Books @ Leadership Network

New Missio Site & Free Resources

This morning Hugh Halter, co-author of AND and The Tangible Kingdom, sent me his latest newsletter, asking me to share it with Leadership Network readers. His organization Missio has launched a new website, complete with lots of free resources for creating incarnational communities. Not sure what that means? We talked about it on last month’s webinar, which you can also download for free.

New Missio Site Launch

Missio is pleased to announce that we have a new website committed to resourcing the church.

Check out our newest website www.missio.us

Updates include:

• Free - 5 Part Tangible Kingdom Video Training Series
• Missio Intensive Registration
• MCAP Kickoff Date and Registration
• Purchase: AND: The Gathered and Scattered Church, The Tangible Kingdom, and The TK Primer
• Updated Missio Team profiles and partners

Free Tangible Kingdom Video Series

Free - 5 Part VideoTraining Series now available.

The videos are designed to help community leaders as they start The Tangible Kingdom Primer.

If you’ve been reading The Tangible Kingdom or AND: The Gathered and Scattered Church you may not yet know about The Tangible Kingdom Primer. This resource is an eight week guide that combines a spiritual formation process that is deeply integrated with community formation and missional/incarnational living practices. As we said in The Tangible Kingdom, God’s ways are natural, but they aren’t easy – especially at first. New ways of life must be formed in us through hours, days, and years of intentional practice. TheTK Primer is about building life-long habits, and now we’re also providing a video series and other tools that will help you explain the WHY, WHAT, and HOW of incarnational community. All the videos are FREE! In addition, we’re also providing a special video for pastors to help you think through how to begin a movement of incarnational communities in your church.

Simply go here - register with an email address and a password will be emailed back to you. Then go to videos to login and watch the series. 

Missio Intensive

September 28-29 in Denver, CO

Missio is going back to offering our face-to face training for pastors and church leaders called Missio Intensives. These two-day trainings will be based around the concepts of AND, which is designed to help any church, of any size or form, find a balance between the gathered and scattered church. Use the Missio Intensives as your once a year “recalibration” with key leaders and staff, or as a strategic initiative to build a plan to move your church further into mission with a solid base of incarnational communities.

Limited to the first 150 - early bird, and team discounts available. Go here for more information and to register.

A working conference designed to help you and your church find the balance of Gathering and Scattering.

MCAP

MCAP Kickoff September 15th.

Limited to first 15...coached directly by Hugh and Matt.

MCAP [Missional Church Apprenticeship Practicum] is geared for church planters who want to start churches from the ground up through the process of engaging culture, forming community, and then structuring congregation. MCAP planters can expect 9 months of video training, interactive peer-learning, and individual coaching, along with additional resourcing from other Missio team members who have modeled true missional church planting pratices.

Go here for more information.

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Stephanie Plagens is the Publications Manager for Leadership Network.

The Morning After Innovation 3

It's very quiet around here this morning. I'm sitting here in my favorite chair with a cup o joe reflecting on all that I saw and heard at Leadership Network's Innovation 3 Conference that concluded yesterday. Personally it was a phenomenal time of connecting and networking with a ton of old and new friends. I met so many young ministry leaders there that I would probably never cross paths with had we not gathered in Dallas this week. If I had to boil it down to just one thing that I took away from this gathering, it would be this -- how encouraged and hopeful I am for the future of the Church. As ministry leaders (and servants), we will always have our struggles and disagreements. That's just part of the deal. Beyond all that, I witnessed a real hunger for connection, for learning, for community, and for a real sense of mission, as overused as all of those terms are. As great as it was to hear positive feedback from conference participants, I know that there was so much more going on during those two days than just another Christian conference. Yet again, God showed up and put together some incredible encounters for us.

If you didn't have an opportunity to be there with us in person, you'll have an opportunity to virtually experience much of Innovation 3 in the coming weeks. We recorded just about everything! Todd Rhoades, aka The Monday Morning Insight Guy, told me last night that we probably captured and recorded somewhere between 40-50 hours of content. That includes audio and video recordings of main sessions and breakouts. We'll be rolling that out for you soon. Some of it is already posted on the Innovation 3 website. We'll post more on the site as we get to it. More details on that later.

Here's the link to the Innovation 3 Conference Live!site. You may want to check out the photos and other stuff posted there when you have a few minutes.

I'm keeping this post brief today. There's so much still rolling around in my head this morning. As the consummate introvert, I need some time to process and reflect. I just wanted to say thank you -- thank you to all of you who invested the time and the dollars to join us in Dallas this week. My thanks to God for showing up and for orchestrating the entire experience. And lastly, my thanks to God and to Leadership Network for providing this vocation for me. This is certainly not the path in life I would have chosen for myself. I wish I could say that I developed this tremendous, focused, intentional strategy for my life that led me to where I am today. The truth is, I stumbled into this vocation, I thought by accident. I'm glad that God had (and has) plans for me.

Well Mr. White, aka Coffee Drinking Cat, is actually drinking my coffee right now so I'm abandoning that cup and heading over to the kitchen to get another cup. Stay tuned for further Innovation 3 developments.

Linda Stanley directs the Life Stage Leadership Community Groups for senior pastors.

  

Compelled by Love

Compelled by Love: The Most Excellent Way to Missional Living is a new book by researcher and missiologist, Ed Stetzer, and church planting missionary, Philip Nation.

"The theme of this book is The Love of Christ Should Compel Believers in All Things (2 Corinthians 5:14-15)." [p. 9]

Structured for individual or group study, the book seeks to help the reader integrate love into all aspects of missionary calling. As such it is not a sexy, exciting, or prophetic book, but an extremely important book.

It helps people who claim to be engaged in missional living to seek to answer core questions such as What is the gospel?, and not just methodological questions and community interaction questions. It begs the question, do we know and are we the embodiment of the very gospel we proclaim? Or, are we simply a culturally relevant community in a newly emerging Christendom?

If you pick this book up, and I hope you will, I urge you to make this not a quick airplane, beach, or side porch read, but a part of your daily spiritual walk for at least 12 days taking one chapter per day. Only then will the richness of the book speak to your heart, soul, mind, and strength. Only then will you begin to be compelled anew by love.

You will also want to connect with Ed at www.edstetzer.com. And, by the way, you ought to notice that this book comes from a publisher many of you might not know, but ought to know--New Hope Publishers at www.newhopepublishers.com.

--written by George Bullard at GBullard@TheColumbiaPartnership.org and www.BullardJournal.org.

Dangerous Faith

Great book by Joel Vestal... and very convicting.

This was definitely one of the best books on missions that I've read!  Joel does an awesome job with weaving together passionate pleas for us to be missional-minded with inspiring stories of his many missions adventures.  My favorite chapter was "Money: Enabler or Entangler?" We can never be reminded enough that the real issues of giving our resources to further the kingdom of God are these: Are our hearts pure?  Are we devoted to Jesus and His purposes around the world?  Is our commitment to invest in the kingdom of God greater than our commitment to our own financial security and wealth?

I love Joel's heart.  He is kingdom-minded to the core... and you can see his heart for people to know Christ woven throughout every page.  Amazingly, Joell has been doing missions in some form since his teens... and you can tell his passion only grows the more he walks with Christ.  If you find your heart growing cold or indifferent towards people... if your compassion capacity is low... if you want a better understanding and insight into what God is up to in the world, get this book!

Joel's intro and the foreword by Louie Giglio are alone worth it. ;-)

Darren Plummer

www.DPLUM.org