The Missional Channel

Nope, this isn't an addition to Sky; sorry to raise your hopes.

Instead it's a site on Vimeo, where there are about ten videos from mission-focused speakers, including some whom we've often named in this blog for various reasons: David Fitch, Alan Hirsch, Ed Stetzer, Graham Cray (the Fresh Expressions man), Andrew Jones, Alan Roxburgh.

The videos vary considerably in length, the longest being around half an hour and the shortest just under two minutes (the length shows up down the bottom left of the screen before you start running the video). The titles aren't terribly helpful ('Missional Conversation', 'an interview with..', 'cultivate gathering' and so on) so it's a matter of opening up one of the videos and seeing what it has to say.

Recommended for those short patches when you just need to stop and listen for a while....

Colin Greene

“…I firmly believe God is raising up a new generation of prophets and visionaries who are what I call ‘brokers of a new reality’. In other words they really want to know what is going on in our world on all kinds of levels, politically, economically, spiritually and culturally. They want to know what are the contours of the cultural space we presently inhabit and they want to be able to celebrate what is good about that process of rapid globalization, as well as critique what is dangerous and reckless about it. As an Anglican I want the Anglican church in the West to stop re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and accept that the Christendom ship is now sinking very quickly and will soon be gone below the waves of rapid fundamental change and innovation. The Anglican Church requires a new missional imagination and to do that it must re-engage with the biblical narrative in such a way that it can discover new ways of being church among the cultural refugee’s and spiritual seekers of our generation…”

Colin Greene, author of Metavista: Bible, Church and Mission in an Age of Imagination (Faith in an Emerging Culture Series)

Alan Hirsch calls this book: Well written, theologically stimulating, meticulously researched, and will no doubt be an authoritative text in its genre. But the best thing about Metavista is that it is simply great missiology in the Newbigin tradition.

The problem with institutions

Alan Hirsch has recently written two posts on the subject of the church as an insitution, and how that affects its ability to do mission.
This is a quote from the second post.
Perhaps a further exploration of what is meant by institutionalism is needed here: Institutions are organizations initially set up in order to fill a necessary religious and social function and to provide some sort of structural support for whatever that function requires. In many ways they fulfill the very purpose of structure; organization is needed if we seek to act collectively for common cause. And all movements start this way, but in the initial stages structure exists solely to support the grassroots. The problem happens when the newly instituted structures move beyond being simply structural support and become a governing body of sorts-structure becomes centralized governance. So religious institutionalism happens when in the name of some convenience we set up a system to do what we must do ourselves so that over time the structures we create to do this take on a life of their own...

To read the first post, click here.

Both these posts appear on Alan's blog, The Forgotten Ways: the missional musings of Alan Hirsch (developing apostolic imagination and practice in Western contexts)

Compelled by Love

In this book, Ed Stetzer and Philip Nation challenge their readers to look at love within the context of God, the church, and the lives of individual believers. Compelled by Love gives readers a basic theological grounding and a platform for personal application as they understand what missional living is all about—it is simply the calling to love others. Look at the love of God; begin to truly understand what is at the center of the church’s foundation, commission, and direction; but most importantly, understand your role within the mission of God as you integrate love into all aspects of your missional calling.

There is a brief interview with Ed Stetzer on neoleader about the book where he says, amongst other things: Biblical love is willing to die. Culture paints love as the building up of the heart and the completion of life. The Bible shows that the loving Great Shepherd dies for his flock. Biblical love is heroically sacrificial.

Without love, churches will not release people to go to the mission field. You have to love God enough to be obedient to him. You must love the world as Christ does in order to die for sin. You must love your neighbor enough to tell them the truth of their sin, aid in their time of need, and walk them (even ploddingly) toward the cross.
Book published May 2008

The Forgotten Ways

Alan Hirsch wrote in his book, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church -

Missional church is a community of God’s people that defines itself, and organizes its life around, its real purpose of being an agent of God’s mission to the world. In other words, the church’s true and authentic organizing principle is mission. When the church is in mission, it is the true church. The church itself is not only a product of that mission but is obligated and destined to extend it by whatever means possible. The mission of God flows directly through every believer and every community of faith that adheres to Jesus. To obstruct this is to block God’s purposes in and through his people.

On his blog site, also called The Forgotten Ways, he takes issue with the word 'missional' being made to be the new emergent. In other words, if I'm reading him rightly, he doesn't believe that the emergent church is a new way of being missional. For him 'it was not so much that the church has a mission but that the mission has a church' - that is, mission is what the church does, and the reason many churches fail is that they forget to keep on in mission.

The Shaping of Things to Come

I know that the book, The Shaping of Things to Come, by Mike Frost and Alan Hirsch, has been around for about four years, and most of you will have read it, or come across it.

However, for those who haven't, there's an excellent review and detailed summary of the book and its contents on the John Mark Ministries site, in Australia. It has enough detail in it for you to be able to assess the whole book without having to read it from cover to cover - something the busier ones amongst you might appreciate.