Verge Highlights - Everyone Gets to Play

The Verge conference was designed to rally churches and church planters around missional communities. Missional communities are simply communities of Christians that are committed to each other and are committed to being connected to the mission of God. Mission is not a service project or an event, but an identity, a critical part of discipleship and a lifestyle. I found the conference really helpful and practical. It seems much easier to start and maintain missional communities in organic churches, new churches or church plants. It is more complex in a large church setting, but well worth the effort. Here are some of my highlights broken down by the different speakers. Hopefully you will find them helpful in transforming your community to a missional community.

Thursday Night – Jesus is Lord
Matt Carter, pastor of Austin Stone, encouraged the leaders to never love the mission more than loving Jesus, our first love.

Francis Chan talked about the community on mission that needs each other so that we don’t get distracted from the mission. The early church saw a man rise from the dead so they got together and sung some songs, ate some bread and some gave 10%. No, they gave their whole life to the mission. If you saw someone rise from the dead, you would give everything.

Friday Morning – Organic Systems
Neil Cole said plant Jesus, plant the gospel and then let the church grow. Jesus' parable of the seed and the sower implies that most of the work is done in the sowing and harvesting. There is little work when it comes to growth, yet that is where so much of our time is spent.

Jeff Vanderseldt reiterated the idea that in missional church, everyone gets to play. Everyone is a full time minister and God is routing his money to you through Dell, AMD, Freescale, etc to you. Equipping is not just informing. Equipping is life. Lets not extract people from life, lets equip them for life and call them to mission.

Friday Afternoon – Apostolic Mission
Alan Hirsch compared the movement of the gospel to viruses. Apostolic mission plus the people of God gives everyone a role to play. If we want to reproduce, we have to create things that are reproducible. If the concept of the church is not reproducible then it will not spread like a virus. If concept of leadership is not reproducible, then leaders will not be developed. Your baptism is your commission!

Hugh Halter talked very practically about misisonal communities including three elements: mission (being a blessing), communion (prayer, scripture, great commandment, etc), and inclusive communities. He believes that that the error most churches make is focusing on only one of these aspects of Spiritual Formation rather than all three. There are three barriers to these kinds of communities: individualism, materialism, consumerism.