My wife and I help lead a Wednesday night small group that originally began as a Story of Redemption small group made up of Christians and seekers. Two of the small group members were baptized, and the group has transitioned into a "missional" small group. 

A few months ago, our group "adopted" the…

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A Missional Gathering - High Pointe in the Park - Last night was our “High Pointe in the Park.” On this night we allowed McKinney High School to use our building for its baccalaureate while we headed out to Towne Lake park. This accomplished two things.

First, it let us be a servant to our community by letting them use our…

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Weekly church attendance in the US is 17.5% and dropping. Why is this? Why is it that "church" just is not working for the majority of people?

 

One of the new members on the Missional Outreach Network told me that she found this site through reading Mike Slaughter's book, Change the World: Recovering the Message and Mission of Jesus. Naturally, I checked the…

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I read a recent post from the Christian Standard, the leading periodical for the Christian church on baptisms and megachurches that was eye opening. Click here for the article. Here is a quote:

A new trend in 2009 was for megachurches and emerging megachurches to hold…

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I was asking a young woman in Starbucks the other day where she went to church. Her name is Katie.

Katie said that she had started going to a church. She had only been only been going one time, but she liked how the minister was interactive and applied to lesson to real life.

 

Her co-worker asked her, you don't know which church it was or it's…

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On Sunday, I will begin preaching through the book of John. As the missional crowd knows, John contains some of the most explicitly missional themes in the NT, including John 20:21, where Jesus says to his disciples, "As the Father has sent me, I am sending you."

 

Recently, I sat down with a good elder friend of mine, and we went through the first 18…

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Hello everyone. I hope that you have had a great week. I wanted to pass on a few of this week's highlights on the Missional Outreach Network!

 

1. New members - It is a great to have several new people join MON this week, including Frank Viola, author of Pagan Christianity and several other books. Frank has a great blog, …

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Time. 

 

None of us seem to have any. We talk about how precious it is. We speak of it as a commodity when we talk about "saving time" or "borrowing time" or "giving up our time."

 

With long commutes and both parents working in most families (or single parents trying to do it all), there is no doubt that there is a time crunch in the…

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The major focus of this year's Exponential New Churches conference (a church planting conference) was on missional communities. Besides people like Alan Hirsch laying down a foundation for this, many of these sessions were led by Mike Breen and Alex Absalom, authors of…

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The past couple of weeks I have gone to the Exponential conference and the Pepperdine lectures. Both events were filled with speakers saying the same thing--that we are losing people to the world in droves, and that the church must wake up, stop being inward-focused, and become outward-focused or "missional."

 

On this subject, I was also reading last week The Externally Focused Quest: Becoming the Best Church for the Community by Eric Swanson and Rick Rusaw. In this…

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