pat loughery

Rachelle blogged her thoughts about the time with Todd and other planters today here.

I had the honor of spending time with about 15 other missional church planters in the Seattle area, plus Rich & Rose Swetman, plus Winn Griffin, and Todd Hunter today for a few hours. Todd was in town for an off-the-map meeting and the Alpha training conference, and we got to sit and work through some thinking with him.

The deal Rich & Rose set for us was that our attendance fee was answering a set of questions (which I’ve lost the original link to), but basically ‘what are you working out’, ‘what do you want todd to talk about’, ‘what’s your context’, ‘what else should people know’?. Or something like that anyway.

Rich & Rose summarized and grouped questions, lobbed them at Todd, and Todd spoke for a while. It was a helpful time for me.

A few notes from this morning… I jotted down 6 pages of nots which I can barely read. I’ll flesh some ideas out, and others transcribe what I jotted down.

When I arrived (late) Todd was working on a question about leadership. He began by prefacing his statements with a section from Saint Eugene’s intro to Matthew in the Message. I’m too tired to grab my hardcopy but it was the section that talks like this: “the story of Jeus doesn’t begin with Jesus… themes, energies, movement are at play before Jesus arrives”. And, “every day we wake up in the middle of soimething that’s already going on”. It was Todd’s reminder to us that we are partners in God’s work, but we are the followers; God is the initiator.

He gave us a nice little wake-up call, by saying this: Pastors are, by and large, atheists. And church planters are worse than pastors in their dedication to atheism. A functional atheism, though, defined as “when I wake up today, nothing’s going to get done if I don’t do it”.

Burnout == unmet expectations.

Todd then read the story from John in which Jesus invites us to cast our burdens on him. Saint Eugene includes this phrase which I’ve blogged and marvelled at before: “learn the unforced rhythms of grace”.

Church planting (and all corporate leadership) is about “creating a corporate culture, an ethos”.

See Todd’s article on intentionality – originally written with regard to evangelism, but in his opinion as good as or better when applied to leadership.

If we’re afraid of leadership as manipulation, we need a new grid/lens/paradigm for leadreship (or evangelism). Todd repeats his theme: “the answer to bad [leadership | evangelism | use of the gifts | etc] isn’t NO USE of the [*], but healthy use of the [*].

This part was great:
Two things will keep us on track in deconstruction/reconstruction:
Take our notions of leadership, evangelism, ecclesiology, etc. Baptize those notions in the golden rule and the great command, and you’ll be safe. you’ll create an environment of grace, a place where people can make mistakes.

Q on The vision thing: Let’s not kid ourselves: we’re all intending to do something. The absence of something we see as bad is still vision.

Leadership implies intentionality. (If you want to fix something or create something, you’re being intentional, & leading).

A positive of the postmodern decon underway is that it’s resulting in a people with high ethics. So reinvent leadership with ethics.

There’s the thing we’re trying to do, and the feel of the thing (ethos, corp culture, values).

Q: to what extent is it OK to react against models we see as unhealthy?

reactivity is often a temperamental thing. It’s how you may be wired (reactionary), so get used to it (baptize it).

Another healthy help from pomo decon: Realize that your reaction is a) contextual, and b) perspectival. this realization results in humility.

Q: Evangelism in a non-manipulative way; being missional
First, we must realize: pre-modern, modern, post-modern eras all had embedded within them opportunities and threats with regards to the Gospel.

We now have a great opportunity: Rearticulating “what is the Gospel?” for the pomo culture. We created the Gospel for Modern Man; now let’s do it for Postmodern Man.

{Interesting side note about the growth of megachurches as a natural outcome of the bigness of culture in the post-WWII Boom}

“If we can learn to communicate the Gospel well in this context, it would be our greatest gift to early postmodern Christianity – MUCH greater than our current projects to rethink ecclesiology”

Jim Henderson spoke a few minutes while Todd refilled his beverages:

What if we blurred the lines between knowledge and serving?

What if, when you said the word “evangelism”, a person didn’t automatically hear the word “preaching”?

I think about faith this way: “I’m following in the footsteps of the most free person who ever lived.”

Back to Todd

See Jesus as the Great Both-And, not the Great Either-Or (embracing paradox).

Christ is (not just “his blood was”) our atonement.

“Missional” is simply another word for saying “otherliness” our “outwardness”.

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there, try to make sense of THOSE notes without proper context 😉