Real leaders ask hard questions and knock people out of their comfort zones and then manage the resulting distress.

If a can opener no longer has the capacity to open cans, what is it?

Being the church that Jesus intended means that we must participate in God’s eternal purposes for his world. Renewal means more than reinventing ourselves; it means rediscovering the primal power of the Spirit and the gospel already present in the life of the church—reconnecting with this purpose and recovering the forgotten ways. This purpose and potential have always been there, but individuals and communities have largely lost touch with them.

If we are going to make the change from community to communitas, and not just end up with an unsustainable adrenaline-junkie culture, we must have a sophisticated process to form people into adventurer-disciples.

The church of Jesus needs to wake up from the exile of passivity and embrace liminality and adventure or continue to remain a religious ghetto for culturally co-opted, fearful, middle-class folk.

Think of mission like the paddles of a defibrillator applied to the chest of a dying church.

In missional churches, the baby birds have been pushed out of the nest and are learning to fly for themselves.