Isn’t She Beautiful | Becoming the Church

Becoming The Church:
Neighborhoods of Hope in a Culture of Despair
Andrew Richards, Brad Nelson and Nate Ledbetter

• What does it look like to mobilize the church?
• Maybe the instrument of measure isn’t “more” but “less”
-Less poverty
- Less insecurity

• Sometimes it feels like a “pet the poor project”

• Who is helping this house church along the way?
• The idea of becoming the kind of church that God would have us be
• “Be prepared to give an answer for the hope that lies within you…” Is anyone asking about the hope?
• Are we part of a great story? A story that people are asking about?
• Join in suffering and relationship
• When you go out you’re not just fixing, you’re joining
• We are in the midst of an empire of global consumerism
• The chief end of man is not just to buy and vote, but to take the resources we have and subvert them for the good of the world
• The church as a subversive organization
- Al-Qaeda- young boys are taken in and given training, education, and A STORY
- They are trained to go into the world and live out their mission of destruction and death
• We’ve lost the imagination to tell compelling story
• How was the house church positioned?
• They misused the narrative
• When you study the narrative it becomes clear that God wants to use broken people
• We have to be comfortable with our own story, people who are on an inward journey
• When you have groups of people that have engaged their own story they start to engage the others stories differently

POSTURE
• People who have engaged their story with God’s story tend to be people who are more about joining than they are about fixing
• Job- you were getting it right when you were joining me

• reclaiming NEIGHBOR as noun with NEIGHBORING as verb
• neighbor has become a very passive term
• What is my personal calling on my street, where I live?

• Ephesians 3
- “God is able to do more than we can ask or imagine…”
- Who is the “we”?
• Interdependent Imagination
• US Cencus Bureau: 2025
- Less than 50% of the population will be white
• we live in a new sub-urban world
- gentrification-
• Justice is most always married to relationship, and injustice is most always divorced from relationship.

• Reclaiming a Theology of Place
- proximity is central to mission
- we need neighbors who will reclaim where they live
- I live here because all of the law and prophets hang on loving my neighbor
• Are we a church to the community or are we a church of the community?
• from betterment to empowerment
• Trans-cultural instead of multi-cultural

• Luke 16:9
- what are the gates that we stay behind
• Mitzvoth- good deeds
- we need to address the specific needs
- we steward our story well be incarnating the word
• Mission Continuum
- Progression toward maturity
- not linear
• From a pastoral model to a missional model
- reading the newspaper differently
- watching the news differently
• Focusing for impact
- If we’re going to do this list of activities, what things are we going to make sure are on the list for every person in the church?
• Measure impact not by numbers, but by change
- Poverty alleviation
• What is God doing? Joining with what He is already doing

Q&A
• House churches
- 6-40 people
- don’t communicate that being a part of a house church is THE way to belong
• Community emerges from mission- not the other way around

• Where is God moving and how can we join that?

~ by Dave on January 23, 2007.