Book Review: Church Zero

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zeroBy Dr. Mark Convoy

The Church of Jesus Christ sports a 2000 year history, punctuated by breakthroughs, set-backs, catastrophes, and new beginnings. Peyton Jones’s book, “Church Zero” is nothing less than a cry for a hard-boot, restart of the modern evangelical leadership structure.  Imagine the gall of an upstart Southern California church planter, calling for nothing less than the restructuring of the modern common highly centralized evangelical church leadership model. Then imagine the possibility that he may be right.

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4 Lessons Learned on the Missional Journey

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pmo-lessons-learned

By Laura Hairston

About 4 years ago, my husband, Ryan and I heard the term ‘missional’ for the first time. For us, it was a completely new concept learning to live as missionaries in the places God had already placed us. Also, hearing of the 60% who would never walk through the doors of the church on our best Sunday where we were on staff. And, hey, I grew up a southern Baptist girl in Texas – all of this rocked my world, as I am sure you can imagine.

So, we made a huge paradigm shift and life change.

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ReThinking Witness: Creating a Culture for Discipling Skeptics

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discipling-skeptics

A blog post about James & my new ebook was written last week highlight a section of our book. If you would like to read an excerpt before downloading, now is your chance.

When it comes to discipling skeptics and seekers, we’ve found that it’s easier for believers to get involved in evangelism when you have an evangelistic community that supports their endeavors. Not only that, they’ll also be more effective. To do that, you need to address the culture of your faith community. How would you change a church culture so that it supported discipling of skeptics and seekers? Here’s a summary of five (download our new eBook,  Discipling Skeptics and Seekers,for the full text) of six rhythms that can help:

Read the full article with the five rhythms here.

The Five-Fold Symphony: How the Gifts Work Together

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By Jon Hietbrink

God gives us gifts to play a symphony, not a solo.

Every significant discussion of spiritual gifts[1] in the New Testament is situated in the context of a complex system—we are “one body with many parts” designed to operate in symbiotic harmony with one another. The problem is that the way we’re taught to understand and express our spiritual giftedness can often be a very individualized and siloed experience—we’re taught to understand our personal gifts, but we’re left to wonder how those gifts actually work together in the way God intended.

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How to Stop Running Fruitless Events

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Studio shot of yellow apples in a wooden bucket

Here is a great article from the InterVarsity Evangelism blog. If you are calibrating your church or campus ministry to be more fruitful evangelistically, please read this. It has great advice. Here are a few excerpts below and a link to the whole post.

That’s right. Sixty newcomers have a great evening listening to someone explain the message of Jesus, love what they hear, and spend a long time discussing it afterwards with their Christian friends. Somehow, though, not a single one becomes a follower of Jesus.

Very odd. It’s not like this was a tough audience. What went wrong?

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How To Welcome A Prophet

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Yikes!

3pdD94DMThis 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.

Prophetic types might be the hardest to welcome because their gift is often unwanted. Even the most refined prophets are hard to hear. The history of, well, history—is that religious people don’t just fail to welcome prophets, we kill them. Here, then are some tips on how to welcome (and not kill) your prophets.

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