The Relational Mission

Group strategies abound. Some refer to them as small group, others as missional communities. There are a lot of right ways to do groups. Some will argue about where they should or should not meet. Others talk focus on things like when they should meet, whether they should be mixed gender to gender specific, whether they should target a specific demographic or be geographically based, whether they should be closed or open, whether they should be long-term groups or short-term groups and whether they should study the sermon or choose their own topics. Should the oversight system be flat or a pyramid? Should the leadership system be based on the advice of Jethro to Moses in Exodus 18 or upon Jesus' strategy of choosing the twelve? And there is quite a bit of discussion about whether small groups of 8-15 or mid-sized groups of 20-50 are preferable. We could talk for hours about the various nuances and distinctions between strategies. Discussions around all of these i...

Small group meetings are important. If you don't do meetings that well, then people will not want to explore life together outside the group. However, if we don't have much life interaction outside the meeting, how good can the meetings actually be? It's a chicken and egg thing. Good group meetings can lead to life together. And life together generates good group meetings. In order to have great small groups the goal cannot be to have a great group meeting. As soon as we put the success of a group meeting in the cross hair, then we will miss one another. The point of it all is to love one another. We have great meetings to the extent that we see the other persons, when we encounter them in truth, and when we serve the other. Great group meeting occur when we turn our faces to one another and we experience the other. When we value the success of the group meeting over the people in the meeting, then we fail. It's a paradox. We actually have a great group exp...

In yesterday's post , I asked the question related to why it is so hard for people to enter into community. Most of the time, we look for ways to fix this problem.  They usually come in the form of "6 Ideas for Taking Your Group to the Next Level" or "3 Sure-Fire Ways to Turn Your Group Around." Posts like that are needed. But this is not one of those. Sometimes I think we try to fix the problems in our groups without going deeply enough to identify the real issues. So we medicate the lack of community, while we become numb to what the Spirit of God really wants to do. The problem though is that the Spirit of God usually does not work as fast as we want him to. We want to "get over" the problem of the lack of community. While God wants to lead us into the painful reality that we are not very good at living in community. He wants to reveal show us that we don't know how to love others very well. That "considering others as more important th...

 In a previous post , I wrote about how we our core being is defined relationally. We are socially formed. At the same time, this formation has shaped our personal identity in such a way that we set the self over against others. We are taught to look for our core identity apart from others, as if there is some kind of essential identity that is pure and untainted that can only be found in the individual, isolated soul.   This sets up a problem that often goes unnoticed when we try to establish small groups. We tell people that they need community, that we are created as social beings in the triune image of God, and that the Bible tells us that we are called to love one another. Then we organize people into groups and give them curriculum to talk about each week. Thus far things are heading on a good track. But something happens. The group doesn't move beyond the Bible study experience into community. People say that they want to love one another, but the group struggles t...

I'm working on my next book today. Here are a couple of paragraphs that I wrote about sharing meals. Any feedback? When I read the Gospels while asking the question “Where was Jesus?” I’m continually shocked by the fact that I read so much about Jesus eating and at parties. Food and Jesus came together. We also have evidence that the early church most often met over a shared meal. And we know that worship occurred in the early church with the celebration of communion, usually over a meal. In the life of Jesus, we see him relating to his disciples over meals, teaching them over food and even using parables about food. We see him engaging neighbors and networks over meals and parties. The most obvious is that party at Matthew’s house where many tax collectors and sinners had assembled. There is something about food that moves us beyond technical solutions to problems that we encounter in our small groups. Some things are better addressed by eating together than through strategy se...

What does it mean to live in community in small groups? Or as a part of a church? Or in missional communities? Or with others who are holding us accountable, i.e. groups of two or three? When we think of community, too many times we think of it in terms of preferential love, which means that we will relate to others as long as they are pleasing to us. I've been reading and rereading Soren Kierkegaard's Works of Love recently. He has some challenging insights and reflections on what it means to love our neighbor. "Thus the neighbor is the person who is nearer to you than anyone else, yet not in the sense of preferential love, since to love someone who in the sense of preferential love is nearer than anyone else is self-love—'do not the pagans also do the same?'" The neighbor, then, is nearer to you than anyone else. ... 'the neighbor' is what thinkers call 'the other.' that by which the selfishness in self-love is to be tested." (21) This ...

Connecting happens in all kinds of shapes and sizes. And we call connecting by all kinds of names. We connect as families, at school, in the workplace and at church. We connect with neighbors, with friends and with those who share the same hobby. And almost always, these points of connecting happen in some form of small group. In the church, we have all kinds of ways to connect with others: Home Groups Task Groups Mission Groups Cell Groups Choir Groups Bible Study Groups Worship Groups Fellowship Groups Care Groups Recovery Groups Service Project Groups Outreach Groups Leadership Development Groups Church Leadership Groups Committee Groups Short-term Sermon Study Groups Sports Groups Sunday School Groups I remember one time in my journey when I connected in seven different church small groups at the same time. I was what you might call a Christian Go-Getter. I was serious about my faith and the way to follow through with that seriousness was to get involved in g...

One of the primary realities that undermines small groups in North America is the fact that Americans are not very good at relationships. Years ago, I heard someone ask a leader from Brazil why they thought that God was doing such a great work there. He responded, "We don't have TV." The fact is that we have developed anti-relational patterns. We need to train people not just in how be a good Christian or how to lead a small group. We need training in how to relate. Here are some things to consider: Level 1: Making Room Training I use this name because of the influence of Randy Frazee and his book Making Room for Life . In it he challenges specific patterns of American suburban living and provides alternatives that are practical and concrete. The point of it is to reframe how we spend time and make room for relationships. It really does not matter if we have great relationship skills and have a overwhelming desire to connect with other if we don't have the time o...

I'm reading A Life Together by Seraphim Sigrist, a Bishop in the Orthodox Church who learned what it meant to follow Jesus in underground home churches in the former Soviet Union. This little book is a gem with a message forged under great pressure and resistance. In the introduction he writes: "Now, if the gift of ourselves and the ability to stand on our own feet is a first discovery in community, I would add a second discovery and gift found in community. Our continuing agreement to share life together opens out into deeper and deeper oneness with the others of our community. We live into a friendship in a full sense that Jesus spoke of when he said, 'From now on I call you friends.'      Community is an ongoing entering into friendship, for the mystery of community is that of friends, and the giving of our lives for our friends. This friendship is the ongoing gift of the ever deeper realization of the law of sharing and exchange, living Jesus' command to ...

Do we do small groups for community? For the fellowship? To close the "back door?" To get 100% of our people involved? For evangelistic growth? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. And Yes. But might there be a deeper motivation? In her book Community is Messy , Heather Zempel challenges us to go deeper than all of these. She wants us to grow up. She calls us to allow community to shape our lives. She invites us into a life of discipleship that deals with reality. She writes, "Community is messy because it always involves people, and people are mess. It's about people hauling their brokenness and baggage into your house and dumping it in your living room" (24). We offer our messes to one another not to wallow in them , but to grow as disciples together. This is made especially clear in her chapter entitled "Discipleship is Not Linear." She challenges us to think about how people really grow instead of trying to fit people into a one-size-fits-all process. She wri...

When we talk about being missional, at the same time we need to talk about being relational. If we don't we turn God's mission into an act of violence where we try to accomplish something for God. People, usually called unbelievers or the lost, become objects of our monologue. We turn ourselves into Gospel agents of aggression, trying to get something done for God. I've been down that road far too many times—although we didn't use the word "misssional"—and I've no desire to go back. The Apostle Paul wrote: "make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others." (Philippians 2:2-3) The way we love one another determines how we will be on mission. In our modernistic mindset we tend to divide outreach from community....

Recently, I asked if a common mission produces community ( click here to read) or if the experience of community results in mission ( click here to read) . Both are taught, often with great passion. Both have scriptural support. And both seem to have anecdotal evidence (great stories) to bolster the claim. However, when I have stepped back from both scenarios and looked beneath the specific path that a group has taken, I've found that in every case something deeper is really going on. In other words, the argument of community first versus mission first is a argument that leads us to miss the real thing that produces both. I'll first explain why this is true and then I'll point to the deeper issue that often is overlooked in small group strategies. Paul instructed the church at Philippi, "Consider other more important than yourself." This is the mind of Christ and this is one of the primary ways that the Spirit works through his people today. The problem is th...

Does a common mission produce community? I don't think that we can make this a universal claim. Nor can we toss the claim aside as if it has no relevance. See my previous post . Then must we conclude that community produces mission? Many make this claim and it has some very important biblical texts to support it. Jesus prayed in John 17 that his followers would live in unity so that the world might know him. After washing the feet of the disciples, Jesus told them that the way that the world would know that they were his disciples was by their love for one another. Our love for one another is one of the greatest, unused evangelistic tools. And I have seen many small groups communities that have grown in love and the natural overflow of that has been mission, evangelism and even group growth. We have 40 years worth of small group experience around the world to support this. So we cannot say that community does not lead a group into a life of blessing those outside the group. A...

In my leadership at my church, I wrestle almost every week about what it means for us to move into a missional way of being the church. It is so easy for our leadership team to grab hold of easy answers to the question of what our church will look like in the future. We are tempted to label a structure for the future church and define all of the new structures that we will provide for the church. We try to define the church around geographic mid-size churches or we try to predict that our church will become a network or networks of small groups. But there is a problem here. We assume that changing the structure will change the people. But if you move a person from sitting in a weekend service with 1800 people into a group of 300 people or into a house of 15, we cannot assume that people grasp the nature of a missional perspective on the church. We can change the language and the structures of the church all we want, but to assume that we have changed the people is just plane stupid.  B...

It has taken me a long time to set up a blog and write my first one. This is weird because in many things in my life I am an innovator. I had to have the first color Mac laptop. It may have weighed more than my four year old son, and the screen was not much bigger than my phone screen now, but I had it. I remember taking it on a plane with me to London, writing my first thoughts about the nature of biblical community. I am not sure what I wrote at the age of 23. I am sure they were profoundly informed. Ha! Even now I feel I am struggling to find words for the call God has on our lives in the church. I feel like a wilderness wanderer who is no longer satisfied with institutional forms of church life, but is still trying to find the new rhythm of being God's people in this age. At times, I have felt like I had a clear picture of what it looks like, but then I realize there is another piece that is undeveloped.  Recently, I have come to realize how small groups have been used to prop ...