Week in Review

Charles Kiser —  April 29, 2008 — 1 Comment

We had a good time in Orlando at the conference. I ended up seeing lots of people I would have never expected to see there. And we learned a thing or two, which is good. It was fun staying in a big house with several other Mission Alive people, and riding around in the rental car with Les and Logan, Mission Alive church planters in Savannah, TX.

One thing from the conference I’m chewing on is a session in which I learned about conducting a community needs assessment. It’s a big commitment and a long process, but the benefits seem astounding—it would provide us with invaluable community relationships and also a sense of what gaps exist in community service. One of those gaps might be an opportunity to start a special justice initiative that we can champion as a church. I’ll post more later about this.

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We didn’t waste much time when we returned to Dallas. We hosted the kickball party on Saturday. About 20 people showed up for the festivities. All in all, it was a smashing hit. Several people from the party will join us for our first house church gathering next weekend.

The X factor was playing “crazy kickball”, in which every person was required to hold their drink in a red solo cup at all times, whether kicking, catching, or running. Let’s just say we got plenty of drink on us.

If playing kickball sounds like a flashback to 3rd grade, know that there is a kickball craze among young professionals in our area. We promise we’re not totally missing the mark with our weird ideas.

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Please pray for our first house church gathering coming up this weekend. We put on a preview gathering on Sunday night with several of our friends, after which they gave us feedback about their experience. It was exciting to me the way a meal and good conversation drew people together, even those who didn’t know each other very well beforehand. I love helping to create community.

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The justice post is coming soon.

In House Churches, Justice, Prayer
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Prayer for This and That

Charles Kiser —  April 21, 2008 — 12 Comments

We’re headed to Orlando, Florida today for the 2008 National New Church Conference. Leaders in church planting from all over the country will be there as resource people. Ryan and I are signed up for the “nuts and bolts” track. It promises to be a powerful event.

Please pray for us as we’re away from our wives…we don’t know how to live without them! Pray that they’ll manage alright, too, in our absence. Pray that we’ll hear from God through the people presenting at the conference.

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We’ve hired an ad firm to help us make a good decision about a church name and initial branding issues. We hit a bit of a brick wall when, after a month of brainstorming and the development of a couple church names, we received consistent negative feedback about the names from many of our Dallas friends.

So we’re back to the drawing board. This is a BIG decision for us, especially given the nature of the context we’re in. Making a good impression is important, whether we like it or not. Please pray that God will give us clarity on the name by the end of the month—by the time we’re ready to launch the first house church gathering…

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We have a timeline for the launch of our first house church. This weekend we’re throwing a big kickball/cookout kickoff party as a way of celebrating the launch. Weekly house church gatherings will start on Sunday nights following the weekend of the party. We’ve had fun thinking through what those gatherings will look like.

It’s our hope that this gathering will grow such that we can start another house church out of it, and that those house churches start other house churches that start other house churches. This is the heart of our methodology for ministry and vision for what church is. Out of the developing network of house churches we’ll start a regular worship gathering that will draw the network together for times of storytelling, celebration and encounter.

Please pray for this initial party and the first house church gathering on May 4. We’re constantly reminded that only God can bring this thing to life.

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We’ve been having some amazing conversations and experiences regarding justice issues in Dallas. I’ll share more about those next week.

In Church Planting, House Churches, Prayer
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Church Starter or Spiritual Guide?

Charles Kiser —  April 16, 2008 — 19 Comments

What do we lead with in spiritual conversations? To what or whom do we draw people? How do we describe ourselves to people?

Do we lead with “church”—or do we lead with “God”?

This question has emerged often in the weeks we’ve been in Uptown. People ask me what I do for a living. I’m confronted with this question. People ask me to describe what we’re doing in Uptown. I’m confronted with this question. We’re thinking through marketing and perception issues for our context. I’m confronted with this question.

How do I respond when people ask what I do? I usually tell them I’m starting a church—that I’m a church starter. It’s a natural reflex. The answer reflects my own perception of my vocation. It also reflects, for better or worse, the church-centered religious heritage from which I’ve come.

A growing trend in mission, however, is to stray from framing a community or individual’s existence in terms of the church and frame it rather in terms of God’s work in Jesus. It is God’s work, after all, that brings the church into existence.

This growing trend seems to be the reinvigoration of a practice of the first Christians. The Apostles in the early church were not commissioned as witnesses to the church, but rather to the work of God in Christ. The formation of the church was a natural outgrowth of preaching about and living within the kingdom of God.

Leading with Jesus in our conversations with people is a move of humility. We point away from ourselves, the church, as a source of healing and righteousness (because we so often are not), and we point to God, the one in whom healing and righteousness are found. We don’t want people to connect with us because we’re awesome—because we aren’t. We want people to connect with God in Jesus because God is awesome.

This approach is also particularly appropriate for the next generation, urban context we find ourselves in here in Dallas. People in my generation and younger tend to be suspicious of the institutional church. Many have been burned by it. Many have negative perceptions of it in light of abuse scandals and fanatical right wing politics.

So instead of pointing urban Dallasites to the church, perhaps it’s better that we point them to the character of the God who brings the church to life. If they can connect with God in Jesus, God can be responsible for reshaping their perceptions about church (even if some perceptions are unfortunately on target). The church is certainly important; but it is secondary to the character and work of God.

Help me process through this. What do you lead with? Church or God?

How does leading with God in Jesus change how we describe ourselves to other people?

On a very practical level, if I don’t call myself a church starter, what do I call myself?

In Church, Conversation
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Sports Talk

Charles Kiser —  April 7, 2008 — 8 Comments

1. I’m a Mavs fan. I watched a great comeback win yesterday over the Phoenix Suns. It looks like they’ll make the playoffs in a tough Western Conference. Julie and I got nosebleed tickets with the Chappotins to watch them dominate Golden State last week—oh so satisfying after getting kicked out of the playoffs by the Warriors in the first round last year.

I was skeptical about the Mavs’ ability to win big games after the Jason Kidd trade, but they’ve got my attention now. We’ll see how they finish the season and perform in the playoffs.

2. I ran in the Big D Texas Marathon 5K with a good friend this weekend. I was pleased to finish at (what I consider) a decent time after not running very consistently since we’ve been in Dallas. We were mainly there to support a new friend of mine who was running the half-marathon. It was quite an accomplishment. Less than a year ago he struggled even to run a mile, and now he’s just finished running 13.1 miles at less than a 10 minute/mile pace. Pretty impressive.

Friend Raj in red, James on far right

All of this has made me want to get back into running again. I’m planning on participating in a 6 mile Mud-run event in November, and maybe even the White Rock half-marathon in December. Sometime I’ll have to share the hilarity of my experience running/walking/crawling the original marathon event in Athens, Greece when I studied abroad there in 1999. I trained for a whopping 3 weeks. It took me more than 2 weeks to recover. Enough said.

3. The Porches and I are going to join a flag football league in Uptown. It’s co-ed 8 v. 8 on Thursday nights. Everyone plays a game and heads to a local bar afterwards to hang out. Should be a great way to have fun and meet people.

Every one of these everyday life activities—basketball, running, flag football— presents itself with opportunities to enjoy the good world God has made for us and to live out the way of Jesus in friendship with other people. Living missionally is sometimes not about doing new things as much as it is seeing the same old things with a different set of lenses.

In Mission, Running, Sports
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Acceptance and Transformation

Charles Kiser —  March 31, 2008 — 13 Comments

Yesterday we visited an American Baptist/United Church of Christ/Alliance of Baptists/Emergent church that’s meeting in a Presbyterian church building in North Oak Cliff. It’s obviously quite a diverse community of faith.

I really enjoyed the service. It’s hard to describe it—kind of a contemporary-high church hybrid. In the pastor’s words, the church has one foot in Mainline Protestant churches (high church) and one foot in Emergent churches (contemporary). We listened to a jazz solo, sang an a cappella African song and followed a liturgy. The sermon was an actual conversation between the pastor and church members. Claudia Porche guessed that it might have been the most significant church experience we’ve had yet in our eight weeks of participant-observation.

At the heart of this experience’s significance for me was dealing with the tension of acceptance and transformation. This little eclectic church majored in the gospel value of acceptance. Everyone is welcomed and embraced, regardless of background, race, or even sexual orientation. We experienced this welcome and acceptance ourselves from church members after the service.

The church’s stance on sexual orientation got us talking at brunch afterwards. Though we hold different theological convictions on the subject of sexual orientation, we found ourselves drawn to the culture of acceptance there. We found ourselves asking: How do foster a culture of acceptance and at the same time value life transformation that results when the gospel is appropriated? How can we avoid judging people without loosening our grip on our theological convictions?

It’s a delicate balance. I recently read a book by John Burke addressing these questions called No Perfect People Allowed: Creating a Come as You Are Culture in the Church. Burke said a couple things that stuck out to me. First, unbelievers can’t be expected to fall in line with the transformative values of the gospel until they make a commitment to Jesus. Second, unbelievers don’t make a commitment to Jesus and experience life change without the power of the Holy Spirit at work in their lives. Ministers can’t engineer conviction and transformation.

On a practical level I think Burke’s observations mean that we love people unconditionally and leave conversion and life change to the work of the Holy Spirit. He is the only one, after all, who can convict the human heart and bring about transformation. Unbelievers see the values of the gospel as they are lived out in the Christian community and the Holy Spirit uses that modeling as fodder for change.

That’s about as far as I’ve gotten. I’m curious for your feedback on this matter.

How do you / your church community live in the tension between acceptance and transformation?

In Books, Gay & Lesbian, Spiritual Formation, Values
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