How to Start a Missional Community

One of our diocesan goals is that every congregation would have at least one missional community. So how do you get started? Robert Logan in his book, The Missional Journey, describes a clear path to forming missional communities. He puts all of the steps into four basic phases:

• Get Ready
• Get Going
• Stay With It
• Keep Growing

So, if you are looking for some help to get started, here is what one of the most strategic church planting leaders in the world lays out for us.

Get Ready

1. Engage the culture around you by building relationships and living incarnationally. In order to be a community on mission you need to have a clear sense of the needs, dreams, fears, joys of the people you want to reach with the love of Jesus. You also need to have relationships with these folks.

2. Pray for faith conversations. As you listen and ask questions of the people you are getting to know, you want to be learning about their spiritual journey. The goal is to come alongside people and cooperate with what God is already doing in their lives.

3. Look for the person of peace in a community. Every community has someone who is able to connect with others. Sometimes that person has a public, formal leadership role (Mayor, for example). Often the person of peace is an informal leader. Along with their ability to connect widely to a community of people, the person of peace is also open to the message of Jesus. Lydia is good example of this kind of person (see Acts 16:13-15).

4. Understand the triple focus of a missional community: sacrificial serving, authentic relationships and spiritual transformation.

Get Going

1. Start gathering together with people interested in being part of the missional community (regardless of numbers). Through prayer, worship, support and encouragement, you can begin to build authentic relationships and see spiritual transformation.

2. Start a missional (outwardly focused) ministry of some kind. What group of people need to know Jesus? What need in your community do you feel called to address through prayer and action?

3. Remind each other of God's involvement in your lives and ministries. Henry Blackaby, in Experiencing God, talks about finding what God is doing and joining Him there. God is always already present in people's lives before we arrive.

4. Create groups-within-a-group. As your missional community moves beyond 7 or 8 people you will want to create groups of 4-7 within the larger group for more personal sharing and personal support.

5. Make disciples. We are all on a life-long journey of spiritual growth. Help new Christians learn what it is like to follow Jesus.

Stay With It

1. Find the balance between challenge and encouragement. Missional communities are called beyond comfortable boundaries. So we need to be pushing each other to move beyond what is easy. We also need to celebrate what we see God doing.

2. Provide coaching and peer gatherings. We all need intentional conversations that help us reflect on what is going on in our lives.

3. Help people discover and develop their spiritual gifts.

4. Encourage life-long learning.

Keep Growing

1. Develop new leaders by identifying apprentices.

2. Celebrate what God has done and is doing.

3. Look for new opportunities to form missional communities among different people or with a different community focus.

This is a lot to assimilate. But, I encourage you to get Logan's book, The Missonal Journey, and read it with others. If you want to get more from Robert Logan, check out his website: www.loganleadership.com.

With you in the partnership of the Gospel,

Jim Hobby

Exponential 2013 - 2 - Shift from Reaching to Making

Discipleship Shift #1 - From Reaching to Making

There has been a tent revival going on in Thomasville for a week. So many people are "getting saved" that the folks leading the meetings have decided to stay for several more days. Every day teams of people take to the streets of Thomasville with the salvation message. At last count there have been over 4,000 "salvations." While I applaud the zeal behind the meetings, have supported the effort and am praying that God will indeed be bringing people to Himself, I wonder if the focus on conversion will transform my city. Perhaps we need to shift our focus from reaching people to making disciples.

At the heart of discipleship is a journey into maturity. Making disciples is making learners and followers. Paul puts it this way, "Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ" (Col. 1:28). Proclamation for Paul included warning and teaching; its goal being maturity, not just praying a prayer. But here is a big question for most of our churches: what does a mature disciple look like?

Lifeway has developed a tool for measuring transformational discipleship. It looks at 9 areas: Bible engagement, obeying God and denying self; serving God and others, sharing Christ, exercising faith, seeking God, building relationships, being unashamed, and doctrinal positions. You can take an assessment for $9.95 that gives you some feedback about how you are doing. My lowest score had to do with sharing Christ with unbelievers - not exactly shocking news. But the question for me is, What are your going to do about it? I need to address this place of deficiency in my personal discipleship.

How does your congregation define maturity in a disciple of Jesus? What is in place to help people move towards that vision?

Exponential Conference 2013 - 1

It has been three weeks since Shari and I were heading to this year's iteration of the Exponential Conference entitled "Discipleshift"; likely the largest gathering of church planters in one place in the world. I came back with a to do list of 31 items based on what I was learning. If you can swing $69, you can have access to the main sessions. Go to www.exponential.org/extend and check it out. On their website you can also find a bunch of free ebooks!

The focus of the conference was discipleship and the ways that the Church needs to shift it focus. In the next posts I'll spend some time with each of the shifts that Exponential talked about. But a huge question the conference raised for those of us interested in church planting is this: Is church planting a goal or the by-product of something else, namely making disciples?

As part of my Bible reading, I read Acts 14 and 15 this morning. I was struck by Paul's discipleship method. He told anybody who would listen about Jesus. Then he got together with them wherever he could. And he spent as much time with them as he could until he was thrown out of town. On his way back through town he appointed elders for their community. He made disciples and got a church.

Obviously, the two things are inextricably connected. But which one is the focus? Is it possible to gather a congregation without actually making disciples? Is it possible to make disciples without having them eventually coalesce into a congregation? And what exactly do we mean by "disciple" and "church?" After all the diversity of expressions of the Church is dizzying. What does a house church have in common with a multi-site mega-church? It's like asking what does a hamster have in common with an elephant? But, as in the church question, though the hamster and the elephant are not the same species, they are both mammals. They, in fact, have a lot in common. Likewise the divergent congregations. Both have expressions of worship and prayer. Both have ways of devoting themselves to the fellowship. Both are on mission in the world. And both are making disciples. Just in very different ways. Which brings us to the shifts that we need to make and the next post.

Wrong Address

I was heading to Gainesville, FL, on Monday to teach at a Perspectives course being hosted by Passage Church. I typed the address of the church, 2020 NW 15th Street, into my phone's map app and merrily followed its directions...until I arrived at the address to discover no church anywhere around. So I did what any sane individual would do. I drove around the block (twice!) hoping that a large church building would appear.

At this point I stopped and googled the church in my smart phone; only to discover that I couldn't navigate the webpage to find the address. Since I didn't have the phone number of anyone at the church, I called my daughter who lives in Gainesville (no answer) and then my wife (no answer) hoping that they would be able to look up the church online.

Having exhausted all my resources and with the time that I was supposed to be there fast approaching*, I prayed; then drove to the closest place I thought I might be able to get directions. The clerk at CVS gave me a I-just-moved-here-from-Alaska-to-go-to-school look when I asked if he knew where the church was. Providentially, a lady was standing a few feet away and knew where the church was. She gave me simple directions. I jumped in my car, drove straight to the church and arrived 2 minutes before I was to start speaking.

As I was collecting my thoughts I realized I had just encountered one of the Lord's object lessons. The address of the church is actually 2020 NE 15th Street - just one letter different than I had typed into my phone. But that little error put me 30 blocks away from my destination.

According to God's call of Abram, His people are meant to be blessed so that they can be a blessing to all the families of the earth. But instead of typing "bless them" into our spiritual guidance systems we keep typing "bless me." And so we think that our mission is to find the best church to suit our needs. It's only off by two letters. But it is the difference between a church that pleases Jesus and a church that pleases Satan.

So, I want to spend the rest of my life being the lady at CVS who tells people how to find the true church.


*Actually time approaches at the same pace. It just seems to speed up if we are late for an appointment and slows down when we are waiting for Christmas.

Three Elements of a Successful Leadership Community

If you want to gather a group of leaders together, what are the elements that will create synergy and accomplishment? The folks at Converge have discovered that groups of leaders that gather around relationships, prayer/study, and mission tend to stay together longer and produce more results than groups of leaders that gather around only one of those elements. Think of them as three circles. Each circle by itself tends toward entropy (slumping attendance, confused direction, etc.). But when the three circles overlap there tends to be low entropy, high synergy and high results in shared mission.

What would that insight mean for a Vestry, staff, short-term mission team or Clericus?

Surprising fact: any personality can plant a church

Folks at the Orchard Group did a study to see if there was a correlation between church planting and personality profiles (using the DiSC assessment). What they found was that organizations tend to gravitate towards certain personalities (dominant and influencing) in placing planters. But they also found that any personality type can plant a church; albeit different types tend to plant different kinds of churches. The highly entrepreneurial planter tends to plant larger program-driven churches. Other personality profiles plant smaller, more intimate, relationally-driven churches.

So, anyone can plant. We will just all use different seeds.

Key Factors for Success in Church Planting

From Exponential 2012 - Key Factors in Successful Planting for the Experience of Converge

1. Assessment: by adding thorough assessment of potential planters Converge brought its success rate (i.e. the church still exists in 5 years and has attained self-sufficiency or is moving towards it) to 65%. There are many groups that are doing assessment. And since the basics of planting are the same regardless of denominational and geographical differences, this is something that can be "farmed out."

2. Coaching brought the success rate to 75%. While many groups do coaching, this is better done within the ethos and values of one's own organization. Therefore, raising up of coaches and developing a coaching ethos is crucial.

3. Introducing risk assessment and management brought the rate to 85%. Here are the eight risk factors that need to be taken into account when considering when and where a person/team should plant.

Four "strong" factors.
1. Funding. Lack of a clear funding strategy and/or lack of funds tend to create anxiety that leads to failed plants.
2. Cultural fit. The greater the cultural divide between the planter/team and the people the plant is intending to reach the greater the stress.
3. Number of ministry partners. Planting with a team is easier than showing up alone.
4. Number of pre-existing contacts. Planting among people you already know is easier than trying to build relationships with strangers.

Four "moderate" factors.
1. Proximity of family and friends. Converge has found that people who are close to family support are more likely to thrive in a planting setting.
2. Proximity of geographical roots. This is connected to cultural fit and pre-existing contacts. Planters who plant closer to "home" (however that is defined by the planters) are more likely to succeed.
3. Proximity of helpful churches. Plants connected to supporting churches tend to do better than ones that are isolated. "Mother," "sister," or "partner" churches can provide a variety of resources; prayer, money, members of a launch team, administrative help and personal encouragement, for example.
4. Prior ministry success. Planters who have no need to prove their competency as pastors tend to have lower stress levels.

These risk factors are helpful in recruitment, assessment, and placement since the goal is always to get the right person in the right place at the right time.