Come Holy Spirit, breathe life into us as we seek to do your will on earth. Inspire us to grow your church through the love shown in Jesus Christ, our Lord, Amen.
-t
Thursday, March 13, 2008
What This is About
After attending several events discussing evangelism, church planting, and Missional Church, it has become clear to me that a network it forming within the Anglican Diocese of Toronto of people that are interested in talking about and discussing these issues. So I've decided to start this blog as an experiment to see if this a good format for sharing and discussing ideas and resources....
-t
-t
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2 comments:
Tay,
Doug Cowling told me you had a blog with pictures of the Lenten physical layout for the liturgy. I think it looks great. We did similar things in the past for one-offs or seasons but always went back to the ‘default’ design. It may be time to keep it that way. Having been to St Gregory of Nyssa I experienced the benefits of such a design – although I’m having a hard time imagining certain persons dancing to the altar!
Anyway I went to look at the pictures but was most interested by your interest in the missional church and your new blog. I was introduced to the concept many years ago when I began my D Min at Seabury Western. There I discovered Leslie Newbigin, Donald Bosch, and the seminal book 'The Missional Church’edited by Darrell Guder. I notice that you are aware of Allelon but another organisation and website is The Gospel and Our Culture Network www.gocn.org. They developed a list of empirical indicators which I have used as a template for missional faithfulness.
I, of course, began to introduce the concept at Messiah, and began implementing missional practices. We upped the ante on hospitality with good food before and after the liturgy and began to create a culture of welcome and acceptance. Having studied missional liturgy with Ruth Meyers we made changes to reflect these principles. Fundamentally we wanted the liturgy to be an opportunity for people to encounter and be transformed by God and also to be called out into service in God’s mission. This is well articulated in a book written by Thomas Schattauer titled 'Inside Out'. Practically speaking at Messiah we put all the service in the leaflet and had the music for sung bits – both a practice of hospitality and removing the many books and paper that distract from the possibility of the divine encounter. I also made an effort to preach more missionally. That is that I wanted my preaching to reflect the sacramental notion that suggests that God is active in the community, in the world, and therefore the preaching enterprise is that of discerning, indeed facilitating God’s activity. There is a good new book out on this by a friend of mine named John Dally. It is titled 'Choosing the Kingdom: Missional Preaching for the Household of God'. In faith formation we instituted Godly Play and tried to bring that model even into sermons and adult faith formation. The genius of Godly Play is that it operates on the decidedly missional notion that children (and adults) already have an understanding and experience of God. It's no coincidence that the growing emergence of the mission shaped church is accompanied by the significant growth of Godly Play. But I know that there is still much to do and am pleased that you are there and poised to do it.
I will say that it takes a lot of work to get a parish to think and act missionally. Many transistions need to take place - from believing to behaving, from maintenance to mission, from information to transformation, from scarcity to abundance, from destination to journey and so much more. And you can expect resistance. Many of our parishes operate as clubs and our buildings become clubhouses for people whose hobby is Anglicanism. The mission identity calls us to look out but too many only want to look in. As someone once said to me at a Messiah Parish Council, "I know, it's not about us!" And certainly there has been resistance at my new posting.
As you may be aware my particular passion is for leadership development. When Momentum was developed we were intentional in including missional principles and this term I am teaching the Trinity College 3rd Year students on missional leadership.
Anyway I could go on all day about this stuff. I'm thrilled you are starting this blog and I would be pleased to be involved with whatever proceeds from it.
Excellent. In that case, I'll give you "admin" privileges so that you can create your own posts on this blog. My intention is really just to create a kind of bulletin board for people to post thoughts, resources, etc. Your Bibliography here is a good example of that.
-t
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