Tag Archives: community group

June 6, 2012 · 10:06 am

To Lead Well, Share Well

I was meeting with a leader of one of our Community Groups who was exhausted. He was ready to give up, discouraged by the lack of participation from the rest of the community and felt like he was doing too much. He thought the best answer was to quit leading and end the Community Group. After a good conversation over lunch, it became clear that one of the biggest issues facing the Community Group was that he was trying to lead everything. This seemed counterintuitive to him and to most of us. “If I’m the leader, shouldn’t I be leading everything?”

The biggest issue I see in leadership is hoarding responsibility. It comes from a great place, but does not serve the leader, nor does it serve those being led. It burns out leaders, frustrates those being led and rarely mobilizes or develops other leaders.

This is a major issue for gospel-centered communities on mission. To lead well, leaders must share well. Leadership is not about doing everything, being the superhero who plans every event, meets with every person, or finds every opportunity for mission for the community.

Leading like Christ leads us takes an empowering approach, especially to a community. This kind of leadership reflects the gospel of Jesus Christ. Believing in the gospel of Jesus Christ requires people to believe that we have flaws and only Christ was truly perfect in every way and sphere of life. A leader who is a follower of Christ does not assume that they can do everything the community or group needs accomplished.

Missional communities desperately need leaders who humbly seek to share responsibility for leading the community. The question we need to answer is why do we typically hoard leadership?

We View it as Scriptural Expectation

For many of us, we view this type of leadership as very scriptural. Aren’t we supposed to lead like Christ? Doesn’t this mean we sacrifice most and take on most responsibility, not demanding from others? This is a view of leadership doesn’t think a leader is ever supposed to share responsibility.

The good news for every leader: they are not Jesus Christ. Christ alone could fully embody every perfect gift and bear the burden of us all. The scriptures that follow Christ’s life, death, and resurrection point the need for communal leadership that seeks to empower every Christ follower for the work of ministry.

This is the point of passages in Romans 12, 1 Corinthians 12, and Ephesians 4 that speak to the reality we see everyday. We are all gifted uniquely, which leads us to need one another to accomplish the mission that God has placed in front of us. We cannot do this alone and the community can lead through individuals taking leadership in a variety of ways.

This how the scriptures speak of leadership and how it is demonstrated for us in the stories of the Bible. A community led by a community of people.

We Fear Losing Control

For some of us, if we’re honest, we fear losing control of the outcome. This could be born out of fearing that quality will suffer or that it won’t get done or done perfectly.

The gospel of Jesus Christ can free us from this. Christ’s gospel reminds us that we couldn’t accomplish salvation on our own and we were in need of Jesus to do it right for us. It frees us from thinking so highly of ourselves that we think we need to do everything or it won’t be done well.

Quality tends to suffer most when people hoard leadership most. Sharing leadership may result in a dip in quality, but part of good leadership is coaching and empowering those you share with to better than you were.

This sounds that a nice ideal, but it may actually be what is preventing us from sharing leadership in the first place.

We Fear Others Being Better Than Us

There are some leaders who don’t share responsibility and if they were really honest, would admit that some of it has to do with fear of others doing it better than them.

When we look at Jesus and His leadership, once again we are encouraged to move beyond this fear and make it a hope. Jesus says that His disciples will do greater things than what they saw Him do. He didn’t have a fear that they would accomplish more and do greater things, it was His hope and plan! Isn’t that amazing?

We see this same mentality in Barnabas in the book of Acts. If you follow the story of Barnabas, you see that he was the one who took a risk on Paul and discipled him. Over time Acts tells the story of how the discipler (Barnabas) takes a back seat to the disciple (Paul).

Great leaders don’t fear others being better than them, they aim for it. Sharing leadership can be the best way to empower and develop leaders that will take the community to greater places. It will redefine success for leaders who tend towards wanting credit and seeking glory, to wanting the same for others.

Leader who seek the glory can tend towards using people to get their own ends, instead of being for people, wanting greatness for those they lead.

We Don’t Know How

For others, and specifically for the Community Group leader I had lunch with, they don’t know how to share leadership.

Over lunch, we discuss the various aspects of his Community Group. They were seeking to be a healthy missional community. A community that prayed and discussed the scriptures together, ate meals together, served together, had accountability and incorporate non-Christ followers into the community. The main problem was that he was the only one initiating all of these things.

After discussing the people in his community and what they are passionate about in the community or naturally gifted in, it became apparent that the next step in his leadership development was to help them and given them ownership.

The first step in sharing leadership is personal invitation as opposed to mass messages of requesting help. This means identifying the potential gifts of those in the community, encouraging them in those gifts and personally asking them to use their gifts for the benefit of the community.

I encouraged the leader to work with them to get started and follow up with them after they began leading, but then to give them the freedom to lead. Eventually, a leader has to move from directing to coaching to fully trusting those with whom they share leadership.

The biggest transformation that takes place through shared leadership is the death of a consumer community and the birth of a contributing community. An entire community that seeks to contribute to the overall health of the missional community based on the gifts God has given them.

Only when this happens can the community truly display Jesus to one another and their neighborhood.

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May 15, 2012 · 10:37 am

The Life Cycle of a Missional Community

At the beginning of each new season of Community Groups at Apostles Church, we gather together as leaders to re-focus on the gospel and our core values while also highlighting important points of emphasis for the season. Back in January we gathered for 3 hours, had amazing conversation, shared a meal and communion with one another to start the year. It was a great beginning.

One of the things we discussed was the life cycle of a gospel-centered community on mission (missional community). Every living thing has a specific life cycle and it’s important to identify this for a Community Group so leaders don’t have false expectations throughout leading their community.

Every community goes through a time of formation, fun, messiness, mission, and multiplying.

Formation

This is the beginning of the community where developing relationships, vision, and a cohesive direction happen. It’s a crucial time, but it also takes longer than most people think.

Many leaders approach a new community thinking it will develop great relationships quickly and when the first few gatherings of the community turn out to be awkward, they’re confused. Communities typically take at least 3-6 months to form quality relationships and begin to care for one another well. There are some communities that form faster and some slower, but it generally takes about this much time.

This is the point where the community lays the foundation, vision, and future direction for the community. For missional communities, it is essential to begin with the understanding of and preparation for extending the gospel on mission and eventually multiplying. Each community must recognize that this will not be the last community they will be in and more than that, begin seeking to extend the community to others from day one.

The community takes this time to get to know one another, to work through the awkwardness, to begin bearing one another’s burdens, learning how to care for one another and extend the message and mercy of Christ together as a community.

Fun

After the community forms, there is usually a time period where things are pretty smooth and enjoyable. Relationships have been developed, depth of gospel conversations is happening, and the community is beginning to extend the gospel. This usually happens for a few months.

It is easy during this time for the leader to feel like the community is successful, but the community is about to face a new challenge that can feel like failure.

Messiness

As a community is established on the foundation of the gospel of Jesus Christ, it will eventually face a season of messiness. This time of messiness happens when people begin to feel comfortable sharing the junk in their lives. Sins, past hurts, brokenness, and ongoing struggles begin to be confessed. Most leaders assume failure because hard things are being revealed and it’s not “picture perfect”, but messiness is actually the best sign of gospel health. Confused yet?

Messiness reveals that the community is actually founded on the gospel of Christ and not just merely liking one another. The gospel of Jesus Christ tells us that we are sinful, but we don’t have to make up for our sinfulness, mistakes, errors, and brokenness because Jesus did that for us through His perfect life, forgiving death on the cross, and life-giving resurrection from the dead. As the community continues to encouraged people to believe this for every area of their life, the people in the community begin to realize that freedom from the burdens of sin and brokenness is actually possible.

An opportunity to be rid of guilt and shame through confession and belief in the power of the gospel gives great comfort to people and lets them begin to share where their lives don’t match up with Christ’s life.

This is messy and this is good. This is how a community becomes empowered by the gospel, by letting the truths of Christ’s redemptive work transform the individuals within the community. Healthy mission follows healthy gospel transformation. If you want to know why your small group or church aren’t on mission, it’s because the gospel of Jesus Christ hasn’t been applied to the community yet. When the gospel is applied, sin is confessed, and people become delighted in Christ over themselves, mission follows naturally.

Mission

As the gospel of Christ is applied to the ordinary life of the community, the ordinary life becomes a place of a great mission. Mission as a community is extending the regular rhythm and life activities of the community to people’s neighbors, co-workers, and family. It’s opening the community to new people to let them experience a community shaped by the gospel.

This happens through meals together, gospel conversations over late nights, nights out together, family outings and every other “normal” activity that both the community and the local neighborhood participate in.

One side of mission that can be neglected by a missional community (to its own peril) is extending the mercy of Jesus Christ through social justice. The phrase social justice makes some people cringe, but Jesus was clear that His disciples would experience His salvation in such a way that they couldn’t help but care for the poor and the marginalized. Something powerful happens to a community that takes ownership of their neighborhood to the point of creative compassion to meet the needs of the neighborhood around them.

Mission is a time where the community continues to grow in their knowledge of God, His gospel, and their love for one another. The results are usually that the community grows in number and then it faces another challenge. Will the community multiply or will it decline?

Multiplying

As a community grows, it approaches a point where it either multiplies, creating another community or it begins to decline as a community. Becoming multiple communities is challenging, but remember in formation that this was planned and discussed. It doesn’t make it any easier though. If the community chooses to delay multiplying, they will see the community decline, the conversations begin to lack the gospel depth they once had and mission becomes harder with a larger community.

Most communities delay multiplication out of fear. They fear losing friends and relationships. Multiplying is never easy, but often results in the exact opposite of these fears. I’ve seen multiple communities where friendships deepened as a result of multiplying. While they no longer spent as much time together, their time together developed a quality in encouragement and care that they had not seen before placing the gospel mission before their relationships.

Following multiplication, the life cycle begins again for both communities. It can be a confusing and challenging time after experiencing great things in the original community, but eventually each community begins to see the same results of the gospel they had seen earlier.

While this is the typical life cycle of a missional community, some communities that are starting in brand new areas where there isn’t a gospel presence from their church community face a more challenging and longer process for developing as a community. Tomorrow, I’ll look at the challenges facing missional communities that are started in new areas and later in the week, I’ll look at the key components of the formation of a new missional community.

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April 18, 2012 · 10:54 am

Missional Community Implications: For Life

As our church continues to aim toward being a collection of gospel-centered communities on mission (Missional Communities), I’ve noticed that many people are not ready for some of the real implications that come with this idea. Even as many other churches wrestle through this, one thing that must be acknowledged is that pursuing this Book of Acts type community has major implications for your life, your church, and even the world.

Missional community methodology has implications for our lives because the gospel of Jesus Christ has implications for our lives. True faith in Christ involves reorienting our lives to follow His ways instead of the ways we have developed over the course of our lives. These implications deal with many of things we say we treasure, but the end results are many of the things we long for but think we will never have.

Dying to the Unhealthy Embrace of Individualism

We have all bought into the American ideal of individualism, that the collective best is accomplished by each of us seeking our own individual ascension. While individualism can have the benefits of promoting innovation, it has the downside of achieving this at the significant cost of others and relationships.

We have taken an unhealthy embrace of individualism that has led us to be suspicious and judgmental of others and seek our own good no matter what happens to others or our society. We seek our own self-ascension to the destruction of others. Jesus shows us a much better way.

Of all the people that ever lived, Jesus had the right to pursue His earthly ascension, many even wanted to make Him king. But He consistently sought the advancement of others with His power, His love, and eventually with His death and resurrection. He knew that only by laying down His life and even His desires (as He expressed the desire for another way to God the Father before going to the cross), would the collective best have the opportunity to be fulfilled. The collective best now has potential because of Christ’s death and resurrection when Christ is embraced as Lord by faith.

For the Christian, we proclaim that we follow Christ’s life, share in His ways, and seek to mirror those ways to our world. He spent His life with a community of people seeking to bless everyone He interacted with leaving us a pretty high bar as our standard for life.

A Life Bound Up with a Community

When a Christian becomes a part of a Community Groups or Missional Community, they are pursuing the life Christ laid out for them, but what they are usually not ready for is the required change. Committing to any type of community means that work, life events, and family time will be affected. This is true for buying season tickets to a sports team, joining a community organization, or even over-committing to work.

Committing to a missional community means we have less of our perceived sovereignty over our time and our life. We open ourselves up to gracious intrusion by others when our homes are less put together, we’re less prepared and it’s less convenient to us.

To be a part of a community is not to add more events. It will require a realignment of the current events of your life to align with a group of people, which may mean less events. You will likely be doing many of the same things, but no longer doing them just for yourself or by yourself.

Meals, recreation, and regular hang out time become community activities rather than individual escapes. And before the introverts go crazy, it doesn’t mean that alone or private time doesn’t happen, but it does mean that alone time is meant to refresh you to engage with a community of people.

Your Stuff is not just for you anymore

In Acts 2:42-47, we see the first church established in a response to the gospel of Jesus Christ. It’s described as a community with shared beliefs, shared life, and shared resources. It begs the question, am I ready for my stuff to not just be for me? We’ve been taught and continually marketed to that we work so we can purchase and we all need to purchase the exact same stuff so each of us can have it.

What if we viewed our stuff as community stuff? What if we arranged our homes to enable hospitality? De-cluttered to become welcoming and became comfortable with our stuff being messed up and potentially ruined if it meant experiencing relationships in community.

The implications of missional communities is to shift our thinking from if I have more stuff, I’ll be happier, to recognize that real happiness comes from real relationships. It may changes our litmus test for purchases to be more gospel-centered. We may start measuring a purchase by how it can be a blessing to other people and not just a blessing to us.

You are expected to give & not just receive

Church culture has become great at letting a few people lead many people, placing the majority of people on the side of receiver and the few people as givers. Missional communities by their very nature require shared leadership and everyone in the community taking responsibility and ownership for one another and a mission greater than themselves.

This implication is that you become expected to contribute and not just consume a conversation or relationship. This means you have to stop complaining about the community not caring for you enough or giving you enough attention. It’s not that you won’t be cared for by the community, it’s that you help create a caring community for everyone, including yourself.

It also requires that you begin to remove conditions on your contributions to others. Unfortunately, we judge whether to care for someone based on our perceived value they bring to the community and us. A gospel-centered missional community does not operate like this. It recognizes that the love of God was given to us in the gospel of Jesus Christ not because we were good enough, smart enough, or people liked us, but because God chose to extend that love to us. He even chose to do it when we weren’t living like He demands. This is the nature of grace and a community embodies it well when they extend love based on God’s definition of value.

Assessing what we truly want

Missional communities affect what we value, but it ultimately forces us to ask what we really want in life. Most of us want quality relationships, deep conversations, and purpose to our lives, but too few us evaluate if our lives are set up in a way that these will ever be accomplished.

I truly believing aligning yourself and committing to a community increases all of the things we truly desire. I’ve never experienced more joy and enjoyment of life as being in the midst of a community that loves the gospel of Jesus Christ most. The implication of this type of gospel enjoyment is the creation of a community that blesses one another and the world.

Tomorrow I’ll tackle the implications for the church and Friday I’ll deal with the implications missional communities has on the world.

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March 20, 2012 · 9:37 am

Missional Community Success: Gospel, Not Mission

I have heard many people say, “What you celebrate, you also cultivate.” It’s absolutely true, which makes storytelling and defining success a huge deal whether it is in a business environment, a classroom, at home, or in the church.

For missional communities, the idea of a group of Christians being a gospel-centered community on mission, it is most definitely true. But this forces us to question what we are celebrating. Is success in a missional community only multiplying that community into two or three communities? Is success only celebrating baptisms? Is it a service project?

What you celebrate, you will also cultivate.

If the above list is what you are celebrating, you will likely see more of it, but if they are the only things you celebrate, what are you creating in the process? What aspects of a gospel-centered community on mission suffer when these are the only measures of success?

I’ve been really impacted lately going back to look at how Christ developed His disciples to eventually lead a movement that would change the world. One of the most impacting passages on this for me lately has been Luke 10:17-20. This follows the disciples being sent in pairs with some brief instructions. They go out in pairs, meet with the leaders of the community and based on receptivity stay or leave. They come back to Jesus and have this exchange.

“The seventy-two returned with joy, saying, “Lord, even the demons are subject to us in your name!” And Jesus said to them, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. Behold, I have given you authority to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall hurt you. Nevertheless, do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” Luke 10:17-20

Celebrate & Cultivate Gospel as Success

That last sentence is impactful. They came back with joy and were celebrating their mission success and Jesus does celebrate with them, but then redirects their rejoicing to the reality that they know God in the gospel of Jesus Christ. He tells them not to celebrate their mission success, but celebrate their salvation in the gospel.

There is no doubt that Jesus desired to see the things they accomplished in mission, but the mission was not the end in itself. When we only celebrate mission as success, we set ourselves up for failure. There is only so much control we have over the “success” of investing in a cause or sharing our faith with others. What happens when the success dries up and that which you celebrated has disappeared? For some, they will be fine, but I’ve seen many times where it completely wrecks people.

There’s pressure to maintain great mission to be seen as a successful Christian, there’s the potential for burnout because the focus has shifted from loving God to doing for God, and we begin to depend on ourselves and our effort rather than trusting and depending on God. Christians are called to faithfulness to God to bear fruit, not just a focus on mission.

Power of God & Purpose of Mission

This is why Jesus celebrates with them, but then immediately points to what they should be celebrating. He places their focus upward on God and the gospel because it is the power of God and the ultimate purpose of the mission.

The gospel is the power of God that motivates mission. So celebrating and loving the gospel is the only way to sustain mission. By the gospel we know, experience, and rest in the love of God that is rooted not in our efforts, but the work of Christ in His life, death and resurrection. We are reminded that it is ultimately God who gave us the gospel, gifted to us a great salvation providing and empowering us to accomplish His mission through His message. It also places us back on the right purpose for our mission.

Mission doesn’t end on serving your community or extending the love of Christ to your neighbor, the end is that Christ is exalted and worshipped as He should be. The final result should be that what is most valuable (Jesus) becoming most valued.

Seeing a merciful God that has chosen to punish Christ on the cross instead of us, exchanging His righteousness with our sin and rejoicing in God because of it is the aim for the Christian on mission. The purpose that all might see Jesus as the resurrected King and a good King at that.

Widening the Lens of Success

We must widen our definition of success in gospel communities on mission. We have our favorite stories that we share, but why not share and celebrate the messy side of community? A community that is messy is usually the result of the gospel sinking in deep into the lives of the people in the community. They believe there is hope for change, a way out from their hurt, their anger, their addictions, and they’ve been told they won’t be defined by them anymore because of Christ. Is there any more comfortable environment to share these things than a community centered on the gospel?

But the lack of celebrating the messiness makes leaders feel like they are failing if there are sins, errors of judgments, addictions, etc. when it’s the very reason we have the gospel! This is success in the gospel and not failure in mission.

Widening the lens of success means that you get to rejoice often. You get to rejoice with the community when people seek to live near the community  and how they seek God together and find an apartment. We celebrate when we see the gospel setting people free from addictions, or fear of man. We celebrate when conversations no longer center on ourselves and our thoughts, but on Jesus and His scriptures. We get to celebrate so many things that express the love of God being extended to other through the community.

We still rejoice in the mission, but it’s always in light of the gospel and not on its own. Mission gets put in its rightful place, a byproduct of the gospel of Jesus Christ and not our grounds for celebration.

In celebrating the gospel, Jesus becomes our foundation for hope, joy, approval, and freedom. He never gets replaced by the work of our hands. He deserves the reward of His suffering, a people praising His name, not just their work for Him.

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February 24, 2012 · 10:35 am

Missional Community: Proximity over Affinity

At our church, we are defined by 3 core values, Gospel Enjoyment, Intentional Community, and Prayerful Mission and our Community Groups aim to contextualize these values in their neighborhood. They are often guided by 3 convictions that we believe assist them in being a gospel community on mission. Those 3 convictions are proximity over affinity, rhythms over events, and integrating children in the Community Groups.

One of the major shifts we made over a year ago is moving from affinity based small groups (marrieds, families, single men, single women) to proximity based gospel communities on mission. We made the shift for a few reasons.

Gospel Mission

When you gather around affinity, an unintended result is that people don’t even reach outside of their affinities in their own church. If they can’t even be on mission within their own church to people who are different, they will have difficulty being on mission to those different than them outside your church community.

We had a few Community Groups that were gathering people from all 5 boroughs in Manhattan and because of the traveling time and challenges, they were really unable to be in each other’s lives on a regular basis that would lead to true community that encourages and exhorts. They were unable to be on mission together on an everyday basis. It presented many challenges.

Gospel Identity

Additionally, people begin to define themselves by their affinity and it has the danger of becoming their primary identity over the gospel. This was evident to me when we made the shift and the pushback I received was asking how a single man can identify with the other men in the group that all identify themselves as husbands and fathers. The reality is that the gospel is your primary identity and then defines the way you live as a husband and father just as the gospel is the single man’s primary identity and he seeks to live it out as a single man. A husband and father can be challenged by the single minded devotion to Christ of the single man or woman, just as the single man can be challenged in what it means to become a man who pursues covenant and disciples children.  It also seems to be a problem when Jesus or Paul is unable to hang out in your small group time.

Gospel Presence Where You Are

Another reason we made the shift is that as you read the scriptures, there is a consistent challenge to love the city where God has sent you, to not assimilate into the ways of the city, but to seek its flourishing, its welfare, its shalom, which is Hebrew for holistic flourishing. We see this idea in the old testament as the Lord speaks through Jeremiah to challenge the exiles in Babylon to seek the welfare, literally the shalom or holistic flourishing, of that nation that they have been brought to serve because in seeking its flourishing, they will flourish. In the New Testament, Paul in Acts 17 describes God as determining the boundaries of our habitations so that people would know God.

As a result, transitioning from affinity to proximity can be challenging and we focused on people over process during the shift. This caused a lot of people to ask for the first time “How can I love my neighborhood? My neighbors?” We just kept asking, what do you love about your neighborhood? What would you love to see God repair, restore, redeem through a community in your area? It’s changed how people walk the streets of their city, how they view their neighbors, and created a desire for mission in the people at Apostles Church.

We encourage people to find encouragement in their affinity within their Community Group or within the various Community Groups in the same region that partner together for a wider gospel presence.

In Transition

The transition is ongoing, but many left the Community Groups they were traveling to in order to start a Community Group in their neighborhood. For others, as their lease came up, they chose to move with gospel motivations. Instead of asking how can I get more space, the question becomes should I move to engage with a certain community or should I move to a certain area of town where there is a major need for gospel presence. We have to let the gospel guide all of our decisions.

For a few couples, this led them to move within a 10 block radius (1/2 a mile for you non-New Yorkers) of their Community Group. For others, this led them to move to Brooklyn Heights and Beorum Hill in Brooklyn to see a gospel community get started where there hasn’t been a large presence.

With proximity becoming a conviction, our Community Groups now gather around the gospel, the identity they have in Christ as the bond that forms them together and the mission they are all on. It opens opportunity for mission to families for our singles and opens up mission to singles for young marrieds and families. As a result, we are more adequately reflecting the demographic of the neighborhood in order to extend the gospel to our neighbors.

It forces us to get out of our comfort zones and be confronted with the challenging circumstances of others so we see how God has uniquely equipped us with our circumstances, our life stage, and our personalities to care for, encourage, and challenge each other where God has placed us.

Proximity provides the greatest ability for our Community Groups to embody and live out our core values of Gospel Enjoyment, Intentional Community, and Prayerful Mission.

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February 9, 2012 · 11:07 am

Cultivating Gospel Enjoyment in Communities

©iStockphoto.com/ Marcus Lindström

Yesterday, I outlined our core values and the convictions that end up guiding them. Our communities start with Gospel Enjoyment to center our lives on the finished work of Christ and define our lives through its implications.

In concept, it’s a good aim, but in order for it to move from rhetoric to reality we have tried to equip our leaders to cultivate gospel enjoyment in their communities.  I’m convinced that a community that loves the gospel above all else will love one another well without creating a dependence on the community. I’m also convinced that this is how mission is sustained, by loving Jesus more than success on mission. Any Christian will tell you though that it is hard to maintain the gospel at the center of life.

In order to help our leaders we provide up-front training and then aim to provide ongoing coaching as they seek to lead their community to love the gospel most and extend the gospel on mission. Here’s the focus of our upfront training for Gospel Enjoyment.

Caring for the Leader’s Soul more than their Success

Every time we gather our leaders we celebrate the gospel of Jesus Christ. We start by reminding them what Christ has done by His death and His resurrection and by celebrating what God has taught them as leaders (not just their success stories).

We clearly communicate to them that we care more about their love for Jesus than their ministry for Jesus. I’ve been through burnout thinking leading a Community Group was more important than cultivating my own love for Christ. We try our best to prevent that through consistently encouraging and challenging people to spend more time with the Lord.

We don’t merely tell them to spend time with the Lord, we train them to do it. We teach on Sabbath (planning & working to set aside a full day for rest & refreshment in the Lord), we teach & model prayer in our trainings, and we are now training people to study their bible through hermeneutic (fancy way to say bible study) principles.

We want our leaders to know that our expectations of them are faithfulness not great success. We believe God takes care of the results, but calls us to faithfulness to Jesus and faithfulness to loving others. Our leaders need to abide and spend time with the Lord to see fruit or success in their own lives and cultivate fruit in the lives of those they lead.

Practical ways to cultivate Gospel Enjoyment

It’s one thing to cultivate Gospel Enjoyment personally, but it can be a challenge to cultivate it in an entire community. When thinking about how we cultivate gospel enjoyment, we focus on 3 main things. We use the language of Soma Communities & Jeff Vanderstelt of gospel fluency, focus on the scriptures over the sermon, and equip for Christ-centered accountability.

Gospel Fluency

Gospel fluency is having such intimate knowledge of the gospel of Jesus Christ, that you are able to see how the gospel influences all of life. We encourage our leaders to consistently ask of themselves and others “How does the gospel address that?” This may sound Sunday school-ish, but it results in celebrating the magnificence of Christ.

For instance, if someone in your Community Group has been complaining about work and specifically about their boss. Maybe their boss is incredibly hard on them, rude to them, and they are now angry at their boss. How does the gospel address this? Well, when we look at Christ, He was beaten, cursed at, spat on, reviled, yet we are told He did not revile in return, He did not seek revenge, but extended forgiveness and love. Seeing the gospel shows us how much we need Jesus to guide more of our life if we are ever going to love our boss who seems to hate us. It changes us from wanting the worst for our boss to wanting our boss to know the love of Christ through our actions.

The hope is for this to be commonplace in the community to where every believer in Christ is beginning to process their life through the lens of the gospel and the scriptures.

Scripture-based though not a Bible study

A lot of missional communities or community groups are sermon-based discussion. This is an easy method of leading groups, but it is short-sighted. It doesn’t equip or encourage people to be in the scriptures. We develop a weekly guide that is based on the scripture for the upcoming sermon. We do this to avoid the “my pastor said this awesome thought that stuck with me” discussion and to encourage the “I was challenged by this passage of scripture” discussion.

It’s subtle, but it’s been helpful to place the focus on contributing to group discussion what you are learning rather than regurgitating what you consumed on a Sunday. Though we are scripture-based, we encourage our communities to not see themselves as a bible study. Bible studies are not bad, but often end as events for knowledge with little community application outside the time the group meets.

In addition to the weekly guide, we encourage our leaders to let the devotional life spill into the everyday. Our private time spent in prayer and reading the bible is meant to change us and then to be used to assist and change others. 

Christ-centered accountability

A big emphasis this year is cultivating gender-specific Christ-centered accountability groups. Accountability groups in church world too often mean a confessional booth and a pep talk to attack the sin you just confessed better next time. This puts the focus on sin and that’s not how you defeat sin. (See Colossians 2:20-3:4)

The aim for these accountability groups is Gospel Enjoyment, so the questions need to open-ended and focused on how we are growing in our love for Christ. Morality & the end of sin in our lives only comes when we finally see that Jesus is better than all of our desires.

As I mentioned at the beginning, this is just our starting point with the hope being that we care for our leader’s souls and encourage them to love Jesus most throughout their lives so they can encourage others to do the same.

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February 2, 2012 · 11:07 am

Missional Community Fail: When Community Takes Center Stage

So I have told you that I used to hate missional communities and that a church community that puts mission at the center leads people to burnout, kills community, and puts the Great Commission over the greatest commandments. These are things I’ve watched in communities, experienced in my own life, and try to my best to prevent as I seek to pastor 30+ communities in New York City.

The more subtle danger for missional communities is to make the community the central focus. It’s natural for us to care for those we already know and we know God calls us to care for and love people that share our faith. It’s subtle because we can use all of our energy and fill our schedule with church activities without realizing we have stopped giving time and love to those who do not share our faith.

It’s dangerous because the intent is to develop the community, but it ultimately stifles and kills the community.

3 Major Failures when Community takes on the central focus

1. Community turns Inward

When a community turns inward, eliminating the opportunity for people outside the community to participate, the goal becomes creating a community of perfection. We cannot neglect caring for one another and helping people become like Christ, but the goal is not to be perfect people, but to know our perfect Savior.

Eventually the community will consume itself. It won’t happen immediately, but eventually the community will become stagnant, no longer becoming like Christ because they are not welcoming to those outside of the community.

Have you ever seen a church split over a seemingly foolish issue? It happened because the community turned inward, began arguing toward perfection on secondary issues and drawing lines in the sand that everyone must follow. The gospel no longer became the only close-handed issue that couldn’t be compromised. It became a Christ+ community. You have to not only follow Christ, but you have to act in a very specific way like the community. Christ + specific belief/way of life is now the measure of your belonging.

2. Community becomes savior

Eventually the community becomes your savior. You can’t imagine living without the community and even the idea of creating a new community for new people is seen as evil and destructive to the community.

Yes, the Christian faith is a community faith. It is not simply a me and my God, but a us and our God faith, but an overdependence on the community for our spiritual relationship will kill the community. The Christian community was not intended to be Jesus, but to point us to Jesus.

When this happens our identity, the guiding reality of our life, shifts from being a son or daughter of God to the community identity. If this is our life-stage, job, or mission, we take on this secondary identity as primary. So when someone from a different life-stage, job, or outside the mission comes along, we don’t welcome that and actually reject them to maintain our community.

The gospel community maintains Jesus as the goal and maintains our identity in Christ. This frees us from clutching onto community to make it welcoming to others and even leave it when the opportunity to glorify God elsewhere presents itself.

3.    The community bears no fruit indicating death

Throughout the scriptures and very pointedly in John 15, Jesus describes those who depend on God as people who “bear fruit”. They display by their character, convictions, and actions a Christ-likeness with joy, patience, love, self-control, faithfulness, and peace. In addition a community of Christ followers is to grow and expand to include more Christ followers.

This faithfulness to God in lifestyle and mission is what God asks of Christians. He will take care of the results of seeing people come to a saving faith in the loving work of Jesus Christ on the cross and in the resurrection.

If something is intended to bear fruit but does not, it is dead. An inward facing community is typically unwelcoming and tends to be judgmental. No one who does not share that attitude wants to be around people who are judgmental. A judgmental community conveys a solely judgmental God. We serve a God who is just and will judge everyone, but extends a gracious opportunity to avoid judgment through faith in Jesus Christ.

Gospel-Led Community Enhanced by Healthy Mission

A community that embraces Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior should become the most welcoming community. The results of the gospel taking root is freedom to love anyone and everyone.

A gospel-led community grows and is made healthy by mission. We’ve seen this repeatedly in our communities. When we extend hospitality and love to those we disagree with, to those who don’t live “just like us” or believe differently, we get to experience how Christ lived on earth.

The judgmental community of Christ’s day and culture, the Pharisees, were shocked that Jesus welcomed people who disagreed with him, who weren’t righteous like them. The scriptures show that Christ was quick to extend grace to anyone who needed to be welcomed and loved.

The gospel-led community does not sacrifice community on the altar of mission, but it also does not exalt community to replace Jesus. Starting with the gospel leads to a community that loves Jesus, loves one another, and loves anyone outside the community.

This is what I have seen in the past and at times currently. It has shaped my approach to missional communities which I hope to elaborate on in the weeks to come.

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February 1, 2012 · 12:49 pm

Missional Community Fail: When Mission takes Center Stage

Yesterday I remembered when I hated missional communities and how that changed over time. As I’ve watched a number of missional communities, I’ve seen two major ways they end up failing as a gospel-centered community on mission. These failures both result from making something other than the gospel the motivation for the group of Christ followers.

I watched multiple missional community groups fail when mission takes center stage. When the motivation for gathering is solely and primarily about a specific people, service project and success is only seeing those people know and love Jesus Christ. Today I will elaborate on this danger for missional communities and tomorrow I will elaborate on the danger of community taking center stage over the gospel.

3 Major Failures Resulting when mission takes center stage

1. Great Commission Trumps the Greatest Commandments

The church overall has lacked in extending the love and grace of Jesus Christ, whether that’s to their neighbor, co-worker or even close friends. In response to this, many church leaders have over-emphasized the Great Commission (Go and Make Disciples) to the point that it has trumped the Greatest Commandments (Love God and Love your neighbor as yourself) for the Christian.

The Great Commission flows out of the Greatest Commandments. You only talk about, proclaim, or extend what you love and enjoy. If that’s football, the latest fashion trend, or your faith in Jesus, you will naturally share it with others. The church’s lack of mission is a gospel issue, not understanding that they have been given salvation in Christ, provided reconciliation with God, to bring reconciliation with God to the world. It’s not merely that they haven’t been challenged to go and make disciples.

We can’t trade loving God for duty to God and expect making disciples to be sustainable. A community only emphasizing the mission is very active and looks like they are accomplishing much, but often turns people into projects to fulfill their duty rather than to extend the love of God.

2. Your value is based on your contribution

When mission becomes center, your value to the community is becomes based on your production for the mission. How much have you been evangelizing? How active have you been in building relationships? How many of the service projects have you been to? Are you accomplishing the mission of the community or not? You become an impersonal cog in a mission machine.

The scriptures describe each Christian as valuable to any Christian community because they are sons or daughters of God, saved by Christ and equipped by the Holy Spirit to use their gifts for the common good. When your value is not based on the gospel but on your contribution, you are only cared for and celebrated when you tell stories of mission. Your exalted for the evangelistic or justice work you have done, while your personal holiness and love for God becomes of no concern.

This leads to burnout, a lack of desire for anything to do with God, and when you stop contributing you don’t want to be a part of the community anymore. You realize you are not valued or cared for unless you have proven your successful mission.

3. Community Dies

There is a saying that goes “If you aim for community, you never get mission, but if you aim for mission you always get community.” It’s false. It sounds like a great tweet that would be retweeted across the twittersphere, but it lacks sustained results.

It is true that mission enhances a gospel-centered community, but mission alone is not the answer. Jesus is the solution, not just His mission.

When mission becomes center, people aren’t cared for well and then there is no loving community to invite someone into that is exploring faith. Jesus said they would know we are His disciples by the way we love one another. If we show our love for one another only by celebrating successful mission that proclaims a gospel that Jesus loves you only when you do great things for Him.

What type of community are you inviting people into?

The Gospel at Center

A community that desires to see mission flourish must lift the gospel of Jesus Christ high as the most valuable definer and sustainer of the community. Jesus was sent into the world, God’s best missionary, invested in community, led them on mission to meet the physical and spiritual needs of the world, died for them and for us, and then sent them on mission as a community.

A gospel-centered community remembers the invitation of God into His family, into the community of faith to be a contributor to the growing love of that community. The community defines the value of each individual as God does, valuable because God has declared them valuable in Jesus Christ.

The gospel-centered community doesn’t stop at merely enjoying the benefits of the loving community, but remembers that as God sent Christ into the world, so Christ has sent His community of follows to extend His message and mercy.

For a missional community to see community and mission flourish, the gospel needs to take and remain the center stage.

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