Now I realise that I said my next post would be about Jesus as Leader and Mike Frosts session on that – but I’ve changed my mind and have decided to post about Alan’s session on The Forgotten Ways and mDNA.

Alan’s new book coming out in the New Year (and available in the foyer after church….how many of you know this stuffs good?  How many of you are sitting next to someone who is good – no-one? Oh well this stuff will sell well after church) and is based on 4 years of research on questions he was asking himself and others regarding the early church and the church in China.

The Questions:

Question 1. How did the church the early church grow from approximately 25k members in around 100AD, with about 40million people in the entire Roman Empire, to around 20million members in 300AD prior to Constantine with about 60million people in the Entire Roman Empire?

Question 2. How did the church in China grow from around 2million members prior to Mao Tse Tung’s decimation of it’s leaders and taking of it’s buildings into state ownership (and therefore inability to be used as church buildings) to a massive underground movement of 155million in only 55yrs?

The Chinese Church was persecuted and had no infrastructure or recognised leadership (I even think some of the new leaders who arose were unmarried Homer – although I have no evidence) and yet it grew to numbers that were phenomenal.

Alan suggested that the answers we required were not far from us – we have inside of each of us all that we need to transform the church and to move it on in missional activity.

Flame is to spark as
Tree is to seed as
Church is to members

Alan, through his research noticed that there were certain essentials that made up the life of the early and the Chinese church what he has termed mDNA.  The following is a pictorial representation (based on Alan’s own representation).

The first element or the central element (hence it’s location at the centre of the diagram) is that Jesus is Lord.  It is the default setting for the church – the place to which we go back when things have choked up way too much.  Any effective Jesus movement focus’ on it’s founder – we need to rediscover the centrality of Jesus to the life of the church.

It’s all about Jesus – not Paul, not Peter, not Apollos:

1 Corinthians 1:11 – 13 and 22 – 25
For it has been reported to me concerning you, my brothers, by those who are from Chloe’s household, that there are contentions among you.¹² Now I mean this, that each one of you says, “I follow Paul,” “I follow Apollos,” “I follow Cephas,” and, “I follow Christ.”¹³ Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized into the name of Paul?… … For Jews ask for signs, Greeks seek after wisdom,²³ but we preach Christ crucified; a stumbling block to Jews, and foolishness to Greeks,²⁴ but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God. ²⁵ Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

Alan suggested that Paul would be…wait for it…aPauled at the idea of people ascribing to paulianity instead of Christianity.

Alan gave the illustration of how we button up our shirts and come to the top and find that it’s all wrong – we have to go back down to the bottom button and realign it before any of the others will be aligned.  He also used the illustration of a computer being rebooted to get tit back to its primary configuration – it gets all choked up with information and freezes and then we have to Ctrl/Alt/Delete to reboot – to reset the default so to speak.  Well Jesus is Lord is the default position of the church, the bottom button on the church!  Our Christology (our understanding of Jesus) is what should be defining our Missiology (how we reach those who are not yet Christians with the gospel) which in turn should define our Ecclesiology (how we view the church and its different forms).

We need to get back to the simple truth that at the very core of our faith – the central position of our entire raison d’etre is that Jesus is Lord.

My next post will complete the other elements of mDNA.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 1st, 2006 at 3:57 pm by Greg the explorer and is filed under Forge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.