The Long Tail & Church Planting

Posted by D. Goodmanson on Oct 2, 2006 in Church, Church Planting | 1 comment

An interesting article (The Long Tail & Church Planting ) was brought to my attention that both evaluates and critiques the Five Trends for the Future of Church Planting I wrote.   Particularly Rick Presley addresses my "pessimism about established churches dying at a faster rate than ever before."  I am not so much pessimistic but a believer that churches that do not change/reform to speak to the culture will die.  It is because they are not on mission.  When I wrote the column, Sheep & Goats, I had the opportunity to visit/speak with dozens of pastors and visit their churches.  Quite frankly there are a lot of churches that have lost their heart for mission and hold tightly onto tradition, which will result in their ultimate death.  This is the lampstand being put out in Revelation. (If you are a dying church, here are resources to get your church back on mission if you are unwilling I suggest you donate your church building to the furtherance of the gospel.) 

Presley argues for the 'long tail' of church planting explaining that their is no one-size fits all approach to church, something he believes both fundamentalists & emergents miss:

The paradigm shift for most of us is to recognize that the choice that is right for us is not necessarily right for everyone. In a culture of unlimited choice, personal preference is rewarded rather than punished. Just because people don’t want to do things our way doesn’t mean they are wrong. Recovering fundamentalists and legalists often have a hard time distinguishing between personal preference and Truth. Sadly, many on the emerging side of the fence don’t catch on to the Long Tail effect any better than the denominations they leave.  Much of the carping in the emerging church centers on how “The Church” has messed up and how they are here to rescue it from modernity. For all the lip service they give to a postmodern mindset, often they remain wedded to an either/or mindset.

My heart would to see 'the Church' grow in gospel ecumenism (#1, 2), differ on methods based on their situation/context and mission (#4, 5) and for Christians to rally together to fund more church planters because they see this is (the?) best way to evangelise the lost and reach the diverse culture we live in. 

A second critique of the 5 trends article was the death of the preaching pastor in favor of video venues.   This portion caught most people's attention as they railed against or for the change.  I believe video venue is a method.  It is not good or evil.  To me there is a danger in this tool that can lead into many of the problems of consumerism, pop-Christianity that is so rampant in America. I suspect those who are attracted to this lean toward pragmatism. I’m just glad I don’t have to make the types of decisions that involve video venues.  You can read a long discussion on the video venue conversation @ Reformissionary.com .

UPDATE: Also encourage you read David Fairchild 's piece on the issue of video venues:"Ed Young, CEO of walmart church "

Mars Hill NEW (Beta) Website

Posted by D. Goodmanson on Oct 1, 2006 in Church, General Technology | 4 comments

I attended Mars Hill for many years but one thing that always bothered me was their website.  The total-flash based site (while great looking) just was not functional.  It is great to see the launch of Mars Hill's new (beta) website !  Web standards, clean design, oh my.

This is a BETA, so there will be bugs, but some of their goals in making the site better include:

Glorify God
Get the site out of the way as much as possible and let the gospel get out.

More information
As the body grows it becomes harder to keep up with what is going on, blogs here, media here, events over there. Well, we are trying to build a site that aggregates all things Mars Hill Church into one spot.

Deep Linking
On the current site nothing can be linked to. What's that all about? Well we are pulling the site out of flash and making each page of the site have a distinct URL. A big part of that is this section of the site, which we are calling the Mars  Hill Church Wiki.

Media Library
We are in the very early stages of upgrading the Media Library. For now all that means is that it has been pulled out of the main site and is now at /media. We will be making some minor updates to the player to add such things as Pause (yeah!), and have revised the look for now.

Great step forward guys.

Vintage Jesus & the Supremacy of Christ

Posted by D. Goodmanson on Oct 1, 2006 in Church, Culture, Teaching | 0 comments

First, I love this picture of Jesus from a post on Jesus over at Driscoll's blog @ theResurgence .

Jesus

No one is more loved or hated than Jesus Christ.

Jesus was born in a small town to a poor, unmarried teen mother roughly 2,000 years ago. He was adopted by Joseph, a simple carpenter, and spent the first thirty years of His life in obscurity, swinging a hammer with His dad.

Around the age of thirty, Jesus began a public ministry that included preaching, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and befriending people who were marginalized because they were perverts, drunks, thieves, and such. Jesus’ ministry spanned only three short years before He was put to death for declaring Himself to be God. He died by shameful crucifixion like tens of thousands of people had before Him.

read entire post: Vintage Jesus

 Second, Challies Dot Com blogs at 2006 Desiring God National Conference – The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World .  Here you can read his posts from sessions by Piper, Keller & Driscoll amongst others… If Piper's lifelong mission is to increase people's passion for God for His glory, Steve McCoy quotes the heart of Driscoll/Keller's lifelong passion and cause they champion.