Steve Drinkall
(Note: The picture here is actually of the band Rhubarb. You might remember that they won Triple J's Unearthed and had the hit 'Exerciser'. Steve is in the front. He was the lead singer).

I have had the privilege of working as a staff member in the church and also as a staff member at many pubs around Brisbane. My experience is that the people are basically the same. All of us have hang ups, insecurities, addictions of various sorts, doubts and even a considerable amount of faith at various times. The only difference is that some of us have found grace.

As Michael Frost says so eloquently, "We are all beggars, its just that some of us have found where to get bread". In that context its makes perfect sense that we should orient our lives and activities around sharing that Good News with all beggars. Conversely, it makes less sense to sit in the church and postulate about how we should go out and tell them. Theorizing about which methodology is superior seems to me unhelpful.

I suspect that following Jesus requires us to dine with sinners a bit more than some of us are comfortable with…

Missional churches are simply christian communities who actively train their people to play the real game of coming alongside sinners in order to point them towards Jesus…maybe I'm too simplistic.

Steve is currently on staff of a missional church called Pathway.

neoLeader weekly emails
We have now been sending out the neoLeader email for about 4 months! During that time there have been numerous leadership articles written by myself and some of our other contributors including Jenny Dobbin, Helen Bates, and John Robertson.  

We have also profiled some effective younger leaders including Wes Jessop, Billy Williams, Steve Drinkall and Nathan Harris.

neoLeader site
Lots of people have been visiting the neoLeader site (neoLeader.org), reading the articles and using the links to challenging podcasts. Some have also been interacting with the blog. For example, a recent controversial article on alcohol stirred up an interesting debate.

Feedback
It's only early days and there is so much we would still like to develop, but we are really interested in any feedback. What do you like? How could the email and website be improved to help you more as a leader? What issues would you like us to tackle?

You can reply to this email or leave a comment on the website.

Our heart
I believe that the development of strong young Christian leaders is essential to the growth of God's kingdom. God is calling young adults to the challenging and exciting task of forging a new generation of disciples. We want to assist and support these new leaders.

John Sweetman (for the neoLeader team)

A book review by Scott McKnight

Alan Hirsch has a mission himself: to inspire Christians and churches around the globe to become missional. His book, The Forgotten Ways, traces the DNA of missional churches (mDNA). We've looked at two of the six ingredients – the centrality of Jesus and a focus on disciple-making – and today we look at #3.

Missional-incarnational impulse. The word "missional" has become the darling for many, and I want to go on record here that I think this term is worth sticking on your desk to remind of what is important.

What is it? Essentially "an outwardly bound movement from one community or individual to another… a genuine missional impulse is a sending rather than attractional one" (129).

Is your church missional? Why or why not? What can we do to create more missional churches? I might ask it this way: How local is your church? Or is it just like the other churches of your denomination that happens to meet in your community? How many ministries do you have at your church that are specific to your community? Have you tried to "apply" things that work elsewhere to your community – work or not?

The attractional model is what he says characterizes Christendom. Success is measured by numerical growth, better programs, and increase in resources – this requires an attractional model. Outreach services and evangelism programs are measured by how many new folks attend church.

A missional model is incarnational. The defining moment of God's coming to the world is the incarnation – that is how God is missional. That is, missional participates in the missio Dei, the mission of God. It was an act of identification with others, taking up residence among others, and revelation for us. Four elements of Incarnation:

1. Presence
2. Proximity
3. Powerlessness
4. Proclamation

Hirsch contends simply this: God's missional move is to find its counterpart in our similar incarnational missional move. And he sees a good theme in 1 Cor 9:22-23: "To the weak I became weak, so that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, so that I may share in its blessings."

Incarnational ministry means (1) embedding the gospel and (2) deepening the gospel in people groups so they might become God's people.

Another theme: Christology determines missiology; missiology determines ecclesiology. The Church is an element of missiology.

An example of an incarnational missional model is Third Place Communities. First place: home; second place: work; third place: where we spend time off. So, places like pubs, cafes, sports centers … forming communities in such places is the goal of Third Place Communities.

Link

Greg Ligon

1. Sermon Series Campaigns – New groups are launched that accompany a sermon series that is a good fit for building new communities. This concept is built off the the "40 Days of Purpose" campaigns of a few years ago.

2. Apprentice Leaders – New groups are formed as apprentice leaders "graduate" from a season of walking alongside a seasoned leader.

3. Turbo Groups – These groups are, as the name suggests, groups designed to identify, equip and launch new leaders and the groups they lead in a short time frame. Most of the leaders that participate in this program are seasoned leaders in other areas of church life but new to leading small groups.

4. Connection Events – These events, held as frequently as monthly, are designed to match leaders and participants over a meeting, often including a meal. This strategy is used most to introduce new attenders to small group life.

5. Membership – Churches with a formal membership include introduction of small groups into their process, demonstrating the high value and clear expectations of participation in group life.

6. Dinner Groups – These groups are often originally organized geographically or based on an affinity. In most cases they are intended primarily as a connection point and a "feeder system" into the fuller small group ministry of the church.

7. Reproducing Groups – New groups start when the existing group reaching an agreed upon size and leadership within the existing group surfaces to launch a new group.

How do you launch new groups?

Link

A book review by Scott McKnight
Anyone who begins a chapter with this quotation from TS Eliot has my attention: "The greatest proof of Christianity for others is not how far a man can logically analyze his reasons for believing, but how far in practice he will stake his life on his belief." So Alan Hirsch quotes Eliot to open chapter 4 of The Forgotten Ways.

Questions for the day: Is consumerism the biggest threat to discipleship today? What is the best way to make disciples?

This isn't just about the old debate about orthodoxy and orthopraxy but about the stunning impact Christian integrity, love, and holiness can have on those who observe them. In other words, it is a comment about the significance discipleship needs to play in "church programming" (to use an expression Hirsch might wrinkle his nose at!). So, the second element of mDNA – missional DNA – is discipleship.

Overall this chp had lots of good ideas, but it wandered around way too much between discipleship and leadership and consumerism. Still, I want to put on the blog today the central ideas of this chp.

First, Hirsch thinks the major challenge facing the church to day is consumerism – it has infiltrated everything, including identity, purpose, meaning, and community. He lists the rise of capitalism, the nation-state, and science and how these conditions have turned religion into a privatized, personal, non-public exercise. And the pervasiveness of consumerism has made much of Christianity consumeristic. And medium has overwhelmed the message.

Consumerism of our day and discipleship of Jesus' day are incompatible. And, "if we don't disciple people, the culture sure will" (111). We have two options:

1. Redeem consumerism.
2. Reject consumerism.

A model of rejection is Rutba House's new monasticism.

Second, he thinks the point of it all is to make "little Jesuses" in every neighborhood. He sees this as the Conspiracy of the Little Jesus. This is a good section, but what I've said gets to the heart of it.

Third, he deals with leadership and how we train people to be leaders (and this is part of how he sees discipleship). He posits the Academy over against the Apostolic Genius. Here he's picking on seminaries. In the Academy approach, which is "thinking our way into a new way of acting" (Hellenistic approach), the person is yanked from society and taught abstract things and re-socialized into a new way of life and these folks then have trouble adjusting and then impose the Hellenistic approach on the local church.

The Apostolic Genius approach was from the Hebrew concept where we are involved in "acting our way into a new way of thinking." It leads to new thinking and new behavior, while the Hellenistic model leads to new thinking with old behavior. And he's got a cool chart to show this.

I doubt Hirsch has read much of Plato or Aristotle, for they weren't simply abstract guys, and I don't think the Hebrew system is simply doing leading to thinking – but the simplisticity of his thesis isn't the thing to pick on.

The issue here is simple: What is the best way to disciple others? How do we get it done? What's involved? What are the goals?

Clearly, anyone who has done it knows that an "outcome based theory of education" proves that we are concerned in the Church of leading others into a life of discipleship and that can only come about if we know the behaviors and thinking patterns necessary for such to come about – and then creating a "program" or "model" or "system" that leads to that. And it won't occur simply in a classroom. It must occur in both the classroom – learning things – and in the rough and tumble of actual being and doing. Reading a good book on marriage helps most marriages; living daily with another in love will transcend that book into living realities.