Church Planting Leadership Summit

Well we came back to the cold. When I left San Diego it was in the upper 50’s lower 60’s at 6:30 in the morning, when I departed the plain Minneapolis welcomed me with a cutting 10 degrees. Along with the great weather was a great summit. Since most of you out there were not able to come I am going to recap the event over the next few days. Please feel free to post any comments and let me know if you have any questions. I will be making numerous posts over the next couple of days so keep checking back, or better yet, subscribe to the RSS feed.

As I mentioned in the on site blog, the first session was great. We had an opportunity to listen to some successful church planters. I have already touched on one of the topics. But I would like to bring up a couple of other topics that were touched on during our first session together.

Mark Batterson brought up some interesting points during his talk and I want to briefly touch on one of them and I would love to hear your thoughts. Mark believes that God is calling the Church out of the church and into the Marketplace. I think we can all agree that God doesn’t want the church to be locked up behind the four walls of its buildings but Mark feels that instead of drawing people to the building and the programs that it houses, rather God is drawing the people out of the building and developing programs and ministries that are in the Marketplace. This is a different mind-set from the church that I grew up in. In my church our senior pastor always made the comment that if we would just get our friends to the church, he would present the gospel and get them saved. Now that may have been an inappropriately extreme statement, but I think at some point we not only need to discuss the extent to which we are to take on this “market place” thinking (some call it missional) but we should also discuss the innovative and creative ways in which we can bring the Church to the community rather than the community to the church. What do you think?

Peace
Mac

By the way, we will have some pictures up on the home missions website at www.mnaog.org. Enjoy!!!