Scot McKnight on the Books Pastors Like to Read

About a year ago I came across a post from Scot McKnight that grabbed my attention, and that I've continued to think about. Here's the opening paragraph

Evangelical pastors have flipped in the last generation. 30-40 years ago what most incited excitement was a new book by the arch-pastor and expositor, John Stott, expositing a New Testament book or a J.I. Packer book on theology. Today's evangelicals pastors are enamored with the latest book on leadership, like that morsel of an idea in the book called Tribes, or the latest book on management, or the latest fad in creativity.

I guess part of this has to do with the fact that for the first time in my life I am reading John Stott. I'm one of those who, for the past decade or so, would choose books devoted to orthopraxy over orthodoxy. It wasn't so much that I was disinterested in theology but more that I wanted to flesh it out, to put it into action. However, lately I've been rethinking a lot of things. Though I've always known it in my head, today more than ever I believe that our orthopraxy must be shaped by our orthodoxy.

Today was Union Avenue Baptist Church's annual rummage sale to raise funds for mission trips, so I went down to check things out. I came away with 17 books, with all but two written pre-1980. Oh, and six of them are by John Stott.

Leadership Summit

I'm headed to Willow Creek's Leadership Summit in about an hour. Mandy and I first attended this conference in 2000, about a week after we had moved to Mill Valley, CA. It was a great way to begin our new adventure there. Six years later we went again. This time it was seven months into another new adventure: Memphis. Unfortunately Mandy can't join me this year, so I'm flying solo. I have discovered that avenues for learning such as this one are key to me staying full, so I can say with confidence that I am ready to drink from the hydrant of some great leaders.

Weekly Links

Real Life on Food Stamps - In this great Sojourners article a mom shares her experience of getting signed up for food stamps

Why single-tasking is more productive than multi-tasking

Doing two things at once, like singing while you take a shower, is not the same as instant messaging while writing a research report. Don't fool yourself into thinking you can multitask jobs that need your full attention. You're not really having a conversation while you write; you're shifting your attention back and forth between the two activities quickly. You're juggling. When you juggle tasks, your work suffers AND takes longer--because switching tasks costs.

John Carroll has assembled a great list of seminary-level learning that is available for free online. This is a great list. All of his links go directly to iTunes

Thinking of getting rid of cable and watching shows online? Check out this article from Lifehacker

Reflection from Verge - Day 2

Another long day, another good day. I'm really becoming a Jeff Vanderstelt fan. He was one of the speakers during the first main session. Key quote: "What we're getting (here in this session at Verge) is informing, not equipping. Equipping involves doing." His point was that it's one thing to do that at a conference. It's something completely different to think that we're equipping our church, when in reality all we're doing is informing. We have to create outlets for practicing.

Most of our day was spent listening to Hugh Halter. I first heard Hugh almost two years ago. Soon after that I went through MCAP. What I learned there, and through his and Matt Smay's book The Tangible Kingdom, has had a huge impact on Neighborhood Church. Both Josh and Joe had read The Tangible Kingdom, but hearing Hugh in person was great for them.

He shared a lot of the stories that I've heard before, but what I really love about these guys is that they're practicing this in a way that some of the other speakers aren't. They continue to flesh this out, which I really appreciate. Some of what they might have said two years ago they aren't saying today, because they figured out that it doesn't work as well as they thought. But the fact that they continue to experiement, and then implement, is good.

If you've read the book, you know about the three circles: Communion (spiritual formation), Incarnational Community, and Mission. One of the biggest takeaways for us is realizing that we do incarnational community and mission pretty well, but almost all of our weekly activities feed the communion circle. The problem with that is that whatever we invest our time, energy, and resources in reveals what is most important. The good news is that we are not stuck. Hugh reminded us that pilots never fail. We will continue to experiment. We'll shelve things that don't work. We'll continue to implement what does. Continued innovation is crucial.

Reflection from Verge - Day 1

Yesterday was a long travel day. Josh, Joe and Steve got to my house at 6 am, and we drove to Little Rock. After a layover in Dallas, we finally arrived in Austin with just enough time to get our car, drop our bags off at the hotel, and get to the conference for the first session. The main sessions are going to be organized around the six themes of Alan Hirsch's The Forgotten Ways. Last night's was "Jesus is Lord."

After a great worship time led by Aaron Ivey, Matt Carter opened things up by talking about the dangers of loving your mission more than your Savior. He spoke from Revelation 2 (church of Ephesus). When you look at what Jesus commends them on, it seems like an awesome church. But Jesus says that he is no longer at the center of their lives. And the warnings of continuing this are that he will remove his blessing and presence from them. The question he left us with was, "If everything was taken from you, and all you had was Jesus, would that be enough?"

After communion Francis Chan spoke. The one thing you can count on when Francis speaks is that passion is going to pour out of him. You don't really outline or take notes when Francis speaks. He's really all over the place. But God speaks, so occassionally you write something down, knowing it's quite important.

His main points were that we just need to go back to the Scriptures to learn how to live out the Christian life. We've added so much to it. He brought us back to Acts 2. This group of 120 saw Jesus raised from the dead, and it radically changed their lives. They told everyone about it. The things that had seemed important to them before no longer appealed to them. That's why they gave their stuff away to others in need. This made perfect sense to them. What wouldn't have made sense is for this community, after seeing Jesus raised from the dead, is for them to come to a church service once a week for some singing and preaching.

When I listen to Francis speak, he reminds me of how simple things should be. Simple doesn't mean easy, but it does mean simple. This isn't rocket science. We just need to come to God through his Scriptures, and do what he says. He ended our time by calling us to pray for God to move. Earlier he had asked the question, "What power would I believe in if I really read the Bible?"

I'm still a little tired this morning, but am ready to learn. Grateful to be here with Josh and Joe, and look forward to going through this with them.

Evangelism - the dreaded "E" Word

This fall our church is going to discuss what it means to live the Outward Journey. One of the topics we'll be discussing is Evangelism. I admit that my early attempts at evangelism were very awkward. My conviction now is that the gospel (good news) must be both declared and demonstrated. Both are necessary. Below are some of the resources I'm using.

Evangelism in the Early Church, Michael Green

The Celtic Way of Evangelism, George Hunter

The Tangible Kingdom, Hugh Halter & Matt Smay

More Ready than You Realize, Brian McLaren

Out of the Salt Shaker and Into the World, Rebecca Manley Pippert

The Gospel and Personal Evangelism, Mark Dever

Ancient-Future Evangelism, Robert Webber

2007 Top Ten List: Books for 2008

Here's my final Top 10 list. These are some books on my shelf that I'm hoping to read (or reread) this year...

1. Community and Growth, by Jean Vanier
2. The Radical Wesley & Patters for Church Renewal, by Howard Snyder
   
3. Renovation of the Heart, by Dallas Willard
4. Seeking the Face of God, by Gary Thomas
5. Breaking the Missional Code, by Ed Stetzer & David Putman
6. A Theology as Big as the City, by Ray Bakke
7. Ministries of Mercy, by Tim Keller
8. unChristian, by David Kinnaman & Gabe Lyons
9. The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, by Leslie Newbigin
10. The Externally Focused Church, by Rick Rusaw & Eric Swanson
11. The Confessions, by Saint Augustine
12. Confessions of a Pastor, by Craig Groeschel
13. Money, Possessions & Eternity, by Randy Alcorn
14. Extraordinary Leaders in Extraordinary Times, edited by H. Stanley Wood
15. The Bible, or at least most of it - here is our church's Bible reading plan for this year
    

Articles worth reading

Over the last few weeks I've come across a couple of really good articles that I thought were worth linking to.

Living a Transformed Life Adequate to Our Calling, by Dallas Willard.
I was first exposed to Dallas Willard's writing about eight years ago. He's never been easy for me to understand (he teaches philosophy at USC). Still, I've attempted to read his books, and in doing so have been shaped by them. This is a 24-page article that seems to be his attempt at summarizing his previous works. If you've ever wanted to know more about the Kingdom of God, discipleship, or spiritual formation, this may be worth spending some time on.

We Aren't About Weekends, The Christian Vision Project's interview with Bob Roberts
Bob Roberts is the pastor at Northwood Church in Keller, TX. This church seems to truly understand why they exist. Roberts give a great explanation not only on the role of the church and its members, but also on the tasks of transformation and shaping culture.

Kingdom Workshops

These folks from Florida are experimenting with a new way of training missionaries. Their first gathering is this weekend. Here's an excerpt about these workshops.

A few months ago, T and I had a series of conversations with Chris about the need to expose some of their full-time workers and volunteers to training that would move Urban Youth beyond convert-making and into disciple-building. We struggled with this question for quite some time, not least because I had been resistent to the idea of simply providing information to people without the potential for long-term learning and application to occur. Chris too, frankly, was tired of seeing people go through training programs and then get wrapped up in a culture of busyness that is such an easy path to follow in an active ministry.

So if you've read this far, you're probably interested in what we've come up with: Kingdom Workshops. I've created a little website that will give you all the details so I won't go into everything here. Very briefly, Kingdom Workshops will be 2-day collaborative learning experiences around different values of the kingdom. They will not primarily be informational, but will be aimed at helping us understand and appropriate kingdom realities in our real lives. From the website: "The goal is to create a shared learning environment that enables everyone to participate in the discovery process. In God's world, there are no experts, only explorers." In other words, it will not be myself or T or anyone else getting up and lecturing about the kingdom. There will be some ideas offered, a lot of questions posed - but primarily it will be working out the implications together. The first one will be over Memorial Day weekend on the kingdom of God being the basis for the gospel Jesus preached.

Here's the rest of the post.

Church = A Training Center for Missional People

I read this statement on Dan Kimball's site awhile back. He was quoting Scot McKnight. I've been thinking a lot about this, especially since moving to Memphis. There are many people here in Memphis who were raised in church. Whether or not they had a good experience in church is a toss-up, but the fact that many were raised in church is one of the things that separates this culture from the bay area. This means that there is an awful lot of baggage in people whose church experience was less than ideal. But it also means that there are a lot of people with a good foundation. I think there are many here who have been going to church (or who spent a lot of years going to church), but were never released into the culture as missionaries. I see one of our primary tasks here as empowering and releasing people as missionaries.

So how do we train missionaries? Over the next few months I'm going to be posting thoughts, articles, resources, etc. that will hopefully begin to bring some answers on this question.