1. Richard Lints, The Fabric of Theology: A Prolegomenon to Evangelical Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 9.
2. Ibid., 82.
3. Ibid., 315.
4. Ibid., 316 – 17.
5. These three areas correspond roughly to Richard Lints’s four theological vision factors in this way: (1) Gospel flows from how you read the Bible; (2) City flows from your reflections on culture; and (3) Movement flows from your understanding of tradition. Meanwhile, the fourth factor — your view of human rationality — influences your understanding of all three. It has an impact on how you evangelize non-Christians, how much common grace you see in a culture, and how institutional (or anti-institutional) you are in your thinking about ministry structure.
6. It can be argued that the Gospel axis is not like the other two. In the other two axes, the desired position is a midpoint, a balance between extremes. However, Sinclair Ferguson (in his lectures on the Marrow Controversy) and others have argued that the gospel is not at all a balance between two opposites but an entirely different thing. In fact, it can also be argued that legalism and antinomianism are not opposites but essentially the same thing — self-salvation — opposed to the gospel. So please note that putting the gospel between these two extremes is simply a visual shorthand.
Chapter 1: The Search for the Missional Church
1. Darrell L. Guder, ed., Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998).
2. Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 18.
3. David Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991), 389 – 90 (the quotes in this paragraph are from these pages).
4. Newbigin, Open Secret, 18.
5. Harvey Cox, The Secular City (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 255.
6. Newbigin, Open Secret, 18.
7. Ibid., 121 – 23.
8. In The Open Secret, Newbigin writes of “the paganism that was showing its power in the heart of old Christendom” (p. 8).
9. The Open Secret (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978); Foolishness to the Greeks (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986); The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991).
10. Lesslie Newbigin, “Ecumenical Amnesia,” in International Bulletin of Missionary Research 18, no. 1 (January 1994): 4 – 5, www.newbigin.net/assets/pdf/93reit.pdf (accessed February 15, 2012).
11. Ibid.
12. Newbigin’s phrase “judgment and redemption for all who will accept it” could be interpreted to mean that all people who accept it receive both conviction of sin (judgment) and the acceptance of grace.
13. David Bosch, Believing in the Future: Toward a Missiology of Western Culture (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1995), 33.
14. Ibid., 33 – 35.
15. Ibid., 47 – 53.
16. Ibid., 56 – 57.
17. Ibid., 55 – 62. Bosch lists many of these ingredients briefly at the end of the book. He includes addressing ecological issues and listening carefully and respectfully to the theological insights and personal experiences of the churches of the Third World.
18. David Bosch criticized not only the practices of both the liberal and the conservative churches but also their doctrine, particularly their view of Scripture, as being shaped by modernity. For example, in Transforming Mission (p. 342), he wrote, “The subject-object dichotomy [of the Enlightenment] meant that, in admittedly very opposite ways, the Bible and, in fact, the Christian faith as such, became objectified. Liberals sovereignly placed themselves above the biblical text, extracting ethical codes from it, while fundamentalists tended to turn the Bible into a fetish and apply it mechanically to every context, particularly as regards the ‘Great Commission.’ ”
19. The book is a compendium of essays from different authors and so does not speak always with one voice. While Newbigin himself was able to mix Transformationist measures with Counterculturalist measures in his agenda for cultural engagement, many of the contributors to Missional Church fell more into one camp or the other. For a good discussion of the book and its message and the differences among the authors, see Craig Van Gelder and Dwight J. Zscheile, The Missional Church in Perspective: Mapping Trends and Shaping the Conversation (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2011).
20. Van Gelder and Zscheile call this group “ ‘Discovering’ Missional,” who “tend to utilize missional language to promote a more traditional understanding of mission” (p. 71), i.e., those who consider “mission” to be primarily an expanding of the church rather than joining with God to renew the creation. (The label is a bit patronizing, since the authors depict them as still discovering the concept but not really understanding it.) They cite Frank Page, The Nehemiah Factor (Birmingham, AL: New Hope, 2008), and Rick Rusaw and Eric Swanson, The Externally Focused Church (Loveland, CO: Group, 2004) as examples of this group (see lists of authors on pp. 72 – 74).
21. The seminal text for this approach is Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch, The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21st-Century Church (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004). See also the books and website of David Fitch of Reclaiming the Mission (www.reclaimingthemission.com). I also recommend the books of Tim Chester and Steve Timmis; see esp. Everyday Church: Mission by Being Good Neighbours (Nottingham, UK: Inter-Varsity, 2011).
22. Van Gelder and Zscheile list Jim Belcher of Deep Church, Dan Kimball, and me, among others (p. 87). I would include Ed Stetzer here as well.
23. Alan J. Roxburgh and M. Scott Boren, Introducing the Missional Church: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Become One (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2009), 93. Van Gelder and Zscheile (Missional Church in Perspective) state that a missional theology calls the church to “reciprocity, mutuality, and vulnerability” (p. 133); because the Trinity is seen as a nonhierarchical, mutual community of persons, the missional church must have a reciprocal, open, and dynamic relationship to the world (p. 110).
24. For one of many places where this horizontal reworking of sin and redemption is carried out, see N. T. Wright, Evil and the Justice of God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2006). Wright states, “Evil is the force of anti-creation, anti-life, the force which opposes and seeks to deface and destroy God’s good world of space, time, and matter, and above all God’s image-bearing human creatures . . . [But] it is true, as the Gospel writers have been trying to tell us, that evil at all levels and of all sorts had done its worst and that Jesus . . . supremely on the cross had dealt with it, taken its full force, exhausted it” (p. 89).
25. See Wright, Evil and the Justice of God. “The New Testament writers report . . . the remarkable sign of evil doing its worst and being exhausted. When Jesus suffered, he did not curse, and when he was reviled, he did not revile in return” (pp. 88 – 89). “The death of Jesus is seen . . . as the means whereby evil is . . . defeated and its power is exhausted” (p. 136).
26. Van Gelder (Missional Church in Perspective), who puts himself in this category, criticizes thinkers who don’t embrace the implications in the missio Dei of what he calls “the social Trinity.” He argues that putting the emphasis on the fact that God is a community of mutual love who is redeeming all of creation will keep us from seeing “individual Christians as the focus of God’s redemptive work” and will strengthen “the communal nature of the church as well as the corporate nature of discipleship”(p. 84).
27. Despite the fact that Brian McLaren and others in the Emergent network adopted the term, Alan Roxburgh and Scott Boren (Introducing the Missional Church, 47 – 62) show that the emerging church and the missional church are not the same thing. Indeed, as I will argue, it is possible to properly use the term missional without buying into the mainline/ecumenical definition of the missio Dei.
Much of the work of the mainline-oriented missional church thinkers (represented by the “reciprocal and communal” group) seems to have Karl Barth’s shadow behind much of it. Barth reworks the doctrine of election so that (in his view) all people are elect in Christ, even those who do not believe, so that all human beings are essentially simul justus et peccator. There is much controversy over how Barth’s view works itself out in ministry practice, but many who accept it deem it inappropriate to view non-Christians as being under the wrath of God and in need of personal reconciliation. It is not hard to see how this would move the focus of a church’s ministry from calling individuals to conversion to building community and healing society.
28. Conservative evangelicals in particular should bear in mind that the theology of Lesslie Newbigin and David Bosch, while not evangelical, may still be appreciated as a reaction and critique of the thoroughly secular theology of many of the churches that make up the World Council of Churches.
29. Roxburgh and Boren, Introducing the Missional Church, 59.
30. See John R. W. Stott, “The Living God Is a Missionary God,” in You Can Tell the World, ed. James E. Berney (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1979), 3 – 9 (first presented at the 1976 Urbana Student Missions Convention).
31. See more on this subject in part 2 (“Integrative Ministry”), as well as a full treatment in chapter 3 (“Equipping People for Missional Living”).
32. Those who lean toward a conservative theology may say (as I would) that while the mission of the church qua church (the institutional church) is to evangelize and make disciples, individual Christians must be well-known for their sacrificial service to the poor and common good if a society is going to give the gospel a hearing.
Chapter 2: Centering the Missional Church
1. Michael Wolff, “The Party Line,” New York (February 26, 2001), http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/media/columns/medialife/4407/index1.html (accessed February 17, 2012).
2. See chapter 5 for an extended discussion of evangelistic worship.
3. See part 3 in Center Church (“Gospel Contextualization”) for an extended discussion of what a contextualized gospel message looks like.
4. A number of good theological and practical objections can be raised to habitually using the word incarnational to describe ministry. However, for our purposes here, we will accept the practice and the main definition given because the term is widely used in missional church discussions.
5. Alan Roxburgh and M. Scott Boren (Introducing the Missional Church: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Become One [Grand Rapids: Baker, 2009], 69) define an “attractional” church this way: “One of the ways the basic story of the gospel has been compromised is that it has become all about us and how God is supposed to meet our needs, and we have created attractional churches that are about how God does just that.”
6. David Fitch, “What Is Missional? Can a Mega-Church Be Missional?” www.reclaimingthemission.com/blog/153 (accessed February 17, 2012).
7. Ibid.
8. Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch, The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21st-Century Church (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004), 211.
9. See ibid., 210 – 24.
10. Roxburgh and Boren, Introducing the Missional Church, 21.
11. For example, Darrell Guder (Missional Church [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998]) reasons that if God’s purpose in mission is to “restore and heal creation” (p. 4), then the idea of salvation means bringing the reign of God to bear on communities and organizations. He writes, “For a bank, it might mean granting loans in formerly redlined neighborhoods. For a public school, it might mean instituting peer mediation training among students” (p. 136).
12. Dieter Zander, “Abducted by an Alien Gospel,” www.baskettcase.com/blog/2006/11/01/abducted-by-an-alien-gospel/ (accessed February 17, 2012).
13. D. A. Carson, “Three Books on the Bible: A Critical Review” (April 2006), www.reformation21.org/shelf-life/three-books-on-the-bible-a-criticalreview.php (accessed February 17, 2012).
14. See Timothy Keller, Generous Justice: How God’s Grace Makes Us Just (New York: Dutton, 2010), esp. 92 – 108.
15. While Luther expounds on this concept in many places, the two seminal works are “To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation” and “The Babylonian Captivity of the Church.” These two are joined to “The Freedom of a Christian” in Martin Luther, Three Treatises (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1970). For an early modern evangelical effort to recapture the importance of lay ministry, see John R. W. Stott, One People (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1968).
16. For a case that every lay Christian is to minister the Word — that is, evangelize and disciple from the Bible — see Colin Marshall and Tony Payne, The Trellis and the Vine: The Ministry Mind-Shift That Changes Everything (Kingsford, Australia: Matthias Media, 2009), 41 – 60. For resources containing ideas on how to release laypeople to deepen relationships in their neighborhood to do service and witness, see Mike Breen and Alex Absalom, Launching Missional Communities: A Field Guide, and Tim Chester and Steve Timmis, Everyday Church: Mission by Being Good Neighbours (Nottingham, UK: Inter-Varsity, 2011). For a brief overview of how to help people integrate their faith and work, see part 2 (“Integrative Ministry”) in this volume, and Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work (New York: Dutton, 2012).
17. Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Life Together [New York: Harper & Row, 1954], 23) writes, “All we can say, therefore, is: the community of Christians springs solely from the biblical and Reformation message of the justification of man through grace alone; this alone is the basis of the longing of Christians for one another.”
18. See section on “Missional Evangelism through Mini-Decisions” in the next chapter.
19. See section on “Believers with Relational Integrity” in the next chapter.
20. See part 3 (“Movement Dynamics”).
Chapter 3: Equipping People for Missional Living
1. Ryan Bolger, “Marks of a Missional Church,” http://thebolgblog.typepad.com/thebolgblog/2006/01/marks_of_a_miss.html (accessed February 17, 2012).
2. John R. W. Stott, Motives and Methods in Evangelism (Leicester, UK: Inter-Varsity, 1962), 14.
3. Michael Green, Evangelism in the Early Church, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 243, quoting Adolf von Harnack.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., 244.
6. Ibid., 315.
7. Ibid., 318 – 38.
8. Ibid., 339.
9. Many of these examples are adapted from the ones found in Colin Marshall and Tony Payne, The Trellis and the Vine: The Ministry Mind-Shift That Changes Everything (Kingsford, Australia: Matthias Media, 2009), 54 – 56. I’ve added some new examples and contextualized the ones found in the book.
10. Francis Schaeffer, 2 Contents, 2 Realities (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1975), 31 – 32.
11. For several good ideas on engagement, see Tim Chester and Steve Timmis, Everyday Church: Mission by Being Good Neighbours (Nottingham, UK: Inter-Varsity, 2011), ch. 4 (“Everyday Mission”).
12. See Christian Smith, Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 209.
13. Alan Kreider, “ ‘They Alone Know the Right Way to Live’: The Early Church and Evangelism,” in Ancient Faith for the Church’s Future, ed. Mark Husbands and Jeffrey P. Greenman (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2008), 169 – 70.
14. Two other must-read books about the early Christians and their witness through lay ministry are Green, Evangelism in the Early Church, and Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity (New York: HarperCollins, 1990).
15. For excellent, easily remembered outlines to give to laypeople for informal pastoral care and evangelism, see Chester and Timmis, Everyday Church, ch. 3 (“Everyday Pastoral Care”) and ch. 5 (“Everyday Evangelism”).
16. See David Stroud, Planting Churches, Changing Communities (Milton Keynes, UK: Authentic Media, 2009), 172.
17. For practical suggestions on how to do this, see Marshall and Payne, The Trellis and the Vine, ch. 9 (“Multiplying Gospel Growth through Training Coworkers”).
18. For a comprehensive treatment and list of evangelistic venues, see Michael Green, Evangelism through the Local Church (Nashville: Nelson, 1992). Though dated, it is the most complete guide to the subject of its title.
19. See Timothy Keller, The Reason for God Study Guide and DVD: Conversations on Faith and Life (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010).
20. See Timothy Keller, Jesus the King (New York: Riverhead, 2013).
Reflections on Missional Community
1. In the sidebar (p. 254, Center Church), Keller reproduces Newbigin’s short list of ingredients for a missionary encounter with Western culture: (1) a new apologetic (that takes on the so-called neutrality of secular reason), (2) the teaching of the kingdom of God (that God wants not only to save souls but heal the whole creation), (3) earning the right to be heard through willingness to serve others sacrificially, (4) equipping the laity to bring the implications of their faith into their public calling and so transform culture, (5) a countercultural church community, (6) a unified church that shows the world an overcoming of denominational divisions, (7) a global church in which the older Western churches listen to the non-Western churches, (8) courage.
2. See further Tim Chester, Good News to the Poor: Sharing the Gospel Through Social Involvement (2004; repr., Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2013).
3. See Engstrom’s posts in the “Practices of Healthy Missional Communities” section at www.toddengstrom.com/resources.
4. See Engstrom’s posts in the “The Four Stages of Missional Community Formation” section at toddengstrom.com/resources.
Chapter 4: The Balance of Ministry Fronts
1. Edmund P. Clowney, “Interpreting the Biblical Models of the Church: A Hermeneutical Deepening of Ecclesiology,” in Biblical Interpretation and the Church, ed. D. A. Carson (Nashville: Nelson, 1985), 64 – 109.
2. Avery Dulles, Models of the Church (Garden City, NY: Image, 1978). I speak more extensively about church models and Dulles’s book in the section on “Church Models and Movements” in chapter 12.
3. Edmund P. Clowney, Living in Christ’s Church (Philadelphia: Great Commission, 1986), 140.
4. I make the case for this distinction in Generous Justice: How God’s Grace Makes Us Just (New York: Dutton, 2010, ch. 6).
5. It is important to point out that what follows is not a thoroughgoing theology of worship, community, diaconal ministry, and public discipleship. Nor is it a balanced survey of ministry methods. Rather, it is a set of observations about how each area of ministry interacts with the others. Of course, each of these ministry areas or “fronts” deserves a book-length treatment, which I either have done (e.g., Generous Justice), am doing (e.g., Every Good Endeavor), or hope to do.
Chapter 5: Connecting People to God
1. See “Reformed Worship in the Global City,” in Worship by the Book, ed. D. A. Carson (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002), 193 – 239.
2. A good, though dated, volume outlining these approaches is Paul Basden, ed., Exploring the Worship Spectrum: Six Views (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004).
3. For a good, brief description of the regulative principle of worship, see R. Michael Allen, Reformed Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2010), 116 – 21.
4. Scots Confession, www.creeds.net/Scots/c20.htm (accessed February 21, 2012). The Confession goes on to say, “For as ceremonies which men have devised are but temporal, so they may, and ought to be, changed.”
5. For a critique of contemporary Christian worship as practiced by many megachurches, see D. H. Williams, “Contemporary Music: The Cultural Medium and the Christian Message,” Christianity Today 55, no. 6 (June 2011): 46, www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2011/june/culturalmedium.html (accessed February 21, 2012). Williams follows many others in charging that contemporary worship aims directly at the emotions rather than shaping the mind and habits, and that it has been shaped by “consumerist culture . . . creating a mall-like environment marked by splashiness and simplistic messages.” An overlapping but somewhat different critique of evangelical worship is offered by James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2009). Smith is targeting nonliturgical, sermon-oriented worship, which he sees as too oriented to reason and the mind and does not shape the “habits of the heart” as does liturgical worship.
6. Allen, Reformed Theology, 133 – 34.
7. Historical traditions of worship are based on centuries of wisdom and experience, and to rely on one prevents us from having to “reinvent the wheel” every week.
8. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 2:1208.
9. See Paul Barnett, 1 Corinthians: Holiness and Hope of a Rescued people (Fearn, Ross-shire, UK: Christian Focus, 2000); F. F. Bruce, 1 and 2 Corinthians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1971); Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987); Leon Morris, 1 Corinthians (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2008); Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000).
10. I believe he is saying that tongues only make nonbelievers feel “alien” and judged — but that this kind of judgment does not lead to conversion.
11. “Fencing of the table” refers to instructing those in the worship service that only believers who are committed to forsaking their sins should partake of the Lord’s Supper.
Chapter 6: Connecting People to One Another
1. C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1960), 92 – 93.
2. I am acutely aware that many readers will not share the same view of baptism and the Lord’s Supper I am assuming here by using the word sacraments instead of ordinances. In general, those who name them “ordinances” believe they are signs and symbols representing the benefits of salvation, while those who describe them as “sacraments” believe that at some level or another they are also “seals” that bring something of the grace signified. Despite these long-standing differences on an important subject, I believe readers across the ecclesiastical spectrum can accept virtually all of what I am saying in this section about the importance of churchly piety.
3. John Coffey, “Lloyd-Jones and the Protestant Past,” in Engaging with Martyn Lloyd-Jones: The Life and Legacy of “the Doctor,” ed. Andrew Atherstone and David Ceri Jones (Nottingham, UK: Inter-Varsity, 2011), 318. Coffey argues convincingly that, despite the negative results of revivalism, its critics often overplay their hand. Instead of seeing revivalism as a completely novel development, he points out its continuity with elements within the Reformation and Puritanism and critics’ tendency to overlook the great achievements of revivalism (see p. 319). For a good but more negative assessment of revivalism, see R. Michael Allen, Reformed Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2010), 88 – 94.
4. Nevin, a proponent of what has been called “high church Calvinism,” was a student at Princeton under Alexander and Hodge. He appreciated the confessional, ecclesial emphasis but felt it was inconsistent to put such an equal emphasis on conversion and experience. He believed it was subjectivizing Christianity to tell members or baptized children that they should be sure they were converted. For a profile highly sympathetic to Nevin, see D. G. Hart, John Williamson Nevin: High Church Calvinist (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2005).
5. See Archibald Alexander, Thoughts on Religious Experience (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1967), esp. 59 – 78; Charles Hodge, The Way of Life (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1959).
6. See Alexander, Thoughts on Religious Experience, 13 – 35.
7. J. I. Packer and Gary A. Parrett, Grounded in the Gospel: Building Believers the Old-Fashioned Way (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2010).
8. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian in Community (New York: Harper & Row, 1954), 22 – 23.
Chapter 7: Connecting People to the City
1. I have written two books on this subject — Ministries of Mercy: The Call of the Jericho Road, 2nd ed. (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1991), and Generous Justice: How God’s Grace Makes Us Just (New York: Dutton, 2010). For that reason, this chapter will only sketch out a few basic ideas and principles.
2. Bruce Waltke, The Book of Proverbs: Chapters 1 – 15 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 97; see idem, “Righteousness in Proverbs,” Westminster Theological Journal 70 (2008): 207 – 24.
3. We must be careful not to dogmatically draw lines here. Different social and cultural conditions can affect how directly the church is involved in addressing issues of justice. Looking back, we now applaud the Anglo churches that preached against and worked against the evils of African slavery in America. So too, the African-American church, under the extreme conditions of slavery and near-slavery, bravely took on all three levels of ministry to the poor, and their work continues to this day.
4. See Keller, Generous Justice, ch. 6.
5. Julian (the Apostate), The Works of the Emperor Julian (Loeb Classical Library; New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1923), 69, 71.
Chapter 8: Connecting People to the Culture
1. For a full-length treatment of the particular ways in which a gospel-centered worldview applies to work, see Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work (New York: Dutton, 2012).
2. Of course, we must strike a balance here. In some ways it would be as wrong to segregate Christians by vocation as it would be by race. Suspicion among members of certain professions can be raised, and it is liberating and healthy to build friendships across these kinds of barriers. Some people will not want or need spiritual nurture that is vocation specific. But many others will not otherwise be given the care they need to handle the temptations and quandaries that are unique to their vocation — and so they will abandon either their careers or their beliefs.
Reflections on Integrative Ministry
1. We describe this journey in more detail in Faithmapping: A Gospel Atlas for Your Spiritual Journey (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2013).
2. Keller’s writings in Center Church seem to be a direct descendant of that Church Planting Manual.
3. Timothy Keller, Center Church (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2012), 39.
4. Gregg R. Allison, Sojourners and Strangers: The Doctrine of the Church (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), 50.
5. Ibid., 51.
6. Ibid., 51.
7. Ibid., 53.
8. Ibid., 52, emphasis added.
9. Harold Best, Unceasing Worship: Biblical Perspectives on Worship and the Arts (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2003), 47.
10. Ibid., 47.
11. See, e.g., Harold Best’s Unceasing Worship or David Peterson’s Engaging with God: A Biblical Theology of Worship (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2002).
12. For much more detail, see our book Faithmapping, which we were tempted to title “Keller for Dummies.”
13. Montgomery and Cosper, Faithmapping, 21.
14. Ibid., 102.
15. Tip of the old hat to Dallas Willard for this definition.
16. See Montgomery and Cosper, Faithmapping, 105 – 92.
17. Ibid., 202 – 15.
Response to Daniel Montgomery and Mike Cosper
1. D. A. Carson, ed., Worship by the Book (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002), 11 – 63.
Chapter 9: Movements and Institutions
1. For a simple description of the marks of a genuine church as discerned by the Protestant Reformers, see J. I. Packer, “Word and Sacrament: How a Genuine Church Is Identified,” in Concise Theology (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 2001), 204 – 6. Reformed churches have always named these three marks (Word, sacrament, discipline), though others have argued that church discipline is necessarily involved in a right use of the sacraments, and therefore, they reason, there are properly only two marks of a true church. Whether we break these into two, three, or four line items is not critical as long as all the functions and purposes are recognized. The true church communicates sound biblical doctrine through its teachers and also incorporates people through baptism and the Lord’s Supper into a visible covenant community in which its leaders provide wise spiritual oversight.
2. The first to recognize the dependency of the non-Western churches were the British Anglican Henry Venn and the American Congregationalist Rufus Anderson, both of whom urged a model called “indigenization” in which Western missionaries were expected to preach and pastor new churches and eventually raise up indigenous, national leaders and hand the churches over to them. Later, the British Anglican Roland Allen and the American Presbyterian John Nevius urged that this process be started further back and argued that Western missionaries should never act as church planters and sole pastors of non-Western churches. Instead, new converts should be trained and helped to establish churches themselves. Roland Allen wrote Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours? (London: Robert Scott, 1912) and The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church, and the Causes Which Hinder It (London: World Dominion Press, 1927), while Nevius wrote The Planting and Development of Missionary Churches (New York: Foreign Mission Library, 1899).
3. Hugh Heclo’s great little book On Thinking Institutionally (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008) lays out the diverse definitions that scholars have given to the idea of institutions.
4. Heclo, On Thinking Institutionally, 38.
5. Ibid.
6. David K. Hurst, Crisis and Renewal: Meeting the Challenge of Organizational Change (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2002).
Chapter 10: The Church as an Organized Organism
1. See Edmund P. Clowney, “Perspectives on the Church,” in Living in Christ’s Church (Philadelphia: Great Commission, 1986); idem, “Doctrine of the Church” (unpublished course syllabus); Lon L. Fuller, “Two Principles of Human Association,” in Voluntary Associations, ed. J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman (New York: Atherton, 1969); Lyle Schaller, “Tribes, Movements, and Organizations,” in Getting Things Done (Nashville: Abingdon, 1986); idem, Activating the Passive Church (Nashville: Abingdon, 1981).
2. See Edmund P. Clowney, The Church (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1995), esp. 199 – 214; see also idem, Living in Christ’s Church, 111 – 12.
3. See the important essay by Alan Kreider, “ ‘They Alone Know the Right Way to Live’: The Early Church and Evangelism,” in Ancient Faith for the Church’s Future, ed. Mark Husbands and Jeffrey Greenman (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2008), 169 – 86.
4. Books such as The Trellis and the Vine by Tony Payne and Colin Marshall (Kingsford, Australia: Matthias Media, 2009) give the strong impression that institutional forms and structures are, at best, a necessary evil and that management and governing gifts are not really involved in our carrying out the work of the Spirit or our building up the church. On the other hand, many of the critics of revival and broad evangelicalism who call for a greater emphasis on the ordained ministry and the institutional church can make the opposite mistake.
5. RUF produces church planters and missionaries for the PCA, along with Campus Outreach, which is a nondenominational campus ministry with strong ties to the denomination.
6. Most effective leadership pipelines grow organically out of movements rather than institutions. I once learned about a denomination outside the United States that had an evangelical wing. For a number of years, this evangelical wing had leadership “nurseries” in the college ministries of prominent, vital congregations in two or three university towns. College students were drawn to these ministries in great number, and many were inspired to reproduce the community and ministry of the Word they experienced. Dozens of young people from these churches went into the preaching ministry because they experienced movement dynamics there. However, when those churches installed new pastors who weren’t as interested or successful in college ministry, the pipelines dried up, and the whole evangelical cause in that country suffered.
Chapter 11: Church Planting as a Movement Dynamic
1. The general rule when discerning which practices of Scripture to apply today is that “the purpose of God in Scripture should be sought in its didactic rather than its descriptive parts.” (John Stott, Baptism and Fullness: The Work of the Holy Spirit Today, 3rd ed. [Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2006], 21). The cardinal rule of biblical interpretation is that the meaning of the text of the Scripture is determined by the author’s intent, i.e., what the biblical writer was intending to say. This is why in the didactic parts of the Bible — where prophetic and apostolic writers directly address how God’s people should live — it is easier to discern authorial intent than in the historical narratives, where many things are described as having happened but may not be exemplary or serve as a model of behavior for all times.
Christians have argued for centuries about the “normativity” of the book of Acts — mainly over issues of church government and the operations of the Holy Spirit. But Acts is focused on missions, evangelism, and church planting. I believe we can learn much from the material for our own ministries, but since it is written in narrative form, we must be careful not to apply too rigidly the things we learn. See, e.g., David Peterson’s remark that the patterns of the laying on of hands and tongues speaking “are not to be regarded as normative for ongoing Christian experience” (The Acts of the Apostles [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009], 532).
2. John R. W. Stott, The Message of Acts (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1994), 234.
3. Tim Chester, “Church Planting: A Theological Perspective,” in Multiplying Churches: Reaching Today’s Communities through Church Planting, ed. Stephen Timmis (Fearn, Ross-shire, UK: Christian Focus, 2000), 23 – 46.
4. In Redeemer’s early days, we were joined by people who came from other congregations in the city. But as we’ve gotten bigger and older, we have often seen our own members go off to newer and younger congregations where they felt their gifts could be well utilized. They go with our blessing. Older churches are always tempted to resent the loss of members to newer churches, but if we care about reaching the whole city for Christ, we must be glad that we trained people in our congregation who then opt to become involved in new mission opportunities.
5. See Donald McGavran and George G. Hunter III, eds., Church Growth: Strategies That Work (Nashville: Abingdon, 1980), 100; see also C. Kirk Hadaway, New Churches and Church Growth in the Southern Baptist Convention (Nashville: Broadman, 1987); Ed Stetzer, Planting Missional Churches: Planting a Church That’s Biblically Sound and Reaching People in Culture (Nashville: Broadman and Holman, 2006). Stetzer writes, “Churches under three years of age win an average of ten people to Christ per year for every hundred members . . . Churches over fifteen years of age win an average of three people per every hundred members” (p. 8).
6. These numbers are taken from a study — conducted by the Values Research Institute of New York and commissioned by Redeemer City to City — that looked at church attendance and church growth in New York City over the past several decades. These figures, while inexact, should be taken seriously as general patterns. The figures basically align with churchgoing and church-percapita figures in the parts of the United States that are far more religious and traditional than New York City. We have not done research in other countries.
7. Two useful resources for guiding this process are James P. Spradley, The Ethnographic Interview (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1979), and Edward Dayton, Planning Strategies for World Evangelism (Monrovia, CA: MARC, 1974).
8. A helpful resource is Craig Ellison, “Addressing Felt Needs of Urban Dwellers,” in Planting and Growing Urban Churches, ed. Harvie Conn (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1997), 94 – 110.
Chapter 12: The City and the Gospel Ecosystem
1. Edmund Clowney, The Church (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1995), 79.
2. This chapter (“The Church: Community of Disciples”) was not in the original 1978 edition; see Avery Dulles, Models of the Church, expanded ed. (New York: Image, 2002), 195 – 218.
3. Likening a gospel city movement to a biological ecosystem is an analogy, of course, and no analogy illumines the concept at every point. Biological ecosystems consist in some part of stronger animals eating weaker ones. No one should think this means stronger churches should eat weaker ones! Actually, a city in which some churches grow only by drawing members out of other churches is the very opposite of the kind of evangelistic gospel city movement we are seeking. The image of the ecosystem conveys how different organisms are interdependent, how the flourishing of one group helps the other groups flourish.
4. Thanks to Dr. Mark Reynolds for his valuable insights that enhance this section.
5. Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference (New York: Little, Brown, 2000), 12.
Reflections on Movement Dynamics
1. See, e.g., The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2006); On the Verge: A Journey into the Apostolic Future of the Church (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011); The Permanent Revolution: Apostolic Imagination and Practice in the 21st Century Church (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2013).
2. Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (New York: Morrow, 1974), 98.
3. Alan Hirsch and Dave Ferguson, On the Verge: A Journey into the Apostolic Future of the Church (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011), 89. Bill Easum (Leadership on the Other Side [Nashville: Abingdon, 2000], 39) writes, “Churches wanting to break free from the quagmire of their dysfunctional systems and climb out of their downward death spiral must learn to feel, think, and act differently than they do now. The times in which we live require us to change our Life Metaphors, something akin to rewiring the human brain.”
4. Quoted in Scott Nelson, Mission: Living for the Purposes of God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2013), 39.
5. See Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch, The Faith of Leap: Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure, and Courage (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2012).
6. See Peter F. Drucker, Frances Hesselbein, and Joan Snyder Kuhl, Peter Drucker’s Five Most Important Questions: Enduring Wisdom for Today’s Leaders (New York: Wiley, 2015), 51.
7. See chapter 7 in my The Forgotten Ways for an elaboration of movemental organization; see also Hirsch and Ferguson, On the Verge, part 2.
8. See Dee Hock, Birth of the Chaordic Age (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1999), and the more recent edition, One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2005). The challenge Hock gives to every organization is to marry a solid core with a changing periphery; see Hirsch and Ferguson, On the Verge, 45 – 46, 285 – 86, and my The Permanent Revolution, 218 – 20, for an application of this to movement thinking.
9. I cannot emphasize this strongly enough. I believe this is a cornerstone text with huge implications for the church and her mission. To go deeper, read my The Permanent Revolution (devoted to this topic) and The Forgotten Ways (ch. 6), which gives the systemic basis for why movements need APEST. Other excellent books on this topic are Neil Cole, Primal Fire: Reigniting the Church with the Five Gifts of Jesus (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2014), and J. R. Woodward, Creating a Missional Culture: Equipping the Church for the Sake of the World (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2013).
10. Hirsch and Ferguson, On the Verge, 74.
11. Timothy Keller, Center Church (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2012), 347.
1. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 2:1070.