A Day with Reggie McNeal

This past Saturday five parishioners and I attended the Diocese of Rhode Island Convocation in Providence.  The speaker was Reggie McNeal, a noted church consultant and the author of a couple of excellent books on the church (The Present Future, and Missional Renaissance).

Reggie is a funny, sharp guy, so his biting critiques of the modern church came across less confrontationally than they may have.  The audience of 200+ spent a lot of time laughing, even though what he was talking about is a radical change in the way we are operating as a church. 

Here are some of the points Reggie made, though I'd be happy to loan you a copy of either of his books, if you want to hear more.  As he says, none if this is new or ground-breaking.  It's all old stuff, just repackaged for a new audience that can't quite seem to learn it:

1) The church is a who, not a what.  The church is not a building or group of buildings.  It's a body of people.  It is us.  We aren't "the church" when we gather at the corner of Central and Caswell; we are "the church" at our workplace, at school, at home, at the mall...wherever we are, we are acting as the people of God, and so we are "the church."  It's time we start acting like we actually believe it.

2) The next time you're in a meeting and find yourself bogged down in the mundane minutia, ask yourself, if Jesus were here today, is what we're doing or arguing over something I would ask him to die for?  Is the church doing something so profoundly important to our own lives and for the people we encounter, that it's worth the price of Jesus' life?

3) God blessed Abraham and made a covenant with him not to be exclusive or clique-ish, but so that Abraham's descendants would show the rest of the world what God was iike.  God blessed Abraham so that Abraham could then go and bless others.  That is the mission of the church, too.  We are blessed by God so that we can then go and be sources of blessing to others. Anytime we're not blessing others, we're not living up to our end of the covenant.

There's so much more.  Give me a call if you'd like to chew on this with me sometime.