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
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- Stayers
- Returners
- Relocators
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- 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.
