More from Exponential '08

Wow! Another really full day.

Started out the morning with Alan Hirsch. Alan is the author of The Forgotten Ways. I picked up the book after I heard him speak. He was really good and thought provoking. He talked about four things we have to recover to if the church in the West is to survive:

1. the absolute centrality of Jesus for the life of the church - Christology lies at the heart of the renewal of the church. We have to go back to Jesus. Too often, we've taken Jesus out of Christianity. Why? Because Jesus is hard to live with. He disturbs us. It is at times hard to live with Jesus as Lord. How sad is it that we have to state that Jesus has to be at the center of Christianity!
2. the recovery of discipleship as our core task - Movements can grow only in proportion to their capacity to make disciples. If you don't grow disciples, you don't get any movement.
3. the recovery of the ethos/structure of Apostolic Movements - "What we need are missionally responsive, culturally adaptive, organizationally agile, multiplication movements." We must mobilize the whole people of God. Every church member is a church planter and every church is a church-planting church. We must be reproducing and reproducible.
4. the recovery of an Incarnational Mission Impulse - God is a missional and incarnational God and we must be a missional and incarnational people.

I then had a breakout session with Ed Stetzer. He is an interesting and great guy to listen to, but this morning he was talking about putting together a prospectus, something I have already done. Any new info he gave may have been too little, too late. Just kidding!

The disturbing and enlightening information he gave was that the Southern Baptist Convention announced to day that we are officially a denomination in decline. I urge you to check out the whole story, Breaking News, on Ed's blog. For now, check this out:

Baptisms are at their lowest levels since 1970 with seven of the last eight years showing annual declines. Even though some might hope the decline in membership numbers is due to lack of reporting, the inescapable conclusion is that baptisms by individual churches is falling off.
For now, Southern Baptists are a denomination in decline. Some of you were born into an SBC church; others of us chose it of our own accord. Either way, it is dear to us all. Our responsibility before God is, then, to urgently consider how we should respond.

A denominational employee told me today that if you take out our ethnic and African-American churches, the convention has actually been in decline for the last 20 to 30 years. A sobering thought and a reminder of how desperately we need church plants. Without a strong planting
movement, the convention will slowly die away.

I then heard Darren Patrick talk about the church planting team. Really good stuff, but this blog is already getting long.

Lots more stuff this afternoon. I even got a shout-out from the stage from one of the speakers about The Crossroads Community Church.

Then, I got to have supper at Outback with some other church planters. I just love spending time with these guys. They have such a burning passion for the renewal of the church and doing whatever it takes to reach the people God has called them to. Oh, that God would continue to raise up church planters!