A new friend recently contacted me via the Austin Mustard Seed website. What he read about our church community resonated with his own hopes, so he asked to hear more of our story. It was meaningful and motivating for me to recapture it. While pieces of my story have been shared on this blog, I’m [...]
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And this means, as is well known, that his theology has the character of inaugurated eschatology, that is, of a sense that God’s ultimate future has come forwards into the middle of history, so that the church is living within — indeed, is constituted precisely by simultaneously within! — God’s new world and the present [...]
(This is the final post in a series reflecting on David Bosch’s six distinctives for a missiology of Western culture. See the introductory post for a little background.) in the context of the secularized, post-Chrsitian West our witness will be credible only if it flows from a local, worshiping community. Of all of Bosch’s six [...]
(This post is part of a series reflecting on David Bosch’s six distinctives for a missiology of Western culture. See the introductory post for a little background.) A missionary encounter with the West will have to be, primarily, a ministry of the laity. I suppose one might argue that the laity are being given more [...]
(This post is part of a series reflecting on David Bosch’s six distinctives for a missiology of Western culture. See the introductory post for a little background.) We have, at long last, come to the conviction that mission in the Third World must be contextual. We do not have an equally clear conviction about the [...]
Gathering and sending are related to one another like breathing in and breathing out. The important thing is therefore to view life in the everyday world as just as important as the gathering of the congregation in the feast of worship.” — Jurgen Moltmann (Lovely thought. I think I’ll steal it for our church gatherings [...]
(This post is part of a series reflecting on David Bosch’s six distinctives for a missiology of Western culture. See the introductory post for a little background.) a mission to the West must be countercultural, though not in an escapist way I wasn’t planning on spreading the posts in this series a week apart. But, [...]
The church now seems to stand in the same place as God stood in some 2,500 years ago: misrepresented, accused of bigotry, portrayed as narrow-minded and in love with power, only interested in buildings, ready to smite the dirty and sinful, over-occupied with sex, and ready to lend support for unjust wars … And so [...]
We have to create, and sustain, communities where this life is being lived in such a way that when we speak of it we are obviously telling the truth. That is the hard part. As long as our churches are places where we struggle to sustain an hour or two’s public worship per week, with [...]
(This post is the introduction to a series reflecting on David Bosch’s six distinctives for a missiology of Western culture. See the end of the post for links to the rest of the series.) David Bosch was a missiologist in South Africa who died in 1992. A car accident took his life only a year [...]
A year or two after we moved into our home in Washington, I noticed they were starting to move some dirt around on a vacant street corner. It was within walking distance of our house, and I was excited to see what new, and walkable, convenience we might have. It turned out to be a [...]
Many of my conversations with other church planters of late have centered around worship services/gatherings. I am usually the one raising the topic as I have been curious to learn from the experiences of others as we shape our strategy for Austin Mustard Seed. One thing has been significant in these conversations. I’ve talked to [...]
“You should really connect with Kester Smith.” I’m not sure how many times I heard that phrase in the last few months as we have transitioned to Austin. Kester and I have a number of mutual friends (but maybe that is because Kester has about 340973 friends on Facebook). I can think of at least [...]
As we call people (back) to faith in God through Jesus Christ, we must help them to articulate an answer to the question ‘What do we have to become Christians for?’ At least part of the answer to this question will have to be: ‘In order to be enlisted into God’s ministry of reconciliation, peace, [...]
