I remember the conversation like it was yesterday. It was one of those turning-point conversations that seemed small in the moment but ended up being very significant. I was finishing up some dishes in the kitchen after a long day with our four kids. My husband brought it up slowly. I have a feeling God is asking us to plant …
Bryan Wiles is a pastor at H2O Church in Bowling Green, Ohio. V3 Movement partner Reliant (formerly Great Commission Ministries) works with pastor Wiles and partners with missional churches and Gospel-centered nonprofits to mobilize support-based missionaries for the Great Commission. As I talk to pastors and church planters a key question that keeps coming up is, “how do you recruit …
Recently I had a conversation with someone in which I asked the question, “What would you say to other followers of Jesus to encourage them to consider what it might mean for them to join God in their neighbourhood?” My question produced a grimace and a sigh. “I’ve tried, nothing works,” they said. I persisted. “It’s a hard shift,” I said, …
By Christopher Brown and Scott Hagley The Church has a problem: most of its future leaders are being prepared in ways that don’t work and for ministries that don’t exist. Ways that Don’t Work My (Chris’s) first call out of seminary was to be a bivocational church planter. For more than five years, I worked part-time at an independent café …
What is missional? And how do we know if we’re doing it? Is missional just about good works done in the name of Jesus? Is it sharing the gospel? Or does it entail something deeper and more substantial? Charles is in leadership at a larger church south of the Mason-Dixon line and has been thinking and talking about how to …
What if God is inviting us to let go of some of our defaults in order to join the Spirit in our neighborhoods? As those on the Neighbourhood Life (NL) journey in Edmonton attempting to do just that, we are discovering, among other things, a number of shifts in our thinking and doing that illustrates for us the new ways God …
Many years ago, we invited a friend to lead some simple music at the Easter service at a community center. He was early, so he sat outside strumming his guitar. The next-door neighbors heard our friend’s music and invited him into their home to play for them. He told them that he only knew how to play Christian music, but …
Over the last several years, I (and many others) have spent a great deal of time pondering Luke 10:1-12. We have noted how Luke’s context is similar to our own. We have wrestled with how counterintuitive, how countercultural the instructions to the seventy-two “sent ones”—and us—are. The following prayerful ponderation has come out of such dwelling on this text—actually, on …
I’ve been going at this church planting thing for a few years now. I must say that it’s taken more years off my life than my previous decade in ministry. If there is one thing I’ve learned, it’s that there is a plethora of expectations pummeling a church plant. Many nights I’ve experienced myself tossing and turning over the projected …
I have confessed that I have been guilty of three leadership assumptions that work against the missional work of God. In case you missed it, here are those assumptions (the more I confess, the better it is for my healing): We just need to find the right program. More is better. Hub-and-spoke leadership is effective for missional leadership. The truth …