guest | Release the A.P.E.

Toward A Prophetic Youth Ministry

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September 21, 2015

“Why is that Christianity seems so impotent to deal radically, and therefore effectively, with issues of discrimination and injustice on the basis of race, religion and national origin?”

Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited, 1949

2014 and 2015 will easily go down in history as two of the most shocking years of the decade. Immigration to Black Lives Matter, legalization of gay marriage and its ramifications on college campuses around the country and it places of faith, we have seen a lot. Do we respond to these issues? How do we respond to these issues? How are they to be included in how we disciple students and the people we lead? These issues are a part of and influence our lives, whether directly and indirectly. To ignore them, is to ignore context in which students live, and our words can quite easily become “word sown along the path” as it doesn’t translate to the practical life.

The Apostle & Their Ego

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February 10, 2015

This is a guest post by Brian Sanders. He leads an incredible church network in Tampa Bay called Underground. He is one of the most inspiring leaders I know. I love listening to him teach and I love the way he thinks about leadership, church planting, and missional communities. He is an apostolic leader through and through and you see this no better than in the way he is the chief architect for his network of churches. But he also comes hard with timely prophetic words. One of which was his last post you can find here.

Sometimes, what appeals to us in the word and world of the apostle is the sense of grandeur and even importance it conjures. I think this is a deep misunderstanding of the calling of an apostle. We should not aspire to engage in apostolic ministry or apostolic calling because it somehow seems BIGGER than merely being a pastor. We do not rail against the shepherd-teacher model of church because it is too small. Its smallness is probably one of the things that is most noble about that kind of church and ministry. We challenge it because it is out of balance, not because it is small. I keep meeting people who are nominally claiming an apostolic rubric for their ambition, simply to mask their delusions of grandeur. No one wants to plant a church anymore, they want to plant a movement. In one sense this is the epitome of the apostolic urge, and it can be very holy – but only if it is accompanied with an equally profound personal humility. The role of apostle should actually be the most modest of all the roles because nothing that we do or dream is FOR us or ABOUT us.

Are APEs an Endangered Species?

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February 4, 2015

From the book Primal Fire, By Neil Cole with Dezi Baker, Ed Waken, Phil Helfer and Paul Kaak

As we look back over church history, we might be tempted to ask where all the APEs have gone? The church has long been dominated by pastors and teachers (who are often seen as one and the same), but the apostles, prophets, and evangelists have largely been missing from the local church context. Ephesians 4 is clear that all the gifts come from Jesus and that all the gifts are necessary for the equipping of the saints for the work of service. Did He stop giving certain gifts because they were cast aside or not appreciated? No, all the gifts are given until the body is fully mature, so all the gifts are present in every generation, though they may not be evident.

Good News in the Everyday Stuff of Life

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November 19, 2014

This is a guest post by Jeff Vanderstelt. He is a pastor at Soma Communities, an A29 church in Tacoma, WA. He is leader of leaders and a coach and trainer for church planters. His background includes music, business management, working with youth, training youth workers in North America and Europe and starting new churches.

“This is Jeff, that pastor I told you about that is not like a normal pastor,” Amy said as she introduced me to Clay. Clay and Christie had children who attended our local elementary with Amy’s children. Amy had told us many times that she didn’t believe what we did. However, she regularly introduced us to her friends thinking they might be interested.

We’d lived in the neighborhood for three years with the intent of bringing good news to this community, and that the syllables and sentences were meant to be enfleshed. We started by hosting a cookout every Friday night. At first we were told people didn’t do that in our neighborhood. However, the kingdom of God has the power to break in and create a new culture. It happened. Dinner parties became more normative, as did other celebrations.

Jesus, Karma, and Reincarnation

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October 23, 2014

This is a guest post by Josh Howard. He works with Central Indian Christian Mission. I met him in grad school and he has a fire for the gospel. I was so impressed one day when he told me how they share the gospel with Hindu people I have wanted him to share this story for years with us! So here you go.

Christianese.

It gets us into trouble—especially in India.

“Let’s eat the body and blood of Jesus.”

“Jesus saves!”

“Hallelujah!”

What?

Have you ever thought about what this sounds like to people who aren’t familiar with the Christian culture?

Ministry Idols: Individualism

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October 15, 2014

This is a series of guest posts by Scott Bessenecker. He is the Associate Director of Mission for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. Each year he helps to mobilize thousands of students to domestic and international mission. He is author of various books including his new release Overturning Tables: Freeing Missions from the Christian-Industrial Complex

[Check out post one on money, and post two on metrics.]

One of the very first words our kids learned was “MINE!” (spoken with all caps and followed by an exclamation point). One of the first sentences our kids learned was “I DO IT!” again with all capital letters and an exclamation point. Somehow the idea of private ownership and rugged individualism is picked up very early in life without an economics course or special classes in self-awareness. We appear to be born with a nasty strain of independence.

Ministry Idols: Metrics

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October 8, 2014

This is a guest post by Scott Bessenecker. He is the Associate Director of Mission for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. Each year he helps to mobilize thousands of students to domestic and international mission. He is author of various books including his new release Overturning Tables: Freeing Missions from the Christian-Industrial Complex

I’m not interested in growth, I’m interested in flourishing. And there’s a difference.

Growth has become the ministry altar upon which we have sacrificed seeking the flourishing of God’s kingdom and God’s justice. It is sometimes the only lens through which we understand ministry health, as if constant growth were the Holy Grail of ministry success. But in a living organism there is a word for unabated growth which does not contribute to flourishing, it’s called cancer.

Ministry Idols: Money

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October 1, 2014

Serving Two Masters

On any given day I think about and talk about money at least half a dozen times. I talk with my colleagues about fund development, I fill out an accounting report, I check to see how much of my travel budget I’ve spent, I begin working out how to pay for a new ministry idea. As a full-time Christian worker, I am steeped in the world of money.

Jesus warns a great deal more about the dangers surrounding money and possessions than he does about the dangers surrounding sexual infidelity. You could say that followers of Jesus are more apt to be led astray by our coins than by our loins. It is as if there is a highly corrosive quality to my regular obsession with getting and spending money, even in ministry What if the sliver of the Christian church I am part of, one that exists on an island of affluence in a sea of poverty, is straining out moral gnats while swallowing camels?

A Different Call to Action

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September 1, 2014

This is a guest post by Chioma Chukwu-Smith, a friend of ours who is passionate about issues of justice. She moved to St. Louis, MO from New York to work for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA in 2008. She was part of InterVarsity’s National Chapter Planting Cohort and planted a chapter at an urban commuter campus (UM-St. Louis). Chioma was compelled to work in St. Louis after participating in two summer break InterVarsity Urban Projects in St. Louis, and she had the opportunity in 2010 to lead the spring break project with a colleague. In 2013, she began working with InterVarsity’s Black Campus ministries where she had the opportunity to work on a historically black university. Chioma and her husband Brian live in St. Louis and she is currently pursuing a career in law to address racial, economic, and social concerns.

Ferguson is 15 minutes from where my husband and I live and about 5 minutes from the campus I used to do ministry on, and I can tell you first hand – there is still a lot of pain here. There’s pain in realizing that my sons will be black men and as a result, targeted by the police. There’s pain in telling my brothers on the phone not to visit me in St. Louis out of fear for their lives if they are found “in the wrong place at the wrong time”. And I am wounded by white individuals, all professing faith in Jesus, that invalidate the pain I’m experiencing and tell me to wait for “the facts, before jumping to conclusions”. A “fact” for me is that we live in a country in which a black man can be shot and killed in Wal-Mart for holding a toy gun and that easily could be one of my family members.

Loneliness and Planting: A Spiritual Discipline for A.P.E.s

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August 21, 2014

This is a guest post by Alison Marie Smith. She works for Greek InterVarsity at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Her and her husband, Sean, moved to Utah four years ago from the great state of Michigan. She loves reading, running, making meals for her students, and sharing adventures with her husband. Alison blogs at www.alisonmariesmith.com

As a planter, I am attracted by the idea of going where no one has gone before. Four years ago I moved from Michigan to Utah and began planting Greek InterVarsity at the University of Utah. This was the first ministry for fraternity and sorority students in the state as well as in InterVarsity’s Rocky Mountain region. When I arrived in Utah, I was the only Greek InterVarsity staff within a 600-mile radius and few Greek students were involved in Christian ministries. At the time, many people in the West were supportive of Greek InterVarsity, but few understood the unique challenges and value of working with Greek students. It was isolating.