Starting, Assessing & Sustaining Pioneering Mission

Starting, Assessing & Sustaining Pioneering Mission -Steve Hollinghurst

Hollinghurst's Grove Booklet offers some valuable insights for churches and pioneers:

1) Collaboration is key, even when it seems in competition with the local church: The local church is often the broker and supporter of mission projects.
2) Pioneers are risk takers and experimenters and create tensions for managers. But the relationship must work for accountability and backing.  Permission givers must release pioneers as with Nehemiah.
3) Being clear about charitable status and structures is important for well managed pioneering.
4) Incarnational mission has 5 steps over 5 years...and produces signs of UP IN OUT discipleship, Self -financing, governing, reproducing, theologizing.
5) Pioneers must model the Twelve & Seventy-two pioneering model of Jesus to all including new Christians.

Center Church -Tim Keller

Center Church  by Tim Keller is easy to read (for a large book), with a sharpening message about a missional imperative in the city and churches being fruitful there.  

Keller's "fruitful" involves finding a healthy balance along three axes: 1) gospel (with legalism at one end -and relativism at the other), 2) city (only challenge-only appreciate), 3) movement (institution - organic).


For each axis Keller gives an overview of church history and why the pendulum has swung to extremes on the axes and how we might hold a balance today in a "late modern" post-Christendom West.  Full of biblical reflection and referencing the big ideas that have shaped our faith, he provides a "how to communicate to city culture guide" which he calls "contextualisation". 




Analysing missional community (MCs) models (Breen p267), small and large attractional churches he concludes "no single form of church is intrinsically better at growing spiritual fruit, reaching non believers, caring for people and producing Christ shaped lives" but he offers six marks of a missional church p 274 (confront society's idols, contextualise, equip mission, seek common good, seeker friendly, practice unity).  

I'm a bit surprised Keller doesn't provide more nuance about "no one form of church being better..."...Redeemer Church Manhattan is conservative in many ways typically reaching those who are probably more comfortable with institution.  I'd want to ask Keller about church models for cultures that relate to new power more than old power (see Reggie McNeal book review click here). MCs surely reach places other can't.

That said, whatever your churchmanship you will be better balanced and better equipped after reading Centre Church and hopefully more excited about God's mission.

Watch Tim Keller's short videos on vision in the city centre 

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8DOGy0vCewQ

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZfHx2NiV50