I went to this conference about 'mission'. One of the speakers I felt was a little smug, oversimplified things and demonised those he disagreed with.
Another speaker was quite impressive. In particular, his session on approaches to doing evangelism from the 1990s-today. Both the form and the content:
1. The form: He did the good ol' give three options with their pros and cons, the third option being the best.
Often in these cases the person *says* that all three options are valid and so on. But in practice they convey the impression that the first two options are really a waste of time.
By contrast, this speaker not only gave the pros and cons of the first two options and moved on to the next thing. He also told us,
- If you are going to go with this mode, here's how to do it best.
This demonstrated that he really did consider all three options as valid alternatives. So much so that he had thought through how to do each of them in the best way. And so much so that he would 'weaken' his argument in favour of the third option, by helping us do the 'inferior' models better.
Of course, in the end I felt more inclined to hear him out on the third ('incarnational'/'post-christendom') model because of the effort he had gone to.
(2BCont'd)
Volume 6 Number 2: Churching planting in the 90s Part I
