3. Discern the vision groupings

Reconfiguring existing groups around missional vision seems to be a necessity.

I recently heard of a home group at the church in the UK who wanted to become more outward-focused. A great idea. They are thinking of serving once a month at a local old people’s home. Again, a fine idea if it can get off the ground.  My suspicion, however, is that it will be hard to put into practice.  Some people in the group frankly won’t have much interest in that particular area of service.  Many will find it hard to make the time.  Others will start enthusiastically but find it hard to sustain over the year.   Unless the group has ‘serving the old people’s home’ as its primary focus, it’s going to feel like a (worthy) bolt-on to the ‘main thing’ and people’s diaries will start screaming ‘stop’!

In Paris, we had the same issue: our home group was unable to make the transition outwards due to different visions and passions.  People had joined for different reasons and we couldn’t get united around an area of service or witness.  Result: stuck in the prayer/Bible study quadrant.

Now, in Maisons-Laffitte when we started to transition our home group to a missional community focus we encountered some of this too.   Although people were pretty on board for the new vision, after a while it became clear that our group harboured a few different mission callings.  Some of us felt called to our local neighbourhood; other (who live further afield) had their own mission contexts at work or home.  Although we wanted to have a critical mass and all be focused on one area, in reality we actually had a few different visions.

As a result, we are having to figure out how to reconfigure and focus on a smaller, geographically local missional community and a larger, more occasional huddle/training group to help others process their life in the light of their missional calling.  This is not easy, but I suspect this reconfiguring is going to be needed in a number of churches who are trying to transition home groups to missional communities.

Alex Absalom suggests 3 ways to help people understand the missional community that is right for them.  In our situation, where we are a pioneering group with no other MCs in our area, our issue has been that we thought being ‘mission minded’ was enough of a glue. It isn’t.  People do need to be released to serve the people God has impassioned them about.

2. Live the Life, Tell Stories

Building a missional culture is a prolonged process. I found that the group was not prepared to go where I myself (as the leader*) had not yet gone. This is a healthy but challenging dynamic: I had to ask myself some hard questions about whether I was living a missional lifestyle myself!

So now I try to wake up each morning and praying “Lord, send me today. Show me what you are doing and show me how I can join in.” I looked at my diary and examined how I was spending my evenings: what was the balance of family time, time with Christians, time with non-Christians, etc..  Intentionally scheduled time with friends, got myself out the house, tried to build strong relationships.

As I started to put things into practice, however feebly, I tried to tell stories to the rest of the group, to fire their imagination and reset their ideas of what ‘the normal Christian life’ might look like. This is slow going but it is the work of foundation-laying, the essential groundwork without which everything is just theory.

This is where leadership brings real responsibility and challenge. I would really rather explain frameworks and teach people the principles of mission and let them do it! But no. We do need to lead from the front… but (as Hugh Halter put it, I believe) occasionally jam the brakes on so the rest of the group pile up behind, before setting off again!

Recently I was chatting to a church leader who wanted to move his church into mission. He suspected he had to be being more missional himself. Too right! Like everyone else, full-time Church workers have to figure out how to make their entire life their mission field, how to serve both during and beyond their day job, and how to build meaningful relationships with non-Christians. It wasn’t hard for him to find an avenue. He loves cycling – so it seems a simple thing to get stuck into to the local cycling community. This is going to be a great way for him to live the life and have stories to tell.

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* actually deputy leader. Hey, Jesus is our leader!

1. Focus First On Developing Missional Lifestyles

We started with a flurry of outward activity that ended up being unsustainable. I think it was because we were focused on events and not a lifestyle.  We had a complicated monthly diary of social, spiritual* and service events which, frankly, was too much burden for what is still a very small group (at under 10 core team!).

When mission is something you add to your diary, it is very hard to sustain. People got tired and it all became complicated to manage. So we dialled back on the program and spent a considerable period of time encouraging people to see themselves as missionaries to their neighbourhoods and networks we have seen people really switch mindset. We did this via a simple weekly meeting where we processed each other’s lives through a missional lens, talked a lot about who we were called to reach and thought about some ways to make existing life more missional.

This change in perspective takes time for people to absorb, so be prepared to put the events on hold whilst you help people see their entire lives in a missionary light.

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(* yes, everything is spiritual, but you know what I mean, and it began with an ‘s’ so I kept it)

Our first six months was characterised by a strong outward focus – lots of parties and inclusive events -but we over-corrected in the outwards direction and lost the sense of community and discipleship.  We had a complicated calendar that tried to cover all the bases but in the end people just felt tired and confused.

The remainder of the year saw a swing back to the ‘up’ and ‘in’ dimensions of the group.  We started to experiment with focused ways of discipling each other (using Life Shapes, Huddles and other concepts from Mike Breen, 3DM, etc.) and we experimented with including our kids too.  Two of the three core families in our group had babies, and this very naturally slowed things down as they welcomed the new arrivals.

During this time, although it felt slow-going, the culture of the group was really being established as about ‘living on mission with Jesus’.  So people were starting to figure out what a missional lifestyle might look like for them.  This I feel was one of the major successes of the year, and an essential foundation going forward.

Of course, we had once more over-corrected and swung away from the ‘out’ dimension, as a group.  We were a tight knit discipling-unit but not the inclusive and accessible community that we aspire too. So, with an understanding of prayer and discipling each other as an essential foundation, we are once more turning to building inclusive community, with perhaps two main aspects. Firstly, trying to ‘do life together’ and intentionally find ways to invite others in to what we are already doing (going to the park, going swimming, having lunch,…).  Secondly, inviting others more intentionally into that social space so they get to glimpse what we’re all about too.

To do this, we are starting a discipline of simply getting our diaries out at our regular meetings and asking:  how did we do last week in terms of connecting with God, sharing our lives and being a blessing?  What opportunities are there over the next week or two to do those things? Simple stuff, but achievable and workable.

I have also become aware that we haven’t really be trained in ‘living the Jesus life’.  Our church backgrounds have provided us with a Biblical ethical/moral compass and some spiritual disciplines (prayer, Bible study) – perhaps even (hopefully!) a Christian world-view – but not really the skills and mindset we need to live as missionaries to our culture.  How do we bring word and deed together to really glorify God? How do we really help each other, day-in, day-out, to grow in maturity?  How can we explain how the gospel relates to the preoccupations of our neighbours?  This whole area of training is a big area that we need to explore over time.

My next post will digest all this into the lessons we’ve learned, though probably they are pretty clear from reading the above!

What about you?  What kind of learning curve have you been on in this whole area?

Disappointment

The disappointment: there are no magic answers!  Living in community on mission is long term, low key, daily work.  Once you get out of the lecture theatre and into the mission field, it gets messy! They also encounter many of the daily challenges we  have been facing in living and sharing the gospel.

Encouragement

The encouraging thing was that it’s not complex.  The TCH model actually is a lot simpler than many churches. As one of our hosts put it “I get the feeling in other churches being more committed means signing up for more rotas. Here it’s not like that … it’s just about living more on mission.”

Sharing daily life in small (8-25 people) ‘gospel communities’ turns out to be about making time for each other, building relationships with the broader neighbourhood, and mixing the two. They get involved in social action but tend to piggyback on existing initiatives rather than setting up parallel and cumbersome structures.  No rotas or programs; most people really are released into living daily life with gospel intentionality rather than getting sucked in to putting on church events and programs.  It really is about building relationships and not structures.

We in our fledgling missional community aren’t a million miles away.  We are relating more as friends/family, we are trying to encourage each other and reach out together.  We are on a similar track, though at an earlier stage of development.

Challenges

The TCH culture gave us some challenges to chew on too. They are very intentional at speaking the gospel as the way of discipling each other AND evangelising others.  This “speaking the gospel” is clearly culturally engrained; for us it is a skill we are trying to learn.  It involves looking at behaviours and reflecting on whether this reflects a heart-idol (chasing after something that promises fulfilment that only God can really provide) or a false belief (a lie about God that is holding them back from receiving His grace).

It was challenging and exciting to see people so committed to the gospel that they really do ‘put their money where their mouth is’: many of the people we met had moved houses, left comfortable middle-class settings to reach the unreached (Kurds, Asians, white working-class estates, rural communities…).

Questions

I didn’t see much prayer during the few days I spent at TCH.  I have no doubt this goes on, but perhaps it would have been good to see a bit of that and taken part. So my question back to the TCH team would be around that balance between activism and prayer.  I’m sure Steve and Tim would point me to Value #8 or something, but I’m talking about what happens on the ground.

Anyway, it was a well organised, fun and thought-provoking week.  It has definitely helped us shape our life around the principles of ‘doing daily life together, in community and on mission’ and I would recommend it to others looking for some tangible inspiration of do-able mission in a UK/European setting.

Everyday Church is a follow up to their earlier Total Church book, and its subtitle “mission by being good neighbours” resonates strongly with our desire as a gospel community. The book is written out of experience in the UK which is great as somebody working in Europe (a similar missional context than the USA) but the book is also relevant for US readers as the US church finds itself slipping out of the centre (er, center!) of American culture too.

Chester and Timmis go to considerable lengths to make the point that the church is no longer at the centre of society but on the margins, and so we can no longer expect respect, privilege or institutional influence. In other words, Western Europe (and much of the USA) can no longer be described as ‘Christian society’. Personally I felt they spent an excessive amount of time hammering this point home: perhaps that is simply because I am utterly convinced of this already; presumably they know people that haven’t accepted this point.  However, the rest of the book uses the book of 1 Peter as the basis for a reflection on how Christians are to live as strangers and aliens in the world, so establishing the links between our context and that of 1 Peter is important.

The book then starts to explore the implications of a marginalised “outsider” church in a secular culture:

• the secular culture is no longer Christian culture
• it’s a mission field – but are we really starting to act like missionaries? and practical cross-cultural mission?
• we need to rediscover the culture, understand it, and love it
• we are called to be a distinctive community – chosen and sanctified for missional obedience (1 Peter 1:2)
• this distinctiveness comes from love (in everyday life) – not by trying to imitate the culture (cool events)

So how do we ‘do community’? Their answer is we don’t! Community has to come out of a focus on God’s Word, rather than as the focus itself.  Chester and Timmis provide some great insights in how we can care for each other on a daily basis by applying the gospel to each others’ lives.  In particular, they use the 4Gs (God is great… good… glorious… gracious) as a very helpful framework to relate God’s word to the problems of everyday life – and to our own efforts to pastor each other!

Addressing mission, the authors explain Peter’s mission strategy for marginalised congregations in hostile contexts: respond with good deeds; live such good lives that people glorify God; declare God’s praises with words. “Our lives are the evangelistic events!”  A great practical question they explore (albeit briefly) is how can we infuse our daily, weekly and monthly routines (from commuting, to shopping, to getting a haircut) with community, mission and gospel components?

One of the highlights for me (alongside the 4G’s discussion mentioned above) was the section on evangelism.  Tim and Steve explain that they are NOT natural evangelists so their advice amounts to “evangelism for dummies – a guide for the rest of us” which is wonderful! They talk about how our culture has its own stories of creation, fall, redemption and consummation that we can identify and present a gospel alternative to,

There is plenty more in the book that is helpful, practical and solidly grounded in theological, Biblical, reflection.  Their focus on making sure that the church is being the church, authentically and faithfully, throughout the week – rather than focused on programmes and events and a ‘church schedule’ – comes through practically and compellingly.  The book is highly readable, and I would recommend it to any Christian serious about understanding their calling in today’s Western culture.

• 50/50:  invite at least as many non-Christians as Christians to events, parties, etc. that you host or organise
• Phone a friend:  add someone to your day.  Do what you were going to do anyway but invite a non-Christian friend or family along.
• Ask the audience: go to where the people are, and get chatting with the people you meet.

A short and memorable list to run through when you are thinking “how can I be mission-minded today and build relational bridges”?

Building relationships and making contact with people disconnected from God.  Avoiding the trap of the ‘holy huddle’ where Christians spend all their time with each other.  This is really about intentionally investing in relationships and praying to find your ‘people of peace’.

Building respect with the people we know by allowing them to observe how Christ makes a difference in our daily lives.  This is about loving people and about listening to them and understanding why they aren’t Christians. It’s about living a distinctive life and providing commentary on that so that people can make linkages between how they see us behave and what we believe. And it is about asking them questions that make them question their unchallenged assumptions that have led them to reject the gospel. The outcome of this step is really building respect for our behaviour (seeing the positive impact of following Jesus) and for our beliefs (seeing belief in Jesus as a valid and defensible possibility/option).

Building relevance with the people we know so that they can see how knowing Christ would make a difference to their daily lives. This is about us showing how the gospel’s message of love, grace and hope meets their deepest needs; and how a Christian perspective can help make sense of broader issues in the world and in life.

Building response by explaining the gospel truth plainly and to invite people to follow Jesus. This is fundamentally about helping people understand their need for redemption and the call of Jesus to repent and believe the good news and follow him.

I think these stages are very helpful, as it helps us understand what people are likely to need and when. It can also help us understand where we are strong and where we are less able to help people progress.  We will do some more thinking as a group about how to apply this framework to our lives.

• F – Friends (existing, lapsed and potential)
• R – Relatives (family members who don’t yet know Christ)
• A – Associates (at work)
• N – Neighbours (in your street, working in local shops, at the gym, known through local activities,…)
• K – Kids (parents of your children’s friends)

It’s a helpful way of thinking through where God has already placed you.  You are almost certainly the only Christian that some people in each of these categories know.  What a responsibility! If we don’t pray for them and serve them, who will?

(Thanks to Tim Chester for the book suggestion in the first place)

In one sense, our current life defines to whom we are sent.  The people we meet in our daily lives – our family, colleagues, friends, acquaintances and passing contacts – can all be and should be people we serve and reach out to.

However, there is also a question of calling. Is there a particular people group that God is calling us to serve particularly? Who should we reorganise our time, resources and energies around?

An understanding of our missional vision will bring focus and purpose to our daily rhythms and help us to move forward. Sometimes our calling will have a strong match with our current life. We may have a particular heart for our colleagues for example.  But it may also be totally out of the perimeter our current life.  For example, when the missionary Hudson Taylor first developed a heart for China we was living in the UK.  Life – UK, Missional Vision – China.  Over time those separate zones started to overlap (starting with prayer for China, then gradually getting more involved) until he was living in China, dressed as a Chinaman and speaking mandarin.  Missional vision led to missional action.

In our missional community we have spent quite some time talking about our corporate missional vision (who, as a group, will we serve and reach?) Last night we focused more on our individual missional visions, to help everyone understand their calling better and also how our Missional Community fits into that picture.

The heart of the exercise was completing a simple sentence:

“I believe that God is sending me to…” 

The responses were a typical mix of neighbourhood focus and network focus:

• “I believe that God is sending me to my colleagues and to fathers of young families in my local area”
• “I believe that God is sending me to young families who have just arrived in town”
• “I believe that God is sending me to my colleagues and to people involved with me in a particular local charity”
• “I believe that God is sending me to the area where I have just moved”
• “I believe that God is sending me to my colleagues and to parents/families in the local area”

Even just saying it out loud was an important step. If God is sending us, how do we remain faithful and proactive in responding to that call?

So how about you.  What is your missional vision?  Who is God sending you to?