism & communion, are unified by the Spirit, are disciplined for holiness, scattered to fulfill the Great Commandment and the Great Commission as missionaries to the world for God’s glory and their joy.”

8 Marks of a Church:

1. Regenerated church membership. Church planting is popular right now, but ironically regeneration is not. The point of every church plant is that people meet Jesus.
2. Qualified leadership. Elders and deacons must meet the biblical criteria for leaders as outlined in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1.
3. Gather for preaching and worship. Bible teaching is central and the Acts 29 churches generally have strong preaching.
4. Communion/Baptism rightly administered. We regard baptism/communion adherence as close-handed. How a local church performs them is open-handed (we have Presbyterians and Baptists in the Acts 29 Network).
5. Unified by the Holy Spirit. People work together for the cause of the gospel.
6. Disciplined for holiness. Acts 29 churches practice discipline with their members. This is unusual in today’s churches – where people get to say and do all kinds of unbiblical things with no one to discipline them. The church should look differently from the world in behavior. Satan sends heretics/false teachers to break up church plants and without church discipline they’ll tear the church apart.
7. Obey the great commandment to love. Biblical, Trinitarian community – the previous 6 marks enable this loving community to take place.
8. Obey the Great Commission to make disciples. Acts 29 wants to plant churches that introduce unbelievers to Jesus.

Acts 29 as a Network

1. We are churches that plant churches.
2. We are not a denomination. We work together interdenominationally:
   For relationships (we like each other)
   For mission (we want people to meet Jesus)
   For theological cause (we have certain beliefs we hold dear)
   We believe we are stronger together than by ourselves so we work together.
3. We invest in other churches financially to help new plants get started. Each of our local churches determine how much and to whom the finances are invested.
4. We are not trying to build a centralized organization – we want church planting to be the responsibility of the local church.

Three distinctive characteristics of Acts 29:

1. The Men
   Church planters have the gifts of an apostle (small a) – not just pastoral capacity. Additionally, he is a growing Christian, good husband and good father. Men who cannot love their wives first should not plant churches.
2. The Mission
   Jesus was a missionary to the world. We both contend for the faith (Jude 3) and contextualize by becoming all things for all people (1 Cor. 9). We do this “for the sake of the gospel.”
3. The Message
   Acts 29 is a Christian, Evangelical (original form), Missional and Reformed church planting network. These are in order of importance. Our theology is a home, not a prison. We read and listen outside of our theological leanings to humbly learn. We employ discernment when we do this. We can employ partnerships without compromising beliefs.

Characteristics of Movements:

1. Young people are often at the center of the movement
2. High conversion rate comes with a movement
3. Church planting is at the forefront of a true movement of God. God loves the church; Jesus died for the church.
4. Movements tend to be unaware of their external influence because they are busy doing what God’s given them to do.
5. Supporting organizations come up – records made, books published, counseling ministries, etc.
6. Movements often come with a transition in technology (Gutenberg press; Reformation). Today = internet.
7. Visible movement leaders rise up. God puts his hand on certain people to lead.

Cycle of a movement

1. Movement of God
2. Institution
3. Museum (what God used to do)

Final encouragements

1. Make Jesus look good because he is. Your job is not to make yourself look good.
2. Walk in the light. Come under the influence of a small group of older, wiser guys who can ask the hard questions.
3. Pursue humility. Pride is the primary motivator for a guy to plant a church (I can do it better)
4. Repent well. If you don’t model repentance, your church won’t repent.
5. Turn your critics into coaches. Most criticism has some modicum of truth. Ignore garbage; receive truth.
6. Choose to believe that God is both sovereign and good.

From Carl Trueman at Reformation21.org

`There is nothing we are more often told by those who discard evangelical faith than this — that we must now do what scholarship has only just enabled us to do and return to the religion of Jesus. We are bidden to go back to practise Jesus’ own personal religion, as distinct from the Gospel of Christ, from a gospel which calls him faith’s object and not its subject, founder, or classic only. We must learn to believe not in Christ, but with Christ, we are told.’

The author? Peter Taylor Forsyth, writing in 1909, in an essay, `The Religion of Jesus and the Gospel of Christ.’ Of course, the kind of churches that committed to the teaching he describes here (and then proceeds to demolish in subsequent pages) have long since closed their doors. Strange that the church feels a compulsive need to write essentially the same suicide note every generation.

From Tim Challies

…. I am sometimes tempted to express frustration with the way God has chosen to save a people for himself. But through it all I know that his ways are good; his ways are the best.

I will break my answer into three parts.

First, I think we need to have much greater confidence in God’s sovereignty than in the ability of our children to choose God without his foreordaining grace.

Second, I think it is helpful to see predestination as something that is of far greater concern to God than to us.

Third, we need to be careful in how we understand God’s work of election. The Bible does not describe this work as “zapping” or “random” or anything of the sort. We know that God has chosen a people for Himself but he has not told us why or how. Scripture does not say that certain people “had their number called” and others did not. Instead, we read that God chose some because he had special love for them. There is nothing random about it.

Too often, I think, we approach this subject from the point-of-view that every person deserves a chance to go to heaven. We see our sweet children and are unable to believe that they justly deserve an eternity of separation from God. And so we deem it unfair that they may not be among the elect and hence can never turn to Christ. But Scripture tells us that all men, even children, have turned away from Christ. All men have committed an act of cosmic treason and deserve to be punished for it. God chooses to extend grace to some, but not all. But the very fact that it is grace tells us that it is not deserved; it is a free gift.

I conclude by pointing again to the goodness (Psalm 107:1, James 1:17, Psalm 84:11) and sovereignty (1 Samuel 2:6-7, Psalm 135:5-6, Proverbs 16:9) of God. God is good and does only what is good. This is as true in election as in any other area. When the Lord calls us home and when we stand before him, we know that none of us will question God’s wisdom; none of us will deem him unfair or unkind. We will rejoice in his goodness and will rejoice in his sovereign choice.