Blog Room

Drue Phillips

It seems to be common in many churches that there can often be a lack of strong leadership. There are often a lot of people who may have many different qualities and gifts but don't seem qualified, in our eyes, to lead. I wonder if our idea of what a leader or pastor should be is the same as the bible's idea.

The second installment from Drue Phillips...

To keep things exciting on the TCH Blog we thought we might have some 'guest bloggers' who would blog for a period of time on a range of subjects.

Over the next month we welcome Drue Phillips from Providence Community Church in Dallas TX which is part of the Crowded House.

We have already posted his first blog 'Love your Neighbour' and his second will shortly follow... enjoy!

I am a part of Providence Community Church in Dallas, TX which is a part of The Crowded House. Just like all the other Crowded House churches we value and practice mission through gospel communities. Obviously mission could mean a lot of different things to different people. But, I've been thinking a lot about mission specifically to the people we live the closest to; our neighbors.

This is a quote that I recently read in a popular secular magazine. "Neighborhood is not just an assembly of houses- it's when people care about their surroundings and they're engaging with one another".

In my experience growing up and currently living in middle and lower/middle class suburbia I'm not sure that I've encountered "neighborhood" as described in this quote.

The Crowded House church I'm involved with, Sharrow Vale, has recently 'devolved' into 5 smaller 'Gospel Communities'. We still meet together on a Sunday as a large group, but the rest of 'church life' goes on in these communities. The 'GC's' are our primary community if you will. We still feel a responsibility for and identity with Sharrow Vale as a larger church, but the life-on-life, gospelling, pastoral care, mission etc. goes on primarily in these smaller communities.

One of the things that we've really tried to work hard on in our GC is not defaulting to seeing the community as simply a midweek Bible study. To achieve this we've done something that people even in the group have found hard... we've not had a midweek Bible study.

We’re flying out of Sydney, heading for Melbourne and the Forge ‘grassroots’ festival and as we do so we’re crossing from one church culture to another and as such it’s a good moment on the plane to reflect on our time in Perth and Sydney.

We have spent time with church planting teams, supporters of church planting, staff teams wanting to either transition their church from what has become known as an attractional model (time and place) of church to a missional (life and love) model, and staff teams supporting a new missional plant from their attractional mother church. We have met people working from the bottom up, wanting to start something from scratch, to people asking top down questions (how to transition). Everyone seems receptive to the theological principles behind a life and love model of church.

This is a genuine question. This is not a clever hook to get you to read a blog entry that will answer its own question. It’s an invitation to a conversation that will genuinely help a church be a missional community to a group of hard to reach people.

At this years EMA Tim Keller said that so much of our discipleship teaches people how to be a Christian on the weekends and in the evenings and leaves out the rest of life. Paul Tripp has said that evangelicals always know the gospel for past sins and future glory but not for life change in the here and now, after the Cross and before Christ’s return. In other words we don’t know how the gospel gives grace for change in everyday life. We are not used to talking about the gospel beyond not stealing staples at work. We live by a gospel with an excluded middle.