Jims ThirdSpace

Reggisms – Part 2

Some more Reggisms:

• Talking about the future will lead Satan to crank up enough background noise that we cannot hear God.
• Christianity is the fasted growing religious/spiritual group in the world today:
• 175,000 new Christians in the world each day
• 2% of people in apartment complexes attend any church.
• There is not one county in America that has grown in percentage of Christians to the total population in the past decade.
• The “post-congregationlist” category is at 5% of the population and will go to 30% in the next 20 years.
• Newtonian physics was the basis for modernity while quantum physics is the basis for postmodernity. It teaches that inner space is just as vast as outer space.
• Humankind likes to work off prediction and planning. Most of the stuff that impacts our congregations happens outside our meetings and it is stuff that we cannot plan for.
• People who live by a missionary set of values cannot abide those with a “club member” set of values.
• The bandwith is expanded in a missional church: how many conversations are we having, how much life interface is taking place, how is our community service component, how many community leaders are we praying for, how many teachers have we partnered with, how many community groups have used our facility?

This is a link to a Reggie video clip. It’s not a short clip:

http://www.rca.org/NETCOMMUNITY/Page.aspx?pid=3766&srcid=2705

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Tags: missional church, Present Future, Reggie McNeal, Simple Church

Reggisms

Reggie McNeal is an interesting guy.  He writes things that force us to think outside our comfort zone, and if you are lucky enough to hear him first hand, you will think you have run a marathon, and wonder where all the time went.  Reggie talks as fast as an auctioneer, speaks in sentence fragments, is always smiling, and rubs his head (you will be rubbing your head too), and asks questions we don’t want to think about.

I’ve personally heard Reggie four times.  He does not have “the look” of a young preacher-teacher-anti-establishment-why-are-they-doing-this-in-the-church-young-buck, because he’s older and been a part of the establishment.

Like him or not, he does provide a lot of information that causes us to pause and think.  Here are some Reggisms from some of my notes:

• In 1900, 80% of Christians were white, Western, northern hemisphere. In 2000, 80% were non-white, non-Western and southern hemisphere. The kingdom is breaking out all over
• The church is not the destination; the kingdom is the destination. Jesus does not say, “Thy church come.” He spends 40 days before His ascension teaching about the kingdom. Acts closes with the kingdom. Jesus uses “church” twice, but “kingdom” 90 times. When the kingdom breaks out, things change. People’s lives get radically re-altered; their entire worlds get re-ordered.
• God says to Abram, “I’m blessing you so that you can bless all those people who are not like you.” God regularly blesses people with whom He disagrees.
• Our conversation rate has to go up before our conversion rate can go up.

More Reggisms to come.

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Tags: Present Future, Reggie McNeal, Simple Church, third space