Mission Alive

These are the women of Mission813 and those we seek to serve. I am again challenged to be like the women of Luke 8:1-3. I recognize modern disciples, like some of the women above, need my support and I have chosen to support these disciples out of my own means and conviction--the conviction that God’s love and grace is best extended not from a pulpit or a Bible class but from a kitchen table, between tears over a cup of coffee or with a ride to a doctor’s office. This is why I give to Mission813.

Coming Soon August 13 - Mission813 2nd ANNUAL GIVING DAY
Prayerfully consider supporting Mission813 by giving on 8.13
https://missionalive.org/donate/
Select “Mission813” from the "Donate To" drop-down menu

Coming Soon August 13 - Mission813 2nd ANNUAL GIVING DAY
Prayerfully consider supporting Mission813 by giving on 8.13
https://missionalive.org/donate/
Select “Mission813” from the "Donate To" drop-down menu

Luke 8:1-3 Mary (called Magdalene) from whom seven demons had come out; Joanna the wife of Chuza, the manager of Herod’s household; Susanna; and many others. These women were helping to support them out of their own means.

This pic gives me (Tod Vogt) great joy! In 1996 I started working to plant a campus ministry in Birmingham, Alabama. It came to be called The Campus House. Now it is Encounter Ministries https://www.encounterministriesonline.org/campus-house.html
The pic below is of the first cohort to complete Mission Alive's Discipleship Cohort https://missionalive.org/discipleship-cohorts/. Thanks to Willie Chriesman (on the right) for taking the initiative to launch a cohort. Well done to all of the first cohort! I pray many more will learn how to deeply listen to God.

Deepen your connection to God. Follow His voice. Take action. Rest in Him. Come join fellow leaders as they surrender to the leading of the Holy Spirit.https://missionalive.org/discipleship-cohorts/

Want to go on a spiritual adventure? Register here for a Discipleship Cohort. https://missionalive.org/discipleship-cohorts/

Mission Alive 20th Gala to celebrate 20 years of church planting ministry!

What events shape a church planting ministry to marginalized and forgotten communities over a twenty year history? You might be surprised to hear the impact and perspective that’s created by God’s grace over this world’s challenges.
Find out here- https://missionalive.org/a-clear-and-compelling-calling/

Are you a planter with a calling to the lost and marginalized?

Devotion & Prayer from Mission Alive
We touched on God’s love and faithfulness last week and with that as a backdrop we dwell this week on God’s resolve for the future, our future, your future and fresh possibilities.
Ezekiel 39
Focus verse: v8 It is coming! It will surely take place, declares the Sovereign Lord. This is the day I have spoken of.
In his book Gift and Task, Walter Brueggemann, touches on the writings of Ezekiel and God’s mercy for the future. How we see over and over God’s commitment to make all things new and transform lives. His promise to make all things new - our life and areas in our life. All the while exalting His holy name, the name of our Lord God.

Devotion & Prayer from Mission Alive

This week our hearts resonate with God’s immense faithfulness and love across the generations!
Psalm Chapter 89
Focus verse: v14 Righteousness and justice are the foundation of your throne;
love and faithfulness go before you.

We sing of your great love that stands firm forever - your love and faithfulness across the generations. Your faithfulness is established in the heavens themselves, and the heavens praise your wonders. You are mighty and your faithfulness surrounds you. Praise be to the Lord forever! Amen and Amen.

Prayer: We lift up friends and family in need and search for jobs. Let this Psalm ignite our passion, calling and vigor for His ways, timing and outcomes.

20 Matters! Come celebrate our 20th!
Join us live and in person on May 31 at 630PM
– Click now https://givebutter.com/c/MA20 to complete your ticket purchase
Registration closes after this weekend - seating limited!

Just a few more days before we will see you at Pepperdine Harbor! Get ready to chill! Get ready to relax! Get ready for some challenging messages! Get ready to see some friends and colleagues! We'd love to connect/reconnect. Just reach out!

Can't wait to see you at Harbor! If you want to catch a meal or cup of coffee, please reach out through FB Messanger! See you next week!

We'd love to catch up! Come find us in the Wave's Cafe, in our workshop, or track us down!

Let's connect at Pepperdine!

We are about 1/3 of the way through Mission Alive's Reimagining Church blog series. The articles so far have been spectacular! We have been working our way through Reimagining Church theologically with some fantastic writers like Chris Flanders, Greg McKenzie, Mark Love, Omar Palafox, and several other amazing writers. I am enjoying so much their challenging perspectives! If you are not yet subscribed to the Mission Alive substack, click here: https://missionalive.substack.com/ then register to start doing a deep dive into Reimagining Church. We would love to get your responses to what you are reading. Please make comments on the blog or come here and leave them as we post each article.

Mission Alive would like to invite you to celebrate with us the 10-year anniversary of our church plant in Wetumpka, AL - the Redland Hills Church! Wes Gunn and his team have done a fantastic job of leading that church for a decade and the next 10 years look even better! Mission Alive's executive director, Tod Vogt, had the opportunity to worship with Redland Hills Church this past Sunday to help celebrate these 10 years of ministry. Check out the worship service here:

Just As God Promised Redland Hills 10th year celebration!

EDITED post! Sorry for messing up the link to Substack! This should get you there: missionalive.substack.com

3 more days until the first article drops! If you haven't subscribed yet, do it soon. We anticipate about 20 articles. Each one will explore innovative ways of thinking about one particular aspect of our Christian faith in 21st Century America. Among the themes are Missiology, Christology, Pneumatology, Ecclesiology, Ethics, Hermenutics, etc.

Mission Alive continues to be dedicated to helping the Church effectively engage our neighbors now and in the future!

Get Ready! The Reimagining Church blog series will start dropping next Wednesday at www.missionalive.substack.com Check out the authors who will be contributing to this project. Subscribe now so you don't miss a single article!

It was such an honor to be part of the Common Grounds podcast! Kevin & John are fantastic hosts and it was fun getting to reflect on how the ancient church can help us understand what makes a healthy church. Check it out here:

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Mission Alive is proud to announce a series of blog articles for 2024 titled, 'Reimagining Church: An Innovative Approach to Mission in North America!' We have asked nearly 20 leaders from Churches of Christ to help us imagine the future of the church in North America. The series of articles will be split between a focus on theology & a focus on practical ministry. If you are trying to imagine how to minister in the quickly changing church, this series will be tremendously important for you.

To subscribe to Mission Alive's blog, click here: https://missionalive.substack.com/

The articles will drop weekly starting on January 11, 2024. Don't miss it!

Mission Alive in Abilene! On Oct 19 from 7pm-9pm Mission Alive will be at Grain Theory (https://www.graintheory.beer/). We'll have appetizers, finger foods, etc. Come hang out with us. Grab yourself something to drink. Hear some of the amazing ways God is working in Mission Alive and meet some of our team and planters. To register (no fee) click here: https://missionalive.salsalabs.org/101923abilenerefreshment

In case you missed the Mission Alive email last week:
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“Don’t Be Afraid!’ Advice From a Veteran Church Planter

Since June of 2023, Kevin and Lisa Vance and their team have seen 10 people give their lives to Christ! Ten year-olds. Addicted adults. Members of the same family. All of them in the urban center of Regina, Saskatchewan. When asked how that has happened, Kevin simply said, “It’s a move of God.”

Kevin & Lisa started the Gentle Road Church of Christ in 2011. Mission Alive asked, “Why, after 12 years of ministry are you seeing this now?" Kevin replied, “We started praying two and a half years ago before we moved into our building. We prayed for God’s guidance. We prayed intercessory prayers. We prayed for the conviction of the Spirit and the move of God in our community.”

They moved into their current facility with 29 people. Today, the Gentle Road Church of Christ averages 65 people and is still growing. “Earlier this spring we began praying for our ministry in the community during the summer. We had a 3-week prayer vigil with 6-7 hours of prayer a day.”

Mission Alive celebrates the ministry of Kevin and Lisa Vance with their whole team! When asked what he would share with church leaders Kevin said, “Don’t be afraid! Don’t let fear govern your church, your decisions!” He said, “You’re missing out! You are missing the joy of being in the trenches. It can only happen when we get out of the safety of our towers and get out where the action is.”

When asked what he would say to leaders who are considering starting a new, innovative church, Kevin said, “It is so worth it! It is hard work but the blessings are amazing. The depth of the joy is proportional to the amount of work you give it! It can be dangerous, risky but it is so worth it.”

Mission Alive is so proud of our church planters who sacrifice for the sake of God’s Mission and muscle through the hard times. And we need more, lots more! We need courageous, faith-filled leaders who will persevere through the hard work, difficulties, and dangers for the sake of God’s Mission!

We have 2 requests:

Pray for the Vances, their team, and God’s Mission in North Central Regina, Saskatchewan.
Pray about Mission Alive’s need to find more courageous leaders to lead similar movements in other parts of North America.


Our prayer for you is to choose faith over fear. If you want to see a move of God in your own life, start your own prayer vigil, get out of the safety of your own tower, and get into the game!
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We are so thrilled to see such a great move of God in Regina! They have had about 10 people come to Christ since June! Pray that God will continue to draw people to himself through the Gentle Road Church of Christ in Regina, Saskatchewan!

Eric Daniels, Mission Alive's new Director of Development, sent me this article. I finally read it this afternoon. It is an analysis of why church plants fail. While it is short and simplistic, there is much good here. Over the years Mission Alive has seen a number of our church plants shut down - which always comes with grieving - but the conclusion the article offers is absolutely true, "some things are so sacred that they’re worthy of our best effort—even if they don’t succeed." Let me be the first to say how proud I am of every single Mission Alive church planter regardless of the status of the church they planted. These folks are my heroes! They got in the sacred game and gave it their all! Check it out:

The Top Reasons Most Church Plants Fail within Five Years | Great Commission Collective ArticleThe Top Reasons Most Church Plants Fail within Five Years by Bradley Bell one year ago Churches are like mountains. They’re beautiful—but they can kill you in twenty different ways. This quote has been laying the Sriracha to my soul since I heard it earlier today. I was listening to an au...

A month ago, Mission Alive was in Malibu, CA at the Pepperdine University Harbor Bible Lectures. Tod Vogt and Jason Locke (https://www.facebook.com/jasonlockecz ) co-facilitated a workshop. We hear that it is the most downloaded class from the lectures! Check it out here: https://pepperdinebiblelectures.podbean.com/e/reimagining-church-in-a-changed-world/?fbclid=IwAR2AiAvjbiJygbbBtNGcI4k9uMTCAiIM0zgcOiv5mD03fcn_SqUnQ2OCVlI

Jason has written a brief article to summarize our workshop. Let us know what you think:

Reimagining Church in a Changed World

Most North American churches are in crisis mode. Decline. Division. Lack of direction. Even closure. These are the realities you likely know all too well. It’s old news.

In response to these negative trends, I typically hear one of two lines of thought. The first just involves doing what churches already do, only better. Welcome people more warmly. Lead better worship. Be more transparent. Preach more effectively. Make your facilities more inviting. Serve nicer coffee. Have snazzier kids’ classes. Use social media more successfully. The list goes on and on.

This set of strategies stems from the reality that most church leaders have a church-shaped mission. In other words, they know how to do one thing: Sunday morning worship. And since that is what churches do, that must be the tool to turn things around. The mission must fit church as they know it.

The second line of thought is less optimistic. It embraces decline as inevitable and expresses the belief that there is little to be done given the times in which we live. The church’s sole mission, or so the thinking goes, is to hang on and keep doing church.

In this strategy—if it actually is a strategy—death is viewed as a necessary precursor to life. There’s a fatalistic bent here, especially when every change to make a church “healthier” further reduces the number of church-goers. Those who hold to this way of thinking console themselves with thoughts like these: “The path is hard. We must be faithful. Surely God will reward us in the end.”

During this year’s Harbor Lectures at Pepperdine University, I had the privilege of co-leading a workshop on “Reimagining Church for a Changed World.” Tod Vogt, executive director of Mission Alive, was my co-host. Our goal was to help folks picture new ways of envisioning church in our world today. We led a panel of five church planters and church workers who all have experience with building Christian community in ways that aren’t dependent solely on inviting people to worship gatherings.

What strategies did we suggest? How did this panel propose anything different from the tactics commonly found in churches today?

The essence of our thinking is that we need a mission-shaped church, not a church-shaped mission. For far too many Christian communities, Christian life has been reduced to a Sunday morning gathering for one hour per week followed by 167 hours of solo Christian living. Nearly every strategy we hear centers on ways of sending people out to invite their non-church-going friends into a Sunday morning church service. That is all they can imagine.

The reality is that non-church-goers generally have zero interest in walking through the doors of any church service. No matter how well you invite, preach, worship, serve coffee, provide childcare, and so on, they believe church as it exists is not for them. For about seventy percent of people in the US, nothing will get them through the doors of a church building and into a worship service. Yet churches seem unable to picture any other way of doing things.

What Tod and I proposed along with our panelists is to take church beyond our limited imaginings and into places where non-church-goers are. Tod and I both trace our roots back to the Abilene Christian University missions department in the early 1990s. We are both trained as missionaries and we believe that North American churches should also begin to think and act like missionary people.

What might this look like? It will mean that small groups of pioneering Christians will leave their church buildings and enter spaces where they are outnumbered by non-church-goers. This could mean spaces they create or existing ones they join. Ideas are numerous: moms-day-out gatherings, neighborhood dinner clubs, board-game groups, anxiety support meetings, etc. What will differ about these mission-shaped groups is the goal. Here, the aim is not to eventually invite people to Sunday morning church. Instead, the goal is to form Christian community in the middle of these gatherings.

Imagine the example of an English-language-learners’ support group for women immigrants led by a few Christian women. If this gathering meets a felt need and if some immigrant women find these meetings useful, then the Christian women might eventually ask the participants if they have prayer needs. They might then create a prayer board that participants can see as they come for each meeting. If prayer is well received, it could lead to conversations that are more openly about faith. The goal here is to create a kind of Christian community around these women—call it a church, if you will. This raises questions of course, but it also opens incredible possibilities for those who can imagine it.

This is just one example of how church can bend to fit mission. And we believe church absolutely should bend to fit mission, with one caveat. I am not suggesting existing churches stop doing church as they know it. Our existing gatherings are meaningful to the many people who attend them each week. And what’s more, I believe that these gatherings will find ways to bless and support the new forms of church as they take shape.

I am deeply excited about the possibilities that lie before us, if only we can reimagine church in our changed world.

Meet Caleb & Miriam Soares and Steve & Laura Allen. Last weekend they submitted themselves to Mission Alive's Assessment Retreat - a weekend full of interviews, exercises, and observations to determine their readiness to start a new innovative faith community (IFC) with Mission Alive. Please join the Mission Alive team in prayer for these two courageous couples and the vision God has given them. Pray also for those of us on the Mission Alive team as we seek God's wisdom about working with these two amazing couples.

If you missed connecting with Mission Alive at Pepperdine University's Harbor Bible Lectures and want to check out why we had standing room only for the workshop we led with Jason Locke, here is the recording of the workshop Reimagining Church for a Changed World. https://pepperdinebiblelectures.podbean.com/e/reimagining-church-in-a-changed-world/

Let us know what you think!

We had a blast at Pepperdine's Harbor last week! Amazing scenery! Amazing people! Amazing messages! Make plans NOW for Harbor 2024. Our workshop with Jason Locke was standing-room-only! Stay tuned for excerpts.

Can't wait to see everyone on Pepperdine University's campus tomorrow! Come find us in Waves Cafe' or on Thursday at 2pm in the Surfboard Room for our class titled "Reimagining Church in a Changed World".