With Verge LA starting up tomorrow (Friday, November 13th), I will be posting a few more topics today and tomorrow. The basic theme of this gathering is looking at what it means to be missional in imaginative ways. Verge LA is where the next BIG idea meets UNconference. Check out this Verge LA post, to learn more about the event and how to sign up. While the event is free, please register through facebook or leave your name on this blog.

Here is another theme and talk at Verge LA 2009:

Theme: Jesus and Mission

Title: Jesus for your Right Brain

Summary Sentence: How do we equip people to become engaged by Jesus relationally rather than passively listening to one-size-fits-all style application from someone they barely know?

Summary paragraph: People change as they encounter God who engages them and meets them exactly where they are. So instead of taking a limited cognitive, talking head approach, we can help them develop an interactive life with God by taking them into gospel scenes where they are engaged by Jesus themselves. This sets them up for conversations with God in which they sense what they most need to hear from God. We’ll try to squeeze in a few exercises.

With Verge LA right around the corner, I will be posting some of the topics that various speakers will tackle, everyday until the event. The basic theme of this gathering is looking at what it means to be missional in imaginative ways. Verge LA is where the next BIG idea meets UNconference. Check out this Verge LA post, to learn more about the event and how to sign up. While the event is free, please register through facebook or leave your name on this blog.

Here is another theme and talk at Verge LA 2009:

Theme: Unity and Mission

Title: Mission and the Final Apologetic

Summary Sentence: The greatest witness and mission the church has to the watching world is our unity–the love that Christians have for one another.

Summary Paragraph: Evangelical Christians have a penchant for splitting and dividing. Most divisions never come over theological differences but over personal issues and differences over philosophy of ministry or style. These differences breed bitterness which in turn endangers a desire for revenge. Unity is then broken. What is the remedy? Radical forgiveness that only comes from the power of the gospel. Until Christians learn forgiveness, to become one even in spite of differences, our witness and mission to the watching world is compromised.

Graham Cray is passionately concerned for the renewal of the church and its social engagement. He is the former Principles of Ridley Hall, Cambridge, but in close touch with popular culture through his chairmanship of the Greenbelt Arts Festival and leadership of Soul Survior, which now attracts over 20,000 young people. He is the Bishop of Maidstone, caring for the Diocese of Canterbury, yet now leading Fresh Expressions of church reaching out to the never churched.

With Verge LA right around the corner, I will be posting some of the topics that various speakers will tackle, everyday until the event. The basic theme of this gathering is looking at what it means to be missional in imaginative ways. Verge LA is where the next BIG idea meets UNconference. Check out this Verge LA post, to learn more about the event and how to sign up. While the event is free, please register through facebook or leave your name on this blog.

Here is another theme and talk at Verge LA 2009:

Theme: Leadership and Mission

Title: The Death of Leadership: Christ, Co-Leading, and Missional Living

Summary Sentence: Leading in a missional context demands the death of leadership as we know it, replacing it with structures, processes, and people who follow the Crucified Christ, living the gospel even while sharing it.

Summary Paragraph: While news of its death might seem greatly exaggerated, it is true. We must announce the death of leadership. While hardly noticed amid the dearth of Christian leadership books and conferences and blogs, which even I confess to reading, it is true. The death of leadership comes for all those who follow the Crucified Christ, those who seek to announce his gospel and his life. Missional leadership under the sign of the Cross must nurture new structures, processes, and people who lead through living and dying the gospel. The church is on the verge of the death of worldly leadership and the rising again of cruciform leadership.

With Verge LA right around the corner, I will be posting some of the topics that various speakers will tackle, everyday until the event. The basic theme of this gathering is looking at what it means to be missional in imaginative ways. Verge LA is where the next BIG idea meets UNconference. Check out this Verge LA post, to learn more about the event and how to sign up. While the event is free, please register through facebook or leave your name on this blog.

Here is another theme and talk at Verge LA 2009:

Theme: Anthropology and Mission

Title: “Beginning with the Beginning: Leading with an Imago Dei Theology”

Summary Sentence: The Imago Dei theology of Genesis 1, by illuminating a connectedness which binds all people together, is a foundational tenet upholding the church’s mission in the world.

Summary Paragraph: All men and women are created in the Image of God. Before there is a theology of sin or redemption, there is a theology of human being. If we are to engage in meaningful mission in the world, we must make sure we have asked the question, “What is a human being?” In discovering the connectedness to the Imago Dei that connects us all, we find common ground with those to whom we are on mission. Respecting this connectedness frees us to relate to all men and women with honor, respect, love, and even reverence, no matter their story.

Heavenly Father, Help us remember that the jerk who cut us off in traffic last night is a mother who worked nine hours that day and is rushing home to cook dinner, help with homework, do the laundry and spend a few precious moments with her children.

Help us to remember that the pierced, tattooed, disinterested young man who can’t make change correctly is a worried 19-year-old college student, balancing his apprehension over final exams with his fear of not getting his student loans for next semester.

Remind us, Father,that the scary looking bum, begging for money in the same spot every day (who really ought to get a job!) is a slave to addictions that we can only imagine in our worst nightmares.


Help us to remember that the old couple walking annoyingly slow through the store aisles and blocking our shopping progress are savoring this moment, knowing that, based on the biopsy report she got back last week, this will be the last year that they go shopping together

Heavenly Father, remind us each day that, of all the gifts you give us, the greatest gift is love. It is not enough to share that love with those we hold dear. Open our hearts not to just those who are close to us, but to all humanity. Let us be slow to judge and quick to forgive, show patience, empathy and love.

HT WakingHarmony

With Verge LA right around the corner, I will be posting some of the topics that various speakers will tackle, everyday until the event. The basic theme of this gathering is looking at what it means to be missional in imaginative ways. Verge LA is where the next BIG idea meets UNconference. Check out this Verge LA post, to learn more about the event and how to sign up. While the event is free, please register through facebook or leave your name on this blog.

Here is another theme and talk at Verge LA 2009:

Theme: Economy and Mission

Title: “The Beggar’s Bowl”

Summary Sentence: Learning to embody the economics of the Kingdom amid conspicuous consumerism.

Summary Paragraph: In a culture where greed, hoarding, and debt have bankrupted the wealthiest society in history, the church has an opportunity to conspicuously reject the insanity of the consumer lifestyle and embody the truly good life of faith, meeting each other’s needs by the grace of a gift-giving God.

With Verge LA right around the corner, I will be posting some of the topics that various speakers will tackle, everyday until the event. The basic theme of this gathering is looking at what it means to be missional in imaginative ways. Verge LA is where the next BIG idea meets UNconference. Check out this Verge LA post, to learn more about the event and how to sign up. While the event is free, please register through facebook or leave your name on this blog.

Here is another theme and talk at Verge LA 2009:

Theme: Social Justice and Mission

Title: “Thinking Inside the Box”

Talk in a Sentence: The temptation is to believe the answers to all our problems lie outside of our churches, but what if the answers are here all along, waiting to be discovered, valued and set free?

Talk in a Paragraph: Faith can sometimes be touted as that crazy, sexy, blind pursuit of the next big thing.  And with it, the temptation to find the “golden ticket” out there, somewhere.  But what if a key to mission is as simple as not missing the obvious while in search of the elusive?  What if one of the key virtues of justice is listening, to the voice of our congregations and to the voice of our communities?  Many of our answers do not lie outside of our churches, but in the belief that people right in front of us have something remarkable to offer. It’s about valuing what you’ve got, and ministering out of who you are.  It takes thinking inside the box.

With Verge LA right around the corner, I will be posting some of the topics that various speakers will tackle, everyday until the event. The basic theme of this gathering is looking at what it means to be missional in imaginative ways. Verge LA is where the next BIG idea meets UNconference. Check out this Verge LA post, to learn more about the event and how to sign up.  While the event is free, please register through facebook or leave your name on this blog.

Here is another theme and talk at Verge LA 2009:

Theme: Colonialism and Mission

Title: Cheap Wine, Inconvenience, and the Smell of Mission

Sentence Summary: The missional journey transcends the ‘cultural colonial’ to a greater and more, arguably, Christ-like, ‘cultural incarnational’ where the missiologist in essence ‘smells’ like those in their mission field.

Paragraph Summary: The first miracle in John is not Jesus turning water into wine.  it is that Jesus gets invited to a wedding.  And goes.  Jesus smelled like those he would lay his life down.  Yet in a world where mission so easily ensconsed in western culture has such a challenging time finding a context for the greater culture of the one preaching.  This segment will examine ‘the wedding’ as a metaphor for mission in the 21st century.