Fresh +Refresh Canadian Missional Perspectives Book

Current Denominations Fail at Connecting with Missional Churches?

A New Book from Allelon Publishing, edited by Len Hjalmarson & Brent Toderash, is survey of some of the latest and emerging churches across Canada. The book has been delayed and delayed but I finally snuck a copy out of the hands of one of the contributors.

I'm always a sucker for new Canadian made church surveys, they're rare but invaluable for Canadian context ministry.

Half of the book was devoted to contributors taking a 'fresh' approach to the gospel message and church. The other half were re-freshing their current approach to church. I didn't find the latter to be very interesting, but I do see it's value. Continue reading

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Attractional Church is Extractional Church

Attractional Churches = Extractional Churches

This equation is not a unique idea to me but rather was mentioned by Alan Hirsch during a recent conference.

Missional heads have used the term 'attractional' to describe the majority of churches and their operations to 'attract' people into their buildings with programs and 'outreach' events. The saying goes, this consumerist mentality is killing the organic nature of our church 'growth' models.

Rather than using the word attractional perhaps a better word is in fact 'extractional' in that we extract people from culture, have them do all the cross-cultural work to learn what it means to be a right-wing bible thumping movie hating Christian. Continue reading

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PomoTheo Podacst #4 – Missional v Attractional Church

The final installment of a five part series on the nature of the 'Missional Church v Attractional church'.

This five part series is an excellent resource for those trying to figure out and learn the language in the whole 'missional movement'. A unique perspective from Alberta on the emergence of the missional community.

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