Rob Wegner: Blog Archive

Want To Get an Oscar?

OK, the Oscars were so boring I turned it off a somewhere around Best Soundtrack.   If you’ve always wanted to be in pictures, you’ve got your chance this coming Thursday, March 3rd.  The next Missional Moves video shoot is taking place in three sessions:

Thursday March 3rd

9:00-11:00am

11:00am-1:00pm

2:00-4:00pm

Stay for one session or stay the whole day.  If you are planning on coming, please give us a heads up here, so we can prepare.  

What are these session about?  Reclaiming a more primal expression of our faith. Discovering again how to BE THE CHURCH, not just GO TO CHURCH.  Exploring what it means to be the church as a people movement, not just an institution.  The Lord Jesus is leading His people through Missional Moves and we are going to move with Him.  The stakes are high.  Join us and I am confident you’ll leave better able to partner with God on the cutting edge of what He is up to today on planet earth.

By the way, sure you won’t get a real Oscar, but lunch is provided. It may even be an Oscar Meyer Hot Dog.  (Yes, that was the worst joke you’ll hear today)

Launching Missional Communities: A Book You Have To Read

I have a book that I’m telling you that YOU HAVE TO READ.  Launching Missional Communities: A Field Guide by Mike Breen and Alex Absalom is required for an community of faith that wants to jump the curve from intuition to movement.  Before I brag a bit more of the book, let me explain our context.  Context provides meaning.

As best as I can tell, the grassroots energy and momentum within the GCC movement is at an all time high.

We’ve been working together for more than a two years, reeducating ourselves on what it means to BE THE CHURCH, not just GO TO CHURCH.

We’ve been working together for more than a year, reorienting ourselves around a new vision.  This open source process has involved thousands of us.  The religious gurus didn’t go up on the mountain and come back down with “the vision.”  Together, through countless conversations in smaller settings and hundreds of exchanges via email, we been asking, “What is the Spirit of God saying to our church?”  God did not develop laryngitis at the end of the first century.  The Spirit is still leading, guiding, prompting, and yes, speaking to his people.  When we listen together, we increase the chances of clarifying and amplifying what God is actually saying, while diminishing our own personal misperceptions that take us off course. This new vision was birthed as hundreds of us listened to the wild and untamed Spirit of God.   What is the Spirit saying?

Together, we are RAISING THE BAR…

BE THE CHURCH

ACTIVATE THE CAMPUS

REPRODUCE AT EVERY LEVEL.

We’ve been dreaming and working our way through the new vision on the weekends. You can check out the full vision statement here. The closing words of our vision proclaim,

We will launch and equip Granger Community Church start-ups all over the globe. All expressions – micro, mega, multi, rural, suburban, urban, multi-ethnic, local, domestic and international – will be united by the same mission and DNA.  We will be a movement of more than 100,000 missional followers of Jesus gathering as 2,000 reproducing churches.

Let me clarify again what we mean by “start-ups” and “2,000 reproducing churches.”

 

When we see the word church, we get stuck. We think of a destination, a building, and a formal religious event. We think of professional clergy. But, we’ve been relearning that church is not a destination, but a daily way of life.  Church is not a building, it’s a body – your body. Wherever you are as a follower of Jesus, the church is there.  We take church with us everywhere because in the deepest way possible we are the church.  Furthermore, church is not an event, is an every day mission in every area of life and every domain of society.

 

So, we want to produce not 2000 buildings with professional clergy running religious services, but 2000 platoons of people living a daily way of life built around an everyday mission – the mission of Jesus.  What does that look like?

The Greek word for church is ecclesia. This word is used three ways in the New Testament.  One use of the word describes a larger gathering of the church within a specific city, like the church in Corinth.

To the church of God in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be holy, …Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. 1 Corinthians 1:2-3 (NIV)

But in the early church, these larger gatherings were actually made up a collective gathering of smaller units.  These smaller units were platoons of people who were doing life together, being the church together 7 days a week. The second use of the word ecclesia refers to these missional communities of 20-50 people.

Greet Priscilla and Aquila, my fellow workers in Christ Jesus. They risked their lives for me…Greet also the church that meets at their house. Romans 16:3-5 (NIV)

So the church in Rome wasn’t just a gathering of hundreds of loosely connected people who visited a building for a service once a week. The larger gatherings were made up of coalition of these missional communities. Rodney Stark in The Rise of Christianity, documents the exponential growth of the church from 1000 in 40 AD to over 33,000,000 by 350 AD. How did it happen? He credits this missional communities strategy.

We’ve experienced the same reality in our church planting movement in India over the past ten years. What started as a group of 15 of us has exploded into a movement of more then 950 churches including over 120,000 people.  Most of the growth in the movement has happened through “small and reproducing.”  In other words, sure we have some larger churches.  We have one megachurch in our movement and quite a few churches that number 100-800.  But, most of our churches are these reproducing missional communities of 20-50 people.  They have been reproducing like rabbits.

So, we’re bringing that reality back home right here in Indiana.  We’ve got great training materials to help launch missional communities in India, not it’s time to back-translate it for the western context. I’ve spent the last year searching for the best examples and best training materials I can find from pioneers here in the West.   I read 1-2 books a week, so as you can imagine, I’ve been through A LOT OF material.

What I’ve discovered is that there is a ton of material out there on theory, but very little on actual practice.  Where’s the best book that really unpacks how to launch a missional community? I found it!!

Launching Missional Communities: A Field Guide is that book.  We’ve been strongly encouraging every committed member of GCC to read The Forgotten Ways Handbook by our friend Alan Hirsch.  The next book on the list is Launching Missional Communities. I can not recommend it more highly.  Our training of missional communities will be strongly influenced by this book as our future unfolds.  If you ready to learn how to build a community of people who can BE THE CHURCH, pick this book up immediately.  This book walks through the nuts and bolts of launching, growing, multiplying, and making disciples through missional communities.

This is a book by practitioners for practitioners. Mike and Alex have lead a movement through the St Thomas’ Church network in Sheffield, England that has swelled to thousands – with many campuses and different expressions – all built from the grassroots through missional communities. This movement is now one of the largest and fastest growing churches in Europe. 

Expect to see more posts from me in the future featuring Mike and Alex’s outstanding resource.  You can buy online now or look for it in our bookstore.

Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review. I had to! The book is amazing. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

Six Degrees of Separation from Share the Well

We received some very special messages regarding Share the Well this week.   Here are a couple highlights.

We bought a copy of your book this weekend. My eight year old second grader just asked me if she could write a letter to her superintendant to see if he would let her do a fund raiser. She has 6.50 in her bank and tells me she wants to raise 9994.50 so she can open an orphanage in India. She's got it all figured out in her notebook.
The blessing of your book reaches further than you can imagine. Just wanted to share.

May God open every door for your dream to come true, sweetheart!  We’re praying that your next step in sharing the well is clear. Expect living water to surge.

This next letter requires a bit of explanation.  As we have mentioned, Share the Well is also a documentary in development, which will be released in June.  We very much wanted the Caedmon’s Call song of the same name to be featured in the film.   That album was birthed out a month long mission trip to India.  The first time we heard the album up on it’s release, it was ours.  We connected so deeply with that album when it first came out...as it reflects so much our personal experience and journey. We come back to those songs again and again. It's one of the albums where it feels like the artists crawled into your heart, mind, and soul, then came out, and translated it all into music. 

Gene Ort, the genius running point on the documentary, whose makes his living in the music industry – his music has been featured in trailers for movies like Old Country for Old Men and Australia – began that pursuit 9 months ago.   He started with normal channels through the record company. No one even responded to our requests.  Then, a friend of a friend knew someone in the band.  That didn’t pan out, so we moved on.

Sunday night, we got this message from our friends in Nashville, Russ and Lisa Ramsey.  Russ is the pastor at Midtown Fellowship.

I’m sitting here with Randall Goodgame and we showed him your book. He would love to talk to you guys (he wrote the song share the well for Caedmon’s). Could you send me some phone numbers for you and Rob? I’ll pass the info on to him.

She then explained:

Randall stopped by with his kids just to hang out (they live 2 streets over) and it did not occur to me to show it to him (no idea he was connected to Caedmon’s). Russ walks by it while we were gathering his kids together and says, "Hey, have you seen this book Share the Well?" Randall takes it and looks it over and gets tears in his eyes. He just loves the people of India and was so excited about seeing the book.

Randall wrote me the next day,

“Share the Well was a major thing for me personally and artistically, and the plight of humanity over there left me with a permanent scar, so I'm always so encouraged to hear what other folks are doing in India. In other words, anything I can do to encourage, let me know. And you have my full permission to use the song for all that you are doing over there.”

The fingerprints of God are all over this.  We’re stunned at God’s goodness expressed through friends who shared the book and the generosity of Randall, who is sharing his art to help the least of these.  Randall is focusing his creative energies on a partnership with Andrew Peterson (one of my favorites) creating music that influences the worldview of kids for Christ – it’s great stuff.  I’m picking some up for my girls.  Check it out.

There may only be six degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon.  But, there are no degrees of separation from the love of God in Christ. 

A Short History of Missional

The missional conversation is as old as the Scripture.  But it’s more contemporary articulation, which has blossomed in recent years through the voices of people  like Ed Stetzer, Reggie McNeal, Hugh Halter, Neil Cole, and my pal, Alan Hirsch, is traced back to and  largely credited to Lesslie Newbigin.

As Christianity in North America was experiencing a move away from the the dominant influence it had over society, as traditional and mainline churches where experiencing rapid decline, Newbigin was one of the first voices to recognize this shift to a post-Christian, neo-pagan, pluralistic missional field that America was becoming.

As the church growth movement, which would become what is now called attractional, was taking off  and offering a much need reformation of methodology of how we do church, Newbegin went beyond methodology to meaning, more particularly, ecclesiology.  As our culture changes at an exponential rate, we are in a constant and intense need to study and explore the nature of the church. This is the reason we’ve hosted the AND conference, retrained our staff and congregation, and taken two years to form and articulate a new vision (which makes my heart beat hard!).

In 1974, Newbigin, after 40 years of missionary engagement in India (oh yeah, check out Share the Well), returned to the West and began to dream about what it would be for the church in the West to take on a missionary position.  For those with their minds in the gutter, I’m not talking about “s” word either. ;)  He said, “The church could be neither the starting point nor the goal of mission.” It’s a simple, but profound shift. As it has famously been said, “The church doesn’t have a mission. A mission has a church.” Missio Dei creates missiones ecclesiae.

The Mission is derived from the very nature and heartbeat of God.  Here’s how Newbigin intersects that truth with the challenging doctrine of election.

No one can say why it is that one was chosen and another not, why it is that here the word came “not only in word only, but also in power, and in the Holy Ghost” (1 Thess. 1:5), while there the same word carried no regenerating power. The answer to that question is known only to God. But if we cannot know for what reason one was chosen, we can most certain know for what purpose he was chosen: he was chosen in order to be a fruit-bearing branch in the one true vine (John 15:16), a witness through whom others might be saved. He is chosen in order that through him God’s saving purpose may reach to others, and they too be reconciled to God in and through His reconciled and reconciling people…

And we can also see that wherever the missionary character of the doctrine of election is forgotten; wherever it is forgotten that we are chosen in order to be sent; wherever the minds of believers are concerned more to probe backwards from their election into the reasons for it in the secret counsel of God than to press forward from their election to the purpose of it, which is that they should be Christ’s ambassadors and witnesses to the ends of the earth; wherever men think that the purpose of election is their own salvation rather than the salvation of the world; then God’s people have betrayed their trust.”

Lesslie Newbigin, Household of Faith

Thoughts?

Bees and Buzz

One of the most amazing experiences of my life was tracking out into the jungle with Puliyar tribe.  The two tribesman shared with us a skill and trade that has been passed down for generations – harvesting honey from hives buried in the earth.  As we stood surrounded by hundreds of swarming bees, the tribesman said to me, “Don’t swat. If you swat, it will make them angry.”  Ha!  I tell the whole story in chapter 13 of Share the Well.

Here’s some of the buzz going around about Share the Well.

Here’s what Mark Beeson had to say:

SHARE THE WELL is brilliant. It’s a “must read” for every pastor, missionary and church-multiplication-strategist. It explains the essence of GCC’s model of church planting, modular missional coaching and innovative community transformation, with brilliant writing and stunning photography.

Every family at GCC should own a copy of this book.

Every pastor in America should own this book.

Everyone longing to participate in a movement that started with a handful of people in Granger, Indiana that has surged to over 120,000 followers of Jesus gathering in 950 churches in Tamil Nadu, India, should own this intriguing compilation of stories, pictures and truth.

Here’s what Mark Waltz had to say:

The story has been over ten years in the making. The book was conceptualized, lived, photographed and written over the past few months. Rob and Michelle Wegner wrote the story. A story of hope turned kingdom reality, a story of salvation that extends beyond any one individual to an entire community… and beyond.

DC Curry said:

Some of our best friends Rob and Michelle just for their first book and it’s unlike any book I’ve read recently.  Its story is a mixture between a documentary, tangible moves of God in modern form, unleashed blessings from God’s people through intentional acts of service, and a blatant display of the power of God at work in the lives of His people TODAY!

The book is called SHARE THE WELL and it would serve you well to get a copy you and your friends.  The writing is descriptive and compelling, the photography is STUNNING, and God’s story is what it always is REDEMPTIVE!

Hope you’ll go check it out and get a copy HERE, and tell a few friends about it.

Eyes Wide Open

Share the Well (Promo) from maustcreative.films on Vimeo.

Jesus said, “Everyone who drinks from this water will get thirsty again.
But whoever drinks from the water that I will give him will never get thirsty again—ever! In fact, the water I will give him will become a well of water springing up within him for eternal life.” John 4:13-14 (HCSB)

Share the Well Available This Weekend!

Hundreds of GCC folks have traveled to Tamil Nadu India over the past several years.  It’s an arduous and challenging journey. One most would not exchange for any other.   We each have met Jesus in life-changing and worldview-shaping ways in the villages of India.  Even more so, we have seen Jesus alive in the lives of our brothers and sisters there, whom we have come to love so deeply.

GCC’s first trip to India was just over ten years ago – Ron Vandergriend, Michelle, and I spent a week with a group of 15 indigenous church planting network leaders.  Within the first few hours of the first day, Michelle and I were already won over by the life and laughter of Rajendran!   As they say, the rest is history.  Over the next few years, I would lead a team every few months to meet with these network leaders.  Deep friendships were formed.  Those friendships turned into a partnership – a truly shared work – that has now birthed an unstoppable movement of over 950 churches that are transforming entire villages.  Now, an army of people have engaged this Kingdom work on the frontline in India, building homes, teaching children, providing healthcare, sharing the beauty of their art, and so much more.

You can be a vital part of this story. You can help write it with your very life.

Michelle, myself and an amazing team of people have been working for 9 months to capture the story of this movement.  That story is now a book entitled SHARE THE WELL.  It will be available this weekend at GCC. You can get it right now at Wiredchurches.

What is the book about? 

Share the Well…

...tells the compelling and inspiring story of GCC’s holistic church planting movement in India. This movement started with 15 followers of Jesus dreaming together in a room and has now blossomed to a movement of over 120,000 followers of Jesus gathering in over 950 churches transforming entire villages. We want to bring the story of what is happening in India back home.  More than that, we hope to inspire  people to dream about God unleashing that kind of movement right here, in our own backyard.

...takes those big statistics and make them small by telling the stories of individuals who have been transformed 15 stories of changed lives.

...is fast paced, story-based, and a quick read.  The entire book is about 150 pages including photography. 

...is visually stunning. Share the Well is laid out as a travel journal.  Stunning full color photography is on virtually every page, accompanying each story with pictures of the people and places described.  Wait till you see the photos!   The photos capture the heart and essence of every story. You’ll feel like you’ve been on a trip to India.

...has a “twist” ending.  No spoilers here. You’ll have to pick up a copy.  (Aren’t you curious?)

...will be a conversation starter among friends and an invitation to “Go!”

...will be a multi-media experience.  The book will be accompanied by a documentary film that will be released in June.  (It’s going to be amazing!!)

…will raise funding for the movement in India.  The team involved – the authors, the photographers, the videographers, the editor, the design team – are donating their services.  Every cent of the proceeds goes directly to the field in India. Every book sold feeds the movement just a little bit more.

Important things to know:

• Share the Well will be available on Amazon, etc. However, the more copies we can sell directly from GCC, the more of the profit goes back to India.  So, please direct as many people as you can to buy it directly from GCC.  Let’s eliminate the middle man so we can provide more resources for our friends in India.
• Also, would you consider not just buying a book for yourself, but 1 or 2 copies to give away?   ALL the proceeds for every book sold will go right back to India. Is that incredible or what?  So, sure get one for yourself, but buy a couple more
• Would you considering spreading the word?  If you’re a social media person, please consider chatting up the book via twitter and Facebook to create awareness not only at GCC, but through as many networks as possible.  You can follow us on twitter @ShareTheWellBk.  Stop by the webpage to see more amazing photography and hear the latest stories. We’re hoping to generate an additional $20,000 dollars for church planting and community development work in India through this book.  So, help spread the word and let them know that all the profits  from this book go directly to the Kingdom work in India. When you buy the book, it’s like making a donation at the same time.  That’s pretty cool.

Finally, would you pray with us that this book becomes a catalyst for hundreds more to get out of their seat and get into the Story, in India and right here at home, as well.

We thank you in advance for your friendship and partnership.

Breathe In, Breathe Out: A Story and a Song

The other day I tweeted “Sabbath. Breathe in. Breathe out.” My friend, Corey Mann, sent me an email saying, “I saw your tweet and thought…weird! I had just finished recording a video of Jason Gray performing his new song by that same title. So, I figured God was up to something. Here it is.”

The theme of the song is based off of an idea I first heard from Rob Bell. The name of God revealed to Moses at the burning bush - YHWH - actually denotes breathing sounds in the Hebrew. Linguists call them aspirate consonants. If you try to pronounce the name without the vowels, one simple breathes. So, every time we breathe in (YH) and breathe out (WH), we are speaking the name of God.  Every time we breathe – all of us, believers and skeptics alike – we are actually speaking the name of our God, the One who is the Breathe of Life.  The name of our God is the sound of our breathing.

I hope this song does to you, what it’s doing to me.