Over the week at New Frontiers I’ve been going along to a series of 3 morning seminars led by Mark Driscoll entitled “Be Radical, Plant Radical Churches”. The structure of these have been for Mark to speak for around 15 minutes, drawing out a few issues, then that was followed by around 45 minutes of Q&A. Obviously because of the structure of the sessions I didn’t take extensive notes, but here’s a few little bits:

Session 1 - Mark spoke about family life, wives, elders and deacons

Session 2 - Mark spoke about the practicalities of church growth, starting new services, campuses and plants

Session 3 - Mark spoke again about elders, leadership and everything else

Here’s something I did write down, ‘a week in the life of Mark Driscoll’. Now it wasn’t always like this, there was a time when he did everything; finance, admin, visiting etc. But now, as Preaching Pastor he has a much more focused role:

Sunday - Preaching (live) 4 times a day, up at 6am, bed at 3am

Monday - Half day, time to exercise, a few meetings, time to plan week with Grace (his wife)

Tuesday - Breakfast with kids, Meetings all day

Wednesday - Goes off to a Christian retreat centre for silence, solitude, prayer and fasting

Thursday - Writing

Friday - Emails, Sermon preparation, Date night with Grace

Saturday - ‘Jammy day’ time to spend together as a family

In Mark Driscoll’s final main address at the Together on a Mission conference he spoke about ‘Movements’ (or networks of churches, like New Frontiers). In introduction he took us to Acts 1:1-11 to the beginning of the movement, with Jesus as the head and the Spirit at work. He spoke about Paul’s church planting strategy of establishing churches in cities and commented on the strategic significance of cities - they have more people, and culture flows from a city.

Driscoll talked a little about some historic movements and described them by 6 marks of movements:

1. Young people, young leaders
2. Conversions
3. Church Planting
4. Unaware of extending influence
5. Supporting organisations (production of resources)
6. New Technology

Mark then went on to discuss the rather depressing cycle of a movement:

1. Simple Organisation
2. Growth (becomes a movement)
3. Institution - founders and friends are the leaders (young leaders leave), guarding previous innovation, stop listening to outsiders (need humility and discernment)
4. Museum

Driscoll then went on to talk about ‘going off course’, 7 ways that movements can turn into institutions, he credited these points to Larry Osbourne:

1. Theologically off course - either too tight (fundamentalist) or too loose (liberal - used Vineyard as an example)
2. Relationships become too close to accommodate new leaders and members
3. Organisationally not adjusted for growth
4. Pride - “not invented here syndrome”, a willingness to listen to others with humility and discernment is needed
5. Pursuing potential over calling - prayerfully consider what to do
6. Lack Resourcing
7. Honouring the founder and the future

Points 2, 3, 5 and 7 were specifically aimed at the New Frontiers movement, point 7 in particular. Driscoll basically said that soon Terry Virgo will have to hand over New Frontiers to a new leader (he is quite old after all!) and that new leaders need to respect Terry and the founding vision, but also respect the future and new opporunities that open. I understand that people in New Frontiers love and respect Terry, while Driscoll saw this as a great thing I think he also saw it as a danger for growth, changing structure and a clear vision for the future. Mark was very gracious to what is clearly a delicate and emotional subject.

In conclusion, Mark gave 6 phases of renewal (from Rick Warrren):

1. Personal - Spirit enabled passion for Jesus
2. Relational - love and compassion
3. Missional - overflow of relational love into sharing faith and church planting
4. Cultural - church culture infects the city
5. Structural - more systems, more policies, more churches
6. Institutional - breathe life into dead churches

Afterwards Mark received a standing ovation for his time with us, his honesty and his ability to clearly speak into the New Frontiers situation. Terry Virgo came up briefly afterwards to speak about momentous times at the Brighton Conference (this being one), and to give an emotional thanks to Mark. Exciting times for New Frontiers, for a vision of 1000 churches.

PJ Smyth started planting churches in Zimbabwe, and now leads a New Frontiers church in Johanesburg, South Africa. His address was taken from 1 Chronicles 11-12…

Start of the Army

• David’s army starts in a cave - in distress, discontent, and debt

Conscience of the Army (11:1-3)

The army followed David because:

1. He was ‘flesh and bone’
2. He was a leader
3. God appointed him

PJ went on to speak about Paul and his uses of the phrase “a clear conscience”

Devotion of the Army (11:16-19)

• PJ bought verses for application about being a leader and a follower

Structure of the Army

• PJ went through chapter 11 speaking about teams and roles for leaders and followers

Leader of the Army (11:4-9)

• Lead Inclusive (bring people together)
• Lead Strong

1. Guard what has been entrusted
2. Spot opportunities
3. Don’t take no for an answer
4. Be committed to forward motion

Carrying on from Mark’s first talk on Spirit-Led Missions he went on to speak about what a Missional church is. Firstly he concluded his 8-point definition of a church:

• Regenerated Church membership
• Qualified Leadership (male eldership)
• Gathers regularly for preaching and worship
• Sacraments ministered correctly (Baptism and Communion)
• Unity in Word and Spirit
• Discipline for holiness
• Loves all people
• Evangelises and makes disciples

He went on expanding on point 8 to talk about all of church being on mission, citing Leslie Newbiggin who spoke of being engaged in mission that understands its culture. Driscoll then gave four examples of churches and how they respond to culture:

• Bombshelter - the fundamentalist church that hides from culture, treating church as a safe haven from it. They preach against the culture in an ‘us’ and ‘them’ mentality, they’re not missional.
• Mirror - the liberal church that is simply a reflection of the culture.
• Parasite - the church that takes all the benefits that a culture provides but does not serve, give to, or love that culture.
• City within a City - the church loves Jesus, believes the Bible and lives differently within the culture, it invites others to join in the distinctive living.

Obviously he’s with the fourth church! Driscoll then went through the 12 aspects of a missional church - he got to 4, having spent about half an hour on the 3rd!

• Church is a missional outpost, it exists to grow, to put on more services, set up new campuses and plant new churches.
• Every Christian is a Missionary. The gospel needs to be preached every week (to encourage inviting friends) and members need to be trained in doctrine and apologetics (so they can answer questions).
• Aware of Local Culture. Mark talked through most forms of media (TV, radio, Internet, blogs, social networking) and how he uses them, he spoke of watching TV missionally - seeing the idols displayed in the media, people’s personal heavens. He also chatted about knowing the places where people socialise and speaking to those in the know about what people get up to.
• Contending and Contextualizing the Gospel. Mark spoke first on 1 Corinthians 9:22 - “I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some”. He spoke of having ‘timeless truths and timely methods’, of being ’seeker-sensible’. In conclusion he gave one of the most clear explanations of contextualization I have heard him give - he said…

“you do not need to make the gospel relevent, but you do need to show that the gospel is relevent”

Afterwards it was good to see a little party from UCCF present and I was able to chat with Scott Thomas about Acts29, church planting and the partnership with Steve Timmis culminating in an event at St. James Clerkenwell on Friday night and the Dwell conference on Saturday. And being a geek, I went and got a picture with Mark - he has a really large head…

Day 2. After the seminar stream (I’ll report about that at the end of the week) was the first main session with David Stroud. David is the leader of Christ Church London and head of New Froniters UK. He spoke from 1 Samuel 14:1-23.

His main point was to use Jonathan as an example of a man who had hope in God. He took us to our situation, this side of the cross and gave us 3 reasons to have Hope:

• The Resurrection - confirming the testimony of Jesus
• Jesus is Alive - He works in the world today
• Jesus Reigns - he is in control

David went on to speak about the hope characterised in Jonathan:

• He gathered people to him (his armour bearer)
• He had the basics sorted
• He moved forward, didn’t just do maintenance, ignored the obstacles

The phrase “perhaps the Lord” was used frequently to say that we should take risks, be daring, in hope and faith that God will work.

There are not many notes here, that’s not because it was a short talk, or a boring talk, but because I felt it lacked substance which constitutes good note-taking material. Although David had briefly outlined our reasons for hope at the start (the work of Jesus) it became very man-centred - my hope, my faith, my courage, my work. It was one of those talks where what was said was not unbiblical or wrong, but there was insufficient (not really any) work done on the text to justify what was said. The problem was that the narrative (Jonathan scaling a cliff to attack the Philistines) was used as a principle for us to follow - the classic, ‘What’s your cliff to scale?’ application… to be honest it felt as though David had a message to give about hope and faith, then arrived at 1 Samuel 14 as a related passage.

The second area of concern I had was with the meeting as a whole (going back to my sceptism of New Frontiers). This concern is to do with the use of ‘Prophecy’ - I do not think New Frontiers have fallen into a Charismatic pitfall of elevating prophecy to be equal or near to Scripture, but I fear there are still issues. So a guy from Canada gives a word to say in effect, a time of blessing is coming to the UK, favour in mission, and specifically favour from government. There are five questions I have:

• Haven’t prophecies like this been many times before and not come to pass - does that make the givers false prophets?
• If prophecies are from God, why are they always so vague?
• How often do you hear someone give a prophecy that thing are going to be bad, that God s judging or withdrawing favour?
• Does this particular prophecy fit with reality? - I realise that God is sovereign and can change anything, but the reality is that Christians are having less and less favour with the Government.
• Does this particular prophecy fit with Scripture? - we are not promised favour from government, in fact surely if anything the opposite is true…

There are admittedly very few preachers who would have made me come to the New Frontiers conference - perhaps Piper or Mahaney might, but Driscoll certainly sold it for me.

Driscoll opened up with his customary auto-biographical sketch along with some of the background to Mars Hill. The Catholic jokes were particularly good in speaking of his conception (’Papal Roulette’) and his mother’s experience of Charismatic Catholicism - praying in tongues to Mary!

He went on to praise the work of the New Frontiers movement saying that he had lots to learn, but also to say that he wanted to serve by where necessary correcting. So he began by giving 5 traps which those who hold to Charismatic theology can fall into - he thought New Froniters may be falling into the 5th trap (not the others though):

• Too heavy a focus on the person of the Spirit rather than on the One to whom He points, the person of Jesus
• Pentecost becomes the main event at the expense of the Cross and the Resurrection
• Health and Wealth become focuses
• Leaders are held up as examples of being Spirit-filled and led as opposed to Jesus the best example
• Mission is not viewed correctly (can’t remember his exact explanation)

So from there Driscoll went on to talk about what Spirit-filled mission is all about. He took us through loads of verses in the first few chapters of Luke’s gospel about the Spirit (1:15, 1:35, 1:41, 1:67, 2:11, 2:25, 3:16, 3:22… and more). He then talked about Jesus’ Baptism, why he had to be annointed by the Holy Spirit, he got into a big theological tangent explaining the Trinity, the 1 Person and 2 Natures of Jesus, the Hypostatic Union…

He came back to the question - How did Jesus live his life? - answer, By the Power of the Holy Spirit. He described Jesus as a missionary, leaving the ‘culture’ of Heaven to come to a sinful world… so the Spirit empowers missionaries. He spoke of two empowering ministries of the Holy Spirit - an active one for service, and a contemplative one for solitude, study and prayer - the active service is preceeded by time for contemplation.

By this point we’d moved from Luke to Acts, picking up on Pentecost and the Spirit empowering the Church as with Christ. He highlighted repentence as the first mark of the Spirit-filled believer (Acts 2:38) and then picked out 3 points of what the Spirit-filled life looks like from Acts 2:42-47:

1. Devotion to apostles’ teaching
2. Love for one another
3. Awe at the Gospel

Driscoll then concluded with his definition of what a church is, stressing that it was important for movements like New Frontiers to keep these definitions to stay on mission. There were 8 points, he only made it to the first:

• Regeneration - he stated that often we fight too much to defend the doctrine of Justification at the neglect of the place of regeneration in the believer and in the church community

I presume he will pick up the next 7 points tomorrow - maybe. As well as this I will be reporting from a Mark Driscoll seminar on Planting Radical Churches and on a main session talk by David Stroud.

Hey. I’m at the Together on a Mission, New Frontiers conference in Brighton. There have been two sessions so far today, and an evening session later, but I’m not going to be going to the evening sessions, they don’t look as good as the rest.

So this morning kicked off with Stephen Van Ryhn, the leader of Jubilee Church in Capetown - he started with the easy job of trying to persuade the conference to have the event in Capetown in 2010, it looked like an amazing place!

We went to Daniel 1 for his talk entitled ‘Prevailing Under Pressure’ - there were 3 main points:

• God is in Control (v.2)

1. God reigns, He is unchanging - therefore we can be confident in hard circumstances, in mission and in prayer

• God is our Redeemer

1. Israel is under God’s judgement, 15 years before it’s destruction God places 4 men in Babylon to work out His plan of redemption

• Be in the world, but not of the world

“It is comparatively easy to be faithful if we don’t care about being contemporary. It is also easy to be contemporary if you don’t care about being faithful. It is the search for the combination of truth and relevance which is exacting.” - John Stott

1. Moral Integrity - Daniel didn’t defile himself with food offered to idols
2. Theological Integrity - Daniel praised God for his gifts, he didn’t revel in his own wisdom
3. Spiritual Integrity - Daniel prays, he longed for communion with God

Stephen concluded with a challenging call not to compromise, asking us what our price was. He challenged us to be faithful by sharing the testimonies of Eric Liddell and Marie Durand.

Matt Chandler from the Village Church is currently on sabbatical, but I need to let you know about some recent good sermons. He’s got to about chapter 9 of a big series on Luke (20 sermons so far), it’s awesome stuff!

Back in May, Matt finished a 5-part topical series on the church core-values which is well worth a listen to:

What is Truth?

What is Christian Spirituality? -  really good, what true Spirit-filled churches should be like!

What is Community?

What is Foot-Washing?

What is Missional Living?

These sermons and others will go into my good sermons database page - it’s just a bit of fun for me but hopefully as I keep updating it, it will be a great resource to find good sermons in one place!

Also, Matt Chandler’s church, The Village are doing a building project and have launched a new website for that including some video testimonies from some members - here’s an example…

Tim Keller has a new book coming out in October called ‘The Prodigal God‘, it’s an exposition of the ‘Parable of the Prodigal Sons’ and I get the impression that like ‘Reason for God’ it will be accessible for both Christians and non-Christians alike. It’s released on the 30th and you can currently pre-order from Amazon for around £9, I’m hoping that the Good Book Company might have it in stock at a similar price nearer the time, I’ll let you know.

Here’s a short interview with Keller about the book, and a response from Keller about the use of the word ‘Prodigal’ in relation to God.

Also, Mark Driscoll has lots of books coming out this year which has prompted the launch of Resurgence Literature publishing (ReLit). The first book was Vintage Jesus, I’ve finally got round to reading that so I’ll review it soon.

The latest books out (released last week) are a series of 4 books - ‘A Book You’ll Actually Read‘ - they’re less than 100 pages on ‘The Old Testament’, ‘The New Testament’, ‘Church Leadership’ and ‘Who is God?’. These are the square shaped ones (left). At the end of July there’s a book called ‘Practical Theology for Women’ coming out by Wendy Alsup, a deacon at Mars Hill. ‘Death by Love‘ (right) is coming out at the end of September, from what I gather it is based on Driscoll’s ‘Christ on the Cross’ series and then put in to a letter format. Finally in January 2009 ‘Vintage Church‘ (middle) is being released, subtitled ‘Timeless Truths and Timely Methods’ - it’s in the style of the Vintage Jesus book and I’m guessing will be similar to the Radical Reformission, probably with more of a focus on some of his sermon series (1 Corinthians, Nehemiah) and some practical suggestions. One more thing, they’re also publishing other non-Mars-Hill books, so far just Total Church by Timmis and Chester.

Last week I picked up some books for myself at EMA - Total Church (Timmis and Chester), Why we’re not Emergent (some American guys), and The Gospel and Personal Evangelism (Dever)… will give some thoughts when I get round to reading.

Next week I’m going to be semi-live blogging from the New Frontiers conference in Brighton and the Dwell Conference in London on the Saturday. I say semi-live-blogging, I’ll be at the main events but will be there to soak everything up and will file a report blog at the end of the day… the main talks will be by Mark Driscoll, I suspect something from Terry Virgo too, and then on the Saturday Driscoll will be joined by Scott Thomas of Acts 29, and Steve Timmis.

So if you’re not going to be at Brighton and you want to know what’s going on then I’ll be providing an ‘outsiders’ perspective of a New Frontiers conference, in fact I’d go further and say a skeptics view of New Frontiers (but that’s another story), but I’m a self confessed ‘Driscoll geek’ so there’s no skeptical view there I’m afraid, well depends what he says!

I’m sure the likes of Adrian Warnock, Bish, and other New Frontiers bloggers will be there and sharing their thoughts, I shall be trying to fit in for a week, pretending to be a New-Frontierser!