[featured_image]For today’s post, I’ve joined the 7 Link Challenge posted by Darren Rowse on problogger.net. Here’s Darren’s challenge: Publish a post that is a list of 7 links to posts that you and others have written that respond to 7 categories listed below.
I’ve been blogging for the past four years, so it was fun to review many of my posts and choose the following to share with you!I I hope you’ll take the time to read all and consider each one…
My first post:
Finishing Well
I started The Missional Challenge blog on June 1, 2006 as I was transitioning out of my role as pastor of Lake Hills Church in Castaic, California. I was intrigued by this statement: Few leaders in Christian ministry finish well! Read the post and discover what Bobby Clinton has learned that it takes to finish well!
A post I enjoyed writing the most:
Remove the Queen
To pick a post that I enjoyed writing the most is impossible. However, rather than skip this item in the list, I decided to pick one of the posts I enjoyed writing. Listening to Alan Hirsch refer to the Sunday worship service as the Queen on a chess board really helped me to see how churches overuse the Queen. They expect the Sunday worship service to accomplish everything. I decided to expound on this idea in this post. I love encouraging church planters to discover how to “be the church” before they actually start “doing church” on Sundays. I hope you enjoy this one!
A post which had a great discussion:
The Essence of Any Church is its Mission
This is a short post of a couple of quotes from my friend Tom Clegg in his book,
Lost in America, on the mission of the church. As I read through the comments, I found it very interesting how the discussion added to the understanding of what the Church’s mission is all about. Feel free to add your comments…
A post on someone else’s blog that I wish I’d written:
know and love your city
I met Eugene Cho shortly after I moved to Seattle. I loved the way that he embraced Seattle and sought to impact the city with the gospel. In this post, I sense his love for Seattle and it challenges me to know and love this city too. I wish that I had written this post. Do you know and love your city?
My most helpful post:
Pre-Conversion Discipleship
Of course, I hope that all my posts are extremely helpful to everyone. This one, though, captures one of the most important shifts that has taken place in my thinking over the past ten years. I hope that you find it helpful!
A post with a title that I’m proud of:
we’re not like the church that you don’t want to go to
I planted a church in 1990 in Castaic, California. I lot of what I’ve written about on my blog comes from my experiences as a church planting pastor over 16 years. There’s certainly a lot that I’d do differently if I were to plant a church again. I’m grateful for the lessons that I’ve learned and I hope that others will benefit from what I’ve written. I liked this post title because I think it captured what was in my mind as we planted Lake Hills – as well as what many church planters are thinking. Here’s the question I’d like to ask today: “What would happen if your church stopped trying to attract “unchurched” people to come and hear the gospel in church and started equipping believers to go and proclaim the gospel and make disciples?”
Another title that I liked was “Jesus Christ is not a Weapon” (inspired by an episode of LOST).
A post that I wish more people had read:
Infantilism
As I wrote my doctoral dissertation, I focused on the obstacles that get in the way of Missional Christianity. One of them is Infantilism – the inability of a Christian to spiritually feed oneself, resulting in an unhealthy dependence on supplemental nourishment from pre-digested food (sermons, books, study guides, etc.). I hope that what I posted will inspire you to become a self-feeder! (Additional obstacles that I’ve posted on include Attractionalism, Consumerism and Extractionalism)
