Moving Toward a Counter-Cultural Community, Part 1: Societal Segregation

by: Timmy Brister

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For the past several weeks, my disciple-making team and I have been working through what a counter-cultural, gospel-centered community of servants looks like. I think this is an important subject matter, one to which I hope to devote several blogposts.

In order for a gospel community to be counter-cultural, we first have to assess what we are encountering in the culture. How does culture and society determine how community is formed and fostered? What are some of the guiding principles and motivations behind its formation? These are questions I find important to determine the starting point, that is, the current reality in which we enter.

I have discovered 11 aspects “societal segregation” that form and foster the community at large. By segregation, I’m talking about ways society separates or isolates individuals to form groups favorable to their preferences and/or convictions. Positively speaking, they may be referred to “affinity” grouping. Most often, this happens naturally.  When multiple aspects of societal segregation are combined, clustering sub-cultures are formed. The eleven aspects of societal segregation are:

11 Forms of Societal Segregation

• Demographically – “age and stage” in life; boomers, busters, Xers, Nones, etc.
• Economically – low, middle, upper class
• Ethnically – black, white, hispanic, asian, “other”
• Sexuality – heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, transgender
• Spiritually – religious, spiritual, atheist, Christian, Catholic, etc.
• Geographically – downtown, midtown, suburb, exurban, rural, etc.
• Linguistically – English, Spanish, Korean, German, etc.
• Educationally – not just levels of education but philosophy as well
• Politically – republican, democrat, independent, tea party
• Occupationally – white collar, blue collar, no collar; government, private sector
• Extra Curricularity – hobbies, sports, music, third-place loyalties

These eleven forms/aspects have several uses in society, most notably being how they serve as filters for societal identification. When you get to know someone, you will discover their age (demographic), perhaps where they live (geographic), what they do for a living (occupation), and maybe even what they enjoy doing in their free time (extra curriculars). These aspects can not only serve as filters but also barriers to keep out (separate) those most unlike yourself. If you find someone to be a Hispanic (ethnic), speaking Spanish (linguistic), practicing Roman Catholic (spirituality), construction worker (blue collar), and you are none of them, it is possible that a person with those aspects may never become a part of your community as barriers have been erected (either knowingly or unknowingly) to prevent that from happening. As you can see, using them as filters can lead to creating barriers, but using them as barriers can lead to judgments and stereotypes. These aspects become the basis or grounds for security the kind of community that most suits your preferences or convictions, that makes you most comfortable by security people most like you. Judgments are made about people to determine who is allowed into the community you (and others like yourself) have formed.

In my next post, I will share what I believe to be the internal driving motivations behind societal segregation and five components of heart idolatry surfacing in the process.

Tags: Kingdom Concept, Local Predicament, Timmy Brister

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Your Words are the Technology of Leadership

by: Tim Kastelle

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The Things We Don’t Know We Know

When we drive, there are hundreds of things that we do every minute that we don’t consciously think about.  Over time, we get so good at making these constant adjustments to speed and direction, gas and brakes, that we forget just how hard it is to actually drive a car.  If we’re not careful, our concentration will slip and that can lead to trouble.

The things that we don’t know we know are like that – they allow us to do incredibly complex tasks without thinking about them, but the unconscious nature of the action can also get us in trouble.

Leading and managing is a lot like driving.  When you’ve done it long enough, parts of it become automatic.  I don’t get to manage much in my current position, so when I get a chance to exercise my management muscles and I can see all these actions coming back, I’m much more aware of them than I was when I was a full-time manager.

Management is all about influencing from a distance.  The whole job is nudges and levers, questions and suggestions.  Little adjustments to keep on course, or speed up, or slow down.  That’s the art of managing.

The academic term for the things we “know” but can’t articulate is tacit knowledge.  It includes mostly things that we learn from doing.  Think about riding a bicycle – can you explain step-by-step how to balance while you’re moving forward?  It’s actually pretty close to impossible – that’s why we need training wheels.

We actually need training wheels as managers too.  Here is how Henry Mintzberg puts it in his superb book Managing:

Little of management practice has been reliably codified, let alone certified as to its effectiveness. That is why Hill found that people “had to act as managers before they understood what the role was”

It should be emphasized that, unlike other workers, the manager does not leave the telephone, the meeting, or the e-mail to get back to work. These contacts are the work. The ordinary work of the unit or organization—producing a product, selling it, even conducting a study or writing a report—is not usually undertaken by its manager. The manager’s productive output has to be gauged largely in terms of the information he or she transmits orally or by e-mail. As Jeanne Liedtka of the Darden School has put it (in a talk I attended): “Talk is the technology of leadership.”

Talk is the Technology of Leadership

I love that quote from Jeanne Liedtka – talk is the technology of leadership.  When was the last time you thought about how you use words?  That’s something we learned to do ages ago.  So long ago that we don’t even know what we know about speaking, or listening.

And yet, these are the core technologies of leading.  Speaking, and listening.

If you’re leading, or managing, it pays to think about these technologies a little more deeply.

Tom Peters addresses listening in a great document that he recently posted  called Presentation Excellence.  The main document is about presentation skills, and it’s useful.  For me though, the goldmine is the appendix on listening.

He starts this by saying “Interviewing/asking questions is a critical—and under-studied and under-practiced—skill. Few have treated it as a skill to be mastered akin to learning to play the piano.”  He then goes on to give 59 thoughts on becoming a better listener.  This is an invaluable resource – check it out.

In terms of speaking, I’ve also run across an excellent resource recently.  It’s a book called The Power of Framing: Creating the Language of Leadership by Gail Fairhurst.  Like the piece by Peters, this book contains a wealth of practical examples and tips for using language more effectively.

It’s time for us to consciously think about the things we do automatically.  If talk is the technology of leadership, than it makes sense to build our skills in this area.  As we do this, we should pay attention to one last quote from Mintzberg’s book:

“It’s not [the manager’s] job to supervise or to motivate, but to liberate and enable” (Max DePree of Herman Miller, 1990).

Tags: Atten, Awareness, Tim Kastelle

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Pushing Ministry Innovation Forward: The Desperate Effort that Comes from Being Hopeful

by: Seth Godin

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As organizations and individuals succeed, it gets more difficult to innovate. There are issues of coordination, sure, but mostly it’s about fear. The fear of failing is greater, because it seems as though you’ve got more to lose.

So urgency disappears first. Why ship it today if you can ship it next week instead? There are a myriad of excuses, but ultimately it comes down to this: if every innovation is likely to fail, or at the very least, be criticized, why be in such a hurry? Go to some more meetings, socialize it, polish it and then, one day, you can ship it.

Part of the loss of urgency comes from a desire to avoid accountability. Many meetings are events in which an organization sits in a room until someone finally says, “okay, I’ll take responsibility for this.” If you’re willing to own it, do you actually need a meeting, or can you just email a question or two to the people you need information from?

Thus, we see the two symptoms of the organization unable to move forward with alacrity, the two warning signs of the person in the grip of the resistance.  “I can take my time, and if I’m lucky, I can get you to wonder who to blame.”

You don’t need more time, you just need to decide.

Read the history of the original Mac and you’ll be amazed at just how fast it got done. Willie Nelson wrote three hit songs in one day. To save the first brand I was responsible for, I redesigned five products in less than a day. It takes a team of six at Lays potato chips a year to do one.

The urgent dynamic is to ask for signoffs and to push forward, relentlessly. The accountable mantra is, “I’ve got this.” You can feel this happening when you’re around it. It’s a special sort of teamwork, a confident desperation… not the desperation of hopelessness, but the desperate effort that comes from being hopeful.

What’s happening at your shop?

Read more from Seth here.

Tags: Innovation, Leadership Engine, Seth Godin

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Check Your Ministry Blind Spots: 7 Ways Your Mind Blocks Out Reality

by: Judith Glaser

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Many of us act as though we all see the same reality, yet the truth is we don’t. Human Beings have cognitive biases or blind spots.

Blind spots are ways that our mind becomes blocked from seeing reality as it is – blinding us from seeing the real truth about ourselves in relation to others. Once we form a conclusion, we become blind to alternatives, even if they are right in front of their eyes.

Emily Pronin, a social psychologist, along with colleagues Daniel Lin and Lee Ross, at Princeton University’s Department of Psychology, created the term “blind spots.” The bias blind spot is named after the visual blind spot.

Passing the Ball

There is a classic experiment that demonstrates one level of blind spots that can be attributed to awareness and focused-attention. When people are instructed to count how many passes the people in white shirts make on the basketball court, they often get the number of passes correct, but fail to see the person in the black gorilla suit walking right in front of their eyes. Hard to believe but true!

Blind Spots & Deniall

However, the story of blind spots gets more interesting when we factor in our cognitive biases that come from our social needs to look good in the eyes of others.
When people operate with blind spots, coupled with a strong ego, they often refuse to adjust their course even in the face of opposition from trusted advisors, or incontrovertible evidence to the contrary.

Two well-known examples of blind spots are Henry Ford and A&P:

▪ Ford’s success with the Model-T blinded him to the desires of his customers. That gave the fledging General Motors an opportunity to capture a winning share of the automobile market with a broader range of models and options.
▪ A&P stuck with the grocery chain’s private label products even as their customers defected en masse to supermarkets that carried the national brands they saw advertised on TV.

Recovery

The good news is that companies can recover from denial; even when they seem permanently wedded to their histories, their philosophies, or their belief systems. IBM, which had been caught up in its own “bureau-pathology,” learned to conquer arrogance and overcome its history and culture, under the leadership of Louis Gerstner.

Intel, DuPont, and Coca-Cola, are more examples of corporations caught in denial traps when launching new products. They demonstrated that when corporate management has strong convictions, or worse yet, hubris about their points of view, they can become blind to their customer’s needs – needs that are right in front of their very eyes.

Seeing the real truth is an art and a science. When we get the balance right between what we think is true and what is really true – we are managing our blind spots with integrity, and wisdom.

Fortunately, these well-known brands did not live in denial very long. It was only a passing phase, and they recovered from it by revisiting reality with an open mind. Blind spots explain why the “smartest people in the room” (as Enron’s top executives were famously called) can sometimes be very dumb. They do not see the light – they are not open to changing their minds.

The Power of Coaching to Dissolve Blind Spots

Denial and Blind spots are one of the primary reasons why Executive Coaching is so vital for leaders, and why peer coaching is equally important for employees to practice. Coaching can effectively uncover and deal with blind spots and denial and give the decision-makers a fresh perspective on how to handle executive challenges.

Coaching can also help individuals gain a broader and more ‘realistic perspective’ about situations and themselves. Executive, Team and Organizational Coaching can help leaders calibrate with the world around them, giving them reality checkpoints that position them to navigate the real world with wisdom and insight.
From time to time, we all need a wake-up call to be sure that we do not allow ourselves to confuse our denial maps with the actual territory.

Check Yourself

Here are 7 Common Blind spots:

1. Denial of Reality – Feeling so strong about our own beliefs that we deny the beliefs of others, or deny facts right in front of our eyes.
2. Control – Seeing ourselves as being more responsible for things than we actually are, or having more control over things and events than we truly do.
3. Made-Up Memories – Making decisions based on memories that did not happen. Often we confuse our imaginations, or our dreams, with reality.
4. Reality Distortions – Distorting reality to conform to preconceptions.
5. Know it All – Thinking that we know more than what we really do. (We simply don’t know what we don’t know.)
6. Listening Only to Validate What We Know – Failure to listen to others.
7. Undervaluing What We Do Know – Listening too much to others, and allowing others’ beliefs to talk us out of our beliefs; or in some cases cause us not to trust our instincts.

Neuro-tips: Removing Blind Spots

Tip #1 – It Takes Thought to Learn. The brain does not always allow us to hear all the facts if they do not fit our prior understanding of a concept. To learn new facts, you must be actively open to accepting opposition.
Tip #2 – Effectively Working Together. Partners who were considered controlling were perceived as critical and rude, and their advice was generally rejected and not trusted. When the same partners showed appreciation, a feeling of rapport and trust developed, creating a deep ‘WE-centric’ bond.

Read more from Judith here.

Tags: Judith Glaser, Leadership Barriers, Leadership Engine

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Don’t Let Your Ministries Get Lost in Meaningless Noise: Play from the Same Page

by: Steven Furtick

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I recently took my youngest son Graham to a music store to let him bang on the instruments. I decided that even though I love music, I would hate to work in there because all you hear all day is noise. Not music.

Multiple people were playing multiple instruments around the store and it sounded horrible. No one was coordinated. It was just an annoying cacophony of sound.

But I also noticed that if you isolated it out, a lot of the individuals who were playing were actually pretty good. You had one guy playing great R&B on a keyboard. Another guy playing a strong version of Stairway to Heaven on guitar. Another playing great jazz on drums.

It’s not that any of these players were particularly bad. They just weren’t playing from the same page. It wasn’t their individual skill levels that were lacking. It was the unity of all their skills going after the same purpose.

That’s what a lot of churches are like: A room full of talented people playing their own music. What could be really beautiful like a symphony has gone wrong because there is no unity. And the result is purposeless noise.

Many of you have the people in your church right now to begin playing some amazing music. A better staff person or better volunteers isn’t going to fix your problem. It will just add to the noise you already have. What you really need to do is get everyone to start playing the same song.

If you’re a pastor, it’s your job to pick the song. Cast your God-given vision. You could have some of the greatest people in their respective positions you’re ever going to work with. But if you don’t give them a common song to unite around, you’re wasting their talent. And your church is just going to make a lot of noise that’s going to repel people.

If you’re on staff, volunteering, or simply attending, it’s your responsibility to be united under your visionary. If God wanted everyone playing your song, He would have elevated you to a place where you could make it happen. But He hasn’t. He may one day, but in the meantime you need to faithfully contribute to the song your pastor has chosen with your unique contribution. And do it with excellence.

We have too great of a message and too great a mission to let them get lost in a sea of meaningless noise. So whatever part you play in your church:

Unite under a common song. Play from the same page. And play your part flawlessly.

Read more from Steven here.

Tags: Steven Furtick, Vision Frame

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An Architect’s Secret Weapons: The Space Between Buildings

by: Jody Forehand

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What would you say if your architect told you he could design you a space that is beautiful, functional, and spacious, and it would only be about 10% of the cost per square foot of the typical building? You might ask him what he’s been smoking, or you might say “I’ll take it!” before you even hear what it is. Too often architect’s forget about this secret weapon. The space between buildings can be an amazing environment, and guess what…you don’t have to put a roof over it or air condition it and that’s where the cost savings come in.

Shopping center behind a sea of parking

Typical Mall is an island in a sea of parking

Great outdoor space can change the entire experience of being on a site and visiting a building. When attention is paid to the arrival sequence from the time you visually see the site, drive onto it, park your car, and walk up to the buildings, you can create an exciting experience out of a typically mundane one. Picture your average Big Box shopping center on one hand with its sea of parking facing the road and compare that to New Urbanist developments that creatively find a way to stash the cars and move you right into a pedestrian friendly environment.

Vickery Village shopping center with great spaces between buildings – Cumming, GA

Baxter Town Center – Fort Mill, SC – Pedestrian Friendly New Urbanist Development

Make no mistake, cars are a part of American culture, and unless you are in a dense urban environment with good public transportation, which most of the country is not, you are not going to get away from having a significant amount of a site dedicated to parking, but the parking lot doesn’t have to be your most prominent feature if you have a good design team. I don’t want to spend too much time discussing parking here, because my main topic is the space between buildings where people interact and where true community has a chance to develop.

Millennium Park in Chicago

Throughout history outdoor public space has been the center of community life for people. Whether it was the Greek Agoras, the Italian Piazzas or the American town square, people have a desire to come together in an environment that is appealing in design, comfortable to hang-out in, and where they can enjoy God’s creation outdoors. Even in the harshest environments of extreme cold and extreme hot climates these spaces are being developed. The weather may not be conducive to outdoor activity every day of the year, but when it’s nice these places fill up. Environment’s don’t get much harsher than Chicago (freezing, snowy, windy winters and hot, baking summers), but head out to Navy Pier or Millennium Park on a nice day and the places are packed with people. If they can develop great outdoor environments in a climate that harsh, then what’s your excuse for not doing it on your site?

Navy Pier in Chicago

Pedestrians enjoying Navy Pier in Chicago

How much more would it have cost to take all these great outdoor environments and put walls around them, throw on some roofs, and air condition and heat those spaces? Plus how different would they feel? There’s a reason no indoor malls are being developed anywhere in the country anymore while New Urbanist open air Town Centers are popping up everywhere. People like to be outside and developers don’t have to build huge enclosed “spaces between buildings”…it’s a win-win for everyone.

Church with Mall-type Parking

Crossroads Christian Church in Corona, CA with pedestrian friendly layout

These same concepts can be applied to church campus designs. Churches often get stuck in a rut called “tradition” or “the way it’s always been done.” With church design that usually means plopping the building down in the middle of the site and then surrounding it with parking, just like the malls and shopping centers do. Church leaders and church designers could learn some lessons about creating places people enjoy coming to that include great outdoor public spaces that are “gifts” back to the community. Crossroads Christian Church in Corona, CA is a good example of this intentional decision to incorporate pedestrian friendly design features and create interesting and inviting “outdoor rooms” between the buildings.

If you are a church planter or pastor of a church and you are contemplating your first building project or an expansion of your current campus, wouldn’t you want to develop spaces that your neighbors would desire to visit, and that your congregation would enjoy hanging out in between services and during the week? The “old school” church site and church facility sits empty six and a half days a week. Is that really good stewardship considering the amount of money being invested in land and building costs? Isn’t it a better investment to make your building and the spaces between them serve a purpose and serve the community the rest of the week? Isn’t getting people on your site a win-win? They can see that you’re not some “scary and secretive institution” and that you care enough to provide these great spaces with no strings attached. Before you start your next project figure out how to turn your church inside out so passers-by can see “community” happening right in your front yard every week.

Where is your favorite outdoor room? What features does it have and how could they be used as an outreach tool on your church expansion project? If you missed the post on “Weapon One”, you can read it here.

Read more from Jody here.

Tags: Architecture, Jody Forehand, Physical space

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10 Challenges for Your Ministry Team

by: Brad Lomenick

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Here are 10 specific challenges I would recommend you make to your team. Challenges to put in place and act out on a regular basis. These are based on the challenges we’ve instilled on our Catalyst team the last couple of years.

1. Authentic. Be Real. Human. approachable. Guard against hubris.

2. No sideways energy. Communicate. Focus. Guard against silos and wasted energy.

3. Stewardship. Each of us embracing and understanding our role in what we’ve been given and required to manage and uphold through the platform we’ve been given by God to steward. Not just the leader.

4. Expertise. see myself as an expert. Individual responsibility and organizational responsibility.

5. Receive what we create. Become our own customer. Guard against the mundane. If you don’t like the product you are creating, you have a problem.

6. Guard against cynicism. Behind the curtain we have to guard against this. Fight it at every turn. And call it out if we see it.

7. Excellence. We are the best in the world. Confidence not arrogance. Act like it. Maintain a standard. Guard against being lazy and pessimistic.

8. Serve one another. Jump in and help. Get it done mentality. Not just when the “lights are on” (sports reference), but all the time. Be willing to do whatever it takes.

9. Protect and maintain a “make it happen” culture. Guard against the phrase “it’s not my job.” and guard against creating clicks.

10. Get better every day. Guard against complacency. Make it your goal to constantly improve and take your game to the next level.

Brad’s new book The Catalyst Leader is out! It will provide practical help for all leaders at any stage of their leadership journey and inspire you to be a true change-maker wherever you lead.

Read more from Brad here.

Tags: Brad Lomenick, Change, Leadership Characteristics, Leadership Engine

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Changing Culture in Your Church, Part 2: 4 Phases, Not 4 Steps

by: Center for Creative Leadership

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Executives, leadership teams and entire organizations need more mature minds to deal with the increased complexity, uncertainty and inter-connectedness of our world.

CCL’s approach to changing culture is focused on growing bigger minds and fostering the thinking that allows for creative action in the face of complexity. Based on five principles, we use four broad, overlapping, reinforcing phases:

Discovery learning — determining willingness. What is the feasibility of entering the culture-change process? This is a mutual learning phase between CCL (as facilitators) and the client (as change agents and organizational leadership). It begins with an assessment of the current level of leadership culture and a look at the capability required by the business strategy.

Players’ Readiness — developing understanding. What are the long-term implications of integrating a new culture into the organization’s work? What is senior leadership’s ability to engage in the change process? It requires a commitment to participate in public learning — practices that many conservative institutions will decline.

Game Board Planning — framing the change process. What does culture change look like? How does interdependent leadership play out in business and leadership strategies, the learning process and organizational work targets? What are the beliefs and behaviors required? As senior leaders’ understanding of the change process grows, they are better able to frame the change challenge and engage other leaders.

Playing the Game — building capability. Once senior leadership has internalized the change work and discerned the way forward, they begin to move the new culture forward into the broader the organization. The same beliefs and practices that moved the leadership culture at the top are taught, practiced and required elsewhere in the organization.

The four phases are not a list of simple steps to take, cautions CCL’s John McGuire.

Many of the traditional serial, step-by-step change management methodologies regard human beings as things to be managed. But we’re not things. We’re complex beings with minds and imaginations and beliefs. We have to engage and participate in order to learn and change.

“We know this work is not for everyone,” McGuire continues. “But if senior leadership is fully engaged, they become adept at their own collaborative learning. Then the senior team is able to immerse larger numbers of leaders from across the organization and develops toward a critical mass for enterprise-wide change. Our goal is to eventually involve everyone in the organization in a learning process that creates trust, ownership and increasing forms of interdependence.”

Read more from CCL here.

Tags: Center for Creative Leadership, Change

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Your Brand is a Story – About You

by: Seth Godin

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Why prefer Coke over Pepsi or GE over Samsung or Ford over Chevy?

In markets that aren’t natural monopolies or where there are clear, agreed-upon metrics, how do we decide?

Yes, every brand has a story—that’s how it goes from being a logo and a name to a brand. The story includes expectations and history and promises and social cues and emotions. The story makes us say we “love Google” or “love Harley”… but what do we really love?

We love ourselves.

We love the memory we have of how that brand made us feel once. We love that it reminds us of our mom, or growing up, or our first kiss. We support a charity or a soccer team or a perfume because it gives us a chance to love something about ourselves.

We can’t easily explain this, even to ourselves. We can’t easily acknowledge the narcissism and the nostalgia that drives so many of the apparently rational decisions we make every day. But that doesn’t mean that they’re not at work.

More than ever, we express ourselves with what we buy and how we use what we buy. Extensions of our personality, totems of our selves, reminders of who we are or would like to be.

Great marketers don’t make stuff. They make meaning.

Read more from Seth here.

Tags: Brand, Seth Godin

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Jesus Doesn’t Send a Christian to the Nations, But a Church

by: Trevin Wax

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The Great Commission was given to a community.

Western readers have tended to read the Great Commission passages (especially Luke 24 and Matthew 28) in light of the autonomous individual. We interpret the commissioning scenes as tasks assigned to individual Christians.

But a proper focus on the corporate dimension of these accounts helps us understand the commissionings in light of the identity Jesus bestows upon a community.

Jesus does not send a Christian to the nations, but a church.

A “Fulfilling” People

By seeking and saving the lost in His ministry, Jesus has formed a new people, the true Israel, who will finally fulfill God’s purposes in the world, in light of God’s own work in fulfilling the promise He made to Abraham. Jesus sends a community to the world, in fulfillment of his work in Israel.

A Foreshadowed People

The communal witness of the church is foreshadowed and promised in the Old Testament, and it sees its arrival as the Holy Spirit descends to fulfill God’s promise in the New Testament. To interpret the commissioning texts as applying only to individuals is to miss the rich, biblical overtones throughout the Scriptures that envision a community serving as salt of the earth and light of the world.

A Gospel-Formed People

The church is united as a witnessing community, but it’s the gospel we witness to that constitutes our identity. After all, the gospel is centered on the Sent One who witnesses to the Father. The person and work of Christ make possible the existence of this witnessing body.

A God-Exalting People

The terminology of witnesses in Luke 24 likely echoes the Lord’s words to Israel in Isaiah 43:10-12:

“You are My witnesses” – this is the Lord’s declaration – “and My servant whom I have chosen, so that you may know and believe Me and understand that I am He. No god was formed before Me, and there will be none after Me. I, I am Yahweh, and there is no other Savior but Me. I alone declared, saved, and proclaimed – and not some foreign god among you. So you are My witnesses” – this is the Lord’s declaration – “and I am God.” (HCSB)

Don’t miss the high Christology on display here. By adopting the same words of Yahweh to Israel, “You are my witnesses,” Jesus is associating Himself with God, and He is associating his followers with Israel.

The implication is that Jesus is the embodiment of Yahweh and His followers are the true Israel who will finally fulfill the task given to God’s people. Witness flows from knowing Jesus.

A Spirit-Empowered People

There is an eschatological dimension to the corporate nature of the “witnesses.”

It is true that Acts 1:8 focuses on the geographical expansion to the ends of the earth, not the eschatological promise of Christ being with the disciples to “the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20). Still, there is a strong element of eschatology in Acts 1:4-8, since Christ’s last words in Acts are preceded by a question from the disciples regarding the timetable of the kingdom’s restoration to Israel. Their desire to know the timing of God’s kingdom coming in its fullness is rooted in Jewish eschatology. When Jesus brushes off their question, He does not do so because it has no validity, but because He desires to focus on what the disciples are to be (and therefore do) in the meantime.

The disciples will indeed be an eschatological people, not because they know the signs and the times, but because they are indwelled by the Spirit who empowers their witness to the ends of the earth. John Stott is right to describe the church as the “pilgrim people of God.”

The corporate witness of the church is missionary in its purpose and eschatological in its framing.

Presence and Proclamation

The most concentrated power of witness is in the corporate, common life of the church united on mission for Christ. The church that is truly “present” in a community will necessarily proclaim the gospel. The communal identity of the church is essential as an undergirding of our proclamation as we seek to fulfill the Great Commission.

Read more from Trevin here.

Tags: Evangelism, Great Commission, Multiplication, Trevin Wax

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