Wednesday’s last plenary was a mixture of these three speakers, each answering the question, “What does it take to transform a community?”

Brenda Salter McNeil is a well known speaker who focused on racial reconciliation using Acts 1:8.  She described reconciliation in “Samaria”, when people are so different they say “God ought to do something about ‘those people’” can follw this cycle:

Two other lines: Church as a “radical third culture people that create a whole new reality”and, “when we engage difference, the differences we engage transform us.”

Shane Claiborne is a well known author and founder of the “Simple Way” community in Philadephia.  Transformation is:

• more than a doctrinal statement
  • we need a rule of life, too.
  • more than ideologies
    • Ideologies don’t demand much of us, but our practices do.
• more than good vision
  • Everybody here wants a revolution but no one wants to do the dishes
• takes a neighbourhood
  • • Stayers
    • Returners
    • Relocators
• takes imagination
  • One of my greatest temptations is to be a church planter

Our community doesn’t need more churches we need a church

• The mega-church is so 1980’s
• We can’t tell a kid to stop selling heroin if we don’t have another way to feed him
• re: Palm Sunday – “We’re just the asses that get to bring Jesus in.”

Dave Gibbons is lead pastor of Newsong, an international multi-campus church.

• Everything has changed
• I know when I was a kid, I got saved 100 times and they still counted me every time
• Maybe our metrics should be to have no foster kids in any city where Christians live.
• Don’t join a movement (he warned that the megachurch movement became the multi-campus movement and became the organic movement, then the missional movement) but instead join the movement of God.
• Walk the streets, the streets will speak to you.

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