In 2009 I wrote a post titled, “Empowering a Movement – A Search for Missional Structures”, about the oldest and in my opinion best expression of a truly misisonal church.  In the original post I shared insights from the writings of Elizabeth O’Connor, who was a long-time leader at...

In a comment to my post, “Is the Church Relevant?”  Karen Muntzing asks a great question: “Serving in a seeker sensitive church provides challenges to my understanding of the gospel, which tends to look more like the island of misfit toys. How do we form communities of authenticity and...

This past Friday, I had the privilege of sitting under the teachings of John W. Kinney, the Dean of the Samuel Dewitt Proctor School of Theology at Virginia Union University. What an amazingly gifted preacher and teacher! Dr. Kinney shared with us that he has been meditating on how to raise...

If you had asked me when I was 25 why I did not go to church, I would likely have answered, “Why should I?”  I had grown up totally un-churched and for me church was irrelevant. At the age of 26, after three miscarriages, God became relevant.  I discovered the one thing this type A...

John Perkins’ book, Beyond Charity, was my first exposure to Christian community development.  It became the text we used in our Unity Works training and was the foundation for the emphasis placed on “indigenous leadership development” that is core to our ministry at Embrace Richmond....

Last March we moved our Embrace Richmond corporate offices onto the campus of Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond (BTSR).   I love being at BTSR.  It has allowed me to have greater contact with the seminary community.  In the past two weeks, I have participated in several classes and...

A few years ago I attended a workshop on “Fresh Expressions” of the church conducted by Bob and Mary Hopkins.  It was the first time I began to connect what was happening through the ministry of Embrace Richmond with a movement of God that was far bigger than us. I started my ministerial...

What is “the church?”  I have been wrestling with this question for several years.  I used to think it was a “worshiping congregation.”  But, is that really a biblical definition? When we look at the Christian tradition, I would suggest that the first “churches” could be...

In my post yesterday, I both commended and challenged David Fitch in his missionary vision.  The basic disconnect for me in many of the more missional expressions of church planting is that emphasis is still on “building a church or gathering of Christians” and not on “building the...

I got very excited when I read these words in a post titled, On Planting Churches That Do Not Cannibalize: The Luke 10 Project, by David Fitch: Let’s stop funding church plants (has anyone noticed it ain’t working?) and fund missionaries here in North America. We need to seed fresh...

Embrace Richmond is in an interesting season.  Our co-laborer, Reverend Janie Walker, is leaving Embrace Richmond to start a new expression of church in the Hillside Court area.  It will not look anything like the traditional images of church.  It will be a collaborative effort of many...

I had the opportunity to travel to California recently to visit a number of ministries that would never define themselves as a “church.”  However, I am getting a sense that how we define church is shifting.  This is how Kathy Escobar defined church in her book “Down We...