The Relational Mission

This wraps up the series on 9 Practices of Missional Small Groups (Community) Leaders. I wrote these to build upon my book Missional Small Groups where I introduce a way of understanding Missional Community as a story that a group tells through their life together. As I have written these posts, I have come to see how these practices and the concepts that underlie them show us how to create a missional habitat, a natural environment where the missional community story spontaneously happens. To those who are new to missional life, one might think that missional community "just happens." But life doesn't just happen. Life happens when the environmental factors are right to support that life. I grew up on a farm. My father who loved just about every farm animal imaginable. Chickens, sheep, cows. You name it, he raised at least one of them at some point. We even hatched chicks from eggs we collected from the hen house. Sometimes a hen would “nest” and incubat...

This is the last practice that I've found to be essential for leaders who want to move beyond "normal" community where small groups connect people and into "missional" community where groups experience life together that makes a difference in the world. This practice is about how the leaders of the group work with leaders beyond the group. This is essential if the group really wants to move beyond the normal small group experience. Most groups don't have enough resources—time, energy, gifts, etc—within the group to have the sustaining impact that is needed in the world. There are two kinds of relationships that groups need in order to create synergy 1. The Relationship with an Elder-Like Leader. I hesitate to use the word "elder" (I give an entire chapter to this in my book MissioRelate ), because it is so commonly used today as a label for a church governance role. Here I'm talking about the need for someone to serve as a wise guide, a ...

We live in a violent world. I wonder at times if we are addicted to violence. It seems that we like having enemies and we like winning. This is what happens when our fallen state becomes the accepted norm. We no longer call into question our fighting nature. Fighting happens at all kinds of levels, globally as nations go to war, nationally as politicians tear each other apart, and locally as neighbors let petty differences cloud their judgement. It also happens in the church. Duh! And IT HAPPENS IN SMALL GROUPS! Of course every small group leader training manual or book says as much. Some call it conflict. Others "storming." M. Scott Peck calls it chaos. When people get to know one another, someone is bound to cause offense. Sometimes it's as minor as an innocent comment taken the wrong way. Sometimes it's as big as a yelling match. A few years ago, a small group leader asks to meet with me. He told me that while I had been out of town over the weekend, his co...

What do you think about this video: This video of the imminent Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggemann is poignant because it gives us an imagination about the kind of people God was calling the Israelites to be as a contrast to life under Pharaoh's rule and the early Christians to be in contrast to life under Caesar's rule. It points us to life in the Kingdom and God's rule. It points us to missional living and it points us toward missional leadership. Three practices are identified. The first two, hospitality and generosity, relate to my post about missional leadership Make Time to Waste Time . The reason we make space in our lives is to create energy, time and emotional space to be hospitable and generous. We need to be shaped by patience so that we can demonstrate hospitality to others. They also relate to my post entitled Be Present in the Neighborhood . Hospitality and generosity shape the way we are present with people in our neighborhood. The third ...

About 15 years ago, our small group pastor challenged all the groups to do at least one outreach event or activity per month. So one month we'd play volleyball at an apartment complex. The next we'd through a cookout for some friends. The next we'd do some kind is service project. While these were good, we failed to be present in any one neighborhood. When I need an imagination about what it means to be present in a neighborhood, I have to break the my pragmatic tendency to immediately develop a list of ways to be missional. As helpful as such lists are, it's too easy to do missional things in a non-present way. In other words we do something but we fail to remain, to reveal God in an ongoing way. By contrast, imagine that you were a part of Paul's entourage in the first century as he began ministering in Ephesus. Pull out a study Bible and look at a map of Ephesus. It was a large city for the time but small in size, only about five miles long. The houses wer...

It might seem counter-intuitive to say that leaders of "missional" community need to practice the art of wasting time. After all being missional usually means being active. However to be on mission means that we are offering people a Kingdom-like way of life, not just a message that will save them from immorality and get them to Heaven one of these days. It means we embody the ways of the Kingdom, which the Apostle Paul calls the fruit of the Spirit. It's what the Old Testament calls shalom , which means peace, wholeness, and communal well-being. Aaron's benediction is helpful here: "The Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you; The Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace ( shalom )" Old Testament theologian Walter Brueggemann reflects on shalom , connecting it to an experience of God's presence ( see my post on Presence ): "Shalom is perhaps perhaps the quintessential mark of infinity, a counting stat...

Imagine if you were to read the Bible just to read it. You are not preparing for a sermon or a Bible study. You are not trying to figure out the meaning of some difficult theological question. You are not even trying to read it devotionally. You are just reading it like you would a epic novel, where you allow the story to take over and let your imagination be shaped by that story. Then after reading it through—yes all the way through—imagine that you tell a friend about it. Now this person is not a Christian and has only been observed churches from the fringe. But she has read her fair share of novels. She does not ask the normal kinds of questions that we church people might ask. Instead she just simply asks, "What makes the story work?" She's intrigued as to how such a long book could keep anyone's interest. Your immediate response is "God." This answer might even surprise you at first because it's so simple but yet so true. He is the on...

Whether serving as a host of a short-term campaign group, a leader of a connecting group or as a part of a leadership team of a missional group, there are some basic small group facilitation skills that apply to them all. In this practice, I'm talking specifically about the meeting. It is my contention—and has been for over 12 years—that missional groups depend upon the meeting much less than those that are simply connecting groups. I estimate that the group meeting contributes about 40% to the group life that is moving in mission, whereas a connecting group might depend upon the meeting for 80%-90% of its life. At any rate, 40% is still significant. If group meetings don't work well and the gatherings don't contribute that 40%, it will steal the momentum from the mission. Here I want to quickly address some of the key basic skills that every leader needs to develop and even refine as a group moves into missional life: Meet weekly: The statistics are conclusive. My...

About ten years ago, we had a group that had grown to the point of multiplying. As I was praying about the future of that group and how we could help it through its growth and transition, I sensed that the Lord was leading us to wait. During that time, we realized that our approach to group leadership put a lot of pressure on ONE person to be all things to the group. Of course, we had leaders in training (Interns, Apprentices) just like we see in all of the small group books. Of course we had a plan for developing new leaders. But when push came to shove, all the pressure fell on one person. And usually, week-after-week, no matter how hard we involved others, the rest of the group looked to that one person to do 80% of the work. As a result, we experimented with co-leaders. I had not seen much at that point about leading groups this way. The common logic was and is that if you have co-leaders you will only have 1/2 as many groups. In fact, pastors often responded to me with this ar...

I've been around a lot of leaders over the last two decades. I've worked with zealots, plodders, rule-followers, and wanna-bees. I've seen those who want to lead a great group but can't though they try with all their might. And I've seen those who seem to lead so easily that it's like a knife cutting through warm butter. In all the lists of habits of great leaders, the focus almost always lies on the actions of the leaders. But most often one is not listed which seems to have a huge impact upon groups that go on mission. The leaders are not just people who do the right things. They are actually the right people. They are the real deal. They are people of character. As I watch leaders and those who lead groups that make a difference, I've found that character is a crucial thing. The inner life of a leader, who they are when no one is looking, the attitude of a leader toward others, the genuine Spirit-directed love has a huge impact. I guess we don't...

The first practice of leaders of missional communities is to hear to the call to go beyond a community that connects people. Connecting groups come in all kinds of forms. Some are short-term. Some are sermon study groups. Some are house churches. Some are even groups of 40. Some are even called "missional communities." What they are called or the form they take is not the point. Connecting community is a kind of story of life together that focuses on helping the people in the group develop good internal relationships. We need to help leaders think in terms of the story that the group tells, not about the strategy, the form or the name of the group. I go into depth about this in my book Missional Small Groups. The call to missional community is the call to a story of life together where the group lives on mission together. It's a call to a way of life that makes a difference in the world. Somebody has to hear this call. Someone in the group has to step up and introdu...

Now I'm about to write nine posts that outline the practices that shape the leadership and life of missional small group (community) leaders.  I'm not the first to try to comprise such a list, but as I've said in previous posts, I'm looking for an alternative imagination for leading. So at the risk of being critical, I've felt I needed to be as concrete as possible. What follows are some key lists that have shaped the conversation about small group leadership over the last ten years. While I agree with them, I also want to ask if we can go further. Might we need to extend the conversation beyond this. If not, then we already have these lists. But if there is something else we need to explore, then lets do it. Henry Cloud and John Townsend speak of these actions as "responsibilities" in their very popular book Making Small Groups Work . These include: Balance grace, truth and time Facilitate process Listen Provide Safety Clarify and Ask Questions C...

In North America, we love our heroes. I challenged this in yesterday's post , but I'd like to pursue this a bit more. We idolize the solitary individual who takes a cause upon his or her back and changes the course of history. When Steve Jobs passed a few weeks ago, watching all of the tweets about him was comical to me. No doubt, Jobs has changed the way we work today. We have five apple devises in our household and I need about three more to do my work well (at least I think I do but my budget says otherwise). But the comments about Jobs impact made it sound like he had built Apple all by himself. It seems that this hero fixation is alive and well in the church. The elevation of the paid minister created spiritual heroes of those called "pastor" and "priest." But this has been taken to an entirely new level with the advent of the mega- and super-mega church. Now the preacher is the hero, even if he has little to do with the day-to-day ministry that occur...

Because there is a lot of talk about churches being missional and the need for missional community, there is a lot of talk about how to be a missional leader. In the previous post, I challenged the common approach to training leaders by giving them a list of habits that promises group growth when they are practiced. This is an leadership approach that is shaped by a mechanistic imagination, "If I do these things, I will be a good leader." As an alternative to this, it seems popular to shape an imagination about missional leadership around word pictures like "radical", "leap of faith", "rejection of the status quo", "irreligious", "subversion", and the like. This is "hero" language. There seems to be a loud call for heroes of the faith to stand up and do wild things for Jesus. This use of words to shake up things and wake the church out of its slumber is challenging the mechanistic imagination, but is this hero imag...

I've been waiting to write this post for over six months. I needed some evidence to back up what I felt I needed to say. Even more, I had to make sure that I really believed this to be true since it goes against most common teaching on group leadership. In addition, I found that what I had discovered actually contradicted much that I have previously taught and written about group leadership. So be warned: the following might take some time to embrace. You might even bristle at it. It took me some time to see it clearly and I'm the one who had the "ahah" experience that caused me to see things differently. Now to the point. Through the years, I have trained hundreds, if not thousands of small group leaders. My first book was a basic training guide that has sold over 20,000 copies. I believe in quality training for group leaders. It's crucial if we want them to have an impact and move beyond the minimal requirements that I introduced yesterday. Some of the b...

Leaders of missional small groups lead differently than leaders of groups that are not on mission. Before I proceed to identify the nine key practices for leading missional community, we need to clarify the commonly accepted practices of group leaders. This will help us better understand how the practices of missional group leaders are distinct and therefore produce distinct results. (For the other posts in the 9 Practices series click here ) In this post, I want to identify the practices of those who lead groups that connect people who attend the church. In my book Missional Small Groups , I call these "normal" small groups. Here I am calling them connecting groups. These groups play an important role. Please don't hear that I'm denigrating connecting. I'm not. They play an important role in the church. But they are different than a missional group. In addition, in what follows I am stating things is overly simplistic language for the sake of clarity. Of...

Small groups on mission don't just happen. Mission doesn't just happen because a pastor, leader or even an entire group wants to it. Mediocrity is a road built with good intentions. Think about it this way. I have faithfully followed the Texas Rangers since 1978. I can still name names of players and give you statistical information about how they played over the years. At the beginning of every year, the players would always say that they had high hopes for the team and that they were aiming for a championship. For over 30 years, I believed them, but they were always one of the worst teams in the league, year after year after year. That is until Nolan Ryan became the president of the organization. Not only did he bring his reputation as one of the best pitchers of all time, he brought with him a different set of organizational disciplines. Before, the organization try to advance with hype, public pronouncements of excellence and commitment to winning, the signing of big-na...