How to Prevent the Emergence of Cranky Organic Church Leaders

Mark Galli wrote a piece in Christianity Today musing about the future of the organic church movement. Although he's on the outside looking in (would have been better coming from someone who's actually participated in the movement), he does raise some interesting questions about the viability of the movement. I noticed in particular his thoughts on the current leaders of the various organic churches (whom cover a wide spectrum of 'church'), and echo his sentiments on the potential of losing many unhappy people in the future.

Organic church. The term is fluid, but it contains at least three ingredients: Frustration with the-church-as-we-know-it, a focus on people (vs. programs) and mission (vs. institutional maintenance), and a vision to transform the world.

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Missional Church Video Conversations with Mike Frost

The Renov8 Congress has come to a close for 2009 and I was very surprised with the quality of the event. I'm NOT a conference junkie and raise my two eyebrows at the church people who find the need to go to the same conferences year after year wasting money for ideas they will never implement. I trust Renov8 will be the catalyst to risk new ventures in our communities.

Part of what I wanted to do while at the Congress was do some quick videos of anybody I could nail down. Since I'm not a pro at video production yet please ignore how bumpy the videos will be :P. Having said that, over the course of the next few weeks I will be releasing snippets of the various conversations I had. To start off, here is the first of a few clips from a brief chat I had with Mike Frost who was one of the awesome plenary speakers at the event. Enjoy. Continue reading

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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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