Apostolic | Release the A.P.E.

Book Winners & Five Great Comments!

no responses
November 11, 2012

That was a fun contest and great to hear the responses about what people are shaping with Jesus! I really was impressed with how you all are pusuing God and letting him use you around the world.

I really felt a strong burden to pray for you as I read the comments and I also felt a strong excitement about this A.P.E. community and what God is doing!

I felt very grateful for this blog space and that you all have taken the time to comment and let us into your world!

This really is shaping up to be an online community and that was one of our dreams in starting “Release the A.P.E.”

It has been very exciting and motivating to read these dreams.

The Winners

Kevin Bennett
Russell Almon

Email me at beau@releasetheape.com to give me your address!

Five Comments

Here are five of the comments that were left on the post. I asked people to share about what they are shaping with God. I hope you enjoy these as much as I did. Please say a prayer for them as well for strength, vision, and encouragement.

Free Friday…Book Giveaway

24 responses
November 8, 2012

Hey Everyone!

I am starting a new thing on this blog where I will pick different Fridays to give away some free stuff!

Alan Hirsch and I were at a conference the other week together and he generously gave me a box full of books!

So I am going to share some of that wealth with you and give away two free books today!

“The Shaping of Things to Come” by Alan Hirsch & Michael Frost

I have not read this book myself so I cannot really comment on it. But I know it is about mission and imagination for the future of our church. I cannot wait to read it myself.

Here is how you can enter…

Tell us in the comments what kind of thing you are trying to shape!
- what is a dream or vision you are working on to bring the world to a better place in Christ’s name?
  - give us the 2-3 sentence version 🙂
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share the Facebook Post on our page on your timeline +1 entry

Rhythms of Missional Discipleship

12 responses
November 7, 2012

As apostolic leaders we get fired up every time we meet students who want to step out in mission. We want to help them vision for what God could do in their lives and their friends’ lives. We want to go with them into their corners of the campus and help them plant the gospel there!

But we’ve become deeply aware during this season of ministry that we can’t do life on life discipleship with everyone. We long to see a generation of college students mobilized for mission on Nebraska campuses, but we’ve wrestled with the question of how we can empower every student we work with to grow in lives of missional discipleship.

Here’s our attempt at putting together a simple, reproducible tool to help students develop some rhythms of missional discipleship. There are three areas: Up, In, and Out and each one has a weekly and a daily practice. Almost none of this is original on it’s own. We’ve borrowed and combined ideas from Michael Frost, Alan Hirsch, and Mike Breen. Check it out:

12 Indicators that Leadership is Lacking

4 responses
November 6, 2012

Today I was coaching the staff on my team planting Greek ministry at UCLA. His name is Nick Kwok and he is a great leader with a desire to see God move big time in the Greek system on campus.

But he is also a new planter and is learning on the job how you create, with God, ministry from scratch. Like I have all people under my leadership do, Nick is reading through “Exponential” by Dave and Jon Ferguson and we are talking about what it looks like to develop leaders inside of a movement. How do we reproduce ourselves and others under us?

Well today, he came to me with conviction and said,

“I don’t think I am doing anything that Dave says a leader should do.”

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What is the Difference Between an Evangelist & an Apostle?

24 responses
November 4, 2012

Evangelists help churches grow up, while apostles help churches grow out

[This is part of a series called “What is the difference between an evangelist and an apostle?” check out the other posts here]

In a recent post I wrote about the apostolic role as planter and how they love starting new things. Especially when it is new things that involve lots of new people that are checking out Jesus.

But a question arose in my head as I was writing the post:

Why does that mean you are apostolic and not just evangelistic? What is the difference?

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Apostle as Planter

2 responses
November 1, 2012

[This is part of a series called “What is an Apostle?” Check the other post here]

Apostolic Leaders are planters. They are driven to start new things where the things of God are not happening. Most clearly, planting churches. Be it in neighborhoods, businesses, college campuses or an unreached country, apostolic leaders are all about planting communities of faith in areas where there is no community of faith currently!

They want the Blue Oceans

This was a big reason for me moving to LA this year to start Greek InterVarsity in the county. There are 17 campuses with Greek Systems and very little happening to reach these students. What caused me to ultimately move here and take this assignment from God was the obsession with unreached people, starting something new, and being able to give years towards planting a completely new work that not many people were thinking about.

I resonate with Paul big time when he says in Romans 15:20,

“It has always been my ambition to preach the gospel where Christ was not known, so that I would not be building on someone else’s foundation.”

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Temptations Planters Face: Not Sending

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October 31, 2012

[This is part of the A.P.E. Pitfalls series. Check out the other posts here.]

Earlier this week, I wrote about one of the first temptations planters face–not starting because we assume that it’s not harvest time. In our journey as a region, we’ve had to confront this temptation again and again as we set foot on new campuses and take Jesus at his word that “the fields are ripe with harvest”!

But what happens after you’ve succeeded at starting something new? Then what?

Can You Stop?

one response
October 30, 2012

This guy has no problem at all!

[This is part of the A.P.E. Pitfalls series. Check out the other posts here.]

Athletes, who work out and lift hard, always take rest seriously.

Why?

Because any serious athlete will tell you that it is actually the rest days that help the muscles grow more. Lifting weights helps of course, but the days off when you are sleeping, eating right, and resting the muscles is what gives space for the muscles and body to grow.

WOW!

As an athlete (yes golf is a sport and I did play it in college) this analogy spoke to me.

How am I as a Christian minister and child of God taking regular rest days to let my spiritual muscles grow?

This started to bother me.

Temptations Planters Face: Not Starting

2 responses
October 29, 2012

[This is part of the A.P.E. Pitfalls series. Check out the other posts here.]

I know, I know. You’re busy. You don’t have time to start something new.

Mandy and Jon at DMACC

You’ve got no shortage of things to do–people to influence, teachings to prep, and to-do lists to tackle. Our lives as leaders are full and we often function with little margin. To be sure, many of us need to get better at saying “no” and not jumping at every opportunity that presents itself, but at the same time, I’m convinced that there’s a temptation that operates in many of us as planters– the temptation of not starting.

This year has likely been the busiest of my life–our region is growing and opportunities abound for fruitful ministry on our current campuses. But we’ve committed ourselves to becoming a planting movement, and so as a way to kick-off the Fall, it felt important for me to prioritize an opportunity to start something on a new campus.

Solution to Christendom Challenge?

3 responses
October 28, 2012

[This post is part of the A.P.E. Theology series. Read the rest of the posts here!]

You do not have to look far to discover that Christendom still maintains a stranglehold on the mindset of the American church. Many leaders still maintain that minor tweaks in the why we “do” church brings the possibility of attracting new people to the programs and activities of the church. They simply have not fully grasped the reality that we no longer live in a place where the church is the dominant seat of culture. The shift from a Christendom to Post-Christendom society is nearly complete; and the corresponding challenges are great.

But what is an appropriate response to the challenge?

The solution is to recognize the church’s relationship to the culture in terms of a missionary encounter. In other words, to see that in a Post-Christendom context the church is once again placed in an alien world. The mission field is no longer located somewhere else, instead it surrounds us on every side. And the greatest problem with making cosmetic changes to the church, is when we falsely assume those changes will some how help the church grow and we therefore put our time and energy into those practices instead of equipping and releasing people into this new, and rapidly growing mission field. There is no final answer or perfect solution to transitioning the existing church in a missional direction. But if there was one—a silver bullet—it would be the formation of every church member into a missionary.