Missional Renaissance // playing with my brain

Okay, the anniversary weekend is over and life will return to normal. Well, not really, these next two weeks are going to be pretty crazy, but at least I’ll be back to twittering and blogging (which I am intentionally trying to do more of during Lent).

So I asked about “church” the other day and the thoughts that word invokes. I’m currently reading a book by Reggie McNeal called Missional Renaissance. This book is doing things to my thought process that have not been done for quite a long time. Its playing with my brain. I’ve taken more notes, underlined, circled, squared, drawn more lines, and dog eared more pages than any book so far this year and really any book since that insanely difficult philosophy of English class I took at Kennesaw in 2006 during my English major sting. (Side story- that was a crazy class, but amazing and made me fall more in love with philosophy. On the first day of the class the teacher started with this sentence, “Hello, my name is ___. You’re going to get three quarters of the way through this class and not know what the h3!! is going on…..that’s okay.” For 90% of the class she was dead on!)

The point is, this book is answering/saying the same thing/reinforcing many of the questions/conversations we’ve been asking/having/discussing as a leadership team at Cornerstone for the past few months, and its just been sitting on the shelf waiting to be read. My plan is to buy a copy for my wife as soon as I can, and then our leadership team and whoever else wants a copy after that. I try not to push books too much as far as, “You need to go read this.” But this is one that I would encourage everyone to read.

Without further ado, and before this post gets way too long, here’s one of the first quotes that’s by no means “revolutionary,” but is just one of those ideas that needs to live in you daily. Reggie writes:

Program driven churches and ministry organizations operate on the suspect but often unchallenged assumptions. These assumptions are that people will be better off if they just participate in certain activities that the church or organization has sanctioned for its ministry agenda…They [the participants][then] wonder, ‘Where’s the abundant life that was promised if we only participated more?’ The answer is that achieving abundant life will require intentional personal development.

Dang. That’s a big shift for a lot of people. This means no giving up. This means less, “I don’t feel like it today.” This means less, “Well, I’ll just let it slide for a couple of days, I’ll be fine.” This means less, “that last relationship was one thing, this one will be different.” This means less, “We’ll just talk about it tomorrow.” This means less, “I promise, tomorrow I’ll start reading and praying more.”

At the same time, it means, quit worrying about a bunch of rules (irony, I know) and dive in deep to that relationship with Jesus.

Achieving abundant life will require intentional personal development.

Thoughts…