Church, YA Summit 2008, culture, emerging church Jason Valendy Church, YA Summit 2008, culture, emerging church Jason Valendy

9 Needed Fundamental Shifts of Christian Living

Presented by Gary at the Young Adult Summit

We need to shift from:

  1. Being Church focused to Kingdom focused
  2. Maintenance leadership to Missional leadership
  3. Fear of failure to embrace failure (fail often to succeed sooner)
  4. Codependency (people have needs, we need people to keep the institution alive) to worship (aka: giving) and service
  5. Talking at people to Talking with people
  6. Counting money and people to counting relationships and missions
  7. Dualistic worldview (there is sacred time and there is secular time) to sacred worldview (all time is sacred)
  8. Judge and savior to Cultivator
  9. Attractional (church growth model) to Missional (ministry with people)
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Church, Jesus, Story Jason Valendy Church, Jesus, Story Jason Valendy

There was a story I heard Jerry Chism tell in a sermon yesterday which I liked.

There was a group of children at Sunday school and their teacher was running late. The children decided to play "church" in which one was the pastor, others were choir members and still others were ushers. As children are, they became tired of playing that game and someone decided that they should play "Jesus". Jesus was a game in which one person would play Jesus and others would be the disciples. After much argument on who would be Jesus it was decided that one particular boy would be Jesus. Soon Jesus was selected, the other children made him carry a cross and pretended to tie him to a tree. They called him names and insulted him to the point the boy pretending to be Jesus said, "Wait!! I have an idea, lets stop playing Jesus and go back to playing Church."

So the question I get is, am I playing Jesus or Church?
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