If you've been following my blog this week you'll know where I'm heading again today. I am sharing things I learned from the Church Planting Congress in Calgary, which was put on by Church planting Canada. The funny thing is, you may or may not have noticed, Considering the topic, I haven't actually said anything about church planting, well not specifically anyway. There are a few reasons for this, firstly, the congress was mostly focused on Church Planting in an urban setting(I found that hard to connect with, but I could connect it to my existing church and community involvement). Secondly, this conference blew my mind open as to what church planting is all about, so church plant talk doesn't look like it used to. The phrase was said -We used to know what church planting looked like, we Just took what worked well in one community and replicated it all over the place, but now it's different. To reach people we have to be relevant to their neighborhood. So the things I have learned may not look like church plant talk but they are... or so I've learned - this is all very new to me. There was a concentrated focus on being sent into your neighborhood as opposed to being sent to a new location, which of course was pretty much the only way I thought about church planting before the congress. This is not to say that going out to a new location is not needed, I'm just saying they didn't talk about it a lot. My mind was opened to how I can be a church planter right here and how I can use these things I've learned to enhance the church I belong to. One phrase I will leave you with today is Again from Mike Frost "We're not in the business of planting churches.(how ironic) We're not in the business of expanding our denomination. The Goal of Christian Mission is to Alert people to the reign of God." "God is the sent and the sending one and there is no such thing as an unsent Christian. Your mission is not inward."
I hope you could follow my ramblings today.
2 comments:
Wow Cindy...I have so enjoyed your blogs this week. Makes me wish I would have gone. But then I couldn't have spent the time with your beautiful daughters!! Tell me more about "the Reign of God"? What does that mean?
So often I thought of you and wished you could have been there too.... Next time.
Good question about the reign of God. Simply put this phrase is another way to say the Kingdom of God, like we pray " your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven." I want to bring this question to the top of the pile and blog about it next week, thanks for you input and encouragement.
Post a Comment