Cole has recently written an e-book entitled Lies My Pastor Told Me: Confronting 15 Church Cliches with the Gospel. Each chapter deals with a different lie or Christian cliche, focusing especially on the lies prevalent within the Pentecostal tradition: “Speak it into existence;” “This is God’s house;” “You have a generational curse;” and so on. You can get the e-book for free by becoming a fan of “Lies My Pastor Told Me” on Facebook.

From the introduction:

Believing a lie about God is all the more damaging than believing a lie about your physical health. It impacts your relationship with God, your relationship with others, your emotions, your behavior – everything. I know this from personal experience. I spent most of my twenties believing such lies and, while I did not realize it at the time, I lived in fear, pride and bondage as a result… the ‘pastor’ I refer to throughout this book is not a specific individual but a composite character based on many pastors I have known over the past twelve years. In many cases these pastors are not intentionally lying but simply saying what they believe to be true by repeating the clichés they have heard throughout their lives. Nevertheless, they must be held to account because, intentional or not, they are doing significant damage to those who have entrusted their souls to them.

AP report

BBC report

We are grieving Rashid’s death and praying/hoping for the safety of other Christians in Pakistan. The country is 97% Muslim, and though the government has a good record of protecting religious freedom, some radicals among the population are very hostile to Christians. Sources on the ground are complaining that the blasphemy charges were spurious in the first place. Religious freedom advocates have criticized Pakistan’s blasphemy law for being vague and subject to exploitation by those hostile to Christianity:

Section 295-C: Use of derogatory remarks, etc; in respect of the Holy Prophet. Whoever by words, either spoken or written or by visible representation, or by any imputation, innuendo, or insinuation, directly or indirectly, defiles the sacred name of the Holy Prophet Mohammed (PBUH) shall be punished with death, or imprisonment for life, and shall also be liable to fine.

People ask all the time what exactly our process is for raising up and training church planters. Listening to these stories might help you have a better understanding of why we believe the gospel, mission, and community come together to have a formative influence on young leaders – and how we try to steward what God is doing in their lives for greater influence.

Justin Dean is a church planting resident at our sister church, Core Community… he tells the story of how his first meeting with Ethan and me at an Acts 29 bootcamp in Louisville last year became God’s means of calling him to Omaha for a season. Erick Whigham is one of our emerging leaders at Coram Deo… he tells the story of how God used a conversation with me to temper his expectations and give him patience.

Justin Dean’s Sermon (Core, 6/20/10 – Exodus 4: What Is In Your Hand?)

Erick Whigham’s Sermon (Coram Deo, 7/4/10 – Psalm 131)

One Surge leader explained the vision to me this way: “Right now, a-theological megachurches dominate the landscape of Phoenix and drive much of the religious conversation in our city. But what if, in 10 years, the more Reformed, gospel-centered churches (whether small or large) were driving the conversation? We think that would be a good thing for the gospel, a good thing for church planting, and a good thing for the city of Phoenix.”

Surge revolves around three primary initiatives: a monthly lunch open to all and focused on networking and training; a year-long “Surge School” open to committed leaders who want to develop theologically and missionally; and a small number of church-planting internships and residencies designed to develop and train aspiring church planters. I was invited to speak at the monthly lunch and to teach on gospel-centered ministry for the Surge School.

It’s great to see movements of God like this, where like-minded, gospel-saturated, kingdom-focused leaders come together to advance the mission of God in their city. I wanted to share what the Surge guys are up to in order to urge you to 1) pray for what God is doing in Phoenix and 2) pray for God’s continued grace as we seek to forge similar kingdom partnerships here in Omaha.

It was a great privilege this morning at Coram Deo to have JD and Michele Senkbile back with us. The Senkbiles were an integral part of the original team that founded Coram Deo. They moved to Cape Town, South Africa, in December of 2008 to oversee Acts 29′s church planting work on the African continent. Throughout 2009, the Holy Spirit made it clear that they needed to plant a church in Cape Town as a home base for gospel movement in southern Africa. So in January of 2010, they launched Vox City Church in the heart of Cape Town. The word vox is Latin for voice… Vox City Church desires to be a voice for the gospel in the heart of Cape Town.

If you’re not familiar with JD and the work God has called him to, audio from today’s message will be up shortly on the Resources page or Coram Deo’s iTunes podcast. Keep JD and Michele and their team in your prayers as they seek to shape a biblically faithful, culturally relevant gospel-community-on-mission in this important global city.

• “How many of you guys are in your 20′s? [Pause to let audience raise hands] You don’t know ANYTHING!” – Mark Driscoll
• “Why don’t you stop blogging about election and go find some elect people?” – Mark Driscoll, lambasting Calvinists who love doctrine but don’t share the gospel with anyone
• “Don’t come up in here talking about yo’ Reformed theology if God ain’t sovereign from your waist down!” – Eric Mason, talking about young black men in his church committing sexual immorality
• “My elders be flankin’ me… if you want to step to a girl in my church, you gotta come through a FLEET of dudes!” – Mason, talking about protecting his flock from irresponsible young men
• “God, I know you sometimes take your people home early… I’m just praying you wouldn’t do that with my daddy.” - Matt Chandler describing his 7-year-old daughter’s prayer for him at bedtime one night

David is a dear friend and partner in ministry who has family in Council Bluffs and is therefore very excited about what we’re doing at Coram Deo. In this video post he explains the tri-perspectival understanding of spiritual leadership which Kaleo and Coram Deo share. For those of you who want to understand how we think about leadership… watch and learn.

Identifying Potential Leaders from David Fairchild on Vimeo.

If you’ve never done anything, something radical could change, but the odds are tomorrow, you’re not going to wake up and start doing a lot. If you’re not faithful, you’re probably not going to be faithful. There’s something to be said for consistency… Whatever God has for you, you’ve got to start by doing something. There are a lot of people who walk in, and they’re totally fired up for two weeks, and then it’s over, you never see them again. Past performance indicates future performance. We want to see somebody who’s been doing something before we unleash them to do something else.

This summarizes our thinking about leadership both within Coram Deo and throughout Acts 29. Read the whole post at Resurgence.

Following up on our previous announcement about Porterbrook, we’re pleased to officially roll out the plan for Fall 2010/Spring 2011 along with application materials. Interested parties should begin the application process now; applications are due by August 1 and space is limited.

Here are the major details:

• Porterbrook is a church-based theological training curriculum that’s rich in content but more relaxed in style than a traditional seminary degree; think University of Phoenix, Bellevue University, community-college-continuing-education. For an overview, check out the previous post.
• It utilizes a cohort-based approach to learning: cohorts of 3-5 students meet together for study and accountability as they progress through the material; all cohorts come together once per quarter for a day-long seminar.
• Porterbrook kicks off this fall with a day-long seminar on September 9, 2010; additional seminars take place on Nov 18, Feb 24, 2011, and May 19, 2011.
• All the details you need to know are included in the attached document (see below), which includes a curriculum sample so you can see the kind of stuff you’ll be learning and applying.
• Our goal for 2010 is to facilitate 4-5 cohorts of 5 students each.

So: if you’re interested, read the attached PDF. If you’d like to apply, please get the ball rolling. We are excited about the potential to train and release future leaders through this gospel-centered, church-based, Reformed/missional curriculum. We’re also working and praying to try to land a Re:Train site in Omaha in the next 2-3 years to provide seminary-level training alongside the more simple/organic style of Porterbrook. Please be praying for God’s grace on these efforts.

Download Porterbrook Promo Document

For the past two years we’ve been gathering together every church planter we know in Omaha for a quarterly lunch. At these quarterly events we pray together, talk about the city, and serve each other through teaching and training. We’re pleased to announce that Hugh Halter will be the featured speaker for the next Omaha Church Planters’ Quarterly on March 30.

Hugh is a missional-church pioneer who describes himself as “a mentor to church planters and somewhat jaded pastor of the Adullam church network in Denver.” He is best known for his recent book The Tangible Kingdom, which has become a must-read among church planting strategists and missional leaders everywhere. Hugh has been a featured speaker at dozens of church planting conferences including Exponential and Verge.

Hugh has been a longtime friend to Core and Coram Deo. What we love most about him is that he is both passionate and pastoral. He isn’t afraid to challenge your thinking, but he’s humble and charitable and disarming in his posture. And he isn’t a one-size-fits-all kind of guy. In his own words, “We’re about all forms of churches: Mega/Micro/Traditional/Contemporary/Mainline. We need them all, but all need to be led by Missionary thinkers and move beyond simply ‘doing church.’  God’s church must get back on the move and find the beautiful balance between gathering and scattering.”

Our goal in bringing Hugh in is to help church leaders think about how to create missional structures. How can you help people live out the gospel in everyday life? What must churches do to shape missionaries, not just Sunday-morning Christians? How can leaders create missional opportunities that fit their context? The theme of this quarterly will be “Your Church on Mission.”

The invitation has already gone out to the church planters we know, but we wanted to post it here on the blog to reach missional leaders we might otherwise miss. If you’d like to attend this lunch, please email kendal@cdomaha.com. We are accepting RSVP’s on a first-come, first-served basis, with priority given to pastors, church planters, and small group leaders. The event will take place from 11 AM to 2 PM on TUESDAY, MARCH 30, at City Church in Benson.

A number of factors contribute to this failure rate, but denominations and church-planting agencies often compound the problem by throwing money and opportunity at any young Christian leader with a dream and an entrepreneurial spirit. In our own city I have witnessed numerous church planters come and go, burning through hundreds of thousands of dollars while trying vainly to hold together a core team by the sheer power of their charisma.

From the outset, the Acts 29 Network has had a different model. We have held firmly to the biblical criteria for eldership given in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1. No man can be approved to plant an Acts 29 church unless he is an exceptional man in every way: a strong husband and father, a sound theologian, a gifted leader and preacher, and a proven start-from-scratch entrepreneur. While others are looking for better methods, we are looking for better men.

And the numbers seem to indicate that God is blessing this approach:

• From 2006 to 2009 Acts 29 assessed 414 potential church planters and approved 240 (58%) to go forward as Acts 29 Candidates. (Candidates must gather a core of 40 people before moving to Full Member status). Two hundred of those men are now Full Members who are active in church planting; the rest didn’t make it through the candidate phase.
• Of church planters who are assessed, approved, and progress to Full Member status, the viability rate within Acts 29 is 98.4%.
• Acts 29 currently has 204 Full Members and 85 men in candidate phase (including our own Will Walker), for a total of 289 churches affiliated.
• With over 40% of applicants rejected, you’d think that aspiring church planters would be going elsewhere. But the exact opposite is happening: in 2009, Acts 29 had 470 new applicants – an average of 39 per month. God is raising up an army of men who want someone to shoot straight with them. They want to know if they’ve got the right gifting, calling, and experience to plant churches – and they’re coming to us because they know we tell the truth.

The purpose of this post isn’t to brag about Acts 29, but to celebrate what God seems to be doing. And to make the point that when we follow the Bible’s instructions for church leadership, surprisingly… it works. Please pray for God to continue raising up qualified church planters who will plant gospel-centered churches all over the world – so that people might meet Jesus, cities and cultures might be transformed, and God might be glorified!

Bob, Will,

The reason for my writing to you is due to God’s call on my life to plant a church in Lincoln.  This is a calling that has been brewing in my soul for almost 2 years now (from obscure to clarity).  I’m currently going to school part time at Covenant Theological Seminary here in town and am plugged-in with a non-denominational church near our home out in the burbs.

I see there is an Acts 29 regional event in St. Louis this month… if you guys are coming, I was wondering if it would be possible to meet up to chat over coffee or something.

I get at least one email inquiry like this every week. Generally I file them in the “call me back when you have moved out of your mom’s house” file. But we were going to be in St. Louis for the regional. And this email had a number of factors that made it stand apart:

• This guy had a real (non-church) job that probably paid well; he wouldn’t be looking to leave that unless he sensed a strong calling from God.
• Additionally, the fact that he had a career as an engineer meant that he could succeed at something besides planting a church – one of my primary criteria for church planters. If planting a church is the only thing you can do vocationally… you probably shouldn’t.
• He was looking to relocate to NE from a cool city (i.e. one with professional sports teams) where he’d put down roots; again, not the easy road.
• He was investing in a seminary education in addition to a full-time job, so he was probably a hard worker who managed time wisely.
• He was a husband and a daddy who was involved in a local church, not a sarcastic church-basher or a starry-eyed idealist.
• Covenant Seminary is a good school in the Reformation tradition, so he was probably theologically grounded – or at least working on it.

So I agreed to meet him for coffee in STL, and I dragged Kendal along just to get another opinion. That conversation at a coffeehouse across from Wash U began an 18-month journey that is reaching its apex this month with the official beginnings of Two Pillars Church in Lincoln, NE. Along the way, Todd Bumgarner has progressed through Acts 29′s church planter assessment, done a church-planting internship at The Summit Church in St. Louis, quit his lucrative job at Boeing, sold the only house he’s ever owned, and relocated his family to a city he last knew as a pagan frat boy.

It’s exciting for us to see this journey come to fruition with the beginning of The Whiteboard Sessions this month. These are a series of vision meetings at “The 815″ – a building in downtown Lincoln’s Haymarket that God providentially provided before Todd even moved to town.

If you’re part of Coram Deo, I hope you’ll read some of Todd’s personal journey – especially the faith step of his resignation at Boeing – and celebrate with us the joy of seeing God raise up church planters. This is why we do what we do. This is why we blog, speak, and write – because through those mediums, God puts us in touch with men like Todd and helps us fulfill our objectives of raising up, equipping, and supporting church planters.

If you’re a blog reader in Lincoln, I hope you’ll either check out The Whiteboard Sessions or at least pray for the success of Two Pillars. Church planting, after all, is good for God’s kingdom and good for the city.

If you’re a person of means who likes to invest your resources to help people come to know Jesus, I hope you’ll send Todd a check or write him into your will!

Jeff Vanderstelt

Jeff is a wonderful brother in the gospel who shares our passion for the gospel and for missional community. When we planted Coram Deo, we thought we’d invented the term missional community. Then we met Jeff and his crew at Soma and realized they’d been doing it longer than we had! The more I’ve gotten to know Jeff, the more amazed I am at the similar influences we share. Wise observers will note many areas of overlap between Soma’s DNA and Coram Deo’s. In fact, CD’s gospel identities and missional rhythms were worked out in dialogue with Soma. Their input was tremendously helpful as we sought to articulate what it truly means to be a gospel-centered missional church.

The training event takes place on Wednesday, December 2, from 10 AM to 4 PM at Prairie Lane Christian Reformed Church. See attached flyer for more. Jeff will also be joining us for the Omaha Church Planters’ Quarterly next Tuesday, so if you’re a planter and you’re reading this, be sure to get on the list for that invitation-only event. (Email us for more info).

I think this was the best bootcamp Acts 29 has done. The quality and insight of the talks was second to none. Put them on your iPod and allow God to bless you as you think about ministry, mission, and leadership.

Those of you who are skeptical, critical, or doubtful about the work of church planting will be encouraged to read what revered Christian leader Al Mohler had to say about the pastors of Acts 29. He doesn’t name us by name, but Scott Thomas does.

Dave contends that the biblical, God-honoring idea of ambition has been all but lost. In its place we’ve substituted a false definition of humility (humble people shouldn’t have ambitions, aspirations, visions, goals). Some insightful observations from Dave’s talk:

• We chase what we love. Our problem is not the pursuit of glory, but the pursuit of the wrong kind of glory.
• Ambition begins with perceiving the value of something. We must perceive the value of the glory of God.
• After we perceive God’s glory, we must prize it — we prize what we perceive.
• One we perceive it, and prize it, we will pursue it.
• We need to have the kind of ambition that spurred Paul in Romans 15:19-20 not to sit back and rest on the fact that he had “fulfilled the gospel” from Jerusalem to Illyricum, but spurred him to the continued ambition to “preach the gospel where Christ has not yet been named.”
  

Listen to or watch the entirety of Dave’s talk at the A29 website. You can also follow live-blogging from the Ambition conference at the Acts 29 website. Tomorrow Kevin Cawley is speaking at 10:30 AM and me at 11:30 AM.

I’d appreciate your prayers as Kendal and I head to Louisville this week. We’re excited about kickin’ it with our good friends at Sojourn Church, who are hosting the last Acts 29 bootcamp of this year. I’ll be speaking on Wednesday morning on “Discipleship and Ambition,” and Kendal will be gleaning worship and liturgy insights from the likes of Sandra McCracken, Kevin Twit (Indelible Grace), Tim Smith (Mars Hill), and Mike Cosper and Neil Robins (Sojourn Music). You can check here and here for more detailed schedule info.

Acts 29 Boot Camps are church planting conferences open to the public that focus on the vision of church planting, the calling of the planter, the mandate to multiply churches, and the theological foundation for gospel-centered church planting. This one is packed out with over 400 registrants, including 30 would-be church planters who are seeking evaluation of their calling and gifting through Acts 29′s rigorous church planter assessment.

Your prayers are appreciated as this opportunity comes at a particularly taxing time for me. Pastors always carry the burdens of their flock as they do the work of counseling and spiritual leadership. But this past month has stretched Walker and I to the breaking point with difficult situation after difficult situation. Confidentiality requires vagueness, but the pain and emotional cost of some of the burdens we’re carrying is great. Pray that in spite of my spiritual weariness, God will allow me the grace of being helpful to some young church planters for the sake of His kingdom and glory.

While in Louisville, we’ll have the privilege of meeting up with former Coram Deo elder JD Senkbile. We’re gathering with some other pastors to strategize together for church planting in southern Africa. Coram Deo sent JD and Michele to South Africa a year ago to serve as church planting liaisons for Acts 29. Since then, God has made it clear to them that the best way to fulfill that vision is to actually plant a church in the city-center of Cape Town. You can read more at the new Vox Church website. And, since JD is cooler than me, you can also follow him on Twitter, which might be a great way to stay up to date and connected with what God is doing in Cape Town.

Of course, the hard work of the week (strategizing, teaching, assessing, and the rigorous preparation for all of these) will be mitigated by fine food, good beer, and the smell of a good pipe, as Acts 29 brothers tend to enjoy feasting together as a celebration of our unity in Christ and a foretaste of the coming kingdom of God.

Thanks for standing behind us in prayer and for owning the vision of church planting. It’s a privilege to represent you and to share the evidences of God’s grace among us these past four years. To God be the glory!

Upon reading that post, one of my good pastor-theologian friends had his research assistant dig out an obscure essay by John Frame, who was one of my favorite seminary profs precisely because of his deep love for Christ and his zeal to serve the church. In the essay, Frame makes many of the same arguments I did in the post. He also proposes a way forward (or backward?) that, if followed, would change the course of theological education in America for the better. Here are some excerpts, abridged for simplicity:

In the early days of American Protestantism, the training of ministerial candidates was carried on by pastors of churches. [Eventually], for some reason or other, theological training was institutionalized, and at the same time academicized. As a result, young men [now] receive no training at all in many crucial areas. Most do not even become good scholars, for they learn the results of scholarship without learning how to think and do research in a scholarly way. Worst of all, it seems to me that most seminary graduates are not spiritually ready for the challenges of the ministry. Seminaries not only frequently ‘refuse to do the work of the church;’ they also tend to undo it. Students who arrive expecting to find a ‘spiritual hothouse’ often find seminary to be a singular test of faith. The crushing academic workload, the uninspiring and unhelpful courses, the financial agonies, the too-busy professors, the equally hard-pressed fellow students all contribute to the spiritual debilitation.

After this frank assessment of the problem, Frame turns to Scripture to establish three biblical propositions: 1) the qualifications for the ministry are spiritual (character, skills, knowledge – all seen through the lens of discipleship to Jesus, not academic prowess); 2) training for the ministry is itself a ministry of the Word; and 3) training for the ministry is the work of the church. On this last point, Frame observes:

Teachers have official status in the church as elders and are entitled to remuneration by the church (1 Tim 5:17). If, as we have argued, the training of ministers is a form of teaching the Word, then such training ought to be carried on by these church teachers. And such church teaching ought (as in the New Testament) to be recognized and administered by the church. A seminary which does not ‘do the work of the church’ does not ‘train men for the ministry’ either.

But the genius – and the danger – of Frame’s article isn’t in his identification of the problem or in his biblical observations. It’s in his bold proposal for a model of ministerial training that would render the current Christian seminary establishment obsolete. Maybe that’s why this essay is buried out of sight, in the relative obscurity of a distant theological library?

I propose that we dump the academic model once and for all – degrees, accreditation, tenure, the works. The academic machinery is simply incapable of measuring the things that really matter – obedience to God’s Word, perseverance in prayer, self-control, the ability to rule without pride, the spiritual power of preaching in the conversion of people and the edification of the church. The actual training, the development of ministerial qualifications, must take place in a non-academy.

But dropping the academic model does not require the dropping of institutional training. Here, then, is my alternative to the academic model. A church establishes a kind of “Christian community” where teachers, ministerial candidates, and their families live together, eat together, work together. It is not a monastic escape from the world; rather, each teacher, student, wife, and child is to be deeply involved in the work of planting and developing churches.

The best candidate for a teaching job at our community is a pastor who has trained elders and congregations so that the work of teaching and evangelism is widely diffused throughout the congregation. Upon first arrival, a student will spend much of the time in menial work around the study center. It will be expected that the student manifest the fruit of the Spirit in the sight of all before being accepted as a full candidate for the ministry. The community will evaluate the quality of the student’s devotional life, contribution to the work of the church, testimony to non-Christians, and particularly the ability to accept correction from elders in the Lord. Intensive counseling sessions will attempt to uncover unconfessed sin and traits of character detrimental to the ministry. The quality of the person’s repentance from these will be observed.

Once the community has verified the likelihood of a man’s call to the ministry, he is enrolled formally in the program. He begins to be trained in evangelism, preaching, and pastoral work. At the same time, the man begins to study the formal theological subjects. Teachers and older students will be constantly involved in the work of supervising the labors of younger men. Wives and children of students will also be subject to training and evaluation. There will not be a set “number of hours” after which a person is entitled to graduation. Teachers and older students will meet from time to time for intensive evaluation of each student’s progress in life, skills, and knowledge. These meetings will determine whether a man will be dropped from the program, promoted to new levels of responsibility, or “graduated” and recommended to the churches for ministry. No person will “graduate” unless the teachers are convinced that he has the character, skills, and knowledge which the Scriptures require of church officers.

But: if we follow this proposal, would this not rob us of the most important centers of Christian scholarship, the academic seminaries? Yes, it would. Such a restructuring of the Christian scholarly establishment would, in my opinion, produce, not a dark age, but a renaissance in Christian thought. Why?

1) Many Christian scholars, under the present system, are tied up doing something they are not really equipped for, namely the training of pastors. It is as if all professors of mathematics were involved full-time in the training of accountants!

2) The integration of theory and practice in Christian scholarship implicit in the above suggestion would help isolate those problems which most need scholarly attention in our day. What a challenge to the aridness of contemporary thought, Christian and non-Christian alike!

3) The current structure is inadequate even to train scholars, for in the academic seminaries the results of scholarship are presented without adequate training in the skills of thought and research, leaving the students easy prey to any fad boasting academic support. How marvelous it would be to have a theological leadership in the church which would not be swept around by every wind of doctrine!

It’s great to realize that in my quest for innovation, I’m simply standing on the shoulders of a giant like John Frame. Apparently his proposal, written in 1984, has gained little traction. Hopefully that is about to change. This is exactly the kind of model we’re shooting for with our Church Planting Residency, and with other Acts 29 initiatives like Re:Train and Soma School.

Any of you thoughtful readers want to chime in?

[Here is the bibliography info - good luck finding an original: John M. Frame, "Proposals for a New North American Model," in Harvie M. Conn and Sam Rowen, eds., Missions and Theological Education in World Perspective (Farmington, MI: Associates of Urbanus), 369-386.]

In November I will have the great privilege of joining fellow Acts 29 pastors Darrin Patrick, Kevin Cawley, Daniel Montgomery, Steve Timmis, and Matt Chandler (along with distinguished guests Dave Harvey and Ed Stetzer) to lead the last Acts 29 bootcamp of this year. We will gather in Louisville, Kentucky, at the very cool digs of Sojourn Church, to preach on the theme of AMBITION and to assess potential church planters.

If you are 1) a leader or emerging leader within Coram Deo or 2) a church planter or potential church planter thinking of aligning with the Acts 29 Network, you should consider attending this conference to get a feel for the DNA of Acts 29 and to network with other leaders and pastors. I will have a pretty full week with speaking responsibilities, church planter assessments, and some meetings, but at least one other staff member from Coram Deo will travel with me to help network with any Omaha or Midwest folks who attend. We’d love to have you along for the journey. It’s going to be a great conference, and the people at Sojourn are first-class hosts.

For more info, check the conference website. And please be praying for me as I prepare.