Note: This is part of a series that started with the March 28 post. Small congregations are like Trader Joe’s—they have all of the basics: bread, milk, fruit, but there’s not a huge selection. They’re not going for huge; they’re going for specialties… things...
There are three kinds of churches: Trader Joe’s, SuperTarget, and the Farmer’s market. If we want to be incarnational and missional, it doesn’t really matter what the forms are. There’s nothing inherently good or bad about any of these models. The...
Some of you may have seen this image before. It’s the root structure of a grove of aspen trees. This has become the guiding image for the network of missional house churches I’m helping start. The aspen grove is actually the world’s largest organism as the entire...
One of bigger shifts in church planting over the years is from attractional to missional. “Build a program and they will come” is just not true anymore. Missional church plants require living incarnationally in order to draw people toward Jesus. But this isn’t to...
“The gospel is like a seed, and you have to sow it…. Now, when missionaries came to our lands they brought not only the seed of the gospel, but their own plant of Christianity, flower pot included! So what we have to do is to break the flowerpot, take out the seed of...
When I asked a German church planter how large his church was, he responded: “We have 90 people meeting in cells.” That’s an interesting answer. Most American pastors would immediately have indicated the size of their worship service. I then discovered he was planting...
