Hi Elaine. Yeah, once a day a random post gets recycled to Twitter and Facebook as a way to make sporadic use of older content. Goldingay was definitely one of my favorites at Fuller, he's a treasure.

David, could have been more explicit, but what I am critiquing are the esoteric nature of the ways in which this idea of "personal relationship with Jesus" is most commonly used. The phrase is typically invoked in correspondence with the notion of "having Jesus in my heart." It is this sentiment which is individualistic and theologically inappropriate, not the notion of authentic and embodied relationship. With you there. Thanks for the enegament on a post that is now over 5 years old - holy cow!

I'm down.

I am gonna try and get that sorted out. Will let you know.

How do you see something like that coming together? Local church inititatives? Innovated approached to distributed models of theological education from seminaries? Some combination of the two or something else altogether?

Thanks for taking the time to share all that Todd. Helpful to have a better picture of what, how, and why you guys are doing what you're doing. Sounds great on many counts.

Not sure I followed you on using the fruit of the tree as an analogy for the medium being the message - there may be a category confusion there. I remain pretty convinced that very often our mediums and messages are directly antithetical to one another. It just doesn't work, in my opinion, to teach on the incarnational nature of Christian witness via a video feed, or talk about the value of replicating and sending leaders when people gather primarily to hear from the same person week after week. I've heard it said before that what we win people with we win them to. From experiential and theological perspectives I buy that, which is why I remain skeptical of using less-than-missional means to garner an audience with the hope of converting them to something else. At a basic level I remain a guy convinced that we should follow Jesus' example of inviting people, at the very beginning of our interaction with them, into the kind of life that God would have for them.

All that being said, it sounds like God is us to some great stuff at the Stone. Blessings on all the stuff you are doing. Hope we get to connect in person at some point.

Right. I guess this just serves as a reminder that the real focus in the "missional conversation" isn't so much church size (mega vs. smaller), but theology and ecclesiology - things which drive churches no matter their size. It's easy to pick on mega-churches because they're like the fat kid in dodge-ball, but we probably need to work harder in helping people understand what we think is really at stake rather than being accused of just being anti-large church.

Tim, thanks for commenting - good to connect on Twitter as well.

Wow, this post is 6 years old now. Though I would probably refine this post a bit if I were writing it today, this remains one of the biggest theological revolutions of my life. The idea that salvation isn't something that I posses has freed me up to know and follow God in ways that I never could have imagined and led me down so many other paths of theological insight as well. Newbigin has been so great, love his writing and what it's done to call us back to seeing the fundamentally missiological shape of all theology.

Hey Todd, thanks for reading and taking the time to comment. Did you catch this line at the beginning of the post, "I think it needs to be acknowledged that the problem isn’t size in and of itself. Who would possibly be against a huge church of fully devoted follower of Jesus on mission with God?! Not this guy." I really did want to get out in front of exactly the criticism that you mentioned, but maybe I could have done better. By the way, I hear only good things about Austin Stone - Stew is a friend of mine.

I'd probably still want to push in a little on how a church remains "mega" without dismantling huge staffs, budgets, and financial structures that are leveraged primarily toward making worship services happen, but, and I mean this with all sincerity, if there is a church out there that might have something to teach others on this, it just may be Austin Stone - you'd of course know better than me. I am just wary of the effects of the mentality that believes it is appropriate to continue using mega-church sorts of paradigms and structures so long as people are on board with trying to move people toward something else. On that count, I am very much a "the medium is the message sort of guy." Care to share some more about some of the ways that Austin Stone is dealing with stuff along those lines? I am genuinely interested!

Thanks for your comment. I have definitely seen this reality of the constant need for volunteers to staff all the various programs played out. There is this air of servanthood to it, but more than anything, it seems like it just stymies peoples growth as they are more inclined to feel like they have checked the "I serve somewhere" box as opposed to having been invited into a discipleship relationship where they might develop the competency for kingdom leadership.