The Relational Mission

Over the years, there have been a myriad of programs, books, and seminars on small group leadership. Most of them focus on practical techniques for how to do small groups in the “right” way. They address questions like:  How to lead a group discussion. How to facilitate an icebreaker. How to grow your group? How to lead worship in the group?  While understanding these techniques of group leadership is important, I found that doing these techniques well does not make for great groups. At best, you will get good group meetings. Leading a group by following the right techniques is a bit like trying to love your spouse because you follow a set of rules for a good marriage. It will leave you wondering why it's not working when you are doing what all the books tell you to do. The foundation for leading a group well lies in the end that you imagine. If all you want is a good group meeting, then follow the techniques. But if you want a group that “lives in love,” that li...

As I survey the landscape of church leadership training—including that which comes from a "missional" perspective, I get concerned about how the focus seems to center around the need to experience some degree of success in church life. By "success" I am not referring to it as an antonym of "failure", which is how we typically view success. I am not espousing some kind of church victim mentality where we revel in failure. Instead, I'm referring to success that we achieve through a form of triumphalism, the kind that comes when we take control and we make things happen for God. The kind that comes when we put the mission of God on our own shoulders so that we can avoid suffering, pain, and deep questions that stir our souls. It's a subtle lie, one that arises when we talk about grace when we preach, but the rest of church is something we as leaders assume is our responsibility so that we can make church work. The only remedy to this kind of triumph...

God is a missional God. The Spirit of God is moving across creation to restore all things. There is nothing beyond the reach of God's redeeming touch. God calls his people to join him in his mission. Some churches (and small groups) step into the flowing river of God's mission. Others don't. In this post I want to identify one of the most significant things that keeps God's people from joining God in his difference-making venture. I call it "Attacking Easy Targets." Ultimately we are complaining ourselves out of mission as we place blame and pick fights. Like a bully at a playground who picks on those who cannot fight back, there has been much ink used and tons of rhetoric spoken by church leaders attacking these easy targets. These easy targets fall into the category of things about which we are concerned but over which we have little to no influence. Target #1: The Culture The first set of opinions can be grouped under the label “There’s a problem wit...

Last week, I wrote about five things we can learn from small group house churches from the first three centuries. Actually there is a sixth, but the last one is so significant—and so often overlooked in our day—that it merits its own post. This attribute of the early church is related to how leadership operated in early house churches; it was team based. If we are academically honest about how we understand the history of the early church, we have to admit that we have very little detailed data about how leadership operated. Some have argued therefore that the early church was absolutely flat, that there were no appointed leaders. Then there are others who read the modern approach of singular leadership into the early church. We cannot read the New Testament to find some kind of house church leadership manual. We have to enter into the story and read between the lines. And we must be careful not to read our current experience into theirs. New Testament theologian, Gilbert Bilzeki...

On our family farm in North Texas, we raised everything from cows to chickens, rabbits to turkeys. We stayed away from pigs and horses, but just about every other farm animal called our farm home at some point. The one species that seemed to impact our lives the most were the sheep. While we owned more cattle, the small flock of sheep were are part of our lives more than any other. Unlike cattle, sheep require up-close-and-personal care. For instance, sheep lack the ability to regulate how much they eat. If food is out, they will eat it. And if they eat too much, they will die. In addition, they have very sensitive stomachs. Therefore a shepherd is required to feed them the right amounts of the right food. Sheep have no ability to protect themselves. They are frail and slow, and they cannot kick, claw or bite. They are easily spooked. They will scatter easily in panic and then once cornered they will sit petrified while staring at their predator.  Therefore a shepherd is requ...

So you have a good small group. The members like attending every week. They enjoy the conversations about the Bible and the ministry to one another is encouraging. But have you ever wondered if there might be more that God wants to do? Is a weekly or bi-weekly group meeting the extent of what God has in mind for you group? Don't get me wrong. Group meetings are a good thing. However, I'm not sure that God is sitting with a checklist to see who shows up at small group meetings and who does not. I think he is much more concerned about things like whether we love one another, how we are sacrificing for each other, if we are forgiving each other, and the like. I think he is looking at how we live our lives and whether our interaction with one another is distinctive from the way typical relationships occur in our world. Is our relational pattern marked by self-sacrificial love? When this occurs our small groups move beyond just connecting in meeting and into an experience of com...

With leadership comes discouragement. In fact let me so bold to say that if you never experience times of discouragement you most likely are not taking many risks. Or you don't care that much. But if you don't care you most likely are not reading this blog. Discouragement is just part of leading. You will hit walls when you don't know what to do. Your group will go through times that make you want to give up. People will disappoint you. And you will disappoint yourself. What do you do with this? Let me suggest a few things that I’ve learned about discouragement through the years of leading. First beware of the temptation to ignore the reality of what you are facing. Avoid the tendency to ignore your discouragement. Some will tell you to have faith, to get back in touch with the vision, to claim God's promises and to act as if there is not a problem. When we do this we are not dealing with reality. God knows where you are on the journey and wants to meet you In you...

Here’s a sure thing for any small group: You will have problems. There will be at least one person in every season of group life that creates, well let’s call them challenges. Groups are full of people. All people are hurting and need healing in some way. And when people start revealing themselves to one another, their hurts will hurt others. Hurting people hurt people, as the old saying goes. These hurts manifest in as many different ways as there are people in groups. However, there are some consistent patterns that I’ve observed over the years. It could be illustrated by this picture: A fun activity is the name each of the people represented in this picture. For instance, the owl at the top could be called Mr. I-Know-the-Answer-but-I’m-Not-Telling. Or Mr. I’ve-Done-This-Before-So-I-Can’t-Be-Bothered. Of course this illustration is all men. Women don’t display disfunctions like these in groups. Right? Well, since I’m a man I won’t respond. Of course, most of the time, people’s...

I grew up in a church where making a difference was something we programmed. It was something we did to and for the world at specific times and at specific places. We did it because the Bible told us to and it was the right thing to do. We did this through mission trips. Through weekly visitation. Through projects for the under-resourced. If I'm honest, I don't think difference making was not in our blood. It was something that we had to program to make happen. What was in our blood? Buildings, meetings, sitting and listening to sermons, hand-bell choirs and business meetings. We wanted to impact people's lives, but I'm not sure we had any idea about what that would actually look like. Recently, I read a Facebook post that stated, Missional is not feeding the hungry at the homeless shelter. Missional is sitting and eating with a homeless man. I also realize that when churched people are not used to sitting and eating with a homeless man that they need steps to g...

I grew up on a farm in north Texas. We grew things like wheat, oats, and maize. But primarily we raised hay that we sold to horse ranches. Now horses have a quite delicate digestive system. They are not like cows who can eat almost any kind of hay, even hay that has tons of weeds or even that which is full of mold. Cows can do this because they have a stomach with four compartments which allows them to digest and re-digest food before it enters into their system. Horses don't have stomachs like that. So when they eat weeds or mold, they get sick. On the farm, growth is natural. It's going to occur, even if you don't do anything to a field. But growth for growth's sake is a farmer's enemy. Weeds grow much faster than grass. Because we were raising hay to feed to horses, we had to pay attention to what we were we growing, not just the fact that we were growing it. In other words, we could not fall into the trap that growth automatically meant health. This is t...

When people talk about "missional community," the first thing you had better do is ask what they mean. Some use this as a label to describe task groups that are reaching out and ministering to a specific group of people or location. Others use it to refer to a group of 20-50 people, a mid-sized group, that has a mission beyond just living in community; in other words it refers to a specific structure. Reggie McNeal uses these words to describe what he calls a "post-congregational" church experience, which basically means that the coming of the missional community experience marks a shift from a centralized, building-centered church to a scattered one. While these description of missional community can be helpful for church leaders to understand their purpose and structure, I've not found them to be that compelling when talking with grass-roots people. That is, the regular people in the church who want to see God move through and even those  who do not attend a...

A while back, I wrote a series of post entitled Why Small Groups Fail in America. Here I'd like to offer 6 reasons why small groups don't fail. Or Why Small Groups Work. Reason #1: Pastors refrain from "fad hopping." There is no trick to making small groups work. There is no magical structure out there that will make groups work better than all the other structures. For some reason, over the past 20 years there have been a slew of different models and approaches offered that try and convince us that they have a new and improved approach. But the reality is that jumping from strategy to strategy actually distracts people. There are a lot of "right ways" to do small groups. And there is no one "right way". Figure out your right way and stick with it. Reason #2: The senior pastor carries the vision for small groups. If this is not the case, then the best you can hope for is a small group program, not the development of community on mission that sh...

In the sitcom The Soul Man starring Cedric the Entertainer, Cedric's character, Reverend Sherman, is a new pastor who was a former singing artist. After his father retires as the pastor of a local congregation and he assumes the role, he is questioning his ability to be a pastor. His father tells him, "Preachers are basically rock stars for the Lord." I know that most of us would never make such a crass statement about a pastor. Most pastors I know have entered the ministry because they want to serve God and love people. Most have put in years of hard work, sacrificed much and worked for must less than we could in earn in other jobs. However, it does seem that we elevate the role of senior pastor to a status that calls for questioning. As I've meditated on Jesus' words "Blessed are the meek," I've realized that being meek is about having the freedom to be oneself, without pretension. It's about having the freedom to live out one's iden...

Every church has a culture, a way of life that defines how things are done and not done. A culture dictates those unspoken norms that no one even knows how to talk about. It’s just the way things are. Just as a fish cannot explain what water is like because the water is the world of the fish, so the culture of a local congregation is the world of that congregation. So what happens when leaders discover that they need to change the culture of their church? What happens when leaders have their eyes opened to the fact that their congregation is falling short of being on mission with God? What do leaders do in order to reshape the culture so that they can be more than a church that happens to do “missional” things and actually become a new kind of “missional” culture ? Well, first  start with JR Woodward’s book Creating a Missional Culture . This a a great introduction to how culture works within a church setting. JR provides helpful handles that help you get beneath the surface ...

A few years ago, a prominent church leader was promoting the mantra "The church is the hope of the world." I'm not entirely sure who it was, but I remember it being a popular saying. At first glance, this looks like a great way of talking about role of the church in the world. I've been thinking about it a bit more as I'm working on revisions to my next book, which are due much quicker than I'd like. It seems to me that we have to think about what we mean by church and it's mission in the world a bit more. The church's mission is itself. For many, the mission of the church is growing itself. The assumption that if the church grows that the world will be impacted. The mission of the church with this mindset it to enlist church members to help gather more people. The church has a mission. In this imagination, mission is one of the things that it does, alongside other things. Mission is the outreach activity and a part if it's church strategy. U...

Out of our pain, while we are still being healed ourselves, we become a conduit of healing for others. We love even in our since of being unlovely. We offer grace, when we are still trying to know grace ourselves. We pray even when we have questions about the effectiveness of our prayers. We sit with others in their darkness when we feel that we have more darkness. We lead others when we are unsure of where we are leading. This flies in the face of so many unrealistic expectation of what great spiritual leaders must be. The mystery is found in the fact that God works through our weakness, not only in spite of weakness. The ministry of God is God's ministry not ours. Hence, we minister our of brokenness, not out of self-sufficiency. Here is a reflection by Henri Nouwen from his great book The Wounded Healer : "In the middle of our convulsive world men and women raise their voices time and again to announce with incredible boldness that we are waiting for a Liberator. We...