Blog - Page 54 of 318 - John H Armstrong

The Steps to Creativity Are Observable and Can be Learned

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:15:15-05:00August 28th, 2013|Categories: ACT 3, Culture, Current Affairs, Leadership, Missional Church, Personal, The Church, The Future|

Robert Fritz, whose book The Path of Least Resistance I’ve drawing offering insights from over the last few days, has several others published titles to his name. One title, which sounds like a seventeenth-century one, tells you everything about his central thesis. This book is called: A Short Course in Creating What you Always Wanted to But Couldn’t Because Nobody Ever Told You How Because They Didn’t Know Either. I’m not kidding. The subtitle of The Path of Least Resistance offers further insight into what Fritz is teaching: “Learning to Become the Creative Force in Your Own Life.”

Fritz is not selling intuition or mystical theory. He believes that you and I can really learn how to create what we desire to be or to do. There is a learning process that can be used to explore and attain your ends/goals as a creative person. Yesterday I began by looking at some of the fundamental principles he provides. A major hurdle to creativity is the reactive-response orientation. He concludes: “Parents understandably want their children to avoid negative consequences. But […]

Why Missional-Ecumenism Needs Creativity Not Problem Solving

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:15:15-05:00August 27th, 2013|Categories: ACT 3, Books, Leadership, Missional Church, Missional-Ecumenism, Personal, The Church, The Future|

Robert Fritz (b. 1943) divides his book on becoming a creative thinker, The Path of Least Resistance, into two parts. Part One deals with fundamental principles. Part Two with the creative process itself.

Fritz’s central argument is that most people can “learn to create.” Given the words of the first of the two creation narratives in Genesis this point is, at least to my mind, one that orthodox Christians should accept without hesitation.

26 Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”

27 So God created humankind in his image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.

28 God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the […]

Living Systems That Are Lean – Learning to Cooperate and Do Mission Together in the Kingdom of God

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:15:15-05:00August 26th, 2013|Categories: ACT 3, Leadership, Missional Church, Missional-Ecumenism, Personal, Renewal, The Church|

Lean manufacturing, lean enterprise, or lean production, often simply called “Lean,” is a production practice that considers the expenditure of resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer to be wasteful, and thus a target for elimination. Working from the perspective of the customer who consumes a product or service, “value” is defined as any action or process that a customer would be willing to pay for. The term originated in Japan within the Toyota manufacturing process. I have been aware of “Lean” thinking for a time but not deeply aware enough to get into it in any serious way. This all changed about two weeks ago when I met Jim Sutton, a friend in Washington, Georgia, who introduced himself to me after reading Your Church Is Too Small. We had several long chats on the phone and exchanged several emails over the course of the last nine months or so. On Monday, August 12, I met Jim and his wife Debbie in my hotel in Atlanta. When I asked Jim what he did […]

American Evangelicals and World Christianity

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:15:15-05:00August 22nd, 2013|Categories: Uncategorized|

Jay R. Case, in his recent book An Unpredictable Gospel: American Evangelicals and World Christianity, 1812-1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012) argues that assumptions about the superiority of western civilization permeated nineteenth century American evangelicalism and thereby worked themselves out in overseas missions through something akin to “the white man’s burden.” There is little doubt that American missionaries exported more than the message of redemption and reconciliation. Case makes a compelling argument for what this meant and how it impacted Christianity through missions.

What Case argues is that most analyses of the Christian missionary encounter have failed to take into consideration the role of indigenous Christian leaders in the missionary response. Case believes standard histories have often misread the power dynamics of the missionary encounter. In the words of reviewer Douglas Tzan (Boston University School of Theology) in the Evangelical Studies Bulletin (Summer 2013/Issue 84), “Indigenous leaders played critical roles in the emergence of new forms of world Christianity, and the most successful missionaries worked from ‘positions of weakness’ (page 8 in Case).” Indigenous peoples critically adopted […]

A Legacy of Ecumenism – Leaving Something Real not Something Full of Argument

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:15:15-05:00August 21st, 2013|Categories: Uncategorized|

In my final tribute to my friend Jeff Gros I would like to tell you more about what made him such a singular influence on the lives of so many and how he was remembered by many of his friends at his funeral service of August 17.

Jeff had a long-standing commitment to Christ and the faith. The Lasallian Brothers have an affirmation that expresses personal faith and their understanding of their own order. It goes like this: “Long live Jesus in our hearts, forever!” This legacy was expressed by the brothers who gathered at Jeff’s funeral. When the words were spoken they responded in unison: “Forever!” If ever I knew a man who desired for Jesus to live in his heart with love it was Jeff Gros. Jeff was pre-eminently a man of intelligent, deep faith who always pursued a sense of profound wonder. He could be amazed at the most simple and beautiful things. In fact, as the eulogist said of him at his funeral, “He nurtured them.” A surprisingly shy man Jeff was filled with […]

The True Greatness of a Friend Who Loved Christian Ecumenism Deeply

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:15:15-05:00August 20th, 2013|Categories: ACT 3, Friendship, Missional-Ecumenism, Personal, Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, Unity of the Church|

My good friend Jeff Gros (1938-2013) moved to Chicago in 2011. He became an adjunct professor at Catholic Theological Union and Dean of the Institute for Catholic Ecumenical Leadership. He also became a consultant to the Office of Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs of the Archdiocese of Chicago, led at that time by another good friend, Sister Joan McGuire, O.P. (I came to know Sister Joan via my work in ecumenism with the archdiocese and the Cardinal George dialogue in March of 2011.) At the time Jeff moved to Chicago he lived across the street from Catholic Theological Union and from this place introduced me to many of his Catholic friends. When Jeff moved he did not know that he would very soon be diagnosed with a potentially fatal cancer. He fought the disease with courage and accepted it prayerfully with profound grace.

Tributes of all sorts have appeared in honor of Jeffrey Gros since his passing on August 12. America, a prominent Catholic magazine, included a wonderful tribute to Jeff, and Jean Bethke Elshtain, in their August 14 […]

The Amazing Life of Brother Jeffrey Gros – A Profile in Missional-Ecumenism

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:15:16-05:00August 19th, 2013|Categories: American Evangelicalism, Missional Church, Personal, Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, Unity of the Church|

The recent passing of Jeff Gros touched me quite deeply. I am thankful that I was able to be present for his funeral service last Saturday at Lewis University in Romeoville, Illinois. The Mass of Resurrection, preceded by a vigil with a time of personal sharing about Jeff’s life, was profoundly Christocentric. Jeff had clearly arranged much of the service before his passing.

Dr. Jeffrey Gros, FSC, was known to all who met him as Brother Jeffrey Gros. To his closest friends, however, he was simply Jeff. I had the joy of knowing Jeff as a close friend. I met him more than a decade ago in Birmingham, Alabama. Our mutual friend, Dr. Timothy George, invited us to share a platform together at a conference on ecumenism hosted by Beeson Divinity School. I had first learned of Jeff from his prolific writing on Christian unity. He edited and authored eighteen books and 310 articles. (None of us is quite sure just how many book reviews he wrote but there were many hundreds for sure.) Jeff was always reading […]

We Must Equip Servants of the Gospel

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:15:16-05:00August 16th, 2013|Categories: Discipleship, Gospel/Good News, Leadership, Missional Church, Missional-Ecumenism, The Church, The Future|

God’s “mission” is to lead the church to corporately spread the good news of the kingdom of Jesus through both deed and word. Seminaries that understand this goal will seek to adjust their curriculum and goals accordingly. Simply put both Northern and Biblical, two seminaries I have looked at the past few days, believe that they exist to gather and send leaders for the mission of Christ in North America. How do they actually attempt to do this?

I could look at a number of other seminaries as well. Some are stronger at one aspect, say the academic preparation of the mind, while others are better at spiritual formation. Some are strong in understanding mission yet very often their faculty might not be able to translate this understanding to students in personal ways that take time and friendship/mentorship. Seminaries from both the mainline Protestant, and the more evangelical Protestant, tradition are beginning to finally awaken to the right questions. Sometimes this happens because of a considerable decrease of students that forces change and sometimes it happens because they have proactively grasped the theology of missional church. Either […]

What Is CityONE Network?

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:15:16-05:00August 14th, 2013|Categories: Uncategorized|

One of the partner ministries of the ACT3 Network is CityONE Network. God willing I will be working with my friend David Hickman to find and train leaders, to begin new CityONE ministries in cities across America. Our goal is to reach out with the good news of the kingdom to Generation Y, the most unchurched generation in our lifetime. Please visit the CityONE site and pray for (and support) this important work. If you have questions contact me or David Hickman directly.

Seminaries – The “Seed Beds” Of Missional Transformation?

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:15:16-05:00August 14th, 2013|Categories: American Evangelicalism, Biblical Theology, Church History, Church Tradition, Discipleship, Leadership, Missional Church, Missional-Ecumenism, Protestantism, The Church|

The root meaning of the word seminary is “seed bed.” This metaphor helps me grasp what a good seminary is and what it should seek to become as times change and the church faces new challenges to the kingdom of God. Seminaries exist to serve the church and, by extension, the world. They exist for mission.

The first seminaries were created during the Middle Ages to mature young men for the priesthood. Much as tender seedlings were grown in a nursery until they were ready to be transplanted seminaries sought to prepare leaders for the church of that time. During the Protestant Reformation emphasis on the priesthood of all believers brought profound changes to the educational models of the time. Changes were relatively modest until the twentieth century. More changes than ever came about following World War II. The “new” world was open to the gospel in a way not previously experienced and travel made it possible for people to study all over the world. Seminaries in America changed in a number of ways, especially as women began […]