quotes from Reggie McNeil
The church in North America is not like the Pharisees–we are the Pharisees, and Jesus does not like Pharisees.
The Pharisees clumped together and built a parallel culture–refuge theology is Pharisaical. When dealing with Pharisaism, we are dealing with a religion that has nothing to do with Jesus. They have a heart for religion, but not a heart for God.
People who live by a missionary set of values cannot abide those with a “club member” set of values.
The missional church is the most radical resorting of Christians since the reformation. Those who are missional have more in common with those in other tribes than with those in their own tribe who don’t get it.
Kingdom growth is profoundly anti- what we have typically been doing.
These are quotes from Reggie McNeil that I ran across here. What do you think? Agree? Disagree?
Tags: McNeil missional
April 14, 2008 at 4:53 pm
Here’s what I love about this: Reggie’s insistence on the centrality of Jesus. This year has been a great year for me to refocus on Jesus, and it’s amazing how much crap we feel obligated to do as good church people and leaders that has nothing really to do with Him. We have been taught to talk about so many other things, to do evangelism, instead of simply telling people about Jesus, which, it turns out, is a lot of fun.
I love the missional church stuff that’s going on right now, I identify with it much more than I ever did the EC, and it has certainly been a cross-denominational bridge for me. Is the missional church the most radical resorting of Christians since the reformation? I’m not sure. I’m guessing the first Lausanne Conference on World Missions and that early missionary explosion felt pretty important. The average life expectancy of all those young people who hopped a ship to Africa was something like 2 years. Hudson Taylor’s Inland Mission movement was equally groovy. The Moravians saw the west as a missional setting. Once again we have some great things going on in the same parts of the world, but it’s happened before. This is different, and very important, but I’m not sure it’s more important.
A religion that has nothing to do with Jesus? I agree with what he intends, that Jesus must be the centre. Alan’s illustration of the church rightly ordered (I blogged it here) helped me make sense of how we often go wrong. We don’t get rid of Jesus altogether, we simply take something else and put it in the centre, whether it be discipleship, worship, or mission. The result is that it looks and smells like church, because all the pieces are there, and Jesus is still important, but only as a means to an end, which is what makes it so insidious.
The danger for us is that we’ll replace worship or discipleship with mission, and still leave Jesus out of the centre. If we do this, we’ll have a new religious order, a new club, not better, only different, and then we indeed wont’ be able to abide “club member” Christians, but it will merely be group rivalry. If, on the other hand, we can manage to keep Jesus at the centre, then I think cannot abide won’t be accurate. When Jesus is central then we simply ask where anyone and everyone is in relation to Jesus. He was hard on the Pharisees, and smacked them around a bit, but at the same time, He was constantly pleading with them to change before it was too late, to let go of all their religion and come into the party. Let us never forget that the father went out to invite both the prodigal and the elder son into the party. I think we’ll long to see them follow Jesus.
April 15, 2008 at 7:07 pm
McNeil is once again dead on!
April 20, 2008 at 2:25 am
Thanks for the link. I too am a big Reggie fan. He has a way of putting into words the very things I struggle to express.