Ideas for blog posts (April 28)

I really enjoyed the discussion last night and found it personally challenging. Thanks very much to all of you who spoke up.Two of my suggestions for blog posts this week come from the blog posts last week.

1. Susan Gill wrote: "I’m more and more convinced that all our talk about Missional Church and some of the values we’ve considered are really about discipleship. Truly being a Christ-follower is about seeking and obeying God’s will and the way we go about that will surely encompass missional values – hospitality, inclusiveness, valuing the other, art etc." I'd love to hear your reflections on the connection between discipleship and a missional outlook.

2. Graeme Flett wrote, responding to something Craig said: "As I recall you [Craig] said something to the tune of 'is it not missional when it is about the other?' I think this is a really apt thought as the word missional can become the in-cliché used to justify all sorts of entrepreneur activity and yet miss the point. I share your sentiments here. I wonder whether consideration of ‘the other’ helpfully sifts the authenticity of our own Christian spirituality! It certainly challenges mine." I'd love to hear your reflections on whether a focus on the other should play a small or large part in the definition of “missional.”

My third idea for blog posts is to make further comparisons between the idea of liminality and the topics we talked about last night. We made some connections between liminality and the leader as a poet. What about the connections between liminality and the other aspects of leadership we talked about, especially apostolic leadership?

Yesterday, before the audioconference, I looked around online to find definitions for “liminal.” I couldn’t find my notes during the audioconference, but of course they turned up as soon as we signed off. Here are some of the ways to describe the meaning of the word:
- From the Latin word, limen, meaning threshold
- A psychological, neurological or metaphysical subjective state of being on the threshold or between two existential planes
- Pertaining to threshold or entrance
- A blurry boundary zone between 2 established and clear spatial areas. Or, when referring to time, a liminal moment is a blurry boundary period between 2 segments of time.
- “a betwixt and between place”

I also found an interview with a novelist who was talking about the liminal characteristics of his novel, and he said that he believes life isn’t really being lived unless it’s a series of transformations. I was interested in the connection he made between liminality and transformation. That parallels, in a small way, what I was saying in the audioconference about my view that Christian ministry often involves liminal moments, because ministry involves watching God, through the gospel of Jesus Christ and by the power of the Holy Spirit, transform our lives and the lives of people with whom we minister.

Another book

I've been meaning to tell you that Kevin Ward, who many of you will know and who teaches in our department and at the Knox Centre for Ministry and Leadership, told me recently that he thinks the best book on the missional church is The Ministry of the Missional Church by Craig Van Gelder. (Unfortunately I learned this far too late to include it in the coursebook.) The amazon.com listing for the book has some nice description about halfway down and three reader reviews at the bottom:
http://www.amazon.com/Ministry-Missional-Church-Community-Spirit/dp/080109139X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1240647148&sr=1-1
Van Gelder has written several other books about the missional church as well.

Too bad it's in Los Angeles

I did an MDiv degree at Fuller Seminary, so I get their alumni emails. I just got one announcing a conference I wish we could all attend. I thought you might enjoy reading about it:
http://www.fuller.edu/academics/school-of-theology/dmin/CE/McNeal.aspx

More books

Here are some more books on topics related to the missional church. These are all in the University of Otago library.

Intuitive Leadership: Embracing a Paradigm of Narrative, Metaphor and Chaos by Tim Keel. Keel is the pastor of Jacob’s Well, an emergent church in Kansas City, USA, that I admire quite a bit and a blogger who I enjoy. In this book Keel describes a number of priorities I think are very important for Christian leaders in our time, including narrative and metaphor, as the sub-title suggests. He does a good job giving his take on the cultural challenges of our time, and there are bits and pieces that help the reader understand the priorities of Jacob’s Well.

The New Friars: The Emergent Movement Serving the World’s Poor by Scott A. Bessenecker. I loved reading about the many ways younger Christians are engaging in service to the poor. The New Zealand based movement, Servants to Asia’s Urban Poor, is described in some detail. The blending of a contemplative approach and a concern for justice seems admirable to me and appropriate for our time.

A Generous Orthodoxy by Brian McLaren. This 2004 book is an important presentation of the ideas that shape the emergent movement. The subtitle gives the feel of the book: “Why I am a missional + evangelical + post/protestant + liberal/conservative + mystical/poetic + biblical + charismatic/contemplative + fundamentalist/calvinist +anabaptist/anglican + methodist + catholic + green + incarnational + depressed-yet-hopeful + emergent + unfinished Christian.”

StormFront: The Good News of God by James V. Brownson, Inagrace T. Dietterich, Barry A. Harvery and Charles C. West. This is one more book in the “Gospel and our Culture Series,” which has provided several books for this paper. These authors use some interesting language, i.e. “storm” for some of the characteristics of our time.

Ideas for blog posts (April 22)

I have three ideas for blog posts this week.

(1) I'd love to hear more about how and where you have observed that spiritual formation happens in New Zealand. I'm particularly interested in the connection between prayer and spiritual formation. Any thoughts?

(2) I'd love to hear more about what you think is the significance of liminality. Thank you very much, Craig, for your clear and helpful summary of Alan Roxburgh's thoughts in the last minute of the audioconference. I'd love to hear more from you about why that chapter seemed significant to you, and I'd love to hear others' thoughts about the concept of liminality.

(3) We talked briefly about the idea of a third place. I believe one way a church with a building can serve its community is by providing space for a third place. I'd love to hear your comments about how you've seen churches do that. If you want to read what I wrote about the church as a third place in my thesis, here's where you can read it:
http://www.lynnebaab.com/academic.htm
Click on chapter 7. There is a section of that chapter entitled "A Third Place" which begins on page 190. The part that directly addresses the church as a third place is only three pages long. I just re-read that section, and I had forgotten that one characteristic of a third place, according to the people who originated the idea, is that a third place makes possible conversation that is open-ended, freewheeling, and not goal-oriented. It's thought-provoking to consider the place of that kind of conversation in a congregation. Here's the citation for the origin of the concept of a third place:
Oldenburg, R. & Brissett, D. (1982). The third place. Qualitative Sociology, 5(4), 265-284.
(Note the format of this citation is the APA format, not the Chicago format that our department requires. If you read the article and want to cite it for an assignment, you'll need to change the format of the citation.)