A day with Mike Frost

I spent the day listening to Mike Frost, coauthor of The Shaping of Things to Come. He’s in Peterborough speaking to some pastors and youth workers. Mike’s been a strong influence on me. A few of pastor friends of mine are currently working through Shaping. His coauthor, Alan Hirsch, also commented on this site before as I wrestled with some of the issues raised in the book. I’ve posted the notes online. Here’s a summary of what he talked about: Session One: Mike rooted his thinking in theology, the missio Dei. God is at heart missional. He cannot be caged. The church has lost its missional understanding and separated the sacred and secular within Christendom. The way back is to relearn the stories of Jesus. Jesus did not attract people to sacred places. Instead, he showed us it is possible to live faithfully as a servant of God in secular space. This completely subverts our religious system because we have become more like the Pharisees than we have Jesus. We have become offensive to the people for whom Jesus was fragrant, and fragrant to the people for whom Jesus was offensive. Session Two: We have put all of our eggs in the “come to us” attractional model. We are dealing with a demographic of 80% of people who are at best blasé and at worst hostile to us. We are in deep trouble in the next twenty years, because we only have 10% of the market and most of them are elderly. The solution is not for them to come, because they won’t. We need to move to mission, to going. Going requires some lifestyle commitments. We need to discover holiness as mission – not about what we don’t do, but about living deeply and fully. We need to rediscover prayer. We need to learn to socialize with unbelievers and enjoy it. We need to resource mission. Session Three: We need to take steps toward mission. We need to ask the people group to which God is calling us, because we can’t reach every people group. We need to join them, because attractional approaches won’t work. Issue: proximity. Don’t ever go alone; find someone to go with you. Change your metaphors of leadership from top-down ones to angler, midwife, gardener. They manipulate the conditions to bring out what is already there. Your job is to draw out all the latent missional potential that is already there. Your people are full of missional potential. There is a role for a central church: to send groups of people out to bars, clubs, leagues, etc. and to resource and protect them. Your church can spin out lots of missional projects. There is still a market for the central church: it will always have 20% of the market. As for the final session, I didn’t hear it because I had to drive back to Toronto. The CDs are on the way. Update: MP3s of talks by Mike from a previous visit are on the YFC website on the right hand side of the page