“For nine-tenths of us, believing in God is not the problem. The real issue is belonging. We have lost track of how to be in relationship with God.” – Pg 11
Dave and Jon Ferguson, founders of Community Christian Church in Chicago, have put out a REMARKABLE book this week. It is called Finding Your Way Back To God and it is designed for seeking people that long for connection with God but don’t know how to make that happen.
As many of you know my wife and I work with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship with a specific emphasis in reaching fraternity and sorority students. We moved to LA two and a half years ago to start a ministry that would reach all 17 Greek Systems in the Greater Los Angeles area.
One of the highlights of the year is National Greek Conference in Indianapolis and it is this weekend. There are 650 students here – all Greek – and they are seeking God and surrendering their life to him in many ways. We have flown out over 20 students from LA to be a part of this awesome conference.
This is a guest post by Brian Sanders. He leads an incredible church network in Tampa Bay called Underground. He is one of the most inspiring leaders I know. I love listening to him teach and I love the way he thinks about leadership, church planting, and missional communities. He is an apostolic leader through and through and you see this no better than in the way he is the chief architect for his network of churches. But he also comes hard with timely prophetic words. One of which was his last post you can find here.
Sometimes, what appeals to us in the word and world of the apostle is the sense of grandeur and even importance it conjures. I think this is a deep misunderstanding of the calling of an apostle. We should not aspire to engage in apostolic ministry or apostolic calling because it somehow seems BIGGER than merely being a pastor. We do not rail against the shepherd-teacher model of church because it is too small. Its smallness is probably one of the things that is most noble about that kind of church and ministry. We challenge it because it is out of balance, not because it is small. I keep meeting people who are nominally claiming an apostolic rubric for their ambition, simply to mask their delusions of grandeur. No one wants to plant a church anymore, they want to plant a movement. In one sense this is the epitome of the apostolic urge, and it can be very holy – but only if it is accompanied with an equally profound personal humility. The role of apostle should actually be the most modest of all the roles because nothing that we do or dream is FOR us or ABOUT us.
One of the key tasks of leadership is to get people to buy in to the mission – especially talented people that are all over the place.
One of the sad things that I see is apostolic, prophetic, and evangelistic leaders written off too quickly because they don’t fit ministry contexts primarily driven by shepherding and teaching activities. Because they are not fitting in well, they get distracted, pull in different directions, and often times are not brought into the center of the mission.
From the book Primal Fire, By Neil Cole with Dezi Baker, Ed Waken, Phil Helfer and Paul Kaak
As we look back over church history, we might be tempted to ask where all the APEs have gone? The church has long been dominated by pastors and teachers (who are often seen as one and the same), but the apostles, prophets, and evangelists have largely been missing from the local church context. Ephesians 4 is clear that all the gifts come from Jesus and that all the gifts are necessary for the equipping of the saints for the work of service. Did He stop giving certain gifts because they were cast aside or not appreciated? No, all the gifts are given until the body is fully mature, so all the gifts are present in every generation, though they may not be evident.
