Here’s a quick recap of the major highlights from the missional conversation last week: N.T. Wright performed at The Rabbit Room (not to be confused with The Bunny Ranch), singing an original song he co-wrote with Francis Collins called “Genesis” (sung to the tune of The Beatles “Yesterday”), as well as an interesting cover of Bob Dylan’s “When The Ship Comes In.” (Don’t quit your day job, Tom!) Wright was making other headlines around his views on Heaven. Money quote:... Read more
THIS: Oh, and THIS: And, well, this: Read more
Verge Network is giving away the first chapter of Mike Breen’s new book Multiplying Missional Leaders. For the “cost” of following @VergeNetwork on Twitter and posting a promotional tweet about the offer, you can get the six-page introduction to the book as a PDF download. I’m looking forward to reading Breen’s new book, and I’m intrigued to discover the nifty system Verge is using to make this offer available, which is called TweetAndGetIt. I’m also planning to do some free... Read more
Chris Dixon, founder of Hunch and SiteAdvisor, writes, If you are starting a company and wondering why nothing good seems to happen unless you force it to happen, that’s because the world wants to stay the way it is. Customers, partners, and most of all incumbents don’t want to think hard, try new things, or change in any way. The world is lazy and just wants to keep doing what it’s doing. … First-time entrepreneurs often fail to realize that... Read more
How you would use $3,000 toward uniting and improving your community through storytelling? The story is yours to tell, so be creative and submit your idea between May 15 and June 12 at noon PST. Then, from June 12 to July 3, get a group of supporting characters to vote for your project during public voting. The top-voted submission will win $3,000 to implement their idea. Apply at stories.maker.good.is (via Kris Socall on Facebook) Read more
Yes, shifty missioners, Christmas has come early this year — in the form of this spiffing new video of N.T. Wright singing the Bob Dylan classic “When The Ship Comes In”: Bishop Wright says the song is “stuffed full of wonderful biblical imagery” and, as he says, “it’s basically eschatology.” While I’m impressed with his courage to sing in front of an audience, the performance leaves a little something to be desired. I’ll just say, please keep your day job,... Read more
As a post-evangelical (progressive evangelical?), it wasn’t that long ago that I thought almost exclusively in a very narrow, evangelical theological framework. I remember thinking that — since evangelical (as an adjective/descriptor) seemed to be on the decline and missional was in its ascendency — that missional might even replace evangelical as the primary identification for Christians. That, of course, assumes evangelical is the primary identifier right now and totally discounts or disregards the other ways that Christians the world... Read more
That’s the question I get asked over and over again in my work as Minister for Missional Initiatives for Hope Partnership for Missional Transformation. (Did you see that word in there a couple times? Yeah.) It’s also the question that will not be easily answered in a single blog post. (Watch for more on this topic in future posts!) But, for what it’s worth, here’s my elevator speech answer to the question: Missional means participating with God in what God... Read more
To find out more about me (your Missional Shift blog host, Steve Knight), the work I do with Hope Partnership, and my thoughts on missional church, check out this recent, hour-long interview that Chris Yaw at ChurchNext.TV did with me: Did you watch the whole thing? What did you think? What did you like most in what I said? What did you not like? Read more
Over the past two decades, the missional church conversation has become a very “big tent” conversation here in North America, with more than 1,000 books written that explore the topic, the history of the movement and its implications. There are dozens of conferences now being held annually that are exclusively “missional” or that have a “missional” learning track of some kind. There are various missional church networks that have formed to promote missional living and church planting. (Full disclosure: I... Read more
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