One of the advantages of having a severe asthma attack, is that you get to use a ventolin nebuliser pump which has the effect of ensuring you don’t sleep - apparantly it makes you breathe too which is always handy.

Yesterday a book that I have waited for a while arrived, and so I atleast had some reading material for last night of sleeplessness.

It seems that Alan Roxburgh has released two books almost at the same time. I am hoping to get the sky is falling next week when Alan is at our Church of Christ conference but last night I started to read The missional leader - equiping your church to reach a changed world. This book is co-written by Fred Romanuk.

At the start of the book Alan and Fred attempt to define the missional church - a phrase that is increasingly used for many different styles and forms of church.

“The question is familiar: “What do you mean by missional church?” Even though the term is now used everywhere, there is still confusion about it. As we begin this book, here is a brief description of what we mean by the phrase.

God is about a big purpose in and for the whole of creation. The church has been called into life to be both the means of this mission and a foretaste of where God is is inviting all creation to go. Just as its Lord is a mission-shaped God, so the community of God’s people exists, not for themselves but for the sake of the work. Mission is therefore not a program or project some people in the Church do from time to time (as in “mission trip”, “mission budget” and so on); the church’s very nature is to be God’s missionary people. We use the word missional to mark this big difference. Mission is not about a project or a budget or a one-off event somewhere; its not even about a sending missionaries. A missional church is a community of God’s people who live into the imagination that they ar, by their very nature, God’s missionary people living as a demonstration of what God plans to do in and for all of creation in Jesus Christ.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 27th, 2006 at 10:24 am by phil and is filed under quotes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.