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  • Mark 12:19 pm on July 25, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Wolfgang Simpson   

    QSQ – A pathway to Movement 

    We in the West are becoming obsessed with people movements… You see this in church conferences too.  ”Church Planting Movements” are all the rage, and they rightly should be!  But it sometimes causes me to smile – My wonderful wife was in a crowd when the speaker asked the question, “What will it take to see a church planting movement in the United States?”  At which point she leaned over to me and said, “Church planting FIBER!”  I love it.

    It is fascinating to read through the pages of the MONDO Layer of the Church (God’s eternal Church, throughout time and space) to see how others have tried to respond to the movement of the Spirit.  What about our actions could partner with or negatively subvert the workings of the Holy Spirit?

    I have seen movements of God absolutely squelched because:

    • Someone wanted to take credit for it,
    • I have seen other movements maligned because a mutation of unhealthy discipleship began manipulating people,
    • Other movements take on distorted views of Jesus Christ,
    • Still others began paying teachers and preachers exorbitant amounts to pacify the rest of the movement into consumers…whoops – that one might have hit too close to home.

    But the question remains – What is the pathway to a church planting movement covering the face the globe, one in which people from every tongue, tribe and nation are able to see a Jesus-centered community close enough to them that they feel as if Jesus himself has “moved into the neighborhood”?

    QSQ – a Pathway to Movement*

    Quality

    The deep shifts that move us away from “church plant engineering” and “multiplication expectations” and “performance anxiety” among the organic churches is to invite people into a life of QUALITY.  Invite people not into a stifling, dead, or manipulative community, but into a rich, dynamic open community full of the metaphors of family.  Point them to the Gospels and to Acts – and all the ways in which God’s in-breaking Kingdom of God will transform their life and their neighborhood.  Go deep with them, and stay there – don’t let them think you’re in it for more church numbers…because you’re not.  You’re in this community with them for the same reason their in it with you - to discover Jesus Christ together.

    Structure

    As you live out your “abundant life” in community with an expectancy for growth (but without expectation), there is the practical and healthy need for STRUCTURE.  The one house church cannot become 2, then 3, then 6, then 12…and so on without a structure to support the same kind of healthy, dynamic God-centered friendship that you experienced at a MESO Level.   So many organic churches don’t get this, to their peril – they think that no structure is the way to stay healthy and vibrant, only to find that the lack of managing a spiritually nurturing system will always be managing them.  The converse is also true – so many program-based, building-based churches rely on an oppressive structure that squelched the life out of them years ago. We need to find healthy “internal” structures and keep the external structures from stifling the life of a multiplying community.

    Quantity

    As QUALITY and STRUCTURE co-mingle, we watch QUANTITY happen naturally.  It is not an explicitly stated outcome – it merely happens.  We want quantity, yes, but to strive for it will ultimately kill the quality, or unnecessarily burden the structures you’ve developed.  Like watching a strawberry plant – it begins as one single plant, you carefully nurture it to maturity, and it will bear rich, delicious fruit – and in time you cultivate a structure around it that promotes and encourages multiplication – and soon the plant is sending out feeders in all directions – using the soil, the sun, the trellis…anything you’ve put in its path to multiply like crazy!

    If we live out of these principles:  Quality, then Structure, then Quantity — and if the Holy Spirit sees our desire for partnership (regardless of who gets the credit!) then we may just see that often spoken-of but much elusive “church planting movement”…but more importantly, we will see a Holy Spirit movement, even here in the Secular West!

    *read more on QSQ: Wolfgang Simpson’s House Church Book (aka Houses that Change the World)

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  • Mark 9:52 am on April 24, 2011 Permalink | Reply
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    The Wrong Newscasters 

    Today:  a strange story about a few hysterical women who come running in from the edges of town with an unbelievable story.

    Something about their Rabbi’s corpse is missing?  In their day, their words wouldn’t even hold up as reliable in a court of law.  Why would a story so central to an emerging faith community under Imperial rule allow the first witnesses to be women?  Why?  Because that’s how God loves to poke fun at us. :)

    Yes, women in the First Century had no more reliability than children when it came to reporting an incident, and yet they were the first witnesses to the Resurrection.  They were the first evangelists – the first missionaries.  In a way, Matthew, John and the other Gospel writers made a choice to include the women as part of their re-telling of this crucial story.  As Christianity spread around the Roman Empire in their day, would anyone in their culture believe this rag-tag group of wild-eyed believers when they heard that it all rested on the testimony of some lower-class women?

    In fact, this “fragile” part of the story is exactly the kind of way God wants to bring his news to folks.  Later apologists would reflect on God’s means to win back his creation:

    1 Cor 1:27 Instead, God chose things the world considers foolish in order to shame those who think they are wise. And he chose things that are powerless to shame those who are powerful. 28 God chose things despised by the world, things counted as nothing at all, and used them to bring to nothing what the world considers important. 29 As a result, no one can ever boast in the presence of God.

    “Jesus is risen!” Scream the winded women as they catch their breath at the door of the disciples rented home.  And the men  have a choice.  Do they go along with the social norms of this world, and pass up what these ladies are saying for favor of living with the way they currently understand the world to work:

    that women can’t reliably tell us the truth…

    that our dreams and hopes are crushed by those in power…

    …that people who are dead stay dead…

    Or will the disciples choose to live in a new kind of world – one where hope overcomes fear, where men and women learn to watch for God together, and…where He is Risen…Indeed!

    The choice is still being made today… in you, and in me.

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  • Mark 7:16 am on April 18, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

    Adventures in Missing the Point 

    We humans are pretty funny creatures.

    We hold in us the very essence of the Divine, the purpose of all creation.  We are the very focus of God’s love and his mission.  We were important enough to him to put everything else in the cosmos on hold so he could live and dwell among us as our friend.

    He dined with us; he died for us.

    And still – we have this funny habit of majoring in the minors.  What more does the Church bicker about than Communion / the Eucharist / the Lord’s Supper… see!  We can’t even agree on what to call it!  :)

    I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised.  When something of that magnitude – dining with our Creator, is handed to us mortals, we have a tendency to shoot off in unimportant rabbit trails, just like the disciples did on that final evening with Jesus in the upper room.  As Jesus is sharing the elements of bread and wine, washing feet and calling them “friends,” they are busy bickering about who will desert Jesus – and we have been bickering ever since.  Right in the presence of Jesus, we have all these ‘adventures in missing the point.’

    Its almost as if we have some mechanism in our minds that numbs us from approaching what is real – and we choose instead the tertiary, the tangential and the temporary.

    It is like Mary hiding in the kitchen preparing the food to the neglect of her guest – Jesus, Immanuel…God with us.  God may be ‘with us’…but are we with him? Or are we just in the other room, finishing up the dessert?

    When it comes to Communion/Lord’s Supper, whatever you want to call it – (don’t call it anything!), let that be the one time when formalities don’t have to matter.  Who cares whether there should be leavened or unleavened bread, one or two cups of wine (grape juice?)

    Maybe its time to re-institute the holy sacrament of playfulness, of friendliness, of devotion to the one thing that matters.  Is it worth giving up your connection to Jesus to decide whether or not to pass a plate of bread around the room, or to come to the front to receive it?

    I’m done majoring in the minors.  I’m done focusing on the steps of the dance, and instead simply enjoying my Dance-Partner.  I’m interested in looking squarely into Jesus’ eyes and letting him remain the center of my life – where he wants to be anyway.  I’m ready to have some fun in my friendship with him – to let his love be the driving force of my theology, my liturgy, my life.  Its so much more fun!

    How about you?

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