The Relational Mission

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...

This post invites us to look at evangelism from a different angle. I'm not talking about whether we should do it within a missional context? I covered that in a previous post. I'm not going to talk here about how it should be done. I'll do more on that down the road. Here I want to ask the question about our evangelistic paradigm and if our paradigm has been co-opted by the attempt to attain power. When I refer to power, I'm not talking about power that controls others. Nor am I necessarily referring to things like political power or positional authority. Instead, I'm talking about the kind of power that comes in the form of ideas, the kind that says "I'm right, you are wrong, and you need to agree with me." This is the kind of power that occurs in debates, in legal wranglings, sales pitches and in quite a few sermons. It's the kind of power that has to prove that "our" side is on the inside of truth and that the rest are deceived and n...

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...

I'm reading Scot McKnight's latest The King Jesus Gospel . I love this book already and I'm only a 25% through it. Because I think that what Scot is saying is so crucial for the Evangelical Church if it is going to advance down the missional road, I'm going to blog as I am reading it, rather than waiting till I complete it. Thus far the strength of Scot's argument is to give us some new language to understand ourselves as evangelicals. Don't worry, he is not attacking the need for having a salvation/conversion experience, he is instead challenging the idea that the Gospel=Salvation. Since the word "evangelical" has its roots in the Greek word for "gospel", we can easily assume that we practice church in an gospel-centered way. Instead he invites us to consider that we are really a "salvation culture" instead of a "gospel culture." Because of our myopic focus on the salvation/conversion experience, we have stripped the ...

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...

Admittedly, I'm wrestling out loud in this post. Because I grew up in a denomination whose core identity was shaped by the conversion experience, I'm finding that I have a lot of ideological work to do around the theme of evangelism. Afterall, by the time I was 12, I probably had sung  "Just As I Am" 500 times. Those words are ironed into my brain. So my question is this: What exactly are we inviting people to "come to" just as they are? This is not a question of whether or not we should do it or even how we should do it. It is a question of what we are trying to accomplish when we invite people to "come." In order to think about this, I reflect on some of the reason why people join organizations. Organizations usually base their invitation for new people to join on one of the following: 1. Usefullness. The organization provides a service that will prove beneficial to the individual. For instance, I was a member and a leader of the FFA organ...

I just read a one of the early books  by N. T. Wright, Bringing the Church to the World . In the epilogue, he writes about praying the thesis of the book into reality. He introduces the Jesus prayer that has become popular over the last decade which goes like this: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me." The goal of this prayer is to make it such a regular part of one's thoughts and expression that it naturally flows out like breathing. Therefore it is often referred to as breath praying. Wright expands upon this in a way that expands our imagination about God. Most people people in the church are shaped by a Christological imagination, but it is a truncated view of Christology. A New Testament view of Christ requires a trinitarian imagination. It is so easy for people today to have a high Chistology, but only apply it to their private spirituality in such a way that it has nothing to do with daily life. We need a way to pray that expands this so that train...

Recently, I read Michael Frost's new book The Road to Missional . I assumed, from its title, that it would be a book about how a church moves along the road to becoming missional. But that's not really the case. I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that the book places a great emphasis on evangelism, specifically sharing the Gospel with unbelievers. For some reason the topic of evangelism from a missional perspective is not been much of a focus. The reasons are many, including the fact that the evangelical church has spent so much time talking about how to talk to unbelievers that we have not spent nearly as much energy on how to "be" the church on mission for the sake of redemption of the world. So during the last decade, there has been much ink spilled over the call of the church to be on mission and not just talk about how to lead people to a point of praying a conversion prayer. In addition, the missional conversation has rightly challenged the individualist...

God is a missionary God. "From all of eternity, mission has been a part of the Divine life." Do we understand God's missionary nature? If we don't, we will try to be on mission in a way that God is not. We do good things apart from the character of God's mission. Here's John Franke teaching on this. Worth your time to watch.

When I was in my early 20s, I got a call from Bob, a childhood friend. He and his wife were in town for a conference and they wanted to buy me lunch. While we were not that close when we were younger, I was honored, so much so that I was willing to miss the Cowboy game and meet with them. After arriving and we got through the pleasantries common to re-connecting, the reason for lunch became obvious. For the next hour, I sat through a multi-level marketing presentation, all the while I was boiling inside. The only thought going through my mind was "I'm giving up the Cowboy game for this." I wish I had had the guts to walk out of the restaurant mid-sentence. Bob and I have not talked since and honestly, that one encounter made me feel like a target instead of a friend. So I'm not sure I care to reconnect. This experience made me think about Eli, the owner of a restaurant where our small group frequented. We would sit late at night, talking and drinking coffee. Over ...

Recently, I've been rethinking evangelism from the lens of a missional perspective. It seems that a lot of people are simply importing their previously established patterns of evangelism and then slapping "missional" on top. On of the better resources on this topic is The Evangelizing Church: A Lutheran Contribution. While I am not Lutheran, this book has helped me think through my assumptions about evangelism. It roots evangelism in theology and causes us to rethink our practices from those roots. The authors write: "Whenever we think about God, we need to add the words, 'the mission of the Triune God within all of creation." Whenever we talk about the gospel, we need to add the words, 'for the sake of the world.' Whenever we discuss the church, we need to add the words 'sent into the world to participate fully in God's mission.' Our view of God is not complete without having the world in view, with God in relationship to it as both C...

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...