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Posts Tagged ‘strategy’

Posted on August 6, 2008 - by ray

Multiple Choice

Question: You live in suburbia. Your neighbor is similar to you in age and family structure. You don’t know much about your neighbor but feel that God is wanting you to invest in him. Do you…

A) invite him and his family to come to church with you and yours.
B) invite him to a special men’s event your church is hosting.
C) invite him and his family over for dinner, fully expecting to talk about spiritual things. You prepare yourself by reviewing the 2 spiritual diagnostic questions, the Romans Road, and the 4 Spiritual Laws.
D) get to know him over the course of several weeks through numerous conversations. After finding out his likes/dislikes/interests you ask if you can come along to his next _______ (you fill in the blank).
E) None of the above (had to add this as no good multiple choice question leaves this answer out).

Be honest with yourself as you think through how you would “witness” to your neighbor. Don’t be too quick to dismiss how entrenched we all our in our consumeristic christian sub-culture and how that influences how you become Jesus to those around you.

Posted on May 12, 2008 - by ray

The Function That Catalyzes (or Frosty, Part II)

What drives your church? What is the function that is the catalyst for all other functions that exist in your church? Michael Frost would argue that the majority of churches today are driven by a single function. That single function is the catalyst for all other functions that the church carries out.

Frost would say that that single function that drives all others in today’s churches is worship. Stop and think about the church you’re a part of. What drives it? For many of us we immediately think of the Sunday event. We even call it “worship”. We invite our neighbors to it. We dress up for it. We set aside our Sunday morning for the “event”. The Sunday event (the worship event) drives our community structures (our small groups, our Sunday schools, our home groups), it drives our discipleship, and it drives our mission. In almost any church today if you took away the Sunday event the church would cease to exist.

Frost goes on to argue that there are four main functions that make up a church: mission, worship, community, and discipleship. None of these are more important than the others. They should all play an equal part in the life of a church. But one will usually be the catalyst for the others, and to Frost it should not be worship - it should be mission. The mission of our churches should drive the way we worship, the way we disciple, and the way we form community. And this is not a simple mission statement. It’s much more complex than that. To Frost mission plays itself out in the missional rhythms of a church (another post for another day).

So, what is the thing that catalyzes all things that your church does and is? Is it the Sunday event, or worship, or your desire to see community formed within your church body, or your desire to see disciples made? Or is it the mission that catalyzes all of these things?

I’ll conclude my series on the Frost conference with missional rhythms later this week.

-shorty

Posted on July 10, 2007 - by ray

On Strategy

I read with great interest blogs and sites that deal with issues of strategy and methodology in missions. I appreciate and respect individuals like Guy Muse and David Rogers. They talk about things like MAWL (Model, Assist, Watch, and Leave), or common elements found in CPM’s (Church Planting Movements), or strategies from Wolfgang Simpson’s book Houses That Change the World.

In and of themselves these are all good things to discuss. I’m of the belief that while strategies are good to study, the implementation of them is quite dependent on the geographical location and group of people you are working with. There are things that Guy writes about on his blog that simply wouldn’t work where I’m at. It doesn’t mean that they are bad, they’re just not right in this context. Much of what is written about mission strategy starts with a wrong assumption. The assumption is made that there are those that have either come to faith, or about to come to faith. So the strategy focuses on what to do at the point of conversion so that it can be duplicated such that it leads to a movement. This is why much of what I read about mission strategy doesn’t work for me.

I live in a European context. But I’m not working with Europeans. I’m working with Muslim ethnic minorities. The community is completely closed. They have little to no use in outsiders. If you don’t have a good or service to offer them they want nothing to do with you. To “do life” with them is very difficult…next to impossible in my opinion. Theological discussions will not persuade them. And these people are not coming to faith and are not near coming to faith.

So you can see that I have a hard time taking what others are doing (or not doing) and try to implement it here. I have to find something that works for where I’m at and who I’m trying to reach. And this has led me to a passage I read recently in John 4. The son of a royal official is very ill. The father comes to Jesus asking him to heal his boy. Jesus responds by saying, “Unless you people see signs and wonders, you simply will not believe”. In other words, Jesus is saying “look, you won’t believe in me based on what I’m saying, so I’m going to have to show you something miraculous and blow you out of the water in order for you to believe.” And he does just that. He heals the boy and as a result the father and his whole household come to faith (v. 53). This is where I’m at with strategy. I’m not giving up on building relationships with those in my community. In fact, I’m doing just the opposite. But I truly feel that these people will have to see sign and wonders, and will have to have dreams and visions in order to come to faith. I know that God can move anyway he chooses, but it just seems that something is going to have to shake these people to their very foundation before they will look and behold the glory and grace of Jesus Christ.

So now my strategy contains a lot of praying for signs, wonders, dreams, and visions. It may be the only way this community is saved.