Thursday morning—Leonard Sweet
Revelation 3:16

We have translated the word “lukewarm,” but a better translation is “mediocre”; we have also mistranslated “spit” or “spew,” which should simply be “vomit”; God says, “Church, you make me sick.” Examples on barf bags: Motion discomfort, Seat occupied, etc.

It is the task of the middle to bring the extremes together, not just to revel in their place in the middle; the bell curve is no longer sociological true in our society, instead it’s a “well” curve, where people are dropping out of the middle and heading to the extremes

Christian orthodoxy is paradoxy; our entire belief system is based on holding two opposite ideas which do not contradict each other; Christ’s divinity/humanity, God is one/God is three, eminent/transcendent; live each day as if it were the last day of your life, and as if it were the first day of your life

Thursday morning—Leonard Sweet
What is God up to today? How can we be part of it?

Like the invention of the printing press, the invention of the World Wide Web (the use of the internet) is an extremely significant time in history

The Bible has only been a book for 500 years; In Jesus’ day, 2% of the population could read and write; it’s significant to know that Jesus could do both; he had mastered the cutting edge technology of that day

Modern Christianity is more modern than it is Christian; churches are not fighting to preserve authentic Christianity, they are fighting to preserve modern culture

The MRI Church
Missional, Relational, Incarnational

This is not how our churches are structured today; today we are APC churches: Attractional, Propositional, Colonial; this is hard to give up, because it has been relatively successful; the problem is, it leads to terminal illness, which the church has; 75% of the churches in America are dying; 1% are truly growing; 24% are taking the people from the 75% who are dying; less than 3000 churches in America are growing; no one in our culture wants to get “churched”

Get away from the “drawing board;” our job is singular: to lift up Christ; he said if we lifted him up, he would draw the people unto him; The “attractional” is important, but it’s not our job; our job is simply to lift up Christ

Truth is relationship; Truth is Jesus; this is a proposition…we can’t necessarily get away from propositions; but we don’t offer people propositions, we offer them Christ

Colonial is fine, as long as we understand our colony is the Kingdom and not America, our city, etc.

Jesus was the most creative person who ever lived; churches should be the most creative, original places around; we should be trying to come up with the old made new, because we don’t need something entirely new; we need to remember and do the old, but in a new, relevant way;

How do we shift from APC to MRI?

The Nicene Creed
One holy catholic apostolic church
• Holiness is fundamentally a relational word; holiness is not “what are you standing against,” but “whom are you standing with?”; holiness is not separating from, but separating for
• Catholic means universal; the only way to the universal is through the particular; Jesus came to save the world, but he did it by coming to a particular place, in a particular language, etc.; this is incarnational
• Apostolic is one who is sent out, one who is on a mission

Just as the protestant reformation helped us see that baptism is ordination into ministry, today God is showing us that our baptism is not just our ordination into ministry but is simultaneously our commissioning as a missionary

God does not want an in-here church, but an out-there church

Jesus’ first definition of himself is “the Way”; we need to come to understand the theology of journeying

One ingredient we need for creativity is juxtaposition of difference; this is why Jesus chose the 12 he chose, because they were widely different people

Churches are getting bigger and smaller, and people are involved in both; church life is becoming extremely complex; we need to learn how to do small and big together

Churches ought not to see each other as enemies, big church vs. small church, but instead how we can help and support each other

Our churches are looking more like warehouses, and our homes are looking more like churches: Great room, cathedral ceiling, stained glass, balconies, pews, etc. Offering plates and kneeling benches are the hottest items on the antique market; only three people still trying to do cash: tax dodgers, drug dealers, and the church

Change is simple, but not easy; change is so simple you can state it in three words, but is so difficult there is a 90% chance you will fail; the three words are: Magnetic: the power of a big dream, a “man on the moon” mission; Resonance: emotional engagement is essential; a leader must engage your mind and your emotions; the dream must resonate with the people; Imaging: you can see actual changes in brain waves when people change from one mode of life to another; there will never be a change that takes place until there has been reframing; you have to show it to people in a whole new way; the only way you can reframe is through the power of a new image or a new metaphor; if Jesus is the greatest communicator who ever lived, why do none of us teach like Jesus did; Jesus did not give us the “Seven Habits of Highly Effective Discipleship,” but instead he reframed everything, including Judaism itself; the key to our ministry is the power to choose the metaphors; our people are dying from the wrong metaphors; altering people’s metaphors is literally brain surgery; we’re being taught how to communicate with words, but we need to work more on images; we don’t need mission statements, we need image statements

Thursday afternoon—Leonard Sweet
From Attractional to Missional

We must learn to think of the use of the Internet as a delivery system like we used to think of a book; we must think of our computer screens as bibles; the print is the hardware, the Scripture itself is the software; the hardware is useless without the software

America is so far behind; but we think we’re so far ahead! What kinds of cars are most popular? In Korea, 75% of the homes have broadband

The Bible gives us a mission statement, so why did we write our own in the 90s? Because the business world wrote them in the 80s, that’s why. The Great Commission is our mission statement; Go into the world and make disciples of all cultures; we make our own because we don’t like the one we have; Our mission statements try to figure out how we get more people to come, instead of how to send disciples out; Christianity is the first non-temple based religion; we have turned Christianity into the very thing Jesus came to free us from; if you don’t believe we’re inward focused, look at your budgets; We should never talk about the church’s mission, the mission is God’s, not the church’s; Missio Dei; When we go out on our own missions, God chooses others (Rahab, King Cyrus, Bono, etc.), who are unlikely and surprising; There are times in history where God is more at work in the world than he is in the church; Bono has become the new Mother Teresa; God’s mission is clear; the question is, will our church be part of it? God is telling us to “Get out more!”

Every church needs a buzz; we want to know we’re the most growing church in town; we should long to be the most going church in town; Over 200 times we’re instructed in Scripture to go, but we’re never told to hide

We practice evangelism as if we are taking Jesus to people; this implies that Jesus didn’t appear until we showed up; this is incredibly arrogant; Christ has been there all along; our first job as an evangelist is to find Jesus at work, figure out what he’s doing, and then join him; we train evangelists to tell your own story instead of asking others about theirs; We are then to connect them to God’s story, not to our own; in order to do this we need to know God’s story! We know verses, but we don’t know stories; narrative is what speaks today, not verses; plus, the Bible wasn’t originally written in verses, but in stories! God works in everyone’s lives differently

We need a theology of journeying, a postmodern “Pilgrim’s Progress;” When you’re on the way, you must decide if Jesus is the truth, which will then give us life; we’ve been making the truth part first, or the life part first, instead of the way part first; if we’re missional, we must be willing to sit in the smoking section; We only want already holy people in our churches

John 17, Jesus gives us a strategy for the church’s work in the world; we are to be in the world, not of it, but not removed from it; if we have clean hands and no dirt under our fingers, maybe the pearly gates will not open to us

We have to get used to people seeing church as a scary place; Christianity no longer has the home field advantage; older generations, it was a compliment to be invited to church, now people think church makes you a worse person, not a better person; in surveys about what the world thinks about Christians, three words are dominant: hypocritical, judgmental, and boring; is it any wonder that people don’t want to come to church?

From Propositional to Relational

There has been no more anti-social invention in history than the book; social networking Internet sites are HUGE! E-Harmony, MySpace, etc.

We used to not have offices, we used to have studies; now we should be thinking “studio,” combining office, study, and electronic/digital space

We must transition from propositional to relational; Christianity has the weirdest understanding of truth of any major world religion, but today we’re not weird enough; we have sold out to a more modern definition of truth, making us sound more Islamic than Christian; every other religious figure said “Follow my teachings…”, Jesus said, “Follow me!” This is a weird understanding of truth; God didn’t send us a principle, he sent us a person; not rules, a Redeemer; not a statement, a Savior; Jesus died on the Cross to restore us to a right relationship to the Father; Christianity is not about lifting up principles, propositions, or points; I don’t CARE what your core values are, that’s business! I want to know, What are your core relationships!! Don’t tell me how you view the Bible, tell me what your relationship is with the Scripture; are you in a relationship with Jesus or are you in a relationship with Paul; The more you love Jesus, the less you have to worry about rules and regulations; this is holiness! Truth is relationship; truth is Jesus; Our culture is relationally defective and handicapped, but hungrier than ever for relationship; we do not need to offer this culture another set of principles, but instead offering them the greatest love story and the greatest lover who ever was

What God longs for the most is to be in relationship with us; one day God comes for his walk with Adam and Eve, and they are hiding; this is our first broken relationship, our relationship with God; our second broken relationship is with ourselves (we’re naked, we can no longer be okay with ourselves); third broken relationship is with each other (she made me eat it!); the fourth broken relationship is with the earth (banished from the Garden of Eden); our life is filled with bad connections; Jesus came as the second Adam, to till the soil of the garden of our souls; the first woman Jesus appears to at his return mistakes him for the gardener

We need to begin to understand ourselves as a relational church, rereading Scripture with a relational hermeneutic; Relationships are messy, crumbly, they make things dirty and stained (the church where the carpet was in the ministry!); Choose whether to be right, or be in a relationship; So often we choose to be right over being in a relationship with this culture; Churches are absolutely fixated in what our principles and propositions are; Jesus never took a stand against anyone, he always walked alongside them; a healthy church will ultimately be attractive; God says he hates our happy-clappy assemblies, because they do not work with God’s mission in the world; we stretch our hands up, but not out; Muslims could sing “Our God is an awesome God…”; we need to be singing that this awesome God became vulnerable

Moses says, “No way, Yahweh!” God says, “I know there is no way…that’s why I chose you.” If we want to know how God is truly going to work in our lives, you’d better have a spiritual weakness inventory! God’s strength is perfected in our weakness, not in our strength!

Submission is key; there are no authentic relationships without submission; whenever you start to think “principle” or “proposition”, try to think “relationship” instead; Submission is more than obedience; we want obedience from our dogs; God wants submission from us! Holiness and righteousness are key words for relational churches

He pointed out on more than one occasion that this is the most important of the aspects, and that we could spend the entire time on the word “relational” and not even scratch the surface of how essential it is


From Colonial to Incarnational, Colonizing to Incarnating

Jesus’ Gospel is incarnational; we don’t take potted plants and transplant them to other cultures, but rather seeds; these seeds then grow in their own culture, allowing aspects of Christianity to come to fruition we never knew about

95% of churches are trying to model themselves after five churches; we are franchising churches!

Reggie McNeal’s metaphor: The refrigerator door; whoever gets refrigerator rights in your household are the people you are in relationship with; the fridge door is always changing with pictures and artwork, etc.; you don’t hang a signed Picasso on the fridge door; Matt Redman, Chris Tomlin, and Darlene Zschech are Picassos of praise music, but why does every song we sing have to be a Picasso? Why don’t we sing songs that are more culturally relevant? Have people with the DNA of your own community writing the songs; the new standard of excellence is not the quality of the performance, but the quality of the participation!

He uses two screens to preach, one with text and one with images; he speaks from the middle of the congregation, and the congregation has several microphones to interact; a person in the back googling images all throughout and putting them on the screen; sometimes the best sermons, lines, laughs, are the ones you don’t preach at all but the ones the congregation preaches

Notes:

Instead of “Here I Stand,” the future is “There We Go!”

As Christians, we ought to be able to say to everyone, “I love you”; Jesus told the woman he loved her, and then told her to sin no more, not vice versa

The verse which separates from all other religions is “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life…”

Brad,
I found your site via John Ballenger via David Ballenger. Thanks for the GREAT notes!

I urge you to re-examine your endorsement of anyone associated with the emerging church movement.

The ECM is the new gnosticism infecting the church today.

At it's very core....it embraces and mixes Eastern/New Age philosophies AND terms with Christianity. It truly is a PROFANE FIRE being offered up in the name of Christ. It speaks of a different gospel....and of a different Jesus.

Anyone in a Christian leadership position NEEDS to be ESPECIALLY discerning today!

If you go to the EPIC description links posted.
Leonard Sweet combines Hinduism with his inclusion of being guided by an "avatar".

Go to this link to see what an avatar is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Avatar

Please read this article and look at the real side of this New Age "christian" teacher, Leonard Sweet.

http://www.deceptioninthe
church.com/dingdong.html

I'm NOT trying to be derisive. Quite honestly, after 23 years of being in the Nazarene denomination, I'm getting ready to leave it because of the infiltration of false teachings that have eroded it. I'm speaking out before I leave. I left the Catholic church because my eyes were finally opened to its false teachings....now the Nazarene denomination is embracing alot of the things I formerly left.

I hope people will open their eyes.

This blog and below links summarize well the Leonard Sweet
ketynote to Presbytery of WV "Festival of Faith" on 3/31/07.
Here are some related links with more valued Leonard Sweet notes:

Click here for more on the MRI Church.
... ... ... emergentnazarenes.blogspot.com

Click here for more on perfect storm idea.
... ... ... www.fum.org/QL/issues ... (Quaker Life Issues)

________________________________
Click here for Leonard Sweet's site:
... ... ... www.leonardsweet.com