Daring Greatly
Brene Brown‘s “data with a soul” may be the most important book you read for awhile. She lays out issues of shame and authenticity in a way that make you feel known. You will be a better human if you read this book.

Prodigal Christianity: 10 Signposts into the Missional Frontier
David Fitch and Geoff Holsclaw

Ecclesia Network friends Fitch and Holsclaw’s pitch for missional neo-Anabaptism. It’s important.

Faiths in Conflict?
Vinoth Ramachandra

One of the best books I read in MAGL. Comparative religions written by a Christian from Sri Lanka.

The Social Animal
David Brooks

David Brooks parable using brain science, behavioral economics and even a pitch for neo-federalism. You might not buy his politics, but he is a model thinker.

Jesus, My Father, The CIA, and Me: A Memoir. . . of Sorts
Ian Chron

Don’t let the ridiculous title fool you. It’s a story about the adventures of life, addiction and where the divine fit in.

Snow Crash
Neak Stephenson

The Matrix meets Raiders of the Lost Ark. Do not read if you are a charismatic Christian with thin skin.

The Power of Habit
Charles Duhigg

How habits work. Read if you want to be a better human. Read especially if any part of your life contains the word “discipleship.”

What We Talk About When We Talk About God
Rob Bell

God is: With us—For us—Ahead of us.
Nothing fans haven’t heard Rob say before, but written for a different audience. The Love Wins fiasco has forced Rob to find a new audience outside the evangelical world. This is a pretty good pitch.

Attached
Amir Levine and Rachel Heller

An introduction to Attachment theory. Great reading if you’re asking “why am I still single.”

Fables
Bill WillIngham

Grimms fairy tales meets Friends. So much fun.

The post 10 Great Reads Encountered in 2013 appeared first on Chris Morton.

Over the last six months, I have been helping to gather a new church community we’re calling Austin Mustard Seed. As we learn whom we are, I am thankful for the twisted paths of preparation we have all taken to get here.

You want to be a Missionary? Here are nine lessons I learned from preparing the hard way.

1. Learn the Story of the Bible (and the Church)

The word “missionary” has some blood on its hands. For centuries, people in power used it to enforce their way of life on others.

The true word for this is imperialism, not mission. Imperialist use the “God card” to enforce their own way of life, and usually increase their wallets at the same time.

The cure to imperialism? Deep study of the entire Bible, from beginning to end. You will find that the Bible tells of a trajectory of history. It begins with creation, becomes complicated in the fall, gets sorted out by Jesus crucifixion and ends with new creation.

Mission happens when the followers of Christ find their place in the trajectory of God’s mission. Any other mission usually results with blood on your hands.

2. Know Thyself

When I was 23 years old, I went to a church planter’s assessment. At the end of three days of grilling from psychologists and missionaries, they told me “Chris, we love you, but right now you are very, very broken.” At their suggestion, I got into counseling.

Of all the things I’ve learned (so far) in counseling, the most instructive is that I must question my own motives. I found was that much of “my identity” had little to do with me and less to do with Jesus. I was living a life based in pain and brokenness.

Counseling was an excruciating and liberating process of peeling back old scabs and finding the person underneath. It’s a process that I will continue my whole life.

There is nothing more messy that spiritual leaders who has not figured themselves out. Their wounds stand in between the people they are want to reach and God.

Do you want a life of mission? Know who you are so you can get out of the way.

3. Develop a Marketable Skill

Theological training is important. The problem is, there is only one place it will pay the bills: an established church.

If you are going to be a missionary, that may mean years of settling in and learning a city. If you have a marketable skill, your settling in time becomes useful in at least three ways.

• You don’t have to introduce yourself to skeptical non-Christians as a missionary.
• You will make relationships with co-workers, who will teach you about your city and become your friends.
• You won’t go hungry.

4. Take Time to Learn the City

I live in a city that is teetering between the Bible Belt and an unknown future in post-Christendom. In my time here, I have interacted with two types of Church planters.

Type A – They came with funds raised and a deadline to launch a church. They created a team of Christians and quickly start a Sunday gathering. They may have a sustainable community, but because of their speed, it may look more like the Bible Belt than the present and future city.

Type B – They settled in, got jobs, went to festivals, met their neighbors and made friends. It might have taken them longer, but their churches feel like they belong in Austin.

5. Practice, practice, practice

When I first arrived in Austin, I visited 15 churches in 3 months. My goal was to find a church that looked like Austin, and was carrying God’s mission for Austin. When I found one I dove in, and tried to learn everything about what they did and why.

As we get going at Austin Mustard Seed we aren’t trying to reinvent the wheel. We already know a lot that works here, and a few things that do not.

When you take time to practice mission you are working towards something worthwhile and preparing for the future.

6. Find Your Tribe

Missionaryhood is lonely. You are doing a lot of tasks that are hard to explain. You are up against spiritual, practical and financial barriers.

Ecumenicism can be good. It’s helpful to have opportunities to learn from people who are different from you. Too much ecumenicism makes you feel like a fraud.

You need a safe place to be yourself. You need to learn from other people who are trying to do the same crazy thing that you are. You need conversations where you don’t have to be guarded about your theological and even political viewpoints.

Fuller MAGL, Ecclesia Network and Missio Alliance have provided that for me.

7. Get a hobby

When Fresh Expressions asked me why the reason that churches seem to only reach Christians, I gave three reasons. One is that missionaries need to get a hobby.

Your week is generally split a few ways: Family time, work, and hobbies. For many church leaders, “hobbies” gets replaced by “volunteering at church activities”. The result is subtle: when you meet your neighbors, you don’t know what to say. Take up a sport, anything from softball to cycling. Don’t join a church league. Have fun. Soon, you and your new friends will be hanging out after the game, getting to know each other.

8. Give up your church baggage

If you’ve been around church for awhile, you’ve picked up some baggage. You read the Bible the way they taught you. You think church should be organized a certain way. You may only like certain types of music. You have specific and inaccessible language that will inhibit make keeps other people from hearing you.

If we all need counseling to peel back the layers and figure out who we are. Likewise, we need to peel back the layers and discover what it means to live the church.

9. Abandon your dreams

When I first wanted to become a missionary, I thought I would show people how to “do church right.” Then, I got excited about social justice issues and wanted to be a part of a church that “changes the world.” I’ve seen others who wanted to be a proper “postmodern Church” or “reformed Church” or “feminist church.”

Ed Stetzer calls this “planting a church in your head.”

“When we adopt a pre-packaged church formula, or simply steal another church’s identity, we often import the vision God has given someone else for a certain time and place and make it ours–we import a model rather than engaging in God’s mission.”

At some point I realized I couldn’t fix the denominations made me mad. Then I realized I couldn’t fix the world. So I’ve abandoned my dreams. When people ask me what we hope to become at Austin Mustard Seed, I’ve started telling them

“I’m just looking for a group of people who want to figure out how to be church together.”

What do you think you need to do to prepare for a life of mission?

The post Nine Necessities for a Life of Mission appeared first on Chris Morton.

I didn’t know if I’d ever get here and I’m not precisely sure what comes next. What I know for sure is, I could not have done it without the support of the following people:

Marvin Crowson believed in me enough to pull the strings needed to get me in to my first attempt at grad school at Harding University.

Mark Powell‘s ethics class at Harding Graduate School had us read Richard Mouw and Stanley Hauerwas hand in hand. This proved to be slightly prophetic: I completed my degree at Mouw’s school, and focused heavily on writers like Hauerwas.

Chris Flander‘s Worldview at Abilene Christian University class dismantled the short sighted popular concept of worldview and helped me to begin thinking of following Christ as a way of life.

My high school and college friend Jeff Cole came back into my life, helped with my admission to the Fuller MAGL, and provided housing during my course work.

Donna Downes led my MAGL cohort. She has been a mother to us all. Not only has she been an excellent professor, but she has been available night and day to answer questions and provide moral support.

Coming to know, Kairos, our 24th MAGL cohort, has been the best part of this experience. They are men and women spread throughout the world who are dedicated to God’s mission at any cost. You have taught me more about following Christ than any of our books.

My parents have always encouraged me in this quest. They have helped me remember its value when I sometimes forget.

My church community Vox Veniae has been the subject of many papers. More importantly, it has provided me a home and a vision of what a missional church should be.

What’s next? Well, that’s complicated. There are some cool opportunities which I hope to announce soon. I am currently looking for what will pay the bills while this new thing gets off the ground. Please keep me in your prayers.

The post The People Who Got Me Through Grad School appeared first on Chris Morton.

According to Woodward’s, there is a direct correlation between the forms of church leadership and the spiritual lives of individual believers.  He draws on Paul’s teaching in Ephesians 4 that there is a “link between the spiritual maturity of the church and the five kinds of equippers operating in the church: apostles (what I nickname dream awakeners), prophets (heart revealers), evangelists (story tellers), pastors (soul healers) and teachers (light givers)”.

This view of church leadership is occasionally referred to as APEPT.  The modern churches obsession with Pastor/Teachers often leads to the joke “where are all the APEs in the church?

Here’s a quick overview, and my response:

Part One: The Power of Culture

The book begins by asking:

• What is culture? 
• How does it shape us? 
• What does it mean to have “missional” culture?

Culture is made up of rituals, narratives, ethics and institutions.  Churches usually copy these from their host culture. Instead, they should be approached missionally.

Part Two: A Leadership Imagination That Shapes Missional Culture

He then shows the inherent social-ness of the Trinity shows the need for social-ness in leadership.  With this framework laid, he introduces his ideal of polycentric leadership.

Part Three: The Five Culture Creators

Woodward gets to the meat of his proposal: the five equippers in Ephesians 4 are meant to be a functional model of leadership.

Part Four: Embodying a Missional Culture

The book ends with examples of from Churches exploring polycentric leadership.

Creating a Missional Culture helped me connect some disconnected dots. I have often wondered “why are all leaders called pastors?” or “what happened to all the prophets and apostles?” If Woodward is right, their is a much fuller and more powerful expression of Church than what we are experiencing.

Woodward’s dream is much more difficult than how many Churches organize. But if he’s right, it may be exactly what your Church needs to grow into what God has dreamed up.

Does your church engage the Four Equippers?  How?

The post Three Essential Leaders Missing From Your Church appeared first on Chris Morton.

• Still flying high from my time in DC with Missio Alliance.  It ended up being a bit of a family reunion, with old friends from growing up in Denver, my alma mater, Ecclesia network, and my Fuller MAGL cohort and my church in Austin.
• One person said to me “now I understand Chris!  These are his people.”  That felt good.
• There’s been lots of great feedback from my post Eight Game-Changers Observed at Missio Alliance. One person even wrote a response.  Check it out, and share your thoughts.
• Here’s some other people who have been blogging about Missio:
  • The Missio Alliance eBook Sale from Zondervan | Scot McKnight, Jesus Creed
  • Missio Alliance Poems | Tori Lane, Fusion Project
  • Theology at Missio Alliance | Ken Schenck, Wesleyan University
  • Did I Get What I Expected from Missio Alliance? | Kevin Scott, Sustainable Christianity
• After leaving Missio Alliance, I headed up to New York to spend a few days with my sister and brother-in-law (and future niece!) in the Bronx. Here we are at The Cloisters.
• She is responsible for my awesome new profile pic.  Thanks!

Brother-Sister-Niece!

• Highlight of this trip to NYC? Highline Park.  A former freight train track that runs across through the city that has been repurposed into a hanging garden.  The best views I’ve seen in New York.  Pretty much the closest I’ll ever get to being Spider-Man.

via

• I try to befriend anyone I see reading N.T. Wright in public.  Yesterday at the best-looking coffee shop in Austin, I met Shane Blackshear, a blogger, podcaster, and part of an inspiring church community named Mosaic.  Check out this interview he did with Derek Webb.

The post Friday Roundup 4.19: Bloggers, Cloisters, Spider-Man and Family appeared first on Chris Morton.