Just looking through my notes from the 'Emerging Churches' workshop with Eddie Gibbs yesterday. There is quite a bit of stuff even in the limited number of notes I took (thankfully he gave us all his powerpoint slides so we didn't have to write everything down).
One thing he stressed about the emerging church is the desire to move from being consumer-driven to being missional (carrying out the mission of Jesus in the world). He says roughly 2% of people in the church are paid staff, and 18% are volunteer leaders. In the consumer church that means 20% of the people are expected to spend their time trying to keep the other 80% happy.
But in the missional church - the 20% should be spending their time training and equipping the 80% in learning to live like Jesus, therefore carrying out his mission in the world. He says we should never "dismiss" a congregation, but we should "disperse it" at the end of a service.
He says a 'Missional Community' ... "Consists of followers of Jesus who are seeking together to be faithful in their place and time."
He referred to the book 'The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations' (by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom). To kill (or stop) a spider, all one must do is step on it. But with a starfish - if you cut off a leg (are they called legs?), it will eventually grow back. So that doesn't work. The correlation is... we often try to bring about change (eliminate an unwanted enemy perhaps) by trying to stomp it out - only to see it resurface later. What Jesus was trying to teach us is how to conquer evil not by crushing it, but by changing the environment in which it lives (that's how starfish are removed). Hmm... you could apply this to a lot of things...
No comments:
Post a Comment