Tag Archives: small group

June 4, 2012 · 10:40 am

To Lead Well, Love Well

Last week, I wrote about leading well by being faithful after I read a Michael Hyatt article that got me thinking. As I continued to think about the leaders in our church and the expectations we place on them, I couldn’t help but consider writing about other aspects of leading well.

I’m blessed to watch 60+ leaders care for and model Christ to their community groups at Apostles. The consistent thing I see for these leaders who lead well is that they love well.

I’ve seen many people shy away from leadership, describe is as a daunting task and excuse themselves as not the leadership type. Many of those people I see taking the initiative to cook for someone in need, bless someone on a random day, and pursue people out of the blue simply because they care. The most amazing missional community leaders I’ve seen are the ones that love people well by modeling the love of God to them.

This is just another reason why it is so essential for every leader to be rooted in the never-stopping, never-giving up, unconditional, and consistent love of God for them in Jesus Christ. Our love can either be hindered or enhanced depending on our grasp of the love of God towards us.

Love Pursues People

One of the primary reasons this is so key in leading is because love causes leaders to pursue people in their community and those outside their community. This is how God loves us. He pursues us, not because we deserve being pursued or we have made ourselves interesting to Him, but because He loves us. He even pursues when we do everything in our power to run away from him.

For leaders, entering into a community aiming to love people tends to result in them pursuing those people to join and contribute to the community. There will also be times when people who have been a part of the community tend to drift away, but love pursues, not demanding they stay, but communicating their value and extending the invite back into the community.

If leadership isn’t based on love, but on creating a great mission, there’s no reason to pursue people that “aren’t on board” since they left, but thankfully the love of God transforms our whimsical ways. To lead well, pursue the people in your missional community well.

Love Rejoices & Grieves Alongside People

One of my favorite verses recently is Romans 12:15 “Rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep.” There  are few things as powerful in leading than celebrating with those in your community who are celebrating and hurting with those who are hurting.

This is the result of loving someone like Christ loves you. Their joys become exciting for you and there sorrows become sad for you. Community brings us out of ourselves to focus on others and this is only possible through love. No quality leader lacks this kind of love. Every quality missional community displays this kind of love, this kind of gospel-centered love.

It’s been amazing to watch different community groups celebrate together each other’s successes. At times it is even more inspiring and moving to watch a community grieve with one another, tears that display a joining together to endure the worst and seek healing together. It’s a beautiful display of God’s design for community.

Love Enjoys People

The last part of this that I will focus on is the simple reality that when you seek to love someone, you enjoy who they are in all their quirks and personality. Lacking love can cause a leader to identify their favorites in the community and become annoyed with others. This type of leadership does not enjoy people based on their gospel identity of being a part of a Christ-centered community, but on what their contributions are to the community.

To lead well, love like Christ has loved us, enjoying our presence because He chose to and because He embodied love. Enjoy the people you find yourself with, not matter how different, or in your mind challenging, they can be. You’re (translate: I’m) just as challenging to others in the community.

Every one of us longs to be in friendship, relationship with a group of people who knows us and still values us after knowing us. We long for every relationship to be as if it were Christ. Someone that loves us because they choose to and even endures with us our quirks, flaws, and failings.

A gospel-centered community on mission like this is possible, but it desperately needs leaders who have been loved well by God to love their community well.

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May 30, 2012 · 11:02 am

To Lead Well, Be Faithful

Most people assume leadership involves a lot of activity, doing amazing and monumental things or accomplishing many tasks. When we look at leaders, they seem to be incredibly busy and while leadership naturally lends itself to more activity, the only way to ever lead well is through faithfulness. Whether it’s in a company, your family, and in ministry, faithfulness lends itself to good leadership.

Michael Hyatt recently wrote an article titled “3 Reasons Why Faithful is the New Radical” speaking to leaders who desire to be radical. This is especially true of those of us in the Missional Community world who long to see gospel-centered movements. I loved what he had to say,

By and large millennial Christians want offer lives in service to God and others by offering new and creative solutions. This is good.

But if I could speak a word of caution, from one rabble-rouser to another, I would say that sometimes the most radical thing you can do with your life is to simply be faithful.

Yes, you heard that right. By consistently doing the same thing every single day you might be more radical than you think. I know that doesn’t sound very sexy, but it’s the stuff that gives weight to significant social movements.

1 Corinthians 4:2 says that God holds his people accountable, not for the big splashy things they’ve done, but for simple faithfulness:

In this regard, it is expected of managers that each one [of them] be found faithful. (1 Corinthians 4:2, HCSB)

He goes on to share 3 reasons why faithfulness is so key. As I read it, it reminded me of what we ask of our leaders in our Community Groups. As people approach leadership in our Community Groups, we want to be clear to them that our greatest expectation of them is faithfulness. When we speak of faithfulness, it starts with faithfulness to God and then extends to specific people in your life.

Here are 3 reasons why we look for and expect faithfulness from our leaders.

Being Faithful Starts Before Leading

If people aren’t faithful before they start leading, they won’t be faithful while leading. We’ve taken risks on people thinking they would be faithful once they started leading and it simply wasn’t true. This is the clear pattern of scripture as well.

Jesus was faithful to God and faithful to his parents long before He comes on the scene and is baptized. He lived a sinless life, perfectly obedient to God and He remained faithful as He led His movement to the cross and beyond. Faithfulness in leadership is mirroring the character of Christ to those you lead.

In the Old Testament, David is faithful as a shepherd before he ever becomes a king. He lived in obscurity faithfully tending and protecting his sheep and his faithfulness there prepared him to fight Goliath and eventually become a great king.

His kingdom eventually suffers because of his lack of faithfulness to his role and to God. Faithfulness to tasks is one aspect of leadership, but spiritual leadership for Community Groups hinges on the leader’s faithfulness to God.

Faithfulness to God is True Success

All leaders want to be successful in leadership, but we consistently remind our leaders that God’s success is the result of abiding in faithfulness to God. Christ instructs His disciples in John 15 to abide with Him and bear much fruit.

In the missional community discussion, it can be easy to attempt to measure success in terms of people added to the community, service to the community, and in multiplying the community. These are all good things, but if they lack faithfulness to God, the community will likely suffer. God clearly desires devotion to Him over activity apart from dependence on Him.

While subjective in nature, success as gospel faithfulness can be easily seen in the results of confidence in the gospel and greater love for people.

Faithfulness to People helps a Community Thrive

There are certain people who have been placed in our lives closer than others. They could be family, friends, co-workers, or neighbors, but they seem to interact in our world with more frequency than others. When Paul preaches his sermon in the Aeropagus, he indicates that this is no accident, that it is in fact the design of God so that others and we would know Him.

Understanding this allows leaders and communities to be faithful directly where they are placed and directly with people who are placed there as well. This can decrease the strain on relationships for many of us and I’ve noticed that a thriving community results from the faithfulness of leaders to the people who are right in front of them.

Our Community Groups seek to care for one another and their neighbors. This could be a daunting task unless they understand being faithful to who God has placed in their midst. This lets them identify and meet the tangible physical and spiritual needs for one another and their neighbors easier by focusing on specific people.

Faithfulness builds on itself and expands the capacity of the leaders as their influence grows. We can’t be certain what the future has for our lives or our leadership, but we can be faithful with what we’ve been given. Whether it is a job we don’t enjoy, money, or friendships, learning to be faithful with what we have will allow us to be faithful when we have more.

Great leaders are faithful leaders.

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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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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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January 27, 2010 · 5:43 pm

Christian Defaults

I’ve served as the co-director of the college ministry at our church for a few years now and as we’ve tried to implement the vision of our church, I’ve noticed that there seem to be Christian Defaults that believers who have been involved in church continue to return to whether they recognize it or not.

Two of the Defaults I’ve noticed include:

Church is a 1 or 2-day event

I started attending church when I was 13 and it consisted of Sunday morning Sunday school and a church service and a Wednesday night youth gathering. This was my understanding and I believe the predominant understanding of church for most youth in a church growing up. As an adult it looks similar just substitute youth gathering for small group.

These events aren’t bad, but as a result of this understanding of church, Christianity often gets compartmentalized to these events and success in Christianity can be defined by mere attendance.

In contrast, the bible speaks of the church as a people in perpetual community, living in close proximity in an effort to serve together and care for one another as often as possible. This understanding doesn’t allow for Christianity to be compartmentalized but to invade every aspect of your life. Success then becomes a little less clear because it is based on encouragement, serving and caring for one another as habits rather than events.

Small Group is a Bible Study to attend, not participate

The idea of small groups that meet weekly is a move towards a greater understanding of Christianity calling people to live in community, but often results in a bible study with 1-2 teachers and 10-15 listeners. Similar to a Sunday school environment but usually spread throughout the week.

These bible studies are really effective at growing in knowledge of the bible, being involved in people’s lives to care for one another and usually involve prayer as well as accountability to holiness. The downside is that it typically fails to embrace an understanding of Christianity in terms of its mission to expand faith to others and to serve those who believe differently in the world around us.

It often becomes a stagnant community that is no longer inviting, when Christian community in the bible was always inviting and always looking for ways to serve others who believed differently.

Changing Christian Defaults

Our church and many others have started to ask the questions about how Jesus’ redemptive works redefines these defaults in an effort to correct their deficiencies. It even involved the invention of new cool Christian word (missional). Our church redefines small groups as Missional Communities to convey the message that Christians living in community should also actively be engaging and serving the world around them that believes and lives differently.

In this shift, I have begun to wonder what defaults we might be setting for future Christians in their understanding of church. Will the pendulum shift swing to create new defaults with other distortions of Christianity?

Do see these Christian defaults as well? What other Christian defaults do you see? How should the church respond to those?

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July 7, 2009 · 4:34 pm

my preaching confusion

I recently had the opportunity to preach and was once again reminded that it is hard and difficult and that I know nothing, but it has forced me to wrestle with the purpose of preaching. I know it is a gift to be used to edify the body.  But how does that practically play out?  Is our preaching to transform individual Christians in order that they would look differently which would inadvertently affect the body? Is it primarily preaching to the body as a whole and how the truth affects the way we as a local expression of the body of Christ conduct ourselves? What is the aim or application of our preaching? Is it individual application, community application, a mixture of both, is it for vision casting?

These are the questions I have asked myself often lately and I don’t have the answers.  It appears from the state of our churches that they both despise and breed a consumeristic mentality of shopping for the favorite flavor of preaching that it is about individual Christians.  If this is the case, then it borders on self-help psychology engaging you as an individual to make you a better Christian so everyone reaps the benefit, but the primary focus is the individual believer.  

This doesn’t sit well with me, since individual Christianity is seen nowhere in the Bible. The Bible talks about the fact the Christ came to establish a church, a people who would follow Him. It speaks of the church as His bride, His body, and the means by which he restores and redeems the world.  The gospel calls individually, but it calls into a body, and the epistles (which are most commonly preached) are primarily addressing certain situations within a church body. If the Bible tends to address Christians as a part of a group then our preaching can’t focus solely on the individual.

If it is just about the individual, then why do we need a local body?  I’ll just pop in my favorite podcast if I’m not going to get a contextualized message and in that case, why am I going to church? I know church isn’t primarily preaching, but let’s be honest, it’s the primary focus of our Sundays, let’s not kid ourselves.

It seems to me that our preaching has a 3-fold reach in regards to focus and application. It seems that each message has an individual application in how we view God, a community application that explains to the body how this message affects the local church they sit in and informs the strategy or theology of their vision and then finally how it affects the way Christians live in and engage a secular society that doesn’t agree with them.

These are my thoughts, but I do not feel that this is how it is typically accomplished, which makes me wonder if I’m wrong and if I’ve constructed something out of preaching that should be carried out in other ways in the body.  I don’t have the complete answer, but I want to know the right answer.

In the end, I’m honestly confused and obviously frustrated and so I ask you, what is the purpose of preaching? Who is it for and what is it supposed to do?

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