Doug Clark, pastor of GCC, met Reggie through the Leadership Network. Through that connection, he asked Reggie to come to Tyler to speak to local pastors and Grace staff about how to best do church.
This post consists of main points culled during his GCC staff lunch talk...
During this session I learned more about the passion driving the vision of Grace than I have in over 20 months of service...
Pew Stats
- 16% of all Americans are non affiliated or do not identify with any church or religion
- 19.6% of all American men are non affiliated
- 25% of all Americans under age 30 are non affiliated
Are we in a post Christian culture or pre Christian culture? Reggie likes to think of America in a pre Christian culture primed to be ministered to. There are many people even in our local culture that are pre Christian. They are not influenced by religion and since most churches aim toward serving Christian's there will be a larger percentage of non affiliates in our local culture.
This is a great opportunity for effective missional ministry.
Shift #1
How do we then start a discussion of expanding bandwidth of velcro where non affiliated peoples can stick to God?
Most people have been conditioned to look at church as a vendor of religious goods and services. Ministries are like a pez dispensers. But we should be more incarnational in our ministry approach. Missional.
Energies should refocus because our scorecard of measuring success is screwed up... the way we measure church as a success is errant.
- internal focused church vs external focused church
- instead of program driven churches we should produce missional Christians who see themselves as the church
- the missional mindset is we are the church wherever we are (Doug's been saying this for quite some time now)
- an internal focused church is an attractional model (ex: hire a good looking eloquent pastor to draw more people to the church). For example imagine a church with increasing people attending while simultaneously more people in the communities surrounding the church are growing poor yet there is no correlation between the two. that's wrong isn't it. shouldn't our efforts as church be more incarnational... - church as the destination vs church as the connector
- the church is not the destination but rather the connector.
- being church centric is not new testament. church is not the stopping place. the destination is the kingdom... - attractional vs incarnation
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