Tag Archive - missional

Innovation3 Gathering: Missional Community

January 28, 2009 in Marriage-Family, Ministry-Theology with 0 Comments

Stay tuned for the second part of my interview with Anne Jackson tomorrow.

Blogworld and New Media Expo & GodblogCon

September 22, 2008 in Ministry-Theology with 2 Comments

This last weekend was a great time at Blogworld and New Media Expo, and GodblogCon.

It was my fourth year at GodblogCon, and my 2nd time at Blogworld.

I have some thoughts about the conference and I will be posting them this week, but just a sampler of some things that stood out to me.

  1. Moving GodblogCon to Vegas last year to be a part of Blogworld and New Media Expo was a great choice.  I would actually be interested in exploring with the Godblog people some ways that we can integrate even more, so it’s not two separate conferences.


  2. Huge, huge props to John Mark Reynolds, Dustin Steeve and the crew from Biola’s Torrey Honor’s Institute for putting together a great conference.  They are some of the most amazing and hospitable people there are, and I’m glad to be a part of such a great group. Thanks Dustin and crew.


  3. Missional thinking: The connection between the two conferences this weekend was tech, new media, social media, etc.  As Christians we need to do a better job of finding our common ground with others, with the world, build relationships, etc.


  4. New media and tech people seem to be very accessible, patient and easy going to me.  The Church can learn a lot from them, especially how they collaborate with one another, communicate from decentralized positions/relationships, etc, etc.  I was super impressed with how accessible all the big speakers were, and how they spent a great amount of time talking to people. Chris Brogan, Andrew Jones and Guy Kawasaki come to mind.  This conference doesn’t seem to have the speakers that roll in at the last minute VIP and then leave.  The speakers are great.  Very participatory feel.  Again, something Church conferences can learn from.


  5. It’s great to see friends at the conference who are involved in Church-land, but who get new media technology and are using it.  I’m thinking of people like Matt Singley, Andrew Jackson and Lars Rood.

Again, I will post more this week on some more specific issues.  But before I do I have a question.

GodblogCon seems like it’s on the verge of becoming more integrated with Blogworld.  And it probably can take some more strides.

Are there any other major conferences where we can bring together the Church and the non-Church world, using our common interests to unite us, but allowing our differences to teach and learn from one another?

Alan Hirsch’s Fivefold Leadership Roles for Ministry

June 18, 2008 in Ministry-Theology with 4 Comments

Alan Hirsch has a great article in Leadership Journal on what he considers to be the fivefold ministry in leadership, Three Over-looked Leadership Roles.

Hirsch’s main argument is that if we look at church leadership from Ephesians 4:11 we see five different leadership roles (apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds and teachers, but that the Church for too long has only focused on teachers and shepherds at the exclusion of the others. Hirsch says:

While at South, I was invited to lead a revitalization movement within my denomination—the fourth largest Protestant denomination in Australia. Seeing things from this higher altitude, I recognized that South was not the only church facing a crisis. My entire denomination needed to shift toward a missional culture if it was to grow and survive. But how?

We needed a new type of leadership, one with the courage to question the status quo, to dream of new possibilities, and to innovate new ways of being the people of God in a post-Christian culture. We needed missionaries to the West, but our seminaries were not producing them. If we take the five categories of church leadership from Ephesians 4:11, they were training leaders to be teachers and pastors for established congregations, but where were the evangelists, the prophets, and the apostles to lead the mission of the gospel into the world?

Apostles, Prophets, Evangelists, Shepherds, and Teachers—I refer to these together as APEST. But when I looked at my church and most others, I saw congregations dominated by leaders who were shepherds and teachers. What happened to the other leadership types?

Hirsch points towards much more of a collaborative team effort than what is seen in many churches where there is one pastor (head pastor, preaching pastor, exec. pastor, etc.) who makes all the decisions, or there is a very limited group in the decision making process. With a more diverse and collaborative team effort there is an increase in tension which brings fruition the best of all the leadership roles, rather than excluding some to the detriment of others.

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