Heard about this conference thru the DTS Alumni grapevine, and thought I’d share the invitation with the blogosphere, since there are many churches doing missional things everywhere.
The Center for Christian Leadership is pleased to announce an upcoming conference, Beyond the Church Doors: Developing a Missional Mindset within Your Congregation, on March 31 and April 1, 2008, featuring Dr. Ed Stetzer and Dr. Alan Roxburgh. If your church is developing creative and strategic ways of engaging in missional ministry, we would like to profile your activities in our conference materials.
Take the Missional Church Survey online >>
Many North American churches today are shifting away from an “attractional model” of ministry designed to draw people into the church building to a “missional model” which involves training and equipping whole congregations to act as missionaries in their local communities. We would like to know how your church is engaging in ministries of compassion and service in order to further the gospel and impact the culture. …
We are compiling a list of stories that will inspire others to creatively engage in missional practices. Please share one or two of your church’s activities that have impacted your community.
Good idea about collecting stories… Are you going to publish this online? Actually think it would be really cool to have a website / a central online repository where people can post stories on the ways that they have been missional (in their workplaces, neighborhoods, schools, etc.), along with results, and swap ideas on how to be missional. I just keep hearing people asking about how to make their faith relevant outside of church and not getting a lot of concrete, practical answers. So it would be neat if there was a way for Christians across the country to share ideas… Also neat if there was a way to “tag” the ideas by context and/or type of demographic being served (e.g., workplaces by category – research, management consulting, investment banking, the arts, technology, television production, etc.) — a searchable, sortable database structure. This would almost be like a wikipedia for living in the world but not being of the world.
Unfortunately, no, I’m not publishing the missional stories. The stories are being collected by Dallas Seminary to help inform how they put together the conference in Spring 2008. I think there are lots of missional stories scattered around the blogosophere and it takes on many different forms. I haven’t found tagging to actually work that well — it’s been my experience that when I’ve tagged things, very few people don’t actually click on the tags. So I ask myself, why am I spending my extra minutes tagging when (almost) no one clicks on them?