Ministry of the Missional Church , livre ebook

The Ministry of the Missional Church
The Ministry of the Missional Church
A Community Led by the Spirit
Craig Van Gelder
2007 by Craig Van Gelder
Published by Baker Books a division of Baker Publishing Group P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287 www.bakerbooks.com
Printed in the United States of America
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means-for example, electronic, photocopy, recording-without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Van Gelder, Craig.
The ministry of the missional church : a community led by the spirit / Craig Van Gelder.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 10: 0-8010-9139-X (pbk.)
ISBN 978-0-8010-9139-1 (pbk.)
1. Mission of the church. 2. Church work. 3. Community-Religious aspects- Christianity. 4. Holy Spirit. I. Title.
BV601.8.V28 2007
266-dc22
2007015763
Scripture is taken from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Permission was granted for use and adaptation of the following sources:
Craig Van Gelder, From Corporate Church to Missional Church: The Challenge Facing Congregations Today, Review and Expositor 101, no. 3 (Summer 2004): 425-50.
Craig Van Gelder, The Hermeneutics of Leading in Mission, Journal of Religious Leadership 3, nos. 1-2 (2004): 139-72.
To all of my students over the years who have continued to challenge and inspire me as we sought together to better understand how to love and serve God
Contents
List of Figures
Foreword by Alan J. Roxburgh
1. Spirit-Led Ministry
2. Spirit-Led Ministry in the Bible
3. Spirit-Led Ministry in Context
4. Spirit-Led Ministry in the U.S. Context and in the Missional Church
5. Spirit-Led Discernment and Decision Making
6. Spirit-Led Leadership and Organization
7. Spirit-Led Growth and Development
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Figures
1. A Theological Theory of Action
2. The Five Phases of the Discernment Process
3. An Open Systems Perspective
4. A Congregation from an Open Systems Perspective
4.1 Community/Environment
4.2 Congregation/Boundaries
4.3 Feedback and Results
4.4 Purpose (Mission), Core Missional Practices, and Vision
4.5 Leadership and Infrastructure
4.6 Holy Spirit Guiding Transformation
5. A Congregation from an Open Systems Perspective with Transformation
6. Types of Decision-Making Coalitions
7. Types of Planned Change
8. The Cycle of the Process of Change
9. Persons Responses to Change
Foreword
The Spirit of the Lord fills the whole world The Spirit of the Lord moves over the deep The Spirit of the Lord warms our hearts The Spirit of the Lord fills all things.
Matthew Kelly, The Rhythm of Life
This is the invocation for each Wednesday morning in my daily office-it calls us to confess again the source of our lives and the ways God shapes and empowers the church. Scripture tells of God filling us with a new Spirit. In John 20, Jesus appears before his frightened disciples in a locked room, breathes on them the Spirit of God, and creation is reconstituted as the church is born with an identity and mandate to be the sign, witness, and foretaste of where God is moving within all creation. It is in the power of the Spirit that the church receives this mandate, and it is only through the indwelling of the Spirit that the church engages in the ministry of the kingdom. The power of this book is how it is rooted in this recognition and framed by this conviction.
Craig Van Gelder first came onto the screen of my life almost twenty years ago! I was in my second pastorate in Toronto, Canada. It was becoming clear to me as a Canadian that my generation was then far from being called Christian and that most church growth was about the circulation of the saints. It was a time of intense reading and study for me as I searched for ways to frame questions about the place of the church in our culture. I found few in my own context who understood or appreciated the existential nature of my questions about the meaning of Christian life in this strange new world. I was attending a conference one cold May weekend in Chicago that was sponsored by the Seminary Consortium for Urban Pastoral Education (SCUPE). A workshop had a beguiling title about the new missionary situation of the church in North America. I sat in the back of the room listening to Craig talk with deep passion about this theme and was enthralled. I was on a long journey in which my current maps of the territory were becoming more and more useless. I felt lost and alone in a place that didn t make sense anymore. Listening to Craig I knew that, at last, here was someone who understood and could articulate why the maps had failed. He was pointing to ways for us to imagine a different way of being for the church in North America.
Over these twenty years I ve come to know Craig as a friend and scholar. I have learned so much from the perspective he brings to the missional conversation. He has an amazing mixture of skills that uniquely equip him to engage the subject of this book. First and foremost, Craig has a passion for the gospel. This is his focus. He s driven to understand the question of what God is doing in the world, and it is not just a polite theological idea. Craig, as you will discover in this book, can bring such a breadth of disciplines and skills to a conversation that you will be amazed at his ability to synthesize complex subjects covering a multiplicity of disciplines. But all this learning is always being used at the service of this one thing-addressing the question of what God is doing in the world. His work is theological and framed by the God question. Hence, this book is an argument for the critical need to understand what the Spirit of God is up to in the world and, therefore, the ways in which the Spirit is seeking to shape the ministry of the church.
A second focus in Craig s writing is the missional church. He is always attending to the meaning and interpretation of a missional theology applied to and engaged with ecclesiology (the questions of what it means to be the church). Craig is immersed in the literature of missional theology and missional church. His lifework is the framing of a domestic missiology for North America. I know of no one who has so consistently followed this commitment in seeking to articulate a thoroughly missional reading of the church. In this book you will find the distillation of this theology and its application for the ministry of the church. This follows from his earlier book The Essence of the Church: A Community Created by the Spirit , in which he locates the issues that must be addressed by the church in North America in order to form a missional way of life shaped by the intentions of God.
A third focus of Craig s attention and passion is the local church and the systems that comprise local churches. He brings his learning and skill to the question of what God is doing in and among the people of local churches and the denominational systems that serve them. This book about the ministry of the missional church is for communities of God s people in local contexts that represent a variety of traditions and histories. For those wanting to discover how their traditions and histories have both shaped their story and can become forces in framing missional life, this book offers a comprehensive mapping of how denominations took shape in North America as well as how these traditions can provide important pointers forward.
A fourth focus of Craig s work that is manifest in this book is organizational systems. I know of no other individual in the church world who understands organizational theory and organizational change as does Craig. He has been a consultant to church organizations (local churches, denominational systems, and schools) for many years. He knows the theories and is familiar with all the literature-he owns this field inside the church world. There is no better person than Craig for developing processes for change and innovation from the perspective of the organizational systems of churches and the systems that serve them. As you read through this book you will be introduced to multiple frameworks of organizational life, and you will be provided concrete, practical ways of thinking through how to apply missional innovation in your context. But you will not find this material in the first few chapters. Craig loves the church too much to simply write a book that offers only a set of organizational or management techniques. He knows that the adaptive innovations which are required in our time are about theology, about an imagination for what God is up to in the world, and about what the Spirit is doing in and through the church.
All these foci are woven together in this book. It needs to be read developmentally. Chapter builds upon chapter as Craig creates a map. It begins with an argument for the formation of Spirit-shaped, missional ministry and roots that argument in a biblical framing of God s purposes in the world. These early chapters invite you into a journey of discovery about what the Spirit of God is up to in and through the church in the world. It is from this starting point that you are led into concrete and practical ways to cultivate missional churches. This is an important book: its chapters give you the frameworks and tools to help form missional ministry within multiple contexts. It s easy to write books that offer quick solutions for making the church work. Craig Van Gelder provides an alternative approach by helping you first to frame your world as a leader and then to develop a map for engaging in ministry, a minist