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Mission: More then a Slogan //Ben Porter 5:10am 02/07/11
Mission: More than a Slogan
God, His Mission and the role of the Church
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This conference is intended to help planters, pastors, and leaders better navigate through the minefield of competing missional ideas while remaining faithful to the rich story-line of the bible.
Over the last 20 years N.A. churches have shown a growing interest in God’s mission through his church. This encouraging trajectory is not without its challenges. As the church explores and adopts a more missional posture, there is a growing discomfort that these practices have become another pragmatic growth strategy. Sadly, the term “missional church” is more commonly used as a slogan to indicate a trendy way of doing ministry rather than a deeply understood narrative running through Genesis to Revelation.
How can the church encourage its missional identity in a biblically faithful way? What are the unique contemporary challenges the church must grapple with? What biblical and missional history can we glean from? What influence does the emergent church literature have in shaping our missional understanding and practice? What idols must we avoid and what truths can we turn to so that our practices are arrived at through deep biblical reflection? These questions and more will be the focus of our time together.
Schedule
Friday, March 11
9:10a: Greetings
9:15a: Worship
9:30a: S1-Our Missional God: His Church in the World
11:00a: R1-Reflection Questions & Discussion
12:00p: Lunch
1:30p: S2-Our Missional Movement: Gathered and Scattered
3:00p: R2-Reflection Questions & Discussion
4:30p: Worship
Saturday, March 12
9:15a: Worship
9:30a: S3-Our Missions: The Church’s Horizon
11:00a: R3-Reflection Questions & Discussion
12:00p: Lunch
1:30p: S4-Our Missionary Encounter: Culture
3:00p: R4-Reflection Questions & Discussion
4:30p: Worship and Wrap-up
Acts 29 Regional Training
March 11-12, 2011
Mission: More than a Slogan
God, His Mission and the role of the Church
Cost: $79
Location: Infusion Church (Escondido)
Speakers: Mike Goheen & David Fairchild
The GCM Collective will be hosting their first GCM Conference in Austin, TX this October, bringing together church planters, pastors, and leaders to collaborate on the practice of missional communities. This three-day conference will feature main and breakout sessions under the theme of GOSPEL, COMMUNITY and MISSION.
You will get to hear from, meet and interact with leaders who are daily practitioners, living in gospel communities on mission in their cities. This is a unique experience that will present the why, what and how-to of starting, leading and multiplying missional communities. Interactive plenary sessions, breakouts and unique training experiences will fill our days both on-site and off.
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 28TH
3:30 – 5:00PM Pre-Conference: Forming a Collective Drew Goodmanson
7:00 – 9:00PM Main Session ONE: GCM Collective Vision Panel Discussion
9:00PM – Meet-Up at Gingerman Pub
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 29TH
9:30 – 10:30AM Main Session TWO: What is the Gospel? David Fairchild
10:45 – 12PM Breakout Session [ 1 ]
12 – 1:30PM Lunch Break
1:30 – 2:45PM Main Session THREE: A Post-Christendom America Ed Stetzer
3:00 – 5:00PM Breakout Session [ 2 ]
5:00 – 7:00PM Dinner Break
7:00 – 9:00PM Main Session FOUR: Gospel Rhythms Caesar Kalinowski
9:00PM – Downtown Experience
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 30TH
9:00 – 10:30AM Main Session FIVE: Making Disciples on MIssion Jeff Vanderstelt
10:45 – 11:45AM Breakout Session [ 3 ]
12 – 1:30PM Main Session SIX: Stealth Church Steve Timmis
Learn more: GCM Collective Conference 2010
The Gospel’s centrality
The gospel is not just the A-B-C’s, but the A to Z of Christianity. The Gospel is not just the way we enter God’s kingdom, but the way we thrive within the kingdom. We are not saved through the Gospel and then forced to maintain our salvation through obedience, but the Gospel is the way we grow (Gal. 3:1-3) and are renewed (Col. 1:6). It is the solution to each problem, the key to each closed door, the power through each barrier (Rom. 1:16-17).
The Gospel’s core meaning
The Gospel is not that we demonstrate our own righteousness before God and then He owes us something, but that He demonstrates His righteousness through Jesus Christ and then freely imputes His righteousness to us (2 Cor. 5:21). The Gospel is not that “it doesn’t matter what you believe, as long as you’ve been good,” but that “it doesn’t matter if you’ve been good, as long as you believe in Christ as your Savior.” The Gospel is not that we go from being irreligious to being religious; it’s that we realize that our motives for both religiosity and irreligiousness were essentially the same and essentially wrong—that we were seeking to be our own saviors and thereby keep control of our own lives.
To the degree that we rely on something other than Jesus to save us (such as moral performance, career, romance, family), we experience anger, fear, guilt, and despair. But when we trust in Christ as our Savior, we no longer trust in our own self-determination or self-denial for salvation; neither do we trust in moralism or hedonism for our security and comfort.
Kaleo assumes that most people have not heard of or thought through the implications of the Gospel. We exist to bring things “in line with the gospel” (Gal. 2:14), which renews us spiritually, psychologically, corporately, socially. The Gospel avoids the errors of legalism and liberalism, moralism and relativism, yet it does not produce something in between, but rather something different from them all. The Gospel critiques both religion and irreligion (Matt. 21:31). It shows us a God far more holy than the legalist can bear (Jesus had to die because we could not satisfy God’s holy demands) and yet far more merciful than the liberal can conceive (Jesus had to die because God loves us). The Gospel affects everything we do at Kaleo.
New way with God
The Gospel moves us from an impersonal “boss-employee” relationship with God to a personal “Father-child” relationship with Him—from a self-centered, fear-based motive to act morally to a love-based desire to delight (and delight in) God.
New way with Lordship
If we are saved by God’s grace at such an infinite cost to Him, then He can ask anything of us and it can still be a joy for us to obey.
New way with self
We no longer base our identity on what others think of us—or even what we think of ourselves—but on what God thinks of us in Christ (1 Cor. 4:3-4). The Gospel produces neither an inferiority complex (since God sees us as beautiful in Christ) nor a superiority complex (since we know we are sinners saved only by grace). The transforming power of the Gospel simultaneously produces in us both confidence and humility.
A covenant represents the deepest of agreements between two parties. God made a covenant long ago saying, "I will always be your God and you will always be my people." Jesus fulfilled this covenant and issued in a New Covenant. This is a New Covenant because now not only will God keep his side of the agreement, but through the death and resurrection of Jesus, he also keeps our side of the covenant as well; Jesus makes us able to truly be the people of God.
As churches we want to live out this New Covenant together in community. We do this by making a commitment to each other to live out who we are in Jesus Christ and to express this regularly through how we live.
We are wanting to be a church "for" the city/culture/people where God has placed us and through it the world. A church "for" the culture engages the culture in order to transform it.
We are sent by God to restore all things to himself.
God sent his son, Jesus, to Earth to take on human form and live within the culture. He worked, ate and interacted among the people; living in such a way that those around him could see and experience what God was truly like. Jesus came so that all people, places and things could be restored to a right relationship with God. In the same way, we believe we are missionaries sent into our culture to restore all things to God through Jesus. We live this out as part of a missional community. (John 1:14; 20:21; Colossians 1:19; 2 Corinthians 5:17-21)
