Posts Tagged ‘anglican’

A Church Planting Conversation :: Where does your call come from?

October 6th, 2009

I had a conversation a few weeks back with Todd Hunter. Todd was recently elected bishop in the Anglican Church, AMiA. But not only is he a bishop in the Anglican Mission (AMiA) he is also a church planter. His church Holy Trinity recently had their launch (September I believe).

Todd also heads up a church planting network called C4SO :: Churches 4 the Sake of Others. Their goal is to plan 100 churches in the next 10 years in the Western United States.

Enough info, our conversation was great and I would like to share and get some of your thoughts.

One of things that Todd said that particularly peak my interested was his thoughts on where your call comes from. He said that a church planters call typically come from one of three places;

.:: Demographic
.:: Geographic
.:: Psychographic

My best understand of these categories is as follows ::
.:: The demographic call is one that is based on a people group. i.e. young adults, young families, men 25-35, etc. A certain “demographic of people”.
.:: Geographic is pretty easy. You are called to a particular location. Maybe a city or even a certain part of a city, i.e. urban, suburban, etc.
.:: Psychographic was a new word to me but to my best understand it’s a certain type of person, a certain “psychology”. i.e. unchurched; people who have never done the church thing, disgruntle with church; people who are pissed at church and don’t care for Christians, etc. Maybe a religious background, or people with a certain world view would fit into this category?

Those were the three categories that Todd tossed out. In our conversation I was honest with Todd and told him that none of those really resonated with me. For me it’s more of community and team calling. My calling seems to be connected to where a core of people will be and where a team of leaders might be found. I might use / make up the word, relationographic; where there are relationships established and a community is just waiting to burst through the cracks.

Todd was very gracious as i tried to explained to him what this meant for me.

From the beginning I have know I wanted to and was called to plant a community with a community / a team of people. I have never wanted to do on my own and I have never wanted to be the “figure head” or “personality” of the community. A lot of my reason for waiting to actually do something has been based on my desire for the right relationships to happen. There are a few different relationship that might be brewing as the fertilizer  for a community (running with the planting metaphor). I’m praying about that.

But my question for you is what do you think about these categories?
What do you think about my addition?
How were you called? And would your call fit into one of these categories?

I would really love to hear what you think.

Grace and Peace
Erik

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A little ecclesiology…

June 27th, 2009

So what’s your ecclesiology?

I wonder how many of you church planters really thought that through when you were preparing to dive into your church planting adventure.

You have an ecclesiology, that’s inevitable but how intentional were you about thinking it through and forming the workings of it into your community life.

Every once in awhile i will surf the internets looking at church websites, looking for things and ways of doing things that resonates with me. And almost ever church has a “mission statement”. (thank you Willow Creek) and just about every church has a list of their “core beliefs”.

I’m not saying these things are not important, i actually think they are, they are very important. But often it’s interesting what a list like this or a mission statement will say about a particular communities ecclesiology.

For instance, ALMOST every church starts their LIST of beliefs… (i don’t particularly like lists, maybe your catching on to that) … with a statement on their view of scripture. This really says a lot about what’s important to them, what they are trying to defend and build their community on. If we were a real bible believing and living community what might be the first thing on our list? My guess is that it probably wouldn’t be the bible! What do you think?

I could ramble on on on!

It just seems poorly focused and ecclesiologically misshapen to concentrate on some of these things we do and to order our communities the way we do.

I’m reading a book right now about Anglican ecclesiology and  will probably share more about this in the days to come but the reading in general has just got me thinking about ecclesiology for the community planter.

What do you think?

Peace & CHURCH
Erik

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