Monthly Archives: April 2012

Apr 27 2012

Sustaining a Life of Mission…Prayer: Part 2

 

Yesterday I wrote about prayer as an essential ingredient of missional community life.  Today I want to suggest some practical ways you can develop a life of prayer together.

I think one of the best ways of doing this is to develop some regular rhythms that fit your context and life well.   One of the ways of doing this is to develop and maintain a steady and regular rhythm of prayer that runs throughout the year and then have specific times and seasons that you cut back on some of the other activities and focus on prayer.  We have often used Lent or Advent for this, but the period we’re in between Easter and Pentecost is also brilliant – after all that’s when Jesus told his disciples to wait in Jerusalem until they were clothed with power.

One Lent a few of us committed to meet together each week to pray for our community,  it was a great time of meeting God together;  at other times we’ve run regular early morning prayer times to get people up and praying.  These tend to work better if they’re developed “for a season” – only the very hardcore will commit to something if they think it’s forever.   We’re also big fans of 24-7 Prayer and their prayer room idea.  It’s a great way of getting a community, or a network of communities, to commit together to focus on prayer for a chunk of time.  Find out more at www.24-7prayer.com

It’s also good to remember to keep your prayers 3d!*  Get a good mix of worship and adoration for God, waiting on His Spirit to hear what He has to say, bringing the needs and concerns of the community to him together, and praying as intercessors for your friends, neighbourhood and for the world… oh and don’t forget to get people praying and offering prayer in public places to normal people – a great way of bringing the up and out together.

As you develop your prayer rhythm remember to be creative! Prayer doesn’t have to follow one way or pattern.  Often the mid-size community is a great place to experiment with something a bit more creative and discover that God’s Spirit really breathes life into it.  We’ve sung prayers, painted prayers, burned prayers, pinned them to trees, and written them on paper lanterns.  What we’ve found is creativity works great, but it’s often good to pause after “doing” a prayer to let the group reflect together and share anything they felt God was saying.  Prepare to be surprised how well creativity can open people up to God’s presence!

Right: it’s over to you.  I’d love us to get a bank of prayer ideas in the comments below.  Please write down ways that your community prays, let us know what has worked and how you’ve seen God answer you. Here are 3 to get you started:

  • Names of God

Get a large piece of paper and some different coloured pens.  Ask the group to write on the paper as many different names or descriptions of God as they can remember from the Bible.  Once the paper is filled spend a little time reading the names and ask people to respond to ones that strike them.  What do you need God to be like for you today,  what do you need to pray He is like for someone else?  The last time we did this God took us really deep into his presence quite quickly!

  • Text prayers

One of our communities decided that they wanted to go deeper with “in” style prayers.  They committed together to text each other with a prayer request each week and pray about the texts each other were sending.  They got very excited when God started to answer these!  You can also do this easily with Facebook and other social media.

  • “My frontline” prayer cards

This is an idea we pinched and adapted from LICC.   It’s great to get people thinking about where they spend their lives and what God might do there – make a simple postcard with the following questions:

  1. Where do you spend most of your day (work, home, school etc.)?
  2. What would you like God to do there?
  3. What can I pray for you?
  4. What can I pray for your colleagues?
  5. Whose salvation can I pray for?

Get people to fill these in, then swap them round.  Ask people to pray for their person in the week.  Keep coming back to these and reminding each other to pray,  so that a habit develops.

What other ideas do you have?

 

Ben Askew lives in Deal, in the far south-east of England. He is married to the beautiful and talented Helen and they have two children.  Ben and Helen have been involved in leading missional communities for the last 10 years and are particularly passionate about seeing the emerging generations discover God’s love.  Right now they are working for a church in Deal whilst Ben is also training for ordination. You can connect with Ben more at benaskew.tumblr.com

 

* By this I mean, upwards – in your relationship towards God, inwards – in your relationships with others in the church and outwards – seeking to be good news to different people and places in the world.

Apr 26 2012

Sustaining a Life of Mission…Prayer: Part 1

 

I hate to be the one who breaks this to you, but being in and leading a good missional community is hard work!  This is an exciting, world-changing, fun journey that we are on… but it is not an easy one.

One of the regular features on this blog will be a series looking at how we sustain such a life and continue to grow communities that don’t crash and burn.  Last week we reblogged Kathryn England’s great reminder not to forget the “up” dimension to life.  This week I want to build on that a little and focus on prayer.

Essential Ingredient

Prayer is essential for your life and for the life of your community.  This is a lesson I have learned again and again; I think I might even go as far as to say that it is one of the most important things you can do with your community and is the place where mission, activity and everything else is birthed.  Developing a good rhythm of prayer, that helps you regularly connect to God, changes the situations you face and it changes you and your community.  Let’s just explore those dynamics a little more.

 

  • Prayer changes situations

We’ve recently begun a new Young Adult missional community.  One of the things we are consciously trying to develop is a faith that prayer is effective and powerful and it is a lot of fun seeing how this is developing.  As members of the community have asked us to pray together about the challenges and situations they are facing we have started to have the thrill of seeing God answer us together.  People have experienced healing, challenges at work have become easier, lost wallets and passports have been miraculously returned.

Of course, you can say these are small and trivial or even choose to believe that they are simple coincidences but we choose not to!  And the more times that they happen the more we learn that God is interested in us and that he responds!   As we’re seeing God answer these personal prayers we’re getting more courage together to ask for bigger things; friend’s salvation, greater healing signs and wonders.  These things aren’t more, or less, important than the other stuff, they just seem bigger.

 

  • Prayer changes us

Of course, this kind of praying isn’t just about a request line to God.  It’s much deeper than that and prayer changes us as well.  Again, we’re finding this again in our community. We’ve said for a while that we want to reach Young Adults in our area and show them God’s love but, if we’re honest, we all find that a really hard thing to do.  As we’ve prayed about these together, using loads of different and creative ways, we’ve started to feel differently.

We’ve started just to encounter his amazing, loving, changing presence and learn to recognise what it feels like to have him with us.  We’ve remembered all the times the bible talks about God using small, weak people to do amazing things, we’ve started to feel like we care more for our friends at college or work,  we’ve started to believe that maybe God can do something through us.

 

  • Prayer is mission

It’s easy to allow the Up, In and Out elements of life to get separated out too much and forget that we are integrated people and communities.  In so many ways the praying we do is part of the group’s mission, bringing our friends, our neighbourhoods or our workplaces before God, on our own or together is sharing His love with them.

You can of course push this link out even further,  prayer walking round certain areas,  offering healing prayer or prophetic words on the streets, setting up prayer spaces or stations in public areas are all great ways of reminding us of this.  Don’t allow yourself to fall into the trap of thinking that prayer is “just” the background work for the community, something for the spiritual ones or for those who don’t like getting “out there”.   It’s essential to the community and the mission.  In many ways it is the mission.

Tomorrow I’ll post about some practical ways to develop prayer in your community.

For now though I want to stop here with a couple of questions:

  • What have I missed – why do you think prayer is important to you and your community?
  • Have you got stories of ways prayer changes situations, or has changed you?

I’m looking forward to reading your thoughts in the comments below!

 

Ben Askew lives in Deal, in the far south-east of England. He is married to the beautiful and talented Helen and they have two children.  Ben and Helen have been involved in leading missional communities for the last 10 years and are particularly passionate about seeing the emerging generations discover God’s love.  Right now they are working for a church in Deal whilst Ben is also training for ordination. You can connect with Ben more at benaskew.tumblr.com

Apr 24 2012

Free ebook out now!

 

One of our friends Alex Absalom has just released this new FREE ebook with his colleague Greg Nettle.  It is called ‘One Of’ and follows the story of Rivertree Church Ohio on a journey of transitioning from a ‘consumer’ church into having a ‘disciple-making’ mindset.  This is what Alex says about the book.

I’m delighted to announce the publication of a FREE eBook that Greg Nettle and I have co-written!  It is being published by Exponential and covers the first part of the story of the transition that RiverTree has gone through in recent years.

Greg writes about the journey that the church went through from being just For people, to being With them, to (crucially) becoming One Of, and thus enabling the Holy Spirit to come and live In them, so that they can then in turn go and make disciples.  I then share about some of the practical steps that have taken place over the past 18 months in moving the church into a stronger disciple-making mindset.

Thanks to our sponsors – Exponential, Stadia Church Planting, Visioneering Design, Compassion International and our own Synergy – who together have enabled this book to be free to download.  So please do download it, post links wherever you like and generally pass it around!

One favor: If you like what you read, please could you post a quick review on the Exponential site?  It could just be a couple of sentences, but that would really help (especially over the first couple of weeks) if we had some good reviews!  Both Greg and I would be extremely grateful – thank you!

 

So if you like the sound of that, go and download it now!

Apr 19 2012

Guest Post: ???, Discipleship, Mission

 

As an extra treat this week here is a Guest Post from Kathryn England re-posted from her blog Discover, Grow, Share.  This is a great challenge to us as we continue to think about Missional Communities and the life we’re called to lead following Jesus. Enjoy!

Discipleship and mission are buzz words among UK church leadership these days.  It’s great. So many church leaders I meet want to create a culture of discipleship in their church to enable their members to grow in their faith.  They want to make true disciples of their existing church members because they know that this is the foundation that has to be laid if they want their church to become missional and impact their communities for lasting change in Jesus’ name.

Passing into history are the days of the vicar-does-all church, where the congregation turns up on a Sunday to earn their spiritual brownie-points, sit back and let the employed church worker or missionary do all the hard work.  Today’s church leaders are teaching the Kingdom principles of grace, faith and every-member ministry, and building godly character into every layer of church life.  Missional communities are growing up within churches – groups of smaller cells with a desire to reach a specific network of people with the gospel, be it their neighbours, work colleagues, senior citizens, addicts, the homeless, stay-at-home dads or new mums.

Christians are becoming disciples and churches are becoming centres for mission once more.

Many of these churches believe in living a balanced Christian life, a 3-dimensional life if you will: UP to God, IN to each other and OUT to the world.  This is widely taught and understood as the way that Jesus lived his life. However, if we’re only talking about discipleship and mission, our churches run the risk of becoming 2-dimensional and if we carry on living like this, we’re going to end up in a sticky mess of our own making.

So what have we been neglecting? 

In the 1990s, I was a member of one of the churches at the forefront of teaching on discipleship and mission.  Hundreds of young adults like me were equipped to be the every-day missionaries they still are today.  That church is growing, really growing.

But, this didn’t happen because we all went to a great course on a Monday night (though we did!).

It happened because the foundation for our discipleship and future mission was laid correctly: we had first become a worshipping community.

Worship and prayer were paramount in everything we undertook.  You’d prioritise the church’s AGM because God would always show up in power as we worshipped – it was his business we were discussing!  Prayer meetings were full of life and deliberately planned to last through the night.  Our times of worship together were the crucible in which we were formed into disciples who would be sent as missionaries into every walk of life.

I think we’ve forgotten our history though and are teaching people discipleship and mission whilst overlooking the worship-journey we went on before those fruits grew up.  We must remember that what we now take for granted may be new for others and must be taught as part of the whole package.

There are many worshippers in our congregations but I’m not sure we could all say that our churches have become worshipping communities just yet and, as I’ve visited different churches in the UK over the past ten years or so, that’s what I’ve observed.

Why do we put worship at the bottom instead of the top of our priorities?

I believe it’s because you can’t turn worship into a to-do list.

Most church leaders are activists.  They want something they can turn into a project; a new vision or set of values for their church they can purchase from a bigger church that’s going to make them purpose-driven or seeker-friendly or 3-dimensional or … no doubt the list goes on.

The truth is, though you can teach worship (I’m a worship leader and know the hard work encouraging people to worship involves), it’s something that won’t happen if the church leader doesn’t see the value of it.  And if all we do is shop around for church-improvement packages without putting our worship first, we’ll become a church that has a form of godliness but denies its power.  I don’t want to go to a church like that, let alone lead one.

It’s in a worshipping community that the Holy Spirit can forge the character that grows disciples and it’s from the seedbed of corporate worship and prayer that a desire for mission will grow and from where people are sent out.

We need to wake up to the value of worship.  

We need to gather worshipping communities before we send out missional communities.

Jesus said to the church in Ephesus, “I know your deeds, your hard work and your perseverance …. Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken your first love.  Remember the height from which you have fallen!  Repent and do the things you did at first.” (Revelation 2: 2-5)

Apr 17 2012

Lessons in Mission…Families

 

How do you make Missional Communities and Children work together?

There have been countless studies on how children learn, how they interact with information, and how they grow.

One of the themes of this research is that there are three primary environments in which children learn. These are Classroom, Apprenticeship and Immersion:

1) Classroom: The child is taught something by somebody. They listen and then process the information being shared with them.

2)Apprenticeship: The child is shown something by somebody. The child is involved in, and therefore learning from, a process. Information is engaged with, and processed through, implementation, experimentation and application.

3) Immersion: The child experiences and gathers information from the culture, environment or context within which they live.

Sunday morning church kids work is usually 45 minutes, or an hour at best, in the week of a child’s life. There might be activities, object lessons or games to go along with the bible teaching to help the children think through how to apply what they are hearing. It’s a good environment to share information but it’s still a classroom method.

Missional Community on mission together gives children & young people the environment to learn by being part of a community that lives out its faith. They are given the opportunity to be part of a group that looks to share its faith with others that don’t know Jesus. They don’t just attend an event but learn from many different and varied life experiences. They are encouraged to take more responsibility and to participate; to be part of the community – not just to be talked at, but talked with. In a Missional Community context children are not just waiting for adults to define something but shaping and crafting it themselves. They can be involved in, and contribute to, the life of the community.

Children learn by living out their faith – not just learning about their faith from others. They take hold of it for themselves through apprenticeship and immersion – seeing their parents lead, learning how to study the Bible for themselves and sharing Biblical reflections. A Missional Community context necessitates that young people help with younger children, serving and sharing faith together as family.

There are many different ways communities function as they gather. When thinking about appropriate environments for Missional Communities we’ve found it helpful to think through environments which are already natural and normal to families, regardless of whether or not they are Christian.

Three environments all families interact with are:

1) The Educational environment (i.e school, nursery)

This is where the parents & children are learning together. We encourage families and extended families (Missional Communities) to think about rhythms of family prayer, worship and study. One of our family Missional Communities had gatherings where they took a bible passage and the children & young people came up with a drama, craft and teaching lesson from what they’d learnt and then shared with the adults. Even the non-christians kids loved it!! Lots of applause and good conversations followed.

2) The Coffee Shop environment (i.e. Starbucks, restaurants)

This is an adult environment with children present – tables, papers and coffee with activities in the room. This environment encourages the informal relationships and interactions between children, parents and the extended family. One of our geographic Missional Communities does this as an access point for non-Christians with prayer cards and opportunities for conversations on the tables.

3) The Party dynamic (i.e. birthdays)

This is an environment where parents serve the kids – everything is set up for the kids to have a great time together – noise, mess, chaos, games, fun………sweets!! This is a great way to really help relationships & their faith come alive because if there’s one thing kids can do it’s have fun!! This is also an environment where non-Christian parents and children can engage – enjoying the experience.

The imperative of parents taking the responsibility as primary disciplers of their children, and doing this in the context of a Missional Community, has become foundational at St Thomas’ Church, Philadelphia.

Our different Missional Communities use many of these dynamics as they gather and disciple their children, rather than abdicate to the children’s workers or doing a smaller version of Sunday school in a side room whilst the adults gather. The central Children’s Ministry is set up to resource the communities – in prayer, training, and resources – so that families can express their faith locally in community.

The synergy that comes from both a Sunday celebration (with central ministry resourcing) and a Missional Community lifestyle for discipleship of children is a dynamic that works for both parents & children. They are able to grow not only in relationship with God but also with each other as they learn, together, how to be a family of missional disciples.

What have you done that has worked well with the children in your MC?

 

Rich Robinson is a Director of 3dm UK and is the Missional Communities Team Leader at Network Church Sheffield where he has been involved in pioneering, planting and leading Missional Communities for over 12 years.  He and his wife Anna have 3 wonderful young children.

Apr 10 2012

When it went wrong…and what we learnt: Alan!

In a Missional Community, things can and do go wrong… all the time.

For example, a colleague of mine, Alan, had expressed interest in church and faith and was pursuing relationship with me. Our Missional Community was, at that time, in a very embryonic phase and the thought of inviting Alan into it just didn’t seem to fit.

20120411-151213.jpg

We had heard of another Community whose aims and values seemed a really close match for what we thought Alan needed. Not only that but Alan already knew one of the leaders of this other Community. So it seemed sensible on several levels to try to connect Alan with this Community rather than invite him into ours. After all, Jesus said ‘One sows and another reaps’ (John 4:37).

We set to work re-establishing the relationship between Alan and his old acquaintance with the intention that Alan would ultimately be invited into Community and get the discipleship that he craved.

However, despite our best efforts and hints and encouragements, Alan didn’t do what he was supposed to! After several meetings with our mutual friend over lunch or after church, he was still showing no interest in joining our friend’s Community.

I often find that when things go ‘wrong’ people are the problem. They often don’t do what we think they should!

For want of a better idea, we started to invite Alan along to things that our Community was doing. And that was it. He loved it.

We recently did some ‘vision casting’ with the Community, inviting people to step up and take part in the things we feel God is calling us as a group to do. Alan signed up for practically everything.

This process taught us that you can’t socially engineer someone else’s discipleship! It seems an obvious statement to make but it’s an easy trap to fall into when you’re leading a Community. It is important to think carefully about the vision and the aims of your Community (read Jenny Rosser’s excellent post on finding vision). None-the-less, we shouldn’t let ourselves get so caught up in the vision that we overlook the importance of relationship.

Often, as with Alan, a strong relational connection can overcome any perceived mis-match of vision and aims.

20120411-150136.jpg

Stephen Richardson lives in Sheffield with his wife Tabea. He works as a Consultant Engineer for Derbyshire County Council and is trying to find out what the construction and property industry looks like in the God Kingdom. He co-leads a Missional Community that is exploring forms of new monasticism as a means to holistic discipleship and integrated living.

 

Apr 2 2012

How to…Get Vision

Sometimes we think that uncovering and establishing our own missional vision is going to be difficult. It may require time and effort but we can all discover the vision that God has for us.

The key questions to ask yourself are: ‘What am I passionate about?’ and ‘What is God saying to me?’ As George Bernard Shaw said: ‘You see things as they are and ask why? But I dream things that never were and ask why not?’

Over the past few years of observing communities, we have identified that a clear vision and sense of calling has been a key factor to determine whether we see breakthrough in establishing a missional community, and if the resulting missional community achieves sustainability. Everyone can learn how to uncover their own missional vision.

A good biblical example is Nehemiah:
We see in chapter 1; Nehemiah’s picture of how things should be  which grew from description he was given of the present reality in Jerusalem. From chapter 2; He goes round the walls of Jerusalem and surveys the scene for himself and pictures how things could be.  With this vision – Nehemiah was able to lead the people in the task of rebuilding and restoring Jerusalem.

God-given vision emerges when we become aware of a situation in this world. We are gripped by how it is right now, compared to how the Holy Spirit convicts us that God intended it to be. In this gap between present reality and Kingdom possibility – vision is birthed which propels us to action.

The key to all this is prayer. Positioning ourselves to hear God’s heart and receive the revelation of what could be.

It is good to reflect on your passions, interests, relationships and networks and then add a good dose of ‘What If?’

Pray with others too as you consider the following:

  • What is our heart’s desire? – What do we long to see happen?
  • What do we ache for?    - What do we hope for?
  • What is our holy discontent?- What do we long to see changed?

Reflect on and express vision through Scripture. Share what you hear God saying with others. It may be that vision will come through prophetic words or visions from God, through other Christian leaders. or circumstances working together or through requests for help from others. Sometimes facing the truth about what is not working can help as vision can be birthed from difficulty or frustration.

It all comes back to what God is  saying to you? Don’t overlook the importance of setting aside the time to listen and hear Him speak. Once your vision is birthed, prayer becomes key to the on-going reality of your vision; see Isaiah 6: 1-9.

Remember vision and call is for everyone. Not just for the big and famous!

Jenny Rosser lives in Durham with her husband David. They have been involved in the developement and implementation of Missional Communities for the past 10 years.

Image: Pixomar / FreeDigitalPhotos.net