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The Church as Movement: Starting and Sustaining Missional-Incarnational Communities
IVP Readers' Choice Award
Missio Alliance Essential Reading List Public gatherings are vital for movement, but too often in our approach to planting churches, we haven't paid enough attention to the difficult grassroots work of discipleship, community formation, and mission. This book will help you start missional-incarnational communities in a way that reflects the viral movement of the early New Testament church. JR Woodward (author of Creating a Missional Culture ) and Dan White Jr. (author of Subterranean ) have trained church planters all over North America to create movemental churches that are rooted in the neighborhood, based on eight necessary The book features an interactive format with tools, exercises, and reflection questions and activities. It's ideal for church planting teams or discipleship groups to use together. It's not enough to understand why the church needs more missional and incarnational congregations. The Church as Movement will also show you how to make disciples that make disciples. This is the engine that drives the church as movement, so that everyday Christians can be present in the world to join God's mission in the way of Jesus.
Missio Alliance Essential Reading List Public gatherings are vital for movement, but too often in our approach to planting churches, we haven't paid enough attention to the difficult grassroots work of discipleship, community formation, and mission. This book will help you start missional-incarnational communities in a way that reflects the viral movement of the early New Testament church. JR Woodward (author of Creating a Missional Culture ) and Dan White Jr. (author of Subterranean ) have trained church planters all over North America to create movemental churches that are rooted in the neighborhood, based on eight necessary The book features an interactive format with tools, exercises, and reflection questions and activities. It's ideal for church planting teams or discipleship groups to use together. It's not enough to understand why the church needs more missional and incarnational congregations. The Church as Movement will also show you how to make disciples that make disciples. This is the engine that drives the church as movement, so that everyday Christians can be present in the world to join God's mission in the way of Jesus.
240 pages, Paperback
Published July 14, 2016
117 people are currently reading
242 people want to read
About the author
J.R. Woodward
11 books52 followersJR Woodward, PhD (University of Manchester, UK) loves to awaken people to join God in the renewal of all things. He is a catalyst who has been passionately starting churches and ministries for the good of the world for over thirty years. He co-founded Missio Alliance and currently serves as the National Director for the V3 Church Planting Movement. He is an adjunct professor at several seminaries and universities, including Fuller Theological Seminary, Central Seminary, Missio Seminary, and America Evangelical University. He is the co-founder of the Praxis Gathering, and serves on six different boards, including Reliant Mission, Missio Alliance, and Fuller Global Mission Advisory Council. He is the author of "Creating a Missional Culture" and co-author of "The Church as Movement". His most recent book, "The Scandal of Leadership", is based on his PhD research and written to provide a remedy to the problem of domineering leadership in the church. He loves to surf, travel, read, and skateboard, as well as meet new people. He enjoys photography and film and tries to attend the Sundance Film Festival whenever he can.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 31 reviews
January 9, 2017
If I am being honest, I’m not generally a big fan of books on church planting. My lack of enthusiasm stems from two primary observations.
First, many books on church planting are authored by people who actually have surprisingly limited experience in church planting or whose credibility rests on a single (relatively meaningless) criterion—their ability to draw a large crowd.
Second, a preponderance of books on church planting that seem to gain popular traction lack any meaningful theological foundations and/or framework for their proposals.
The Church as Movement by my friends, JR Woodward and Dan White Jr., I am thrilled to say, subverts those stereotypes and gives me fresh hope for a new breed of resources in this area.
Here’s why I say that... Full review here: http://thev3movement.org/2017/01/subv...
First, many books on church planting are authored by people who actually have surprisingly limited experience in church planting or whose credibility rests on a single (relatively meaningless) criterion—their ability to draw a large crowd.
Second, a preponderance of books on church planting that seem to gain popular traction lack any meaningful theological foundations and/or framework for their proposals.
The Church as Movement by my friends, JR Woodward and Dan White Jr., I am thrilled to say, subverts those stereotypes and gives me fresh hope for a new breed of resources in this area.
Here’s why I say that... Full review here: http://thev3movement.org/2017/01/subv...
November 21, 2016
The last ten years has given us a series of books on building the church not as an institution, or an entertainment hub, but as a neighborhood mission center for the gospel. Now in the “missional church” tradition of books like The Forgotten Ways, The New Parish —The Church as Movement provides a walk-thru of missional basics for neighborhood groups seeking to put this into action.
This isn’t trying to be another theological tome or a sustained argument about where the church has gone wrong. Instead, pastors JR Woodward and Dan White, Jr become relatable coaches—walking us through the essentials of the missional-incarnational approach penned for a gathering of practical doers.
Along the way they provide the best-of summaries of key concepts from theological sources like Dallas Willard, NT Wright, Roland Allen and Stanley Haurwaas, plus current practical approaches from Alan Hirsch, Tim Soerens and especially from their own 20 years of lived church-planting experience.
It’s not just the content that’s practical—so is the book itself. Divided into blog-like bite-sized chunks, each section is ideal for assigning to a group of leaders preparing for a real-life discussion about how church works. Sections include: The Stages of Discipleship, Four Spaces of Belonging, and Developing a Scattered Rule and Rhythm.
Tips are consistently theological and actionable at the same time:
* Don’t call people volunteers. It undermines the reality of the body of christ.
* The church is not formed around a stage, but a table. Church planters can start by hosting a weekly community meal.
* Train yourself and your core in active listening. Group listen to the Holy Spirit together and discern the mind of Christ (1 Cor 2:16)
The apparent simplicity may hide how this approach is perhaps more often talked than walked. The movement mindset—building new churches less through big worship band budgets and more through dinner tables in the heart of the city—has a slowness and vulnerable involvement to it that requires more than seminary class or church planter job placements. Head-nodders for the theoretical calls to put the church back into the heart of mission may think twice when engaging the personal challenges that cap each book section like:
* Make a list of people to invite to join you for a shared table.
* What methods of sharing the good news lead to a reductionistic gospel?
* Develop a scattered rule and rhythm of life with at least one concrete practice within the framework of communion, community and co-mission.
Church as Movement comes as a welcome edition to the missional church literature—not as a casual read for practical ecclesiology but as a practical coaching challenge to introduce a real, lived missional communities in the neighborhood.
This isn’t trying to be another theological tome or a sustained argument about where the church has gone wrong. Instead, pastors JR Woodward and Dan White, Jr become relatable coaches—walking us through the essentials of the missional-incarnational approach penned for a gathering of practical doers.
Along the way they provide the best-of summaries of key concepts from theological sources like Dallas Willard, NT Wright, Roland Allen and Stanley Haurwaas, plus current practical approaches from Alan Hirsch, Tim Soerens and especially from their own 20 years of lived church-planting experience.
It’s not just the content that’s practical—so is the book itself. Divided into blog-like bite-sized chunks, each section is ideal for assigning to a group of leaders preparing for a real-life discussion about how church works. Sections include: The Stages of Discipleship, Four Spaces of Belonging, and Developing a Scattered Rule and Rhythm.
Tips are consistently theological and actionable at the same time:
* Don’t call people volunteers. It undermines the reality of the body of christ.
* The church is not formed around a stage, but a table. Church planters can start by hosting a weekly community meal.
* Train yourself and your core in active listening. Group listen to the Holy Spirit together and discern the mind of Christ (1 Cor 2:16)
The apparent simplicity may hide how this approach is perhaps more often talked than walked. The movement mindset—building new churches less through big worship band budgets and more through dinner tables in the heart of the city—has a slowness and vulnerable involvement to it that requires more than seminary class or church planter job placements. Head-nodders for the theoretical calls to put the church back into the heart of mission may think twice when engaging the personal challenges that cap each book section like:
* Make a list of people to invite to join you for a shared table.
* What methods of sharing the good news lead to a reductionistic gospel?
* Develop a scattered rule and rhythm of life with at least one concrete practice within the framework of communion, community and co-mission.
Church as Movement comes as a welcome edition to the missional church literature—not as a casual read for practical ecclesiology but as a practical coaching challenge to introduce a real, lived missional communities in the neighborhood.
August 20, 2017
Summary: An interactive guide for communities wanting to learn how to become “missional-incarnational movements” rather than “Christian-industrial complexes” through growth in eight competencies.
J.R. Woodward and Dan White Jr. believe there is something fundamentally wrong with an American church model focused around the metrics of “buildings, butts (in the seats), and budgets” (as one friend describes it). They refer to this as the “Christian-industrial complex” that has indeed become big business to the point that it shapes how Christians pursue life together and mission, and engage society. In this interactive guidebook, the authors propose a model of church as movement–one that focuses on our communion with God, our sentness as a community, and our co-mission to live as a “sign, foretaste, and instrument of his kingdom in ever-expanding geographical areas” (p. 23).
This happens as groups grow into eight competencies, around which the book is organized:
Movement Intelligence: Movements are on the street rather than the stage, multiply as they move outward and leverage a five-fold set of people gifts.
Polycentric Leadership: Movements organize around many centers of leadership in a flat structure rather than around a single leader over a hierarchical structure.
Being Disciples: Movements recognize that one must be a disciple to make disciples, growing in inward, outward, and upward journeys, overcoming soul pressures, and becoming sacred companions who experience a depth of vulnerability that enables people to embrace their true selves.
Making Disciples: Movements make disciples through “meta, reflective, and experiential” learning (a pedagogy used in this guide), build on a scaffolding of safety and stretching, and gather and develop discipleship cores through phases of forming, storming, norming and performing.
Missional Theology: Movements understand the missional story of which they are a part–God’s social and sending nature, the nature of his kingdom, the holistic gospel (in six acts), and the sacramental markers of baptism and the Lord’s table.
Ecclesial Architecture: This is not about church buildings but the structuring of a movement’s life around communion, community, and co-mission, the gathered and scattered rules of life that constitute a movement, and the different spaces of belonging (intimate, personal, social, and public) in which it exists.
Community Formation: Movements develop a common life, a shared table and learning, healing, welcoming, liberating, and thriving environments. Movements are characterized by trust-building, truth-telling, and peacemaking.
Incarnational Practices: Movements come NEAR their neighborhoods: they learn its Narrative, Ethics, Associations, and Rituals and learn to be present in that context, often with the aid of a person of peace.
The guide follows a three-fold formational learning approach.
1. Meta-learning is identifying the overarching essential truth in each section for one personally.
2. Reflective learning explores how what you are learning makes you feel including points of conflict, clarity, or confusion.
3. Experiential learning identifies real time action steps a group will take to attempt to put into practice what they are learning, and the learning that comes from this experience.
Each of the eight competencies has several sections concluding with a set of formational learning questions following this three-fold pattern. It is suggested that people work through this material with a group. Groups meeting weekly can take a section at a time and complete the guide in eight months. Alternately, groups meeting twice a month might take a chapter each time they meet and complete it in four months. The latter approach seems less workable to me because each competency provides several sections of content, difficult to cover adequately, and more difficult to experience in a single session every two weeks.
I can see several settings in which this might work. One would be for a church leadership team trying to make the transition from industrial complex to movement, to practice first within themselves and then to multiply through their church. A second would be for a small group within a church (or network of groups) who want to become “missional incarnational communities”. It would seem important after several weeks of meetings to “storm and norm” to get to a place of group ownership. Finally, a group, perhaps set apart by church to plant in a nearby community, might use this as a guide for laying the groundwork to plant.
What is helpful for all these groups is an approach that focuses on shared competencies rather than merely planting or growth strategies. Actually most of these flow from the practice of the competencies in a particular neighborhood context. So often, in the eagerness to “do something,” these competencies are neglected. Disciples are not developed. A nimble leadership is absent and there is a reversion to hierarchy, and often burnout. Instead of a compelling story, we recycle nostrums. Woodward and White, out of their own extensive experience of growing such movements provide a comprehensive guide for others warming to God’s missional heart.
J.R. Woodward and Dan White Jr. believe there is something fundamentally wrong with an American church model focused around the metrics of “buildings, butts (in the seats), and budgets” (as one friend describes it). They refer to this as the “Christian-industrial complex” that has indeed become big business to the point that it shapes how Christians pursue life together and mission, and engage society. In this interactive guidebook, the authors propose a model of church as movement–one that focuses on our communion with God, our sentness as a community, and our co-mission to live as a “sign, foretaste, and instrument of his kingdom in ever-expanding geographical areas” (p. 23).
This happens as groups grow into eight competencies, around which the book is organized:
Movement Intelligence: Movements are on the street rather than the stage, multiply as they move outward and leverage a five-fold set of people gifts.
Polycentric Leadership: Movements organize around many centers of leadership in a flat structure rather than around a single leader over a hierarchical structure.
Being Disciples: Movements recognize that one must be a disciple to make disciples, growing in inward, outward, and upward journeys, overcoming soul pressures, and becoming sacred companions who experience a depth of vulnerability that enables people to embrace their true selves.
Making Disciples: Movements make disciples through “meta, reflective, and experiential” learning (a pedagogy used in this guide), build on a scaffolding of safety and stretching, and gather and develop discipleship cores through phases of forming, storming, norming and performing.
Missional Theology: Movements understand the missional story of which they are a part–God’s social and sending nature, the nature of his kingdom, the holistic gospel (in six acts), and the sacramental markers of baptism and the Lord’s table.
Ecclesial Architecture: This is not about church buildings but the structuring of a movement’s life around communion, community, and co-mission, the gathered and scattered rules of life that constitute a movement, and the different spaces of belonging (intimate, personal, social, and public) in which it exists.
Community Formation: Movements develop a common life, a shared table and learning, healing, welcoming, liberating, and thriving environments. Movements are characterized by trust-building, truth-telling, and peacemaking.
Incarnational Practices: Movements come NEAR their neighborhoods: they learn its Narrative, Ethics, Associations, and Rituals and learn to be present in that context, often with the aid of a person of peace.
The guide follows a three-fold formational learning approach.
1. Meta-learning is identifying the overarching essential truth in each section for one personally.
2. Reflective learning explores how what you are learning makes you feel including points of conflict, clarity, or confusion.
3. Experiential learning identifies real time action steps a group will take to attempt to put into practice what they are learning, and the learning that comes from this experience.
Each of the eight competencies has several sections concluding with a set of formational learning questions following this three-fold pattern. It is suggested that people work through this material with a group. Groups meeting weekly can take a section at a time and complete the guide in eight months. Alternately, groups meeting twice a month might take a chapter each time they meet and complete it in four months. The latter approach seems less workable to me because each competency provides several sections of content, difficult to cover adequately, and more difficult to experience in a single session every two weeks.
I can see several settings in which this might work. One would be for a church leadership team trying to make the transition from industrial complex to movement, to practice first within themselves and then to multiply through their church. A second would be for a small group within a church (or network of groups) who want to become “missional incarnational communities”. It would seem important after several weeks of meetings to “storm and norm” to get to a place of group ownership. Finally, a group, perhaps set apart by church to plant in a nearby community, might use this as a guide for laying the groundwork to plant.
What is helpful for all these groups is an approach that focuses on shared competencies rather than merely planting or growth strategies. Actually most of these flow from the practice of the competencies in a particular neighborhood context. So often, in the eagerness to “do something,” these competencies are neglected. Disciples are not developed. A nimble leadership is absent and there is a reversion to hierarchy, and often burnout. Instead of a compelling story, we recycle nostrums. Woodward and White, out of their own extensive experience of growing such movements provide a comprehensive guide for others warming to God’s missional heart.
September 10, 2025
Usually books on this topic are cringey and terribly written. This is not. Helpful reframe for anyone in the church planting world.
June 13, 2019
The Church as Movement, J.R.Woodard
We have failed to be and make disciples of Jesus. The cost of non discipleship is the irrelevance of the church.
Transformation comes by following Christ through the Spirit with others. We must die to self, our infatuation with speed and size, and devote ourselves to the work of making disciples. Movement starts with our imitation of Christ.
Movement occurs when we answer our call to live in communion with God, and out of the overflow of our life with God, we live into our sentness as a community, carrying out his co-mission to be a sign, forestaste, and instrument of his kingdom.
The Christian industrial complex is a mindset about the church, an unquestioned, undergirding concept of the church informed by United States’ idea of success. American imagination success means growing bigger, collecting more resources, consolidating power, creating strong hierarchical structures, and growing rapidly. These are obvious, simplistic cultural signs of success (what we can count). We need a new lens! programs, property, people in attendance, paid staff.
The church as movement moves discipleship to the center. Multiplication trumps addition in the long run; it’s a marathon not a sprint.
The church as industrial complex desires to be on stage. The church as movement desires to be in the streets.
We have to ask whether the church is most faithful in its witness to the crucified and risen Jesus and more recognizable as the community that bears about in the body the dying Jesus when it is chiefly concerned with its own self-aggrandizement.
Mao’s reign, Bamboo Curtain opened in 1980’s, thriving church of 60-80 million Christians.
They believed every believer is church planter, and every church a church-planting church. The seed has the potential of becoming a tree and a tree has the potential of becoming a forest.
God is building his church. The gates of hell will not prevail. Genuine growth is not manufactured or numerical alone. It is being the church in the way of Christ the power of the Spirit and allowing God to bring fruit in whatever way God sees fit. Our focus is being faithful and joining God’s mission, trusting him for fruitfulness.
Jesus said, Well done my good and faithful (not fruitful) servant. When we try to control fruit it leads to surface level growth and passive, consumptive disciples. Our job is to be fruitful in the way of Jesus Christ, and as we do that God will make us fruitful (John 15). We plant and water and till. God causes growth in time and His way.
Get rid of clergy-laity divide. Priesthood of all believers.
Communion. Community. Co-mission. Discipleship. Leadership.
Christianity without discipleship is always Christianity without Christ. Bonhoeffer.
If we seek first to make disciples, we will become vital congregations, have authentic worship, experience real fellowship and develop effective mission. Phil Meadows.
Movement requires simplicity, reproducibility by just about everyone.
Discipleship leads to missional-incarnational community, living in the world for the sake of the world in the way of Jesus.
We noticed that God tends to do less than we expect in the first 3 years, and more than we expect over 10-15 years. 3-5 years God works in us, so that we are better prepared for what he does through us.
Sticky tools are alliteration, rhyme or repetition. Easy to pass on and share. Scalable at different levels.
APEST, we are all to teach, care for one another, share our faith with others, live in the Spirit and speak truth to one another and the powers that be, and live as sent people.
Some are apostolic-evangelists, pastor-prophets, prophetic-teachers. A-P trailblazers, S-E healers. 2 base gifts usually. Each APEST has a weakness (e.g. immature pastors may be drive by fear people pleasing, create dichotomy between community and mission).
Sometimes God calls us to mature in a season by living into another part of the 5fold typology, not part of our base gifting.
Christianity started in Palestine as community, moved to Greece to become a philosophy, went to Rome to become an institution, and Europe to become a government, and America to become an enterprise. What might it take to return to community?
It is better to live by faith and fail than to allow fear to win the day and slowly die.
Leaders create culture. What is your ultimate aim? Israel insisted on a king. They were never meant to wear the ring (LOTR).
Player-coach continuum. Everyone is a player, but not everyone has been given the grace to coach. Everyone has a calling and ministry, but only some are given the grace to devote more time to equipping others.
Mutual leadership is an effort to share power among a trust-soaked, vision-distributed, emotionally-mature, Christ-rooted team. For the sake of God’s mission in the world, we need to distribute leadership.
Community before clergy. Submission before sergeant. Disciples before deciders. (Our 1st responsibility is to develop people) Consultative before concrete. Accountability before autonomy. Follow me as I follow Christ.
Jesus’ primary way of evaluating the church is asking, Are we fulfilling his command to make disciples?
To live we must die. The way to spiritual riches is acknowledging spiritual poverty. The way to rule is become servant of all.
Self-awareness, inner life of a disciple is paying attention to the iceberg under the surface of the water for transformation.
Nothing is more important than relationship with God, nothing more satisfying than being in his presence, nothing is more vital for fruitful ministry than our communion with God. Thus, nothing is more challenging. Pursuing God is a struggle. God is sweeter for the long seeking. A.W. Tozer.
Henri Nouwen, Great difference between success and fruitfulness. Success comes from power, control, and respectability. It brings rewards and fame. Fruitfulness however comes through weakness, faithfulness, and vulnerability. Community is the fruit born through shared weakness, meaningful presence in the neighborhood comes through a long faithfulness and experiencing the surprise of the Spirit comes through vulnerability. Let’s remind one another that what brings true joy is not successfulness but fruitfulness.
Are you developing an inner life that has capacity to face the challenges and resist the temptations we encounter in ministry?
Often our sense of self-worth is tied to the size of our impact. Nope! Matthew 3:17
Young adult formation is heavily influenced by celebrity preachers (podcast and massive platform, we are tempted to imitate success).
We are tempted by production, power, and popularity.
The irony is that I hide because I’m afraid if the full truth about myself is known, I won’t be loved. But whatever is hidden cannot be loved. I can only be loved to the extent that I make myself known. And I can only be fully loved if I’m fully known.
John Ortberg: 3 stages of openness, guarded communication, everyday authenticity, and deep disclosure with close friends (trust, intimacy).
Making Disciples
You will know as much of God, and only as much of God, as you are wiling to put into practice. Eric Liddell
Don’t be fooled by church attendance. Unless people are on an intentional discipleship path they will not be shaped for God’s mission in the world.
Why do we focus on the crowds when Jesus focused on the Twelve?
LOTR is great metaphor for cultivating a discipleship core and going on mission together. This is what Jesus did, calling others into a daring commitment to go on mission with him. Follow me as I follow the example of Christ.
Creating meta-moments often happen when we contemplate stuff we’ve heard a 1000 times before, but seek to deconstruct it in a way that reveals the big meaning hidden in plain sight. (you just blew my mind) Mt. 9:12-13 KingdomNT
Jesus asks 307 questions in the Gospels, while he is asked 183, he only answers 3 of them directly. Typically, he answers a Q with a Q. He expertly challenged people’s underlying assumptions. We’d do good to model this in our discipleship spaces. Jesus helped disciples to understand what was in their hearts by asking them questions and drawing them out. Good q’s make space for God’s disruptive Spirit to work. Sometimes the disciples are caught off-guard by Jesus’ disarming questions, a technique for putting them in a learning posture. Jesus sought to make disciples involving reflective learning.
Jesus taught immersively, with experiential learning, leading by example.
Consumerism has trained us to demand a finished product that meets our highest standards. if we don’t like the quality of something, we move on and purchase something else. Discipleship cannot be consumed; we must participate in it.
The church as industrial complex still acts as if the HS primarily shows up in a building at organized events; this is a brick and mortar mentality. (Jn. 16:7, 1 Cor. 6:19) The Holy Spirit in relational temple of average, ordinary disciples, equipped and sustained with the presence of God.
1 - Communion. What is God’s Spirit doing in me? 2 - Community. What is God’s Spirit doing around me? 3 - Co-mission. What is God’s Spirxit doing through me? 4 - Next step. What is our response to the Spirit?
Missional Theology
When the gospel is reduced to private affair between us and God, it’s not only self-serving but becomes irrelevant to the world (e.g. poverty, violence, ecological disasters, broken families)
God is relational and missional. (The Father sends the Son into the world to reveal and inaugurate the kingdom; the F & S send the Spirit into the world to continue their work, and the S sends the church into the world, through the power of the Spirit, so that we can join our Triune God in the renewal of all things (Rev. 21:5).
When you lose Trinitarian focus, history shows patriarchal/dominating patterns, colonial missions, rise of modern atheism.
Don’t approach mission unidirectional, coming to meet needs/share good news, we can unintentionally exacerbate the already marred image of God in those we are being sent to. When we have them participate in the mission, bringing their gifts to the table, they wake up to the fact that they are made in God’s image. (Jesus sent out the 70 in the same way)
The beginning of mission is the self-giving relationship of the F, S, & HS. Our greatest gift is our life together, our interdependent, love-filled community. When we turn the church into a production/franchise, we lose the beautiful relational witness of the Trinity.
John 20:21; Mission is primarily and ultimately, the work of the Triune God, Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier, for the sake of the world, a ministry in which the church is privileged to participate. Mission originates in the heart of God. God is a fountain of sending love.
Living between the resurrection and the glorious picture of the kingdom in Revelation is a lot like living between D-Day and VE-Day. Jesus has established a beachhead and effected a decisive victory over the powers, but we still linger in the “already, but not yet” of the kingdom of God.
The church is sign, foretaste, and instrument of God’s kingdom. Sign points to something not yet fully visible. Our way of life together ought to point people to God’s future.
Conversion is changing stories, trusting God and switching stories (american story, hollywood story). We start to live by a different script.
Jesus’ way is the way of forgiveness, not revenge, encouragement (gossip), serving (dominating), humility (arrogance), devotion (distraction), generosity (greed), faithful to the end. If his way isn’t our way, we need to ask whether we trust him and have fully applied his work to our lives. Salvation is not about leaving the world, but leaving the ways of this world and entering into God’ s world through the life, death, and resurrection of JC. Trusting that in the end, heaven and earth kiss.
Evangelism works best in the context where it’s an answer to a question.
The Christian hope is not that someday all believers get to die and go to heaven. Indeed, the only reason anyone ever goes to heaven is sin. (If Adam & Eve never sinned, they would have continued to live on this planet enjoying the beauty of Creation as they walked in close fellowship with their Creator.) Escaping Creation and going to heaven is not the solution. Sin is the reason for hunger, war, injustice and death. Sin is taking a stand against God and his loving reign, against life and well-being. Seeking autonomy from God, we experience shame guilt, and condemnation. We make gods in our own image rather than accepting that we are made in God’s image.
“Just as sin began with individuals and rippled out to contaminate the entire world, so grace begins with individuals and ripples out to redeem the rest of creation.”
Sacramental nature of mission: A birthday party for our son is a public way for others to hear how grateful we are that God brought our son into the world.
Sacrament of Lord’s Supper offers us a reminder that GOd’s work in the world brings together the scandal that death brings new life. The double meaning is, 1) God laid down his life. We should never forget this and we should do the same. 2) God is joyously welcoming the world to His table, and we should do the same.
Ecclesial Architecture
Communion and worship are a way of life, learning to live in the life/dance of God throughout our ordinary life.
Church is called to be the welcoming committee, not managers of the guest list.
Church essence is people who find their identity in the arms of God (communion), rallied around tables welcoming each other (community) and sent out into the world with serving hands (co-mission). Jesus models this (Lk. 6:12-19)
Rule & rhythm for gathered people. Different kinds of prayer (intercession, supplication, praise, listening, healing), Scripture (lectio divina, responsive readings, reenacting a short story of Bible) singing, confessing, sharing stories of God’s recent work, and partaking at the Lord’s Table draw us into the presence of God.
Organizing around communion, community, and co-mission is like building an exercise routine (regular incremental practices).
practicing presence of God and sabbath weekly. Meet with people weekly using discipleship tool, bless 3 people daily, (1 person outside church) and have a meal weekly with non-Christian. Rule is practice. Rhythm is how often you engage.
Practice God’s presence by being thankful. Thank you God for gift of new day, that I can see, taste, hear, smell, imagine, create, relate, work; I am a child of God, loved, forgiven, valued, The HS lives within me. He’s made me an ambassador to the world, giving me calling, gifts, and purpose.
Sabbath - ceasing (anxiety, work), resting (physical, spiritual, emotional, intellectual, social), embracing (intentionality, community, time, giving, shalom) feasting (eternal, music, beauty, meal, affection, festival)
Discipleship - confession, encouragement, reconciliation
Everyone has a rule & rhythm. Is yours forming you to be more like Christ?
Not individualism, but interdependence.
Too often our talks end with, “Nice sermon Pastor”
Don’t confuse public space with personal space. Genuine emotional interaction is unnatural here. Public space backfires when we attract people to dynamic preaching and worship in order to get them interested in community, mission and discipleship. This is a genuine challenge to consumer society. Neil Cole, What you win people with, you win them to.
Public gatherings provide inspiration and momentum by gathering stories of ministry and mission taking place in community.
Which space are we seeking to multiply?
Missional culture: LAAMPS language, artifacts, assumptions, mission, marks, practices, strategy;
When someone says, Let’s go to church. reveals a lack of understanding of church nature. Church is not something we go to, it is something we are. We go to a weekly gathering, we attend a service, but we are the church.
To live into church, eliminate words like volunteers and use biblical words: sent ones, priests, saints, missionaries, ambassadors, ministers. Volunteer implies choice to be active in the body of Christ.
What visually represents us? What does our website reveal? Where do people find our mission/vision/values/practices, and definition of success?
Mission: What is God calling us to do? We don’t invent it; we receive it from God. Mission statement is few well-crafted words or simple statement articulating overarching purpose of our existence as community of faith.
Marks: What does it mean to be faithful and fruitful in God’s mission? If you don’t define success, or what it means to be faithful and fruitful, others will. Defining the ends always shape the means. We measure what’s important and that guides our process. e.g. If we value discipleship and helping people become more like Christ, we might want to ask how many discipleship groups are happening in our congregation and how these disciples are displaying the fruit of the Spirit in their lives.
The church cannot storm the gates of hell by gathering around consumer needs. (Contra mature unified communities of self-sacrificial love)
From me to we, 1 Cor. 3:16, together we are God’s temple, collectively.
When we welcome others to our table, we practice God’s future now. (Isa. 25:6-8)
Apostles (thriving environment), prophets (liberating), evangelists (welcoming), pastors (healing), teachers (learning).
A passive aggressive person grasps for power over others by judging their motives without direct, open communication. Relational strategy is indirect, so their anger cannot be identified but is still felt.
Conversing with others with reconciling intent is most powerful way for community to discover God’s Spirit in its midst. Paul never instructed Corinth conflict to leave the community for a healthier one. (1 Cor. 5-6)
Incarnational Practices
The come-to-us stance developed over Christendom period is unbiblical. (John 1:14)
NEAR narrative, ethics, associations, rituals
Weekly gatherings can be missional, instead of consuming religious goods, combine worship and mission; When the weekly service becomes an end, the tail wags the dog.
God is for us (Abraham, blessed to be a blessing), with us (Emmanuel), of us (through incarnation), and in us (through the Holy Spirit).
To be faithful to the mission we must have sustained faith, stubborn hope, sacrificial love.
Faith is seeing the unseen and clinging to God’s promises until they come to pass, believes the impossible is possible. Living by faith means learning to trust God for everything in life. Despite fear, choosing to follow God, experiencing presence and see his beauty through both suffering and resurrection power.
How do you endure? Our hope in the triune God’s ability to bring about new creation - the redemption of our bodies and the world. Because of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, the new creation will be fully realized some day.
As you follow Jesus, as you follow his ways, his kingdom will break into your neighborhood, your city, your world.
more talented than Michael Jordan, more creative than Da Vinci, more gifted than Beethoven, more adventurous than Columbus, more missional than Newbigin, more tools than Tim Allen, more giving than Mother Theresa, better wordsmith than Shakespeare, more paradigm-breaking than Copernicus, a greater imagination than Einstein, but without love, you are nothing, and you gain nothing.
Grateful for the love of the Father, the faithfulness of the Son, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, who have enveloped us with love, sustained our faith. God has given us a stubborn hope and he is teaching us selfless love.
We have failed to be and make disciples of Jesus. The cost of non discipleship is the irrelevance of the church.
Transformation comes by following Christ through the Spirit with others. We must die to self, our infatuation with speed and size, and devote ourselves to the work of making disciples. Movement starts with our imitation of Christ.
Movement occurs when we answer our call to live in communion with God, and out of the overflow of our life with God, we live into our sentness as a community, carrying out his co-mission to be a sign, forestaste, and instrument of his kingdom.
The Christian industrial complex is a mindset about the church, an unquestioned, undergirding concept of the church informed by United States’ idea of success. American imagination success means growing bigger, collecting more resources, consolidating power, creating strong hierarchical structures, and growing rapidly. These are obvious, simplistic cultural signs of success (what we can count). We need a new lens! programs, property, people in attendance, paid staff.
The church as movement moves discipleship to the center. Multiplication trumps addition in the long run; it’s a marathon not a sprint.
The church as industrial complex desires to be on stage. The church as movement desires to be in the streets.
We have to ask whether the church is most faithful in its witness to the crucified and risen Jesus and more recognizable as the community that bears about in the body the dying Jesus when it is chiefly concerned with its own self-aggrandizement.
Mao’s reign, Bamboo Curtain opened in 1980’s, thriving church of 60-80 million Christians.
They believed every believer is church planter, and every church a church-planting church. The seed has the potential of becoming a tree and a tree has the potential of becoming a forest.
God is building his church. The gates of hell will not prevail. Genuine growth is not manufactured or numerical alone. It is being the church in the way of Christ the power of the Spirit and allowing God to bring fruit in whatever way God sees fit. Our focus is being faithful and joining God’s mission, trusting him for fruitfulness.
Jesus said, Well done my good and faithful (not fruitful) servant. When we try to control fruit it leads to surface level growth and passive, consumptive disciples. Our job is to be fruitful in the way of Jesus Christ, and as we do that God will make us fruitful (John 15). We plant and water and till. God causes growth in time and His way.
Get rid of clergy-laity divide. Priesthood of all believers.
Communion. Community. Co-mission. Discipleship. Leadership.
Christianity without discipleship is always Christianity without Christ. Bonhoeffer.
If we seek first to make disciples, we will become vital congregations, have authentic worship, experience real fellowship and develop effective mission. Phil Meadows.
Movement requires simplicity, reproducibility by just about everyone.
Discipleship leads to missional-incarnational community, living in the world for the sake of the world in the way of Jesus.
We noticed that God tends to do less than we expect in the first 3 years, and more than we expect over 10-15 years. 3-5 years God works in us, so that we are better prepared for what he does through us.
Sticky tools are alliteration, rhyme or repetition. Easy to pass on and share. Scalable at different levels.
APEST, we are all to teach, care for one another, share our faith with others, live in the Spirit and speak truth to one another and the powers that be, and live as sent people.
Some are apostolic-evangelists, pastor-prophets, prophetic-teachers. A-P trailblazers, S-E healers. 2 base gifts usually. Each APEST has a weakness (e.g. immature pastors may be drive by fear people pleasing, create dichotomy between community and mission).
Sometimes God calls us to mature in a season by living into another part of the 5fold typology, not part of our base gifting.
Christianity started in Palestine as community, moved to Greece to become a philosophy, went to Rome to become an institution, and Europe to become a government, and America to become an enterprise. What might it take to return to community?
It is better to live by faith and fail than to allow fear to win the day and slowly die.
Leaders create culture. What is your ultimate aim? Israel insisted on a king. They were never meant to wear the ring (LOTR).
Player-coach continuum. Everyone is a player, but not everyone has been given the grace to coach. Everyone has a calling and ministry, but only some are given the grace to devote more time to equipping others.
Mutual leadership is an effort to share power among a trust-soaked, vision-distributed, emotionally-mature, Christ-rooted team. For the sake of God’s mission in the world, we need to distribute leadership.
Community before clergy. Submission before sergeant. Disciples before deciders. (Our 1st responsibility is to develop people) Consultative before concrete. Accountability before autonomy. Follow me as I follow Christ.
Jesus’ primary way of evaluating the church is asking, Are we fulfilling his command to make disciples?
To live we must die. The way to spiritual riches is acknowledging spiritual poverty. The way to rule is become servant of all.
Self-awareness, inner life of a disciple is paying attention to the iceberg under the surface of the water for transformation.
Nothing is more important than relationship with God, nothing more satisfying than being in his presence, nothing is more vital for fruitful ministry than our communion with God. Thus, nothing is more challenging. Pursuing God is a struggle. God is sweeter for the long seeking. A.W. Tozer.
Henri Nouwen, Great difference between success and fruitfulness. Success comes from power, control, and respectability. It brings rewards and fame. Fruitfulness however comes through weakness, faithfulness, and vulnerability. Community is the fruit born through shared weakness, meaningful presence in the neighborhood comes through a long faithfulness and experiencing the surprise of the Spirit comes through vulnerability. Let’s remind one another that what brings true joy is not successfulness but fruitfulness.
Are you developing an inner life that has capacity to face the challenges and resist the temptations we encounter in ministry?
Often our sense of self-worth is tied to the size of our impact. Nope! Matthew 3:17
Young adult formation is heavily influenced by celebrity preachers (podcast and massive platform, we are tempted to imitate success).
We are tempted by production, power, and popularity.
The irony is that I hide because I’m afraid if the full truth about myself is known, I won’t be loved. But whatever is hidden cannot be loved. I can only be loved to the extent that I make myself known. And I can only be fully loved if I’m fully known.
John Ortberg: 3 stages of openness, guarded communication, everyday authenticity, and deep disclosure with close friends (trust, intimacy).
Making Disciples
You will know as much of God, and only as much of God, as you are wiling to put into practice. Eric Liddell
Don’t be fooled by church attendance. Unless people are on an intentional discipleship path they will not be shaped for God’s mission in the world.
Why do we focus on the crowds when Jesus focused on the Twelve?
LOTR is great metaphor for cultivating a discipleship core and going on mission together. This is what Jesus did, calling others into a daring commitment to go on mission with him. Follow me as I follow the example of Christ.
Creating meta-moments often happen when we contemplate stuff we’ve heard a 1000 times before, but seek to deconstruct it in a way that reveals the big meaning hidden in plain sight. (you just blew my mind) Mt. 9:12-13 KingdomNT
Jesus asks 307 questions in the Gospels, while he is asked 183, he only answers 3 of them directly. Typically, he answers a Q with a Q. He expertly challenged people’s underlying assumptions. We’d do good to model this in our discipleship spaces. Jesus helped disciples to understand what was in their hearts by asking them questions and drawing them out. Good q’s make space for God’s disruptive Spirit to work. Sometimes the disciples are caught off-guard by Jesus’ disarming questions, a technique for putting them in a learning posture. Jesus sought to make disciples involving reflective learning.
Jesus taught immersively, with experiential learning, leading by example.
Consumerism has trained us to demand a finished product that meets our highest standards. if we don’t like the quality of something, we move on and purchase something else. Discipleship cannot be consumed; we must participate in it.
The church as industrial complex still acts as if the HS primarily shows up in a building at organized events; this is a brick and mortar mentality. (Jn. 16:7, 1 Cor. 6:19) The Holy Spirit in relational temple of average, ordinary disciples, equipped and sustained with the presence of God.
1 - Communion. What is God’s Spirit doing in me? 2 - Community. What is God’s Spirit doing around me? 3 - Co-mission. What is God’s Spirxit doing through me? 4 - Next step. What is our response to the Spirit?
Missional Theology
When the gospel is reduced to private affair between us and God, it’s not only self-serving but becomes irrelevant to the world (e.g. poverty, violence, ecological disasters, broken families)
God is relational and missional. (The Father sends the Son into the world to reveal and inaugurate the kingdom; the F & S send the Spirit into the world to continue their work, and the S sends the church into the world, through the power of the Spirit, so that we can join our Triune God in the renewal of all things (Rev. 21:5).
When you lose Trinitarian focus, history shows patriarchal/dominating patterns, colonial missions, rise of modern atheism.
Don’t approach mission unidirectional, coming to meet needs/share good news, we can unintentionally exacerbate the already marred image of God in those we are being sent to. When we have them participate in the mission, bringing their gifts to the table, they wake up to the fact that they are made in God’s image. (Jesus sent out the 70 in the same way)
The beginning of mission is the self-giving relationship of the F, S, & HS. Our greatest gift is our life together, our interdependent, love-filled community. When we turn the church into a production/franchise, we lose the beautiful relational witness of the Trinity.
John 20:21; Mission is primarily and ultimately, the work of the Triune God, Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier, for the sake of the world, a ministry in which the church is privileged to participate. Mission originates in the heart of God. God is a fountain of sending love.
Living between the resurrection and the glorious picture of the kingdom in Revelation is a lot like living between D-Day and VE-Day. Jesus has established a beachhead and effected a decisive victory over the powers, but we still linger in the “already, but not yet” of the kingdom of God.
The church is sign, foretaste, and instrument of God’s kingdom. Sign points to something not yet fully visible. Our way of life together ought to point people to God’s future.
Conversion is changing stories, trusting God and switching stories (american story, hollywood story). We start to live by a different script.
Jesus’ way is the way of forgiveness, not revenge, encouragement (gossip), serving (dominating), humility (arrogance), devotion (distraction), generosity (greed), faithful to the end. If his way isn’t our way, we need to ask whether we trust him and have fully applied his work to our lives. Salvation is not about leaving the world, but leaving the ways of this world and entering into God’ s world through the life, death, and resurrection of JC. Trusting that in the end, heaven and earth kiss.
Evangelism works best in the context where it’s an answer to a question.
The Christian hope is not that someday all believers get to die and go to heaven. Indeed, the only reason anyone ever goes to heaven is sin. (If Adam & Eve never sinned, they would have continued to live on this planet enjoying the beauty of Creation as they walked in close fellowship with their Creator.) Escaping Creation and going to heaven is not the solution. Sin is the reason for hunger, war, injustice and death. Sin is taking a stand against God and his loving reign, against life and well-being. Seeking autonomy from God, we experience shame guilt, and condemnation. We make gods in our own image rather than accepting that we are made in God’s image.
“Just as sin began with individuals and rippled out to contaminate the entire world, so grace begins with individuals and ripples out to redeem the rest of creation.”
Sacramental nature of mission: A birthday party for our son is a public way for others to hear how grateful we are that God brought our son into the world.
Sacrament of Lord’s Supper offers us a reminder that GOd’s work in the world brings together the scandal that death brings new life. The double meaning is, 1) God laid down his life. We should never forget this and we should do the same. 2) God is joyously welcoming the world to His table, and we should do the same.
Ecclesial Architecture
Communion and worship are a way of life, learning to live in the life/dance of God throughout our ordinary life.
Church is called to be the welcoming committee, not managers of the guest list.
Church essence is people who find their identity in the arms of God (communion), rallied around tables welcoming each other (community) and sent out into the world with serving hands (co-mission). Jesus models this (Lk. 6:12-19)
Rule & rhythm for gathered people. Different kinds of prayer (intercession, supplication, praise, listening, healing), Scripture (lectio divina, responsive readings, reenacting a short story of Bible) singing, confessing, sharing stories of God’s recent work, and partaking at the Lord’s Table draw us into the presence of God.
Organizing around communion, community, and co-mission is like building an exercise routine (regular incremental practices).
practicing presence of God and sabbath weekly. Meet with people weekly using discipleship tool, bless 3 people daily, (1 person outside church) and have a meal weekly with non-Christian. Rule is practice. Rhythm is how often you engage.
Practice God’s presence by being thankful. Thank you God for gift of new day, that I can see, taste, hear, smell, imagine, create, relate, work; I am a child of God, loved, forgiven, valued, The HS lives within me. He’s made me an ambassador to the world, giving me calling, gifts, and purpose.
Sabbath - ceasing (anxiety, work), resting (physical, spiritual, emotional, intellectual, social), embracing (intentionality, community, time, giving, shalom) feasting (eternal, music, beauty, meal, affection, festival)
Discipleship - confession, encouragement, reconciliation
Everyone has a rule & rhythm. Is yours forming you to be more like Christ?
Not individualism, but interdependence.
Too often our talks end with, “Nice sermon Pastor”
Don’t confuse public space with personal space. Genuine emotional interaction is unnatural here. Public space backfires when we attract people to dynamic preaching and worship in order to get them interested in community, mission and discipleship. This is a genuine challenge to consumer society. Neil Cole, What you win people with, you win them to.
Public gatherings provide inspiration and momentum by gathering stories of ministry and mission taking place in community.
Which space are we seeking to multiply?
Missional culture: LAAMPS language, artifacts, assumptions, mission, marks, practices, strategy;
When someone says, Let’s go to church. reveals a lack of understanding of church nature. Church is not something we go to, it is something we are. We go to a weekly gathering, we attend a service, but we are the church.
To live into church, eliminate words like volunteers and use biblical words: sent ones, priests, saints, missionaries, ambassadors, ministers. Volunteer implies choice to be active in the body of Christ.
What visually represents us? What does our website reveal? Where do people find our mission/vision/values/practices, and definition of success?
Mission: What is God calling us to do? We don’t invent it; we receive it from God. Mission statement is few well-crafted words or simple statement articulating overarching purpose of our existence as community of faith.
Marks: What does it mean to be faithful and fruitful in God’s mission? If you don’t define success, or what it means to be faithful and fruitful, others will. Defining the ends always shape the means. We measure what’s important and that guides our process. e.g. If we value discipleship and helping people become more like Christ, we might want to ask how many discipleship groups are happening in our congregation and how these disciples are displaying the fruit of the Spirit in their lives.
The church cannot storm the gates of hell by gathering around consumer needs. (Contra mature unified communities of self-sacrificial love)
From me to we, 1 Cor. 3:16, together we are God’s temple, collectively.
When we welcome others to our table, we practice God’s future now. (Isa. 25:6-8)
Apostles (thriving environment), prophets (liberating), evangelists (welcoming), pastors (healing), teachers (learning).
A passive aggressive person grasps for power over others by judging their motives without direct, open communication. Relational strategy is indirect, so their anger cannot be identified but is still felt.
Conversing with others with reconciling intent is most powerful way for community to discover God’s Spirit in its midst. Paul never instructed Corinth conflict to leave the community for a healthier one. (1 Cor. 5-6)
Incarnational Practices
The come-to-us stance developed over Christendom period is unbiblical. (John 1:14)
NEAR narrative, ethics, associations, rituals
Weekly gatherings can be missional, instead of consuming religious goods, combine worship and mission; When the weekly service becomes an end, the tail wags the dog.
God is for us (Abraham, blessed to be a blessing), with us (Emmanuel), of us (through incarnation), and in us (through the Holy Spirit).
To be faithful to the mission we must have sustained faith, stubborn hope, sacrificial love.
Faith is seeing the unseen and clinging to God’s promises until they come to pass, believes the impossible is possible. Living by faith means learning to trust God for everything in life. Despite fear, choosing to follow God, experiencing presence and see his beauty through both suffering and resurrection power.
How do you endure? Our hope in the triune God’s ability to bring about new creation - the redemption of our bodies and the world. Because of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, the new creation will be fully realized some day.
As you follow Jesus, as you follow his ways, his kingdom will break into your neighborhood, your city, your world.
more talented than Michael Jordan, more creative than Da Vinci, more gifted than Beethoven, more adventurous than Columbus, more missional than Newbigin, more tools than Tim Allen, more giving than Mother Theresa, better wordsmith than Shakespeare, more paradigm-breaking than Copernicus, a greater imagination than Einstein, but without love, you are nothing, and you gain nothing.
Grateful for the love of the Father, the faithfulness of the Son, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, who have enveloped us with love, sustained our faith. God has given us a stubborn hope and he is teaching us selfless love.
February 14, 2017
Sometimes a resource is so helpful it transcends the category it was created for and ends up changing the entire conversation.
Church as Movement is a resource that does just that—it broadens the scope of church planting to a growing movement that focuses on discipleship, the mission of God, and a holistic gospel that can transform the culture of any group of people answering the call to be church. This book can help provide a pathway to beginning a new missional community, but it is also helpful for existing churches seeking to transform their current culture for the sake of the communities and neighborhoods they feel compelled to serve.
While most reviews of Church as Movement will focus on how this helps new church starts, I thought it might be helpful to hear how this millennial Senior Pastor at a First Baptist Church found this book a helpful guide for his adventure.
Never Too Old for Missional-Incarnational Community
I grew up the son of a Baptist pastor, weaving my way through traditional churches for the first 14 years of life and then serving at a church plant for the next 18. These days, I’m pastoring a 159-year-old congregation that is taking intentional steps to becoming what JR Woodward and Dan White Jr. describe in the subtitle of the book as a missional-incarnational community.
A missional-incarnational community finds its vision to be guided by a deep commitment to the mission of God for the restoration of the world and is committed to living that mission in relationship “for-with-of-in” our neighborhoods and creation. Church as Movement is a helpful companion for discerning why being on mission with God matters and how being the church in today’s world is a meaningful response to the love of God.
Movement in 4D
Broken into four parts (Distributing, Discipling, Designing, Doing), Church as Movement is a guidebook that explores some of the ways leadership, discipling, organizational relationships, and formation are changing in the current cultural environment and ways the church can reimagine its own way of being in the world.
In this new environment, the language of movement is a helpful framework to describe the flexibility and communal habits that are necessary to build bridges in a post-Christian culture suspicious (and often rightfully so!) of the ways churches have embodied faith, hope and love.
Journalist and author Charles Duhigg says in The Power of Habit,
Movements don’t emerge because everyone suddenly decided to face the same direction at once. They rely on social patterns that begin as the habits of friendship, grow through the habits of communities, and are sustained by new habits that change participants’ sense of self.
Disciple-Making
Church as Movement is a guidebook for disciple-making, with fantastic questions and helpful charts throughout, that describe the social patterns and habits of friendship that create disciples for the world today. The disciples described in the book rely on tradition and yet are remarkably innovative, which means that people aren’t facing the same direction at once, but they are held together by both the past and the future into this present moment.
There is a minimalist impulse described by Woodward and White that ushers us into the simplicity of Jesus’ disciple-making patterns. At its heart, this book encourages a discipleship that is emotionally aware and culturally astute for the sake of the mission of God.
In modernity the emphasis on right thinking created a baptism of business practices that churches believed would bring transformation within their people. However, Woodward and White recognize that churches are always much more than what they say in their mission, vision, and value statements. Church culture is a force. They write, “It has the power to pull people down to their base instincts or help them live up to their redemptive potential.” Even more, they recognize that for traditional church contexts like my own, our language is part of the problem. They highlight,
When someone says, “Let’s go to church,” it reveals a lack of understanding of the nature of the church. The church is the people of God. Church is not something we go to, it is something we are. We go to a weekly gathering, we attend a service, but we are the church.
Words create contexts and shape our understanding of who we are and where we are going together. Pastors of traditional churches, like me, would do themselves a huge favor to pay close attention to the words they use that disorient people from the mission and remember the old lessons from Sunday School that the church is not the building (or programs)—the church is the people.
New Wineskins
There isn’t much for me to critique in this book. I tend to dislike charts in books, and yet these charts are incredibly helpful. I find guidebooks to be tedious, and yet the layers of questions provided necessary reflection points to avoid missing the transformative power of the text.
There is more meat to chew on than is possible in one sitting. For those of you in traditional church contexts like my own, you may read this at first and want to throw in the towel because it seems like a far-off and impossible future for your people. My advice: don’t run—instead, allow the disruption from Holy Spirit to lead you to new places. You’ll have some work to do. Some new wineskins will be needed for the new wine. But, has there ever been another way with Jesus? The path to resurrection always involves the cross.
There are five generations of people present in my current church. As I’ve applied the wisdom of these pages into the relationships, organizational structures, and communal habits in my context, the quality of relationships has improved and the mission has been multiplying disciples. Being church has never been easy, but as we live into the mission of God in relationship with one another we become more like Christ, who moves into the neighborhood (John 1:14).
Grandma’s Church
Church as Movement has a proven track record for helping start missional-incarnational churches across the United States, inspiring young people to experience the hope and love of God in creative ways. But to its praise let me add that it helps your grandma’s church, too. And when multiple generations can experience the transforming love of God and participate in the mission together—we really do have a movement.
Church as Movement is a resource that does just that—it broadens the scope of church planting to a growing movement that focuses on discipleship, the mission of God, and a holistic gospel that can transform the culture of any group of people answering the call to be church. This book can help provide a pathway to beginning a new missional community, but it is also helpful for existing churches seeking to transform their current culture for the sake of the communities and neighborhoods they feel compelled to serve.
While most reviews of Church as Movement will focus on how this helps new church starts, I thought it might be helpful to hear how this millennial Senior Pastor at a First Baptist Church found this book a helpful guide for his adventure.
Never Too Old for Missional-Incarnational Community
I grew up the son of a Baptist pastor, weaving my way through traditional churches for the first 14 years of life and then serving at a church plant for the next 18. These days, I’m pastoring a 159-year-old congregation that is taking intentional steps to becoming what JR Woodward and Dan White Jr. describe in the subtitle of the book as a missional-incarnational community.
A missional-incarnational community finds its vision to be guided by a deep commitment to the mission of God for the restoration of the world and is committed to living that mission in relationship “for-with-of-in” our neighborhoods and creation. Church as Movement is a helpful companion for discerning why being on mission with God matters and how being the church in today’s world is a meaningful response to the love of God.
Movement in 4D
Broken into four parts (Distributing, Discipling, Designing, Doing), Church as Movement is a guidebook that explores some of the ways leadership, discipling, organizational relationships, and formation are changing in the current cultural environment and ways the church can reimagine its own way of being in the world.
In this new environment, the language of movement is a helpful framework to describe the flexibility and communal habits that are necessary to build bridges in a post-Christian culture suspicious (and often rightfully so!) of the ways churches have embodied faith, hope and love.
Journalist and author Charles Duhigg says in The Power of Habit,
Movements don’t emerge because everyone suddenly decided to face the same direction at once. They rely on social patterns that begin as the habits of friendship, grow through the habits of communities, and are sustained by new habits that change participants’ sense of self.
Disciple-Making
Church as Movement is a guidebook for disciple-making, with fantastic questions and helpful charts throughout, that describe the social patterns and habits of friendship that create disciples for the world today. The disciples described in the book rely on tradition and yet are remarkably innovative, which means that people aren’t facing the same direction at once, but they are held together by both the past and the future into this present moment.
There is a minimalist impulse described by Woodward and White that ushers us into the simplicity of Jesus’ disciple-making patterns. At its heart, this book encourages a discipleship that is emotionally aware and culturally astute for the sake of the mission of God.
In modernity the emphasis on right thinking created a baptism of business practices that churches believed would bring transformation within their people. However, Woodward and White recognize that churches are always much more than what they say in their mission, vision, and value statements. Church culture is a force. They write, “It has the power to pull people down to their base instincts or help them live up to their redemptive potential.” Even more, they recognize that for traditional church contexts like my own, our language is part of the problem. They highlight,
When someone says, “Let’s go to church,” it reveals a lack of understanding of the nature of the church. The church is the people of God. Church is not something we go to, it is something we are. We go to a weekly gathering, we attend a service, but we are the church.
Words create contexts and shape our understanding of who we are and where we are going together. Pastors of traditional churches, like me, would do themselves a huge favor to pay close attention to the words they use that disorient people from the mission and remember the old lessons from Sunday School that the church is not the building (or programs)—the church is the people.
New Wineskins
There isn’t much for me to critique in this book. I tend to dislike charts in books, and yet these charts are incredibly helpful. I find guidebooks to be tedious, and yet the layers of questions provided necessary reflection points to avoid missing the transformative power of the text.
There is more meat to chew on than is possible in one sitting. For those of you in traditional church contexts like my own, you may read this at first and want to throw in the towel because it seems like a far-off and impossible future for your people. My advice: don’t run—instead, allow the disruption from Holy Spirit to lead you to new places. You’ll have some work to do. Some new wineskins will be needed for the new wine. But, has there ever been another way with Jesus? The path to resurrection always involves the cross.
There are five generations of people present in my current church. As I’ve applied the wisdom of these pages into the relationships, organizational structures, and communal habits in my context, the quality of relationships has improved and the mission has been multiplying disciples. Being church has never been easy, but as we live into the mission of God in relationship with one another we become more like Christ, who moves into the neighborhood (John 1:14).
Grandma’s Church
Church as Movement has a proven track record for helping start missional-incarnational churches across the United States, inspiring young people to experience the hope and love of God in creative ways. But to its praise let me add that it helps your grandma’s church, too. And when multiple generations can experience the transforming love of God and participate in the mission together—we really do have a movement.
November 21, 2016
The Church as Movement Gave Me a Kick
Sometimes I just need a good “kick in the seat of my pants” to get me going. That phrase – kick in the seat of the pants – has always been a reminder that I need to open myself up to new ideas and get outside the box in my thinking, even in church matters. Roger Von Oech wrote a life-changing book a few decades ago that I pull out occasionally just to remind me that I need to keep my thinking open and responsive to what God is doing in my life and in the culture in which we engage.
The book, The Church as Movement: Starting and Sustaining Missional-incarnational Communities, gave me one of those “kick in the seat of the pants” moments as I digested and engaged the ideas presented by the authors, JR Woodward and Dan White. Oh, I have heard some of the ideas before as I engaged with thoughts and books by Alan Hirsch, David Fitch, Mike Breen, George Bullard, and Alan Roxburgh among others. But something about their approach caught my attention. It was like God was saying to me, “Quit complaining about the failure of the Western church to address discipleship and community, and get up and do something about it!” The book gave me that “kick” to realize the hope for our churches and communities when we engage again the Jesus way of relationship and sacrifice.
As I reflect on the book, here are a few of the ingredients that make this a book that people who serve in Western Hemisphere churches should contemplate and study:
1- Basics– Woodward and White make the assertion early that this book is written from a perspective of the “basics” of establishing thriving discipleship-focused, incarnational communities. They are writing specifically to those who are engaged in planting churches in this diverse, relationship-starved world. They also are writing out of their experiences of planting churches in many different parts of our country.
After setting a framework for establishing new communities, the authors teach all of us Western Christians, who are fascinated by big, polished, elaborate programs and personalities, the basics of what it means live out a discipleship focused approach to being church in the 21st century. We could all use a good “kick” to be reminded that Jesus approached relationships as the basic of church life, not programs.
2- Workbook – the material is written to engage us in conversation and discussion. Each chapter concludes with questions for the reader to share in the context of a learning community. The questions provide for a reflective conversation about what the reader is engaging and learning about these new communities. The authors approach to “meta-learning, reflective learning, and experiential learning” give each of us some room for our own understanding and growth. Many of these concepts will especially be challenging for those of us who have grown up in the programmatic world of the mid and late 20th century.
The engagement of this learning in a group context will allow us to engage the concepts and find practical ways to live them out. One of the most beneficial part of this book is its balance between the theoretical and the practical. Take seriously the commitment of these authors to involve other people with you in looking at these concepts. Our accountability for learning and engagement with missional-incarnational communities are a necessity in our own community context.
Even though the book is written to church planters, church leaders in Sunday School groups, small groups, church staffs, deacons, and other traditional-based groups will find the opportunity to process these challenging ideas in their settings. (By the way, if you cannot connect with a group context, I would suggest you consider investing your reading this book with a coach. Your coach helps you process your learning and commit yourself to sustainable action.)
3- Movement Language – One of the constant challenges of church life is our human need to institutionalize and codify our movements. I highly recommend you spend significant time with the chapter on movement intelligence. The book does a superb job helping us think through our fascination with forms of church that have grown up in the industrial world of the 20th century.
Many of our churches have institutionalized the need for growing bigger, having more resources, and developing hierarchical structures. Spend time with this chapter and capture again the sense of church as a movement of relationship and discipleship.
4- Revolutionary – I do not use this word lightly. In fact, I have deleted it twice and tried to come up with a softer word, but when I engage with this material, I sense the concepts that Woodward and White present are revolutionary for the nature of whom our churches will become. Their focus on polycentric leadership, discipleship core, and community formation would change the whole nature of who we will be as churches.
If you take a careful look at life-changing movements, a majority of our churches do not fit the bill. We have become static life forces that tend to succumb to culture and provide little life-changing movement in our communities. If we were to follow many of the principles of this book, our churches would see radical change that brings discipleship back to the center of our existence. (Not many churches are up for that type of change. Most of us would be revolutionized by small, incremental changes.)
“A kick in the seat of the pants” – we all need to be taken out of our boxes and comfort zones and discover new, challenging ways to be and do church in the 21st century. This book will kick you right where you need to be kicked. The church planting world will be inspired and kick-started with the practical concepts in this book. The traditional church world will be provoked and challenged to live out their mission and vision differently because of what they read. And remember – don’t read this alone! Let someone be nearby when you need that kick to get you going!
Sometimes I just need a good “kick in the seat of my pants” to get me going. That phrase – kick in the seat of the pants – has always been a reminder that I need to open myself up to new ideas and get outside the box in my thinking, even in church matters. Roger Von Oech wrote a life-changing book a few decades ago that I pull out occasionally just to remind me that I need to keep my thinking open and responsive to what God is doing in my life and in the culture in which we engage.
The book, The Church as Movement: Starting and Sustaining Missional-incarnational Communities, gave me one of those “kick in the seat of the pants” moments as I digested and engaged the ideas presented by the authors, JR Woodward and Dan White. Oh, I have heard some of the ideas before as I engaged with thoughts and books by Alan Hirsch, David Fitch, Mike Breen, George Bullard, and Alan Roxburgh among others. But something about their approach caught my attention. It was like God was saying to me, “Quit complaining about the failure of the Western church to address discipleship and community, and get up and do something about it!” The book gave me that “kick” to realize the hope for our churches and communities when we engage again the Jesus way of relationship and sacrifice.
As I reflect on the book, here are a few of the ingredients that make this a book that people who serve in Western Hemisphere churches should contemplate and study:
1- Basics– Woodward and White make the assertion early that this book is written from a perspective of the “basics” of establishing thriving discipleship-focused, incarnational communities. They are writing specifically to those who are engaged in planting churches in this diverse, relationship-starved world. They also are writing out of their experiences of planting churches in many different parts of our country.
After setting a framework for establishing new communities, the authors teach all of us Western Christians, who are fascinated by big, polished, elaborate programs and personalities, the basics of what it means live out a discipleship focused approach to being church in the 21st century. We could all use a good “kick” to be reminded that Jesus approached relationships as the basic of church life, not programs.
2- Workbook – the material is written to engage us in conversation and discussion. Each chapter concludes with questions for the reader to share in the context of a learning community. The questions provide for a reflective conversation about what the reader is engaging and learning about these new communities. The authors approach to “meta-learning, reflective learning, and experiential learning” give each of us some room for our own understanding and growth. Many of these concepts will especially be challenging for those of us who have grown up in the programmatic world of the mid and late 20th century.
The engagement of this learning in a group context will allow us to engage the concepts and find practical ways to live them out. One of the most beneficial part of this book is its balance between the theoretical and the practical. Take seriously the commitment of these authors to involve other people with you in looking at these concepts. Our accountability for learning and engagement with missional-incarnational communities are a necessity in our own community context.
Even though the book is written to church planters, church leaders in Sunday School groups, small groups, church staffs, deacons, and other traditional-based groups will find the opportunity to process these challenging ideas in their settings. (By the way, if you cannot connect with a group context, I would suggest you consider investing your reading this book with a coach. Your coach helps you process your learning and commit yourself to sustainable action.)
3- Movement Language – One of the constant challenges of church life is our human need to institutionalize and codify our movements. I highly recommend you spend significant time with the chapter on movement intelligence. The book does a superb job helping us think through our fascination with forms of church that have grown up in the industrial world of the 20th century.
Many of our churches have institutionalized the need for growing bigger, having more resources, and developing hierarchical structures. Spend time with this chapter and capture again the sense of church as a movement of relationship and discipleship.
4- Revolutionary – I do not use this word lightly. In fact, I have deleted it twice and tried to come up with a softer word, but when I engage with this material, I sense the concepts that Woodward and White present are revolutionary for the nature of whom our churches will become. Their focus on polycentric leadership, discipleship core, and community formation would change the whole nature of who we will be as churches.
If you take a careful look at life-changing movements, a majority of our churches do not fit the bill. We have become static life forces that tend to succumb to culture and provide little life-changing movement in our communities. If we were to follow many of the principles of this book, our churches would see radical change that brings discipleship back to the center of our existence. (Not many churches are up for that type of change. Most of us would be revolutionized by small, incremental changes.)
“A kick in the seat of the pants” – we all need to be taken out of our boxes and comfort zones and discover new, challenging ways to be and do church in the 21st century. This book will kick you right where you need to be kicked. The church planting world will be inspired and kick-started with the practical concepts in this book. The traditional church world will be provoked and challenged to live out their mission and vision differently because of what they read. And remember – don’t read this alone! Let someone be nearby when you need that kick to get you going!
August 15, 2016
https://joemcfadden.org/2016/08/15/th... can often tell alot about a book by its title. In “The Church As Movement” authors J.R. Woodward and Dan White Jr do an excellent job unpacking the title of this book. For most of us our view of “church” is tied up in a building; a place we go to on a particular day of the week. Our inherited patterns of “church” fall short of the kind of movement that Jesus and his disciples initiated. Imagine what it would look like for us to return once again to The Church as Movement “where everyone, regardless of race, gender and class, is an active agent in the game.” This book will help the reader understand with great clarity what it looks like to recover lost practices and perspectives of living this out in the world around us on a day-to-day basis.
For those not familiar with the terms “missional” and “incarnational” the authors do well at not only unpacking these terms as well as others related to them, but explaining it as well.
Missional is about joining God in His work of restoration in the world around us. “Not only is God relational; he is also a sending God. In other words, God is missional in his very essence. The Father sends the Son into the world to reveal and inaugurate the kingdom; the Father and Son send the Spirit into the world to continue their work, and the Son sends the church into the world, through the power of the Spirit, so that we can join our triune God in the renewal of all things (Rev 21: 5).”
“Incarnation is about inhabiting the place where God has called us to live, to engage in grounded missional practices in the concrete realities of life. It’s moving from Facebook to facing our neighbors and networks. It’s about standing in solidarity with those who suffer, and celebrating with those who are experiencing the goodness of life.”
Mission and Incarnation is best expressed in community and not an individualistic pursuit. “Too often we approach mission in an individualistic fashion, instead of communally. We get the impression that Jesus has sent us out alone, by ourselves. But typically he sent people in at least pairs.”
There is much I love about Woodward’s and White’s book and much that challenges my thoughts and perspectives as well. I have more highlights in this book than I usually do in other books. Over the last 10 years or so there have been many books written that introduces readers to the missional conversation that is taking place. This book builds on the works of others on this same subject without repeating much of the same conversation but taking the conversation several steps further. If you are ready to move from theory to practice in forming missional communities this book will prove valuable.
One of the many things I love about the book is how broad the concepts range but how interrelated they are to the topic at hand. The reader will begin the journey to understanding the church as movement. The reader will learn about leadership structures with a specific focus on Polycentric Leadership. Woodward and White also do perhaps the best I have seen at unpacking giftedness with an intentional focus on the theo-genetic coding of the five-fold typology and how these relate to starting and sustaining missional-incarnational communities. The reader then will journey to understanding how to be a disciple and then how to make disciples. The reader will then come to a broader understanding of missional theology to help frame and broaden perspective of living out our sent-ness. From there the reader will come to an understanding of ecclesial architecture that allows the reader to designs systems and structures for mission. Finally there are the much-needed competencies of community formation and incarnational practices.
This book will serve as a valuable resource and troubleshooting guide for years to come for practitioners in starting and sustaining communities. The many exercises, with a focus on formational learning through meta-learning, reflective learning, and experiential learning along with the resources available within this book gives the reader many tools to process, implement and apply what they are reading.
Order a copy and allow your perspectives of “church” to be reframed and charged with a grander vision than what we usually settle for. Move beyond inherited structures and patterns of “church” to a glimpse of God’s Kingdom movement in the world around us.
NOTE: I received an advance e-copy of this book from the Publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review. The thoughts expressed here are my own.
For those not familiar with the terms “missional” and “incarnational” the authors do well at not only unpacking these terms as well as others related to them, but explaining it as well.
Missional is about joining God in His work of restoration in the world around us. “Not only is God relational; he is also a sending God. In other words, God is missional in his very essence. The Father sends the Son into the world to reveal and inaugurate the kingdom; the Father and Son send the Spirit into the world to continue their work, and the Son sends the church into the world, through the power of the Spirit, so that we can join our triune God in the renewal of all things (Rev 21: 5).”
“Incarnation is about inhabiting the place where God has called us to live, to engage in grounded missional practices in the concrete realities of life. It’s moving from Facebook to facing our neighbors and networks. It’s about standing in solidarity with those who suffer, and celebrating with those who are experiencing the goodness of life.”
Mission and Incarnation is best expressed in community and not an individualistic pursuit. “Too often we approach mission in an individualistic fashion, instead of communally. We get the impression that Jesus has sent us out alone, by ourselves. But typically he sent people in at least pairs.”
There is much I love about Woodward’s and White’s book and much that challenges my thoughts and perspectives as well. I have more highlights in this book than I usually do in other books. Over the last 10 years or so there have been many books written that introduces readers to the missional conversation that is taking place. This book builds on the works of others on this same subject without repeating much of the same conversation but taking the conversation several steps further. If you are ready to move from theory to practice in forming missional communities this book will prove valuable.
One of the many things I love about the book is how broad the concepts range but how interrelated they are to the topic at hand. The reader will begin the journey to understanding the church as movement. The reader will learn about leadership structures with a specific focus on Polycentric Leadership. Woodward and White also do perhaps the best I have seen at unpacking giftedness with an intentional focus on the theo-genetic coding of the five-fold typology and how these relate to starting and sustaining missional-incarnational communities. The reader then will journey to understanding how to be a disciple and then how to make disciples. The reader will then come to a broader understanding of missional theology to help frame and broaden perspective of living out our sent-ness. From there the reader will come to an understanding of ecclesial architecture that allows the reader to designs systems and structures for mission. Finally there are the much-needed competencies of community formation and incarnational practices.
This book will serve as a valuable resource and troubleshooting guide for years to come for practitioners in starting and sustaining communities. The many exercises, with a focus on formational learning through meta-learning, reflective learning, and experiential learning along with the resources available within this book gives the reader many tools to process, implement and apply what they are reading.
Order a copy and allow your perspectives of “church” to be reframed and charged with a grander vision than what we usually settle for. Move beyond inherited structures and patterns of “church” to a glimpse of God’s Kingdom movement in the world around us.
NOTE: I received an advance e-copy of this book from the Publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review. The thoughts expressed here are my own.
May 28, 2018
JR Woodward and Dan White have written a valuable guidebook for recalibrating existing churches or starting new Christian communities from “a discipler mentality.” They recognize that one of the challenges facing the North American church today is that “things that once were productive … no longer are.” And yet, naturally, we remain “attached to the obsolete.” Simply optimizing inherited habits to reach a new world “is like trying to negotiate New York City with a map of Paris.” They challenge us to listen to the voice of the Spirit for what it means to be followers of Jesus today.
As Alan Hirsch states in his Forward, key to discerning the Spirit’s leading, engaging his mission, and rethinking local church architecture requires the restoration of apostolic ministry. We can rejoice that this is happening, and there is an awakening among God’s people as they rediscover that movements of God take place in the streets rather than in the building.
Concurrent with a renewal of apostolic ministry is the recalibration around Jesus as the paradigm for ministry. Jesus’ message was of the kingdom of God, and he ignited a kingdom movement by “confiding in three, training twelve, and mobilizing seventy.” This is how movements start. Movements happen when the focus is multiplying disciples. “We must die to our self, our infatuation with speed and size, and devote ourselves to the work of making disciples, training the few.” Jesus commanded us to make disciples. Not start a church service.
The book is organized around Distributing, Discipling, Designing, and Doing. “Distributing” is about growing a ministry four generations deep and four spheres wide (Acts 1:8). Church as Movement requires authentic engagement with the Holy Spirit, a missional theology, church simplicity, transferable and locally sustainable methodology and tools. Essential to this are the five ministries of apostle, prophet, evangelist, shepherd, and teacher. Leadership is polycentric where leaders “lead as a community from within a community.” Rather than getting our leadership models from business, we need to get them from the early church.
“Discipling” means changing the metrics of the local church. Discipleship isn’t identified by Bible studies, but by those who live the counter-intuitive, upside down life Jesus modeled and called his followers to embrace. Though Jesus had a public ministry, and though both Jesus and Paul taught in synagogues, the engine of their ministries was the purposeful gathering and training of a smaller group of friends.
“Designing” involves the community of disciples. The community itself is God’s gift to the neighborhood. It is a sign, foretaste and instrument of the kingdom of God. “For the church to be a movement, the way we express being the church should flow out of our theology.” This is expressed in communion with God, community with each other, and commission into the work of Christ in the world.
“Doing” the work of the kingdom is a community affair. “Community is the pod that carries mission.” “The church as movement starts with a discipleship core, hospitality with others, presence in the neighborhood and an inviting spirit.” “Jesus didn’t command us to remember him with mere words but with a meal.” The local church community should be a learning environment, a healing environment, a welcoming environment, a liberating environment, and a thriving environment. Leaders serve these purposes of the church community by connecting people to God and his mission. This requires trust building, truth telling and peace making.
“In order to live into church as movement, you will need to change the way you look at the church. You need to ditch the church as industrial complex. If you want movement, you need to be willing to start small and focus on making disciples, remembering that discipleship is more about imitation than instruction.”
The strength of “Church as Movement” is that it links disciple making movements with church, though to do so requires us to completely rethink our church paradigms and leadership structures. This is difficult because so many of us are invested in the current structures.
Its weakness is that its linear presentation and focus on church can reinforce the belief that a local church is the goal (rather than the fruit) and a discipling movement is the means to get there. More emphasis could have been given to the reality that Christ actively builds the church. It's his responsibility.
As Alan Hirsch states in his Forward, key to discerning the Spirit’s leading, engaging his mission, and rethinking local church architecture requires the restoration of apostolic ministry. We can rejoice that this is happening, and there is an awakening among God’s people as they rediscover that movements of God take place in the streets rather than in the building.
Concurrent with a renewal of apostolic ministry is the recalibration around Jesus as the paradigm for ministry. Jesus’ message was of the kingdom of God, and he ignited a kingdom movement by “confiding in three, training twelve, and mobilizing seventy.” This is how movements start. Movements happen when the focus is multiplying disciples. “We must die to our self, our infatuation with speed and size, and devote ourselves to the work of making disciples, training the few.” Jesus commanded us to make disciples. Not start a church service.
The book is organized around Distributing, Discipling, Designing, and Doing. “Distributing” is about growing a ministry four generations deep and four spheres wide (Acts 1:8). Church as Movement requires authentic engagement with the Holy Spirit, a missional theology, church simplicity, transferable and locally sustainable methodology and tools. Essential to this are the five ministries of apostle, prophet, evangelist, shepherd, and teacher. Leadership is polycentric where leaders “lead as a community from within a community.” Rather than getting our leadership models from business, we need to get them from the early church.
“Discipling” means changing the metrics of the local church. Discipleship isn’t identified by Bible studies, but by those who live the counter-intuitive, upside down life Jesus modeled and called his followers to embrace. Though Jesus had a public ministry, and though both Jesus and Paul taught in synagogues, the engine of their ministries was the purposeful gathering and training of a smaller group of friends.
“Designing” involves the community of disciples. The community itself is God’s gift to the neighborhood. It is a sign, foretaste and instrument of the kingdom of God. “For the church to be a movement, the way we express being the church should flow out of our theology.” This is expressed in communion with God, community with each other, and commission into the work of Christ in the world.
“Doing” the work of the kingdom is a community affair. “Community is the pod that carries mission.” “The church as movement starts with a discipleship core, hospitality with others, presence in the neighborhood and an inviting spirit.” “Jesus didn’t command us to remember him with mere words but with a meal.” The local church community should be a learning environment, a healing environment, a welcoming environment, a liberating environment, and a thriving environment. Leaders serve these purposes of the church community by connecting people to God and his mission. This requires trust building, truth telling and peace making.
“In order to live into church as movement, you will need to change the way you look at the church. You need to ditch the church as industrial complex. If you want movement, you need to be willing to start small and focus on making disciples, remembering that discipleship is more about imitation than instruction.”
The strength of “Church as Movement” is that it links disciple making movements with church, though to do so requires us to completely rethink our church paradigms and leadership structures. This is difficult because so many of us are invested in the current structures.
Its weakness is that its linear presentation and focus on church can reinforce the belief that a local church is the goal (rather than the fruit) and a discipling movement is the means to get there. More emphasis could have been given to the reality that Christ actively builds the church. It's his responsibility.
November 7, 2016
In August, I received a copy of The Church As Movement: Starting and Sustaining Missional-Incarnational Communities by JR Woodward and Dan White, Jr. from their publisher, Intervarsity Press. I was excited to dig into the book as I have known JR for a long time, and I’m regularly impressed by his thoughts on church and faith. When I first met JR, he had recently transitioned from an incredibly successful church plant on the campus of Virginia Tech to starting a cluster of neighborhood churches in three different communities in Los Angeles. Since that time, he has been on the forefront of missiology and church planting in various contexts in the US and abroad. While I am not familiar with Dan White, I know that JR keeps company with many thoughtful individuals who are serious about a fresh embodiment of what it means to be a Christian. I have enjoyed many long conversations with JR through the years about living a deep and fulfilling life of faith and leading others to do the same, and I deeply appreciate his friendship, his example, and his words for fellow sojourners on the journey.
The layout of The Church As Movement was not what I expected it to be. When looking at the cover and skimming the pages, this book is not just laying out some new theory on church-planting or comparing and contrasting styles of developing and cultivating faith communities (although there is some of both in its pages). Rather, the book is meant to be a workbook and a framework for mission focused faith communities who are serious about facilitating transformation in their neighborhoods and the world.
As I read through each section, I found myself laughing out loud at some metaphors, and quietly nodding my head in agreement at the ideas developed on the pages. I read it as someone already aligned with the concepts laid out in the text. JR and I have had many conversations (although we have not been able to connect directly for a few years) about how to facilitate growth of individuals and communities with a primary focus in depth.
The book is laid out as a series of chapter concepts and sub-concepts with a series of reflective questions at the end of each section. The questions are meant to help land concepts as well as perform self-assessment of the reader and his/her faith community. Each chapter’s questions drive toward discovering gaps and thinking through how to address potential pitfalls for an aspiring church planting team or existing faith community looking more seriously at how they can aspire to be a sign, a foretaste, and an instrument of God’s Kingdom come and will being done on earth as it is in heaven.
Are you looking for a personal or communal assessment tool for evaluating the strengths of your faith community? Are you trying to think about how you can take the Good News of Jesus into the world without being a clanging gong or without being obtuse? Are you curious about how to think about shifting your thinking about faith from an extraction or attraction mindset to an embodied and missional mindset? Do you want to learn more about how to lead as a team and not with a CEO mindset? Would you like to see your faith community develop into one that looks more like the early church? If you answered yes to any of these questions, or if you just want to take a look at different approaches to living out a life of faith in community, I believe you will appreciate The Church As Movement. I hope you will give it a read, and that it will stir your imagination to think about all that is possible for running strong in your personal and communal life of faith.
The layout of The Church As Movement was not what I expected it to be. When looking at the cover and skimming the pages, this book is not just laying out some new theory on church-planting or comparing and contrasting styles of developing and cultivating faith communities (although there is some of both in its pages). Rather, the book is meant to be a workbook and a framework for mission focused faith communities who are serious about facilitating transformation in their neighborhoods and the world.
As I read through each section, I found myself laughing out loud at some metaphors, and quietly nodding my head in agreement at the ideas developed on the pages. I read it as someone already aligned with the concepts laid out in the text. JR and I have had many conversations (although we have not been able to connect directly for a few years) about how to facilitate growth of individuals and communities with a primary focus in depth.
The book is laid out as a series of chapter concepts and sub-concepts with a series of reflective questions at the end of each section. The questions are meant to help land concepts as well as perform self-assessment of the reader and his/her faith community. Each chapter’s questions drive toward discovering gaps and thinking through how to address potential pitfalls for an aspiring church planting team or existing faith community looking more seriously at how they can aspire to be a sign, a foretaste, and an instrument of God’s Kingdom come and will being done on earth as it is in heaven.
Are you looking for a personal or communal assessment tool for evaluating the strengths of your faith community? Are you trying to think about how you can take the Good News of Jesus into the world without being a clanging gong or without being obtuse? Are you curious about how to think about shifting your thinking about faith from an extraction or attraction mindset to an embodied and missional mindset? Do you want to learn more about how to lead as a team and not with a CEO mindset? Would you like to see your faith community develop into one that looks more like the early church? If you answered yes to any of these questions, or if you just want to take a look at different approaches to living out a life of faith in community, I believe you will appreciate The Church As Movement. I hope you will give it a read, and that it will stir your imagination to think about all that is possible for running strong in your personal and communal life of faith.
November 8, 2016
Too many of us know how frustrating and even hurtful it can be to love Jesus’s church but not fit into any local church; anyone who questions the elevated role of the Sunday service has felt the isolation. In light of this, Church as Movement is more than the practical guidebook it sets out to be--it’s the resounding reminder that we’re not alone, that we’re not crazy. Reading Church as Movement is a similar experience to talking with the authors in person--it leaves us exclaiming, “I’ve finally found my tribe!”
Even better, Church as Movement is the rare book that inspires both the dreamers and the doers. JR and Dan have done more than dream of a fresh way forward for the church--they have lived it. They pour their dreams and passion into every chapter; but they also punctuate their pages with charts, graphs, and other resources. While many missional church books are heavy on vision but light on details, this is a gift to all missional planters: a vision of how to use the details to grow our dreams instead of drown them.
Church as Movement builds to and flows from the central concept that “the church is not a building, a weekly gathering, or a program, but a people God has called out of the world and sent back into the world to redeem and renew it.” The trouble is, this is an easier sentence to tweet than to live. (Ok,you can’t tweet it either, because it has over 140 characters, but you get the idea!) This book was borne from JR and Dan’s failures and breakthroughs. Then, after they started and led communities, they began to coach others how to do it too. In fact, this book was initially compiled as a coaching curriculum for church planters. This is perhaps its greatest strength: each chapter has undergone countless edits stemming from rich conversations with on-the-ground planters.
The final product is a must-have for anyone interested in missional communities. Among other things, JR and Dan present how to lead a community with movement in mind, the importance of scalable tools, an understanding of mission and incarnation, and how to structure leadership. They walk through discipleship as an essential catalyst of movement--first for who the leader is, then how to lead others who lead others who lead others. Community is explored as a recurring theme--from the shared table, to a collective rule, and more. They also emphasize the neighborhood over the sanctuary stage as where God is moving, and offer clear steps shifting both paradigm and practice. Plus, every chapter includes questions for reflecting and notes with further resources. Anyone would benefit from reading it on their own, it is really designed to be used by group.
Church as Movement paints a refreshing vision for church as it could be and should be. I can’t express how much I’ve benefited from its wisdom, practical instruction, and clear message of hope. I’m confident it will influence the missional church movement for years to come.
I’m profoundly grateful that I’ve finally found my tribe.
Even better, Church as Movement is the rare book that inspires both the dreamers and the doers. JR and Dan have done more than dream of a fresh way forward for the church--they have lived it. They pour their dreams and passion into every chapter; but they also punctuate their pages with charts, graphs, and other resources. While many missional church books are heavy on vision but light on details, this is a gift to all missional planters: a vision of how to use the details to grow our dreams instead of drown them.
Church as Movement builds to and flows from the central concept that “the church is not a building, a weekly gathering, or a program, but a people God has called out of the world and sent back into the world to redeem and renew it.” The trouble is, this is an easier sentence to tweet than to live. (Ok,you can’t tweet it either, because it has over 140 characters, but you get the idea!) This book was borne from JR and Dan’s failures and breakthroughs. Then, after they started and led communities, they began to coach others how to do it too. In fact, this book was initially compiled as a coaching curriculum for church planters. This is perhaps its greatest strength: each chapter has undergone countless edits stemming from rich conversations with on-the-ground planters.
The final product is a must-have for anyone interested in missional communities. Among other things, JR and Dan present how to lead a community with movement in mind, the importance of scalable tools, an understanding of mission and incarnation, and how to structure leadership. They walk through discipleship as an essential catalyst of movement--first for who the leader is, then how to lead others who lead others who lead others. Community is explored as a recurring theme--from the shared table, to a collective rule, and more. They also emphasize the neighborhood over the sanctuary stage as where God is moving, and offer clear steps shifting both paradigm and practice. Plus, every chapter includes questions for reflecting and notes with further resources. Anyone would benefit from reading it on their own, it is really designed to be used by group.
Church as Movement paints a refreshing vision for church as it could be and should be. I can’t express how much I’ve benefited from its wisdom, practical instruction, and clear message of hope. I’m confident it will influence the missional church movement for years to come.
I’m profoundly grateful that I’ve finally found my tribe.
November 21, 2016
JR Woodward and Dan White's book, The Church as Movement, is a must read for anyone with a passion for creating and multiplying healthy faith communities. This book doesn't shy away from either theology or the practices to form and shape missional communities. The authors write from personal experiences that make this rich material very accessible and inspiring. Part of the beauty of this book is that it's very practical yet also leads you to seek further how it can be adapted and applied to your particular situation.
Our theology (our understanding of God) shapes how we live and how we lead. The Church as Movement presents a fresh understanding of key beliefs such as the Trinitarian God, the Missio-Dei, and the Incarnation. This shapes the way we live as a community of disciples on mission together. The uniqueness of this book is that it pushes strongly, yet without rigidity, on how these beliefs can be lived out in our churches. The Church as Movement is filled with tools, questions, and practical ways shaped from a missional theology and a heart to see kingdom oriented churches grow and multiply.
This resource is excellent for any leader or someone who is committed to discipleship. It can be easily digested in many smaller articles, or to be read together in community and for discussion. The questions are challenging and excellent for leadership teams to dive into, with so much to explore. I highly recommend The Church as Movement!
Our theology (our understanding of God) shapes how we live and how we lead. The Church as Movement presents a fresh understanding of key beliefs such as the Trinitarian God, the Missio-Dei, and the Incarnation. This shapes the way we live as a community of disciples on mission together. The uniqueness of this book is that it pushes strongly, yet without rigidity, on how these beliefs can be lived out in our churches. The Church as Movement is filled with tools, questions, and practical ways shaped from a missional theology and a heart to see kingdom oriented churches grow and multiply.
This resource is excellent for any leader or someone who is committed to discipleship. It can be easily digested in many smaller articles, or to be read together in community and for discussion. The questions are challenging and excellent for leadership teams to dive into, with so much to explore. I highly recommend The Church as Movement!
February 3, 2017
If you are interested in facilitating a church planting movement, this book is a must read. JR and Dan have hit the "nail on the head" in terms of the practical "how-to's" for starting and sustaining missional communities. The book is very user-friendly and can be easily used as a "guidebook" for church planting teams.
The book begins with a discussion on "Movement Intelligence" as it defines the four levels of movements: depth, width, length, and height. However, the most intriguing chapter of the book was its discussion on "Polycentric Leadership." In terms of leadership, this was a paradigm shift from my traditional hierarchical leadership experiences. But, due to the sheer magnitude of functional responsibilities associated with explosive movements, I can certainly see the need for a more mutually-shared leadership structure.
At the end of the day, this book has helped me to understand the importance of making disciples in the context of communal relationships. In other words, when "the Word became flesh," Jesus not only dwelt among humankind but He also began staking His claim on our neighborhoods. Therefore, in terms of "The Church as Movement," this is less about how we can successfully plant more physical churches in our communities and more about how we can spiritually plant ourselves as disciples of Christ in the lives of others.
I certainly enjoyed this book and I hope you will too!
The book begins with a discussion on "Movement Intelligence" as it defines the four levels of movements: depth, width, length, and height. However, the most intriguing chapter of the book was its discussion on "Polycentric Leadership." In terms of leadership, this was a paradigm shift from my traditional hierarchical leadership experiences. But, due to the sheer magnitude of functional responsibilities associated with explosive movements, I can certainly see the need for a more mutually-shared leadership structure.
At the end of the day, this book has helped me to understand the importance of making disciples in the context of communal relationships. In other words, when "the Word became flesh," Jesus not only dwelt among humankind but He also began staking His claim on our neighborhoods. Therefore, in terms of "The Church as Movement," this is less about how we can successfully plant more physical churches in our communities and more about how we can spiritually plant ourselves as disciples of Christ in the lives of others.
I certainly enjoyed this book and I hope you will too!
November 7, 2016
The authors, through practical experience and careful research, give readers the information needed for those interested in planting community-based, missional-incarnational churches. This book balances theory, practice and biblical teachings to show the value of church as a movement from a “disciple mentality” and challenges planters to relearn what it means to be a church. I particularly like the interactive component of this book, with tools and activities that can be utilized to strengthen concepts and practices presented. I highly recommend this book for both church planters and leaders who want to start and multiply missional communities.
May 25, 2020
At first I was reluctant to read this book. "Another book on church growth. Here's the pile it goes on."
But I found it useful and even inspirational, a way to recast the idea of church growth not as a thing worth it in itself, but that church growth is what church is. And that church isn't just some one-size-fits-all model, but a continually refreshed operation that finds people where they are, right now, and illuminates and inspires them--until the next movement. "The Reformed Church Always Reforming" isn't just a catchphrase or a catechism--it's the reality of the life of the spirit of the church.
Five stars, and there'd be a sixth for the surprise factor.
But I found it useful and even inspirational, a way to recast the idea of church growth not as a thing worth it in itself, but that church growth is what church is. And that church isn't just some one-size-fits-all model, but a continually refreshed operation that finds people where they are, right now, and illuminates and inspires them--until the next movement. "The Reformed Church Always Reforming" isn't just a catchphrase or a catechism--it's the reality of the life of the spirit of the church.
Five stars, and there'd be a sixth for the surprise factor.
December 13, 2021
In my early 20tied I got accidentally involved in a church planting movement, which aerator through the German speaking world, transforming the christian landscape. Back then I didn’t had the language to put into words what God did through a bunch of crazy folks who didn’t even know that they were too young to do missional church and to busy to think through the methodology.
JR and Dan are putting into worlds what we did experience and give it a good biblical and practical frameworks. My hope is that through this book many more will have a hunger to experience God at work and start to engage in what HE is doing, building HIS church.
JR and Dan are putting into worlds what we did experience and give it a good biblical and practical frameworks. My hope is that through this book many more will have a hunger to experience God at work and start to engage in what HE is doing, building HIS church.
March 9, 2018
If you are new to the "movemental/missional/community as mission" conversation this is a great resource. The authors do a great job of connecting the dots. I especially appreciate their conversation of church as industrial complex and the issues there, they do a great job of presenting the issues and then actually offering tangible steps to address said issues. Worth the read.
May 2, 2021
I've been working through what it would look like to experience church life outside of the industrial evangelical complex for over a decade. This book helped give some really important language and framework to that process. Really helpful if you feel God calling you to something greater than a lecture and show on Sunday mornings.
March 23, 2017
Great guide for those moving toward missional, simple, incarnational approaches of the church in the local. Doesn't sugar coat the journey to different expressions. Lots of great ideas, takeaways, and encouragement for missional community driven believers.
February 25, 2018
It’s a quick read. A lot of practical advice about planting Missional communities and churches. However I found myself moving through it rather quickly because much of it has been covered in other books that I have read for my program. And in general it wasn’t sticky enough to remember.
July 22, 2023
I loved this book. There's a lot of great content in here about church planting and how communities of faith can have an impact on their neighbors and follow Jesus faithfully in our current cultural context.
September 23, 2019
An essential handbook for reimagining church in the West. This critical text blends philosophy and theology with praxis to create a primer that can help practitioners become and lead toward the new expressions desperately needed for making and multiplying disciples in a post-Christian age.
December 31, 2019
Must read for those passionate about starting, leading, and/or being part of a missional, discipleship focused, and community based church....going back to the original church design (Bottom-Up, Polycentric) vs the industrial design (Top-Down, Monocentric) many have experienced.
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September 30, 2016This is an incredibly helpful tool for church leaders and especially church planters! A must read
January 8, 2018
Offers some cool tools for church leadership - more nifty than heady.
July 15, 2020
Took me long enough but I finished this book. Lots of insightful research and information.
September 21, 2021
This is a fantastic book for any church planter, and also any believer who believes that disciple-making and outreach are important. Highly recommend it!
October 28, 2016
As a pastor of a missional-incarnational community, this book invaluable. I spent most of my time while reading it nodding my head in affirmation, elated to see so much of our communities everyday struggle and celebration articulated so succinctly. All the while I had my highlighter hovering just above each page because this book is packed with new insight and practical - ready to implement - wisdom. JR and Dan have put forth a dynamic resource in this book. They articulate many of the things I see God doing in my context through the church in ways they haven't been articulated before. One of the things I appreciate most about this book is the way in which its structured. It is truly a resource for a community to experience, not just for a leader to read. Also, there are so many valuable resources out there for missional leaders, but JR and Dan have found a way to both curate the most meaningful aspects of missional leadership and add their own battle-tested wisdom and insight. Whether you're starting a missional church, or just trying to listen to what God is up to in your neighborhood this book is a must.
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June 8, 2020
This is a great overview of the key components of the Missio also church movement. It’s tightly tied to scripture and the person and work of Christ. If you’re interested in Missio Alliance church stuff, this is a great book. If you’re not, it’s probably a little boring.
June 25, 2017
Gave me quite a bit to think about. I was part of a group that read the book, but wish we'd had more time to really discuss it.
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