At Global Connect

This weekend I am speaking at Global Connect, a conference organized by and for Christian Associates International. Great people!!!! I really love hanging around them. They are inspiring! Which is partly why I accepted their invitation to speak. The other reason is because the folk connected with Christian Associates are some of the most cutting edge and intentionally missional people you will ever meet. Their founder, Linus Morris, is here [we met in Budapest about 8 years ago] and the new president Rob Fairbanks. Both incredible people.

The theme of the conference is “Being the Body” and my part, apart from just being really really ridiculously good looking, will be exploring the contours of a Biblical ecclesiology to match our strategies for the next season. One question I would like to address is related to all the missional church books everyone has been reading and look at a few assumptions, some challenges and possibly some detours that will help us all move ahead.

If you are here at the conference and want to help me out, which I hope you will do, check out David Fitch’s blog post from a few weeks ago and start formulating a response. Is the missional church idea “fundamentally flawed”? Did Alan Hirsch and Michael Frost attempt to “de-ecclesiologize the church”? If the church dispersed lacks visibility due to the abandonment or non-investment in institutional structures, how can we make the invisible visible?

If you cant be with us here in Germany, you can follow the conference on Twitter or Facebook

Andrew

Andrew Jones launched his first internet space in 1997 and has been teaching on related issues for the past 20 years. He travels all the time but lives between Wellington, San Francisco and a hobbit home in Prague.

4 Comments

  • Kelly Crull says:

    Actually, it’s better to follow the Christian Associates conference on Twitter here: http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23Connect10

  • Troy says:

    Thanks for being such a good sport about my prayer for you tonight, Andrew!
    Have really appreciated your ministry here with us.
    Blessing on you!
    Troy

  • The Advocate says:

    Thanks for the Zoolander nod…

  • This is good stuff!
    I don’t think that Alan and Michael “de-ecclesiologized the church” with their challenge to the church to be missional. However I think maybe that the trend to be missional has caused many of us to be more individualistic in missional church/community planting. As a result, maybe it has become harder to see the church being visable and it takes more work to be unified and therefore more work to make the church visable as a whole? As a result of this individualism, the church has become less visible and that makes unity amongst groups difficult. Only with some form of unity will we really be visible to the world without having emphasis on church buildings. I’m all for individuality but individuality cannot be expressed apart from some sort of community which is based on unity.
    As someone who is involved in missional church/community planting and have several friends who are involved in it as well, I think there’s a danger that not a lot of people are talking about when it comes to being missional: having a lack of healthy boundaries. For example, I know some people who were called to start a church community with the poor and homeless and so they moved into the inner city to live among them. But due to the constant toll of living among the poor and homeless constantly caused one of them to get really sick with an illness that doctors didn’t know what it was. As a result, the family had to move out of the area into the suburbs for the sake of their health and in order to continue working with the poor and homeless on a long term basis. Another example: I know some friends who are called to reach out to New Agers, Wiccans, etc. So they moved into a hotspot area where these people are. They go out daily connecting with these people and it has been a real battle for them spiritually. However they lived next door to some people who practiced witchcraft and they regularly casted spells on them. Not only did they have to fight out on the streets but also at home when they came from being out all day working with people. Home should be a place where you don’t have to fight all the time. Consequently they got drained really fast and they had to leave the mission field and go home in order to take care of themselves.
    I am for being incarnational and I believe in being missional but I think there’s needs to be a healthy discussion of knowing what our limits are and setting up healthy boundaries.

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