8 Simple Ways to be Missional
Jonathan Dodson (whose blog did a review of our book Launching Missional Communities) recently wrote an article for the VERGE Network on 8 simple ways to be missional. Loved his train of thinking and thought it was worth sharing.
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Missional is not an event we tack onto our already busy lives. It is our life. Mission should be the way we live, not something we add onto life: “As you go, make disciples….”; “Walk wisely towards outsiders”; “Let your speech always be seasoned with salt”; “be prepared to give a defense for your hope”. We can be missional in everyday ways without overloading our schedules. Here are a few suggestions:
1. Eat with Non-Christians. We all eat three meals a day. Why not make a habit of sharing one of those meals with a non-Christian or with a family of non-Christians? Go to lunch with a co-worker, not by yourself. Invite the neighbors over for family dinner. If it’s too much work to cook a big dinner, just order pizza and put the focus on conversation. When you go out for a meal invite others. Or take your family to family-style restaurants where you can sit at the table with strangers and strike up conversation. Cookout and invite Christians and non-Christians. Flee the Christian subculture.
2. Walk, Don’t Drive. If you live in a walkable area, make a practice of getting out and walking around your neighborhood, apartment complex, or campus. Instead of driving to the mailbox, convenience store, or apartment office, walk to get mail, groceries, and stuff. Be deliberate in your walk. Say hello to people you don’t know. Strike up conversations. Attract attention by walking the dog, taking a 6-pack (and share), bringing the kids. Make friends. Get out of your house! Take interest in your neighbors. Ask questions. Pray as you go. Save some gas, the planet, and some people.
3. Be a Regular. Instead of hopping all over the city for gas, groceries, haircuts, eating out, and coffee, go to the same places. Get to know the staff. Go to the same places at the same times. Smile. Ask questions. Be a regular. I have friends at coffee shops all over the city. My friends at Starbucks donate a ton of left over pastries to our church 2-3 times a week. We use them for church gatherings and occasionally give to the homeless. Build relationships. Be a Regular.
4. Hobby with Non-Christians. Pick a hobby that you can share. Get out and do something you enjoy with others. Try City League sports. Local rowing and cycling teams. Share your hobby by teaching lessons. Teach sewing lessons, piano lessons, violin, guitar, knitting, tennis lessons. Be prayerful. Be intentional. Be winsome. Have fun. Be yourself.
5. Talk to Your Co-workers. How hard is that? Take your breaks with intentionality. Go out with your team or task force after work. Show interest in your co-workers. Pick four and pray for them. Form mom groups in your neighborhood and don’t make them exclusively Christian. Schedule play dates with the neighbors’ kids. Work on mission.
6. Volunteer with Non-Profits. Find a non-profit in your part of the city and take Saturday a month to serve your city. Bring your neighbors, your friends, or your small group. Spend time with your church serving your city. Once a month. You can do it!
7. Participate in City Events. Instead of playing X-Box, watching TV, or surfing the net, participate in city events. Go to fundraisers, festivals, clean-ups, summer shows, and concerts. Participate missionally. Strike up conversation. Study the culture. Reflect on what you see and hear. Pray for the city. Love the city. Participate with the city.
8. Serve your Neighbors. Help a neighbor by weeding, mowing, building a cabinet, fixing a car. Stop by the neighborhood association or apartment office and ask if there is anything you can do to help improve things. Ask your local Police and Fire Stations if there is anything you can do to help them. Get creative. Just serve!
Don’t make the mistake of making “missional” another thing to add to your schedule. Instead, make your existing schedule missional.
great quote
The truth may set you free, but first it will shatter the safe, sweet way that you live.
Church planter workshop pics
Here are a few pictures from last week from our East Coast church planter workshop on Missional Communities (you can read some reflections on the workshop itself by clicking here). We had about 115 church planters make the trip out to Pawleys Island (undoubtedly the beach had something to do with that decision) for two days as we discussed how to plant churches using Missional Communities. The days consisted of teaching inputs and Q&A in a beautiful wooden chapel, a chance to experience MCs in real life flesh and blood (so it’s not all theory but reality), team consultations, lunches, dinners, time at the beach, worship, prayer, etc.
And, as we’ve mentioned before and are delighted to say, we are having a West Coast workshop for church planters…and it will be on September 13 & 14 in San Francisco. More details and registration to come soon.
Picture quality isn’t great, but it’s better than nothing, right?!
Dallas Willard on Grace and Spiritual Disciplines
Recently, Dallas Willard spoke on the main stage at Catalyst and had some searing insights on how grace connects with spiritual disciplines. John Ortberg does a great job in bringing out some golden nuggets from Dallas. Definitely take 5 minutes to watch this.
Top 10 Reasons Missional Communities Fail
Last week our new Director of Content ran a two-part series on his blog that blew up on Twitter titled, “10 Reasons Missional Communities Fail.” I thought we’d highlight a few of those reasons on this blog, and if you’d like to, read the whole post by jumping over to his blog by clicking here.
Reason #1: The Missional Community leader doesn’t know how to disciple the other leaders in the MC. This can result in a few different outcomes:
- The Missional Community becomes the warped version of the culture they are trying to bring the Kingdom into. The leader doesn’t know how to disciple people to be missionaries to a culture, therefore they never truly learn how to be “in the world but not of it.” Because of that, they are more influenced by the culture than redeeming the culture they find themselves in. In this case, there is a lot more cultural relevance than there is Jesus.
- The Missional Community becomes a very religious space and is all about who is in and who is out. Doctrine is used as a weapon of defense and not something that helps to describe the reality of God’s Kingdom. People who don’t know Jesus find the MC the equivalent of running into a brick wall. In this case, there is a lot more law than there is Jesus.
- When people become Christians, there is no one to disciple them as neither the Missional Community leader or the other leaders in the group know how to disciple people. New believers become stagnant, and the life they were told about in the Gospel never comes to fruition and they become disenfranchised and divisions within the MC start to occur.
Reason #6: Too little mission…particularly at the start of the group.
If your MC is just starting, you need to do a LOT more mission than you do worship/teaching(UP) or times of hanging out with people already in the group (IN). You need to be out doing things that connect to Persons of Peace (people God has already prepared in advance to be open to you and your vision) in your mission context and then spending lots of time with them. If it doesn’t get into your DNA early…it won’t get in. Pragmatically, think of it this way: For every time you do something UP or IN focused in the first 3-4 months, you need to do AT LEAST 2-3 outward, mission focused things.
Reason #8: The Missional Community is a mini-Sunday service.
This is one of the more common mistakes people make. They don’t realize that a Missional Community is a FAMILY on mission together, so the task is to build a family, not an event. But because all they have seen most of their lives is a Sunday morning church service (i.e. event), they do that…just without the same quality or number of people to make it appropriate from a socio-dynamic perspective. These communities sink faster than an anvil in the ocean. If people who don’t know Jesus were interested in going to a worship service, they’d find one that’s done well with a number of people that allows them to observe in an anonymous fashion.
a window in…
While Sally and I are on sabbatical, the 3DM team living in Pawleys Island, SC are really continuing to live like a family on mission. One of the things people frequently talk about when they visit or are with us during Learning Communities is that our team (including all of the spouse’s and kids) act as one big Missional Community…because we are! We pray together, laugh together, go to movies together, see people come to know Jesus together, eat together, basically…we truly live life together. We function as a spiritual extended family.
I thought I’d give one little practical thing the team is doing this summer to ensure we live out these family rhythms. You see, we’re acutely aware that when summer comes…things get harder. People are more transient. People mentally check out. People probably aren’t as plugged in with their faith or commitments to relationships. So whatever you do in the summer with something like Missional Communities…it needs to be VERY easy.
Well our extended family in Pawleys has decided to get together every Thursday night at a local mexican joint called Habaneros. When you add all of the adults and kids running around, it’s something like 32+ people. So they eat. Talk about the week. Enjoy each other. Have delicious salsa and chips and better than average chimichangas. (My favorite is that Steve Cockrams kids always order chicken tenders and french fries at a mexican place!) And then, after dinner, there is a big open space in the front of the restaurant and the dads play soccer with all the kids.
For the first few weeks it’s just the 3DM team, but in the upcoming weeks, they’ll start inviting Persons of Peace (people God has prepared in advance to be open to you and the Gospel) to come hang out too. Just tethering them into these relationships.
It’s simple things like this that can keep your Missional Community on track for the summer, keep a sense of momentum and really see massive breakthrough when you head into the fall.
FREE online Fivefold Ministry test
Our friend Tim Harvey (who is in one of our Learning Communities and is at Christ Church Ft. Wayne, which Ben Sternke is pastor of) took the Fivefold Ministry survey you can take at the end of Building a Discipling Culture and put it online for us.
So now…you can take the test online (and it immediately tabulates your results and gives analysis) for free. As Ephesians 4:11 discusses it, are you a Pastor, Prophet, Evangelist, Apostle or Teacher?
it’s gonna be a BIG summer
Here is just a a snapshot of things I’ve worked with our team on to release over the next 2-3 months. It’s going to be epic. 😉
- We’ll be releasing e-books of our core three books (our European friends will be particularly pleased!): Building a Discipling Culture, Launching Missional Communities and Covenant and Kingdom
- FREE online Five-Fold Ministry test with analysis. Are you an Apostle, Teacher, Evangelist, Pastor or Prophet?
- Taster teachings. People have been asking for years that we put videos of our Core Taster Teachings online for people who haven’t been able to make it to a Taster or are interested in coming. Soon you’ll be able to watch them online for free or get free audio downloads. Get excited.
- We’ll be announcing the ALMOST-FREE West Coast Missional Communities Workshop for Church Planters (I think it’ll be $25 a person to cover food).
- FREE e-book and PDF of our Core Teachings: Operating System, Spiritual Feudalism, Cultural Earthquake, 5 Capitals, Cultural Temptations and the Story of Sheffield.
First things first: If you frequent this blog, you know we’re doing a church planter workshop dealing with Missional Communities in two weeks. From our end, it’s been crazy how many people have signed up with no advertising accept through this blog. If you’re still looking to sign up but haven’t, you can register here, but do so quickly because registration is closing soon.
What’s the BIG NEWS for West Coasters?
We’ve had scads of people writing us, asking if we’d do one of these workshop on the West Coast…and so we’ve decided to do just that. We don’t have the exact dates/place quite yet (we should have that nailed down in the next week), but it’ll be sometime in the next 4-6 months.
So if you’re a West Coast church planter or know someone who is (or is thinking about planting) and is interested in Missional Communities…here’s what it’s all about:
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Increasingly, church planters are wanting to explore new and more effective ways of planting churches in a North American context that is more post-Christian with each passing day. Gone are the days when all you need to do is throw up a worship service with the right marketing and see a church spring up with people who aren’t already Christians. In most places in the United States, this just doesn’t work anymore.
Because of that, many church planters are starting to explore using things like Missional Communities and Huddles to start churches. While this isn’t necessarily new, it is fairly unknown in the United States. SO…we want to help!
If you are a church planter or know of one, because planting provides some very unique challenges, we’ve put aside two whole days to teach on, explore, model, answer questions and provide in-depth consultations on Missional Communities in a church plant setting. Cost will be minimal.
More details to come next week for this West Coast workshop.
Missional Communities series | Final Post
Well folks, this is our last post in our long-running Missional Communities series. And what better way to end it than by ending without new content; rather, an easy reference list of each of the past posts. Hope you find this helpful in the months and years to come.
Once again, if you’re really wanting to dive into Missional Communities, I can’t recommend our book long or loud enough,Launching Missional Communities: A Field Guide.
Lastly, if you’re unfamiliar with Missional Communities, I suggest a quick detour to this Wikipedia article, it’ll help familiarize you with the ideas, history, terms, theology and basics on practice.
Without further adue, here’s the Missional Communities series:
Post #1 | Keld Dahlman’s 6 principles for creating an extended family
Post #2 | A video of me answering, “What is a Missional Community?”
Post #3 | Essential ingredients of a Missional Community
Post #4 | Story of a skatepark Missional Community for teenagers
Post #5 | First step in starting a Missional Community
Post #6 | Transitioning a church to MCs without killing it
Post #7 | How the various Ephesians 4 base gifts lead MCs differently
Post #8 | How do immature Ephesians 4 base gifts function?
Post #9 | Identifying which Ephesians 4 base gift you are
Post #10 | Story of a family-based Missional Community
Post #11 | Why Missional Communities function better in groups of 20-50
Post #12 | Chances are, you’ve already led a Missional Community
Post #13 | Blog reviews of the book, Launching Missional Communities
Post #14 | Missional Communities in the early church: Part 1
Post #15 | Missional Communities in the early church: Part 2
Post #16 | Missional Communities in the early church: Part 3
Post #17 | Story of a Missional Community in Seattle and Kenya
Post #18 | Missional Communities, meals and practical advice
Post #19 | Jo Saxton and Michael Stewart talking Missional Communities
Post #20 | Pairing Missional Communities with Persons of Peace
Post #21 | How to disciple people to do mission
Post #22 | The real engine of Missional Communities
Bonus Post | Top 10 Reasons Missional Communities fail
a. Reasons 1-5
b. Reasons 6-10
Mike Breen 