JR Woodward’s and Dan White Jr.’s book The Church as Movement: Starting and Sustaining Missional-Incarnational Communities is well worth reading for church planters or leaders pursuing missional, incarnational movement. Great info and ideas on starting and sustaining missional communities. Also, goes into great detail on the APEST modes of church leadership – Apostles, Prophets, Evangelists, Shepherds, Teachers. Also, great information on the spiritual maturity as it relates to missional communities and deep relationships around discipleship. Would be great for a core group or launch team utilizing missional communities as a strategy to go through. Would also be good for a church wanting to get back to a missional, community driven focus to go through. Want be shelving this one anytime soon. Good tool to keep handy as we look to make disciples and catalyze a movement. Lots of good resources, worksheets, etc. at churchasmovement.com.

Wore through a highlighter reading this book, but here’s a few of my favorite highlights:

1. Jesus’ main message centered on the kingdom of God and his primary way of creating movement was confiding in the three, training the Twelve and mobilizing the seventy.
2. We must die to our self, our infatuation with speed and size, and devote ourselves to the work of making disciples, training the few.
3. Movement is about developing structures and systems that catapult people into mission.
4. the church as movement values shared leadership, sustainability and faithfulness, leaving fruitfulness to God.
5. the church as movement focuses on the “small” grassroots work of developing a discipleship core that builds a missional community together.
6. The church is not the church if it is not moving deeper into the brokenness of our world.
7. The key element to the spontaneous expansion of the church is simplicity.
8. Movement requires reproducibility. What we are multiplying should be reproducible by just about everyone.
9. We must remember that faithfulness is our part, and fruitfulness is God’s. He can choose to move as slow or fast as he desires.
10. Skill is not the first thing that qualifies leaders in the missional church; character is.
11. Personality is great, but a sustainable movement is not built on it. Movements are built on character.
12. Conflict in relating with others in community often hints at things we haven’t paid attention to in our own soul.
13. We discover much about ourselves as we move outward on mission. Our fears, our insecurities, our hypocrisies, our apathies and our chaos is revealed as we attempt to live a missional life.
14. Discipleship is a move toward accountability and vulnerability to learn and practice the way of Jesus on mission.
15. Discipleship involves heart , mind and body learning, not just the transfer of information and beliefs.
16. Discipleship cannot be consumed; we must participate in it.
17. Mission is much more than a weekend project; it is an incarnational pursuit to be faithfully present to God’s in-breaking kingdom in the ordinariness of life.
18. the church is not a building, a weekly gathering or a program, but a people God has called out of the world and sent back into the world to redeem and renew the world.
19. This is the essence of the church: a people who find their identity in the arms of God (communion), rallied around tables welcoming each other (community) and sent out into the world with serving hands (co-mission).
20. The church cannot storm the gates of hell by gathering around consumer needs. A shared life and the shared story that Jesus is King are its rallying points.