I just finished Mark Driscoll's Confessions of a Reformission Rev. The book is a quick read. While I don't agree with everything he does or says, I did find his book very candid. I wish that more people were as honest as he was.
Here are some more highlight. My words are in brackets:
"Until the day of Jesus' second coming, we are not merely to relate to people but also to command them to repent of sin and bend their knee to the King before they are grapes crushed under his foot in the winepress of his fury."
"The more I read the Bible, the more deeply the Holy Spirit convicted me that I had grievously erred by trying to figure out how to do church successfully by reading a lot of books, visiting a lot of churches, and copying whatever was working. Instead, I needed to first wrestle with Jesus like Jacob wrestled with Jesus and then discover what Jesus' mission was for Seattle."
"I did not want to be an employee of the church, keeping shop by working for church people, much like a hotel concierge sitting by a desk, waiting for the phone to ring so that customers can be well served no matter what their outrageous demands are. Believing I worked for Jesus and not the church, I decided to spend my time with Jesus, prayerfully investigating the city like a missionary, trying to figure out what Jesus' mission was for our city."
"And as a curch changes, so does the accessibility of the pastor and his family."
"Sometimes the most important thing a leader can do is to create strategic chaos that forces people to pull together and focus on an urgent need."
"In his 'Rule of 150,' Malcolm Gladwell states that the highest number of people the average person can connect with is 150. This helps explain why many groups cease growing at that number.
"The elders then began tracking their financial giving twice a year to ensure that our members were supporting their church." {I will have to blog about this some later. Wow! Depending on how this is done, it seems like this could become a very legalistic thing in a hurry}
"Things were finally maturing and coming together, just in time to fall apart again." {Yeah, smooth sailing never seems to last forever. That's a good thing because we tend to grow more in the valleys than the peaks.}
"I went downstairs and spent the rest of the night sitting on the couch, staring blackly into the dark and asking God to allow me to do anything but be a pastor. I just wanted to be done with ministry and do something, anything, that would not kill me before I turned thirty."
"The church is a body, and one of the most important parts is the colon. Like a human body, any church body without a colon is destined for sickness that leads to death."
"Preaching is like driving a clutch, and the only way to figure it out is to keep grinding the gears and stalling until you figure it out."
"I decided to never view our church as a church but rather always to view it like a church planter with a core group launching out to reach the city."
"As we get bigger, we must also get smaller with hundreds of small home community groups, in which people will be known, loved, and sharing the gospel with lost friends."
