Emergence

Michael Frost is a brilliant Australian man he is a writer, speaker and missiologist.  He has written several books that have really challenged me, but something he said at a leadership meeting, this past year… I can not shake.

He talked about the four organizing functions of a church.  Frost sees Christ at the center of these all, but churches tend to organize around one of the four organizing functions (below). 

1. Worship Service – The Sunday gathering and celebration…
2. Community – Small Groups…
3. Formation – Monasteries, Inward formation
4. Mission – Intentional, embodied, disciple on mission.  

Now all of those functions honor Christ and glorify God, but here is what has me pretty rocked… Frost sees these four organizing functions fleshed out like this…

Now here is the hard part.  Frost suggests, most churches organize around one principal, and so if your community gathers around formation, it is really hard to get them to worship… (when was the last time you saw a monastery put on a great worship service).  Or if your churches organizing principal is Worship, then you will spend a lot of time talking about community, but will find it difficult to actually get people there.  Harder than community, Mission is the farthest away from worship service.  Frost argues, it takes a huge leap to move a worship service attendee, to someone who is going to get there hands dirty on mission.

Now here is the challenge Frost argues that over the last 2000 years, the church has tried to death to organize around Worship, or community, or formation.  However, to date the church has yet to give a real concerted effort to organizing around mission. 

One of the reasons we keep Sunday mornings so simple at Emergence is our hope to give our best shot at organizing Emergence around the mission Christ has for his church to go and make disciples and to allow community, worship, and formation to flow from disciples living on mission.