Sam O'Neal, our colleague at Christianity Today International and the managing editor of ministry resources, recently participated in the small groups conference at Saddleback Church. In this report, O'Neal shares insights from two presentations. One highlighted the challenge small groups face in our culture, and the other presents an ancient alternative.

Last week, I had the privilege of representing Building Small Groups at the first-ever Purpose Driven Small Groups conference, hosted by Saddleback Church in sunny Lake Forest, California. Because the Purpose Driven folks were running the show, I've returned home with a great deal of useful information, almost all of it nicely packaged into acronyms and "pathways."

But I was most impressed by two presentations that drifted outside the Purpose Driven model. Both of them picked up the gauntlet thrown down by noted church consultant Lyle E. Schaller, who said: "The biggest challenge facing the church is to address the fragmentation and discontinuity of the American lifestyle."

Early Tuesday morning, Randy Frazee spoke on the call to community. According to Frazee, the average American family manages 35 separate relationships on a day-to-day basis - children, extended family, neighbors, government, school, friends, work, Starbucks employees, landlords, telemarketers, etc. And this is before that family gets invited to church, which usually adds another 6 connections - at least.

As a result, Americans are knee-deep in the unprecedented phenomenon of grouped isolation - what Frazee refers to as "crowded loneliness." We are in desperate need of meaningful relationships, yet too busy and too pulled to maintain them.

David Fitch's church, Life on the Vine, is a missional community that has abandoned the leadership model that most churches employ. Life on the Vine has no senior pastor, and they don't want one. In the first part of his post, Fitch outlined three reasons why the "CEO-pastor-leader" model is difficult to reconcile with a missional philosophy of ministry. Here are five more reasons why a multiple-leadership model is better:

4. Because pastors benefit from being bi-vocational. Or, should I say bi-ministerial (since being in the secular workplace is ministry). Pastors who have jobs outside the church can get to know non-Christians and spend time in non Christian settings. They are not entirely bound to the church. Dan Kimball speaks to this in his new book, They Like Jesus but Not the Church (Zondervan 2007). Up until last year, I had always worked outside the church. I will forever be impacted by the many years I spent working outside the church, and as a result I will continually be seeking non Christian connections.

5. Because it models the diversity and interrelatedness of the Body. The notion of a senior pastor puts up a false impression that one person is especially qualified and elevated to ministry. But with multiple pastors, he/she does not stand alone. The whole body is called to minister the gospel inside and outside the church as a way of life.

"When a church focuses on trying to grow, the larger mission suffers and the church can actually become less attractional."

-Chad Hall is a ministry coach living in Hickory, North Carolina, and the co-author of Coaching for Christian Leaders (Chalice Press, 2007). Taken from "Missional: Possible, Steps to transform a consumer church into a missional church" in the Winter 2007 issue of Leadership journal. To see the quote IN context, you'll need to see the print version of Leadership. To subscribe, click on the cover of Leadership on this page.

Pastor/Professor David Fitch is back to describe the leadership structure of his church, Life on the Vine, in Long Grove, Illinois. Like an increasing number of churches seeking to be "missional," Life on the Vine has rejected the notion of a senior pastor. In this post, Fitch explains why the "CEO-pastor-leader" model is losing its appeal.

At Life on the Vine, we recently added a fourth pastor. Some people told me a model with multiple visible leaders would never work - there would be no single face to attach to the vision of the church and the church would never grow. Balderdash (is that a word?). The church continues to grow. There are signs of healing, new mission, and new souls finding God.

Much has been written about missional church leadership. Frost & Hirsch (and Dwight Smith) have advocated the APEPT (apostle, prophet, evangelist, pastor, teacher) model of leadership from Eph 4:11. Roxburgh has another brilliant description of these principles. I have argued that we must dump the CEO- pastor-leader that the church has too often modeled from secular business. I have argued that "the CEO-pastor-leader" is a construction that only makes sense in the Cartesian worlds where man is in control, where leadership is technique driven, and where people are units in a sociological structure devoid of the organic nature that we see characterizes the gifted nature of the Body of Christ (1 Cor 12: 4-31). Because of this I have argued that missional leadership must be multiple, organic, recognized and affirmed within and among a body (not determined from above in a smoke filled room by a CEO and board of the mega corporation it oversees).

Dallas Willard has written about the importance of soul care for those of us in ministry. He says,

The call of God to minister the gospel is a high honor and a noble challenge. It carries with it unique opportunities as well as special burdens and dangers for members of the clergy as well as their families. These burdens can be fruitfully born and the dangers triumphantly overcome. But that will not happen unless the minister's "inner person" (2 Cor. 4:16) is constantly renewed by accessing the riches of God and His kingdom in the inner person.

Willard's words are beautifully optimistic, but how exactly does a minister "access the riches of God and His kingdom in the inner person"? I don't recall that class being offered in seminary. Perhaps that's why spiritual directors are becoming so popular, but a good spiritual director can be difficult to find. It's not as easy as putting a personal ad in the paper:

SWM (Soul Weary Minister) seeks SMF (Spiritually Mature Friend) to help my inner person access God's riches and experience triumph in my soul. I like long prayer walks in the park, guided sabbatical retreats, and reciting the daily offices. My turn offs are elder board meetings, church budgets, and Mrs. Clark's mystery casserole. Please respond quickly, my soul needs urgent care.

The National Pastors Convention in San Diego is over and I've returned to the frozen north. But I still have one last reflection from the conference. Mark Labberton, pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley, California, spoke on Thursday night about the intersection of worship and justice.

Drawing mainly from the Old Testament prophets Daniel and Isaiah, Labberton built a case for thinking differently about worship. "Worship reorders reality to help us see what is true," he said. It should reorder our priorities and help us see the world differently. But quite often worship is simply a baptized version of our culture. In our worship we simply mirror what is all around us - worship of self. This, he says, is "illegitimate worship."

"Fear of God is what matters most," says Labberton. "The failure of our people to live this way is a failure of our worship." The solution is not making our worship louder, faster, or more spectacular as many are in the habit of doing. Rather, we need to reevaluate what our worship is forming within our people. "Does our worship impact our view of our neighbor?"

Last year at the National Pastors Convention, Dallas Willard spoke at an early morning Bible study gathering. Unlike the main sessions the Bible study had no music, no flashing lights, no massive screen. There was nothing remotely worshipful or stimulating about the physical setting. Still, I recall feeling most blessed and caught up into something divine during that simple lesson by Dr. Willard.

Yesterday morning I had a similar experience. For the second year I have been blessed by a soft-spoken, gray haired sage. This morning it was Eugene Peterson. In the same bland ballroom Peterson opened the Bible to share his reflections on prayer. There was nothing spectacular about his presentation, but it carried the gravity of a godly life.

Peterson spoke about the prayer he begins every day with as he walks the quarter mile from his front door to retrieve his newspaper. Living amid the natural beauty of Montana, Peterson greets the squirrels and the deer as he recites the words of Zachariah in Luke 1:68-79.

"Modern Christianity has emphasized the immanence of our Savior, but, pushed too far, we are in danger of making the God of the universe little more than our buddy."

-Tony Jones is coordinator of Emergent Village. Taken from "Prayer Beyond Father Weejus" in the Winter 2007 issue of Leadership journal. To see the quote IN context, you'll need to see the print version of Leadership. To subscribe, click on the cover of Leadership on this page.

Monday was a great day to leave Chicago. The wind-chill was thirty degrees below zero and the Bears had just lost the Super Bowl. This week I'm in sunny San Diego for the National Pastors Convention. Although the main sessions don't start until later today, on Tuesday I attended a five hour "Critical Concerns" course on preaching.

John Ortberg, pastor of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church in Menlo Park, CA, and the author of numerous books with really long titles, presented about preparing the soul to preach. His focus was not simply getting spiritually juiced for Sunday morning, but rather becoming the kind of person that preaching flows out of that pleases God. It was really about character formation.

Part of Ortberg's discussion included a list of the ten deadly sins of preaching. (John said he originally intended to create a list of seven deadly sins, but preaching offered so many temptations that he had to expand the list.)

1. The temptation to be inauthentic
We want to present an image to others that makes us appear more holy, intelligent, or godly than we actually are. In the end this is a foolish pursuit because the truth of who we are will always leak out.

One Sunday Pastor Bob Roberts asked everyone in the congregation at NorthWood Church in Keller, Texas, to invert the collar of the person in front of them, find the label, and call out the nation where the shirt was made. China, India, Vietnam, Mexico, Chile, Kenya, Dominican Republic, and Spain were all mentioned before someone finally said "USA."

The shirts on their backs came from all over the world. It was Bob's way of reinforcing his recurring theme of glocalization, synonymous with Thomas Friedman's "the earth is flat." It describes today's seamless integration between the local and global, a comprehensive connectedness produced by travel, business, and communications.

"Glocal is as important a term to the 21st century as postmodern and seeker were to the 20th century," says Roberts, who has written two books, Transformation: How Glocal Churches Transform Lives and the World (Zondervan, 2006) and Glocalization: How Followers of Jesus Engage a Flat World (Zondervan, 2007).

He has applied the concept in quiet but effective ways at NorthWood, a church of 2,000 in suburban Fort Worth that has helped plant some 89 other churches in the last 15 years. The focus of NorthWood and all the daughter churches is not gathering people inside the sanctuary; it's clearly missional.

"We aren't about weekends," Bob says. "We aren't just trying to get people into church. It's 'kingdom in, kingdom out.'"

I have just finished reading James Martin's The Meaning of the 21st Century. And - in my opinion anyway - every person who seeks to influence others to the Christian way ought to be conversant with this book. Don't expect to find a Christian point of view about the future - just the opposite, in fact. But you will get a catalog of the issues that humanity faces in the next few decades. The issues are political, economic, technological, scientific, and, I believe, moral.

Martin, who comes out of the world of Oxford, spends most of his time ruminating on the social and economic impacts of computers and technology. So says the book jacket. His mind is deep and broad which is to say that he knows lots of things. And this book demonstrates it.

I found myself fascinated, not threatened, by James Martin for several reasons. First, because he is an intellectual who represents the totally secularized mind. It doesn't hurt to acquaint ourselves with what people like him really sound like.

Second, because Martin has done his homework within the world he's defined for himself. In other words, he's thought through this stuff and isn't going to be easily dismissed. Push back at him if you want, but you better have done your homework.

Thirdly, because he's identified the issues of real consequence that every one of us will soon be living with, like it or not. Live twenty more years, and every one of Martin's concerns will be on your mind?daily.