“How do you support your leaders?”

This is one of the most common questions people ask, whether they are leading a missional community, ministry or whole church. Today, here are some great thoughts from Helen on how to do this with leaders of or in a MC.

It is crucial that leaders, who will effectively be leading small churches in their spare time, have enough support, training and encouragement to continue on with their vision and to see it bear much fruit. Without enough support there is a chance that they may find themselves over-burdened and under-equipped which could lead to burnout and failure of that community.

So what might be the key things to bear in mind as you think about supporting and developing your missional leaders?

1. Do it!

People will see what you value most by where you spend the majority of your time. If you really value growing a missional movement and supporting your leaders then I would suggest that they (and the rest of the church) need to see that worked out practically, as well as in just what you say. Look at your diary. Are MC leaders prioritised? If not, why not? Do they feel valued by how much of your time is spent on them and in visiting their communities, or do they see you focusing most of your time on central resources/events etc? Change your diary if necessary and put other people in place to do things you’ve been doing, or find someone whose job it is to take responsibility for coaching and supporting your MC Leaders. I know this is not always an easy one to change but I think it’s vital for the growth and success of MCs in a church!

2. Apprenticeship

As much as possible take time to apprentice or coach your leaders in missional leadership. There are many ways to do this, not all of them requiring lots of time from you or them.

One of the best ways for a leader to be apprenticed is by them being raised up through a community by another leader using the Lifeshapes Leadership Square (going through a process of I do – you watch, I do – you help, You do – I help, You do – I watch.) Obviously when you are just starting MCs in your church this isn’t possible, so then make sure that you spend time sharing stories of success and failure, your wisdom and your experiences of how you’ve led people before. Always give them the challenge to try and work things out for themselves with their team and the Holy Spirit – don’t be tempted to ‘rescue’ them every time they have a problem or to tell them what to do. Keep them accountable for their decisions and actions (remember low-control, high accountability).

3. Training

Operate under the principle of ‘just enough information, just in time.’ In other words, don’t ‘front-load’ your leaders with lots of information or training in areas they haven’t yet experienced. The likelihood is they won’t remember much of it. Give them the specific training they need as and when their experience demands it. Do balance this however with regular general leadership training/development input so that your leaders feel they are being invested into as they lead.

4. Value a range of leadership types

Don’t assume that everyone ought to lead like you! Remember each leader is different, has different skills, gifts and passions and should be released to lead in their own identity rather than feeling they need to be like someone they’re not. This might mean you need to help them discover some of what this is.

5. The most important thing is not the community they lead

Don’t let your desire to grow healthy and fruitful communities within your church get in the way of growing healthy and fruitful disciples in your church. The most important things your leaders should invest in is their relationships with the Lord and with their family. Make sure they are putting regular time in their diary to spend in rest and re-creation. This might mean they can’t get to everything you ask them to come to…..this is ok!!! You’re much more likely to get healthy communities and people willing to step up to leadership if they see leaders who have healthy relationships and a healthy rhythm to their life.

6. Encouragement is vital

Nobody can get too much encouragement in their leadership. It usually comes rarely from the people we lead so make sure you give them as much as you can! Without it it’s easy for a leader to become discouraged and disillusioned, especially when times are hard, so make sure you give them praise for specific things you’ve seen in them, and cheer them on when things get tricky.

I hope these few thoughts help you Church Leaders as you work out how best to train and support your Missional Leaders!

How do you feel about time?

Have you ever heard those in your communities say things like

“We’re just too busy” or

“We don’t have enough time”?

Given that there are just 7 days in a week, how can we choose to invest our time well?

We want to live lives of adventure but can often end up just about surviving the busy rush of daily life and then crashing in exhaustion. How can we do mission in a way that is honouring to our call and and yet doesn’t lead to burn out?

Here are 3 thoughts from our experiences about how to Reduce, Re-Use and Recycle from the perspective of time:

REDUCE the number of things your community is trying to do at once
Rather than attempting to do everything at once try to articulate with the group what God is currently teaching you about. Do this for the areas of worship, of mission and of community. To invest time in these 3 things you may need to reduce time spent on other good things. Within the missional community members will have taken on different responsibilities. Encourage group members to take an honest look at what is absorbing time and give permission for some things to stop or be done less well.
Consider – What am I doing that could be done with less investment of time? What am I doing that I can stop doing all together?

RE-USE the life rhythms of your group members
Missional Communities are about a lifestyle of worship, community and mission. Instead of adding on extras to an already busy lifestyle try instead to think about what things you already do. An easy place to start is with meals. Invite others over for dinner. Over the dinner think about how you want to use this time and use a question to direct conversation. Maybe ask that everyone shares something they are thankful for while you eat. Re look at your everyday life of shopping, exercise, walking home and think about how to re use the time you already spend to include others.
Consider - What do I already do that I can include others in?

RE-CYCLE the time your community spend together
Take a look at the next few months and what the group has planned to do together (including time spent at small, medium and large church gatherings.) Think about if some of these opportunities can be recycled and used differently to more match what God is saying and what the opportunities or needs that you can see. For example, if someone is moving house, your group could spend the time normally given to meeting together that week to help with the move.
Consider - What time have I already committed which can be used differently?

These are some practical ideas. The foundation to getting healthy rhythms always needs to come back to grace:

If you’re feeling tired, overworked and low on time as a resource, the answer isn’t to try harder. It’s to come to Jesus and ask him to teach you how to do it.

“Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.” Matthew 11:29-30 (The Message)

Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono

In 1857 a Dutch missionary called Jeremiah Lanphier was employed by Fulton Street Church to minister to the unchurched in the city of New York, USA.  After spending a time going from door to door of people’s homes delivering tracts and inviting people to church meetings, and running boys clubs and Sunday School classes, he felt discouraged as he felt that for many nothing seemed to be changing…

Jeremiah looked around him and watched the people who worked in the city as they went about their work, and he became distressed by their weariness and sense of indifference to life.

 He conceived the idea of starting a lunchtime prayer meeting for businessmen, to provide some mid-day spiritual refreshment.  

He put together a simple invitation which he left in shops, hotels and factories as well as to the homes he had visited, where he invited anyone who wanted to come together to pray for 5 minutes or upto an hour, whatever people could manage:

“A day of Prayer-Meeting is held every Wednesday from 12 to 1 o’clock in the Consistory building in the rear of the North Dutch Church, corner of Fulton and William Streets. This meeting is intended to give merchants, mechanics, clerks, strangers and businessmen generally an opportunity to stop and call on God amid the perplexities incident to their respective avocations.

It will continue for one hour; but it is also designed for those who find it inconvenient to remain more than 5 or 10 minutes, as well as for those who can spare a whole hour. Necessary interruption will be slight, because anticipated.

Those in haste often expediate their business engagements by halting to lift their voices to the throne of grace in humble, grateful prayer. Mr. Lanphier set the very first meeting for noon September 23rd 1857 in the lecture room on the third floor of the Consistory Building of the North Reformed Protestant Dutch Church.”

On the first Wednesday 6 men had joined Jeremiah.  

Week 2 became twenty,

and by Week 3 it had become forty, and the meeting moved to daily.  

The structure of the gathering was led like a business meeting, it was simple and was easily reproduced when the prayer meetings spread to multiple locations across the city:

1. The meeting started promptly
2. Scripture was read out loud
3. There was some sung worship
4. The meeting was then opened up and everyone present were invited to say prayers of thanksgiving or intercession. (Anyone who attempted to start giving a talk or a long prayer (more than 5 minutes!), or debate theological issues etc was simply interrupted and reminded it was just a prayer meeting
5. The meeting lasted maximum one hour long.

The meetings and fervency in prayer grew, the Holy Spirit moved powerfully amongst the meetings, people from all classes and denominations began to gather together, and people started giving their lives to the Lord.  Soon other churches were hosting meetings and gatherings across the city in department stores, police departments, music halls and theatres.  

Within 6 months the prayer meetings were having such an impact that businesses began shutting down over an extended lunch.  It has been estimated that at it’s height there were 50,000 conversions a week throughout the city.  Even the secular press recognised this extra-ordinary move of the Holy Spirit, and has become known as the beginning of the Third Great Awakening in the history of USA revivals.  

Within 2 years, the churches involved had seen an extra 1 million new believers.  You can read more about it here

Whilst of course revivals are unique moves of the Holy Spirit, there are some distinctive features about this move of the Holy Spirit which I wonder could be insightful for missional communities seeking to see God move amongst our workplaces.

Firstly, it started with one guy looking around him and asking himself: how can I connect all these people with the reality of God’s presence, without requiring them to come to one of our church meetings?  He then set about establishing a rhythm of gathered prayer and the communal reading of scripture at a time and a place for which the people it was designed to be available to could easily take some time out of their busy to day to come along.

• What would a lunchtime gathering centred around prayer look like in your workplace, town or city centre?
• Where and when could you meet and how could people know they were invited?
• How could you keep the structure simple, the space open to the leading of the Holy Spirit and the centrality of God’s Word being read speaking into peoples lives?

(Image taken from revival-library.org)

Let’s be clear….. In order to establish a culture we need to start with ourselves.

Today, here are 2 practical ways to look at establishing a missional culture through our lifestyles.

They are both about learning to be part of God’s mission involving new ways of approaching the shape of our week, different from the ways our culture or our past experiences have influenced us to do life.

You might want to apply it both to your own journey of learning how to do this, and to how you lead.

1 Missional Rhythms

Learning to live differently takes time and spiritual disciplines allow God, over time, to change us.You may already be familiar with spiritual disciplines such as bible reading, fasting or celebration, try to think creatively about what missional spiritual disciplines you and your community could use.

Perhaps you could learning to prayer walk an area, to talk to new people on the commute to work or a regular commitment to be in a public place where people gather.

What could you do on a daily, weekly or seasonal basis?

A group of my friends choose to spend just under an hour straight after work one day a week walking particular roads of the estate they live in. They prayed for it, talked to anyone they met who seemed friendly and often bought take away prawn crackers to share.

Some weeks there were great stories of people they met or answers to prayer, but many weeks seemed un eventful. Over time they got to know people and a group now gather weekly in one of their houses for worship, food and bible reading.

What missional discipline would help you invest time to allow God to teach you and use you in his mission?

What might this look like this year? Allow God space to surprise you by what he does.

2 Missional Accountability

Building on a missional rhythm, accountability about how your missional spiritual disciplines are going helps it to be a journey of learning about mission and not an event that you just do. When it’s difficult, scary or more likely you just feel tired or bored, sharing your journey with others helps you decide what you want to do about that.

Sometimes it might be time to step it up and add another level of challenge……..if you’ve been going making new friends is it time to offer to pray with them? Or time to invite people along to something?

Alternatively you might be pushing yourself too hard and you need to learn to relax and just be available in a place and let God surprise you.

The other day, I managed to run 2.5k around the local park. On my own I would never have made it, but I was running alongside my sister in law. Partly just the shared nature gave me encouragement to keep going, but also as I started to flag ¾ of the way along, her simple running wisdom on my failure to breathe properly allowed me to make the finish line.

Learn to let others encourage and challenge you in your pursuit of a missional lifestyle.

Where do you already have accountable relationships?

As part of this do you discuss what you are learning about mission?

Allow others to be part of what you learn.

Todays two reflections are not quick wins to a missional culture.The culture we live in can encourage us to live quite isolated lives and without deciding otherwise we can slip into a lifestyle where we are not meeting new people.

The church culture some of us have grown up in may not have taught us alternative ways of living that make mission a natural part of our way of life. Rhythms of mission and accountability are two ways God can teach us to live differently from these assumed patterns.

How could you inspire those you lead to take on missional spiritual disciplines?

What ways can you include missional accountability in the discipleship or leadership structures you already have?