Tag Archives: creativity

Mar 20 2013

Our Mission, Our Story….Martini Church!

 

This week’s post comes from a Missional Community leader from St George’s Church in Deal, Kent.  It’s his story of how the first Missional Community he led started, developed and grew. 

What exactly is going to Church? (or Martini Church – any time, any place, any where)

I grew up going to a lively Anglican Church in South London. My mum says it’s Surrey but she’s a bit posher than me. We all went every Sunday, at least once and sometimes twice. Mostly, this was a good experience.

As a grown adult living in Deal our Curate rocked our Church boat one morning in 2005. On Sunday mornings our building was uncomfortably full and she wanted us to stay away to leave some space for newcomers! Instead, our leaders encouraged us to do an alternative form of Church ourselves but somewhere else. The vision (for vision is essential) was to create communities that would, themselves, grow.

stepping stonesMy wife, Jacqui, has more ideas than you can imagine. She talked about forming a group, called ‘Stepping Stones’, with a vision for reaching out to families with younger children. The vision has changed, or rather, developed as we’ve gone on and the way we’ve met has varied massively over the years. Our concept of what going to Church meant was so shaken and since we were tearing up the rule book anyway, we were free to experiment and adapt to find out what worked best for us. Interestingly, the children had fewer hang-ups than the adults. They just asked ‘is it big church or little church today?’

Our Church agreed on five core values (which we borrowed from Phil Potter) that each Missional Community would try to embrace

  • All involved
  • Becoming disciples
  • Creating community
  • Doing evangelism
  • Encountering God

Initially, we succeeded in drawing in a number of families who had loose connections with the Church, gave them jobs to do and made sure they kept coming back! We basically ran a family friendly act of Worship on a Sunday afternoon (and soon on a Sunday morning instead) in the Church Hall and then in a local school. Getting away from Church buildings proved to be a good move. It was hard work but fun and relatively successful. People liked coming, felt valued and were committed to the group. We have been best at creating community but have never lost sight of our other values.

One Sunday morning we took about 20 adults and 20 kids 10-Pin Bowling in Margate. I felt so uncomfortable! How could this be Church? In fact, to me, it felt wrong! I started to chat with a Dad I’d never met. His daughter was starting soon at my kids’ Primary school. I knew his wife and daughter who came most weeks we did Stepping Stones, but less often to Big Church. We got chatting about sport, work, life in Deal, the kids’ school and so on. He enjoyed his day out with us and his wife was thrilled. He’d never been to anything run by the Church before. She described the event as ‘the most spiritual thing we’ve done’. He now comes to Church (big Church more than Stepping Stones) sometimes and he once came to an Alpha supper.

Stepping Stones grew. It became too big. It’s two MCs now, Sunday AM and One Step Beyond. Each has a separate and distinct vision although they overlap one another. People have come and gone but the vision for reaching out to people remains.

We have gone from being a group of people who go to Church to a group of people who do Church. It’s a much healthier arrangement.

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Bruce Watson lives on the Kent coast and teaches Modern Foreign Languages. He taught for 3 ½ years in Pakistan, married the Science teacher & came back to England (where he planned to live happily ever after).

Photo courtesy of Milan G on flickr.com

Feb 12 2013

Celebrating Seasons as a Community: Lent

This week sees, as well as Valentines day, the start of Lent. The 40 days between now and Holy Week make a great opportunity for you and your missional community to voluntarily engage in a bit of pruning and learn together how to draw close to Jesus. It’s also a great chance to try out a new practice or discipline over a relatively short period of time and have a fixed end point in mind.

crossSo how might your community focus on getting closer to Jesus this Lent? Here are a few ideas:

Discuss giving up and taking on
Make a habit of talking about your thoughts and ideas about the season. Perhaps read together the story of Jesus’ time in the desert. Discuss why it is good to fast and give certain things up. Maybe take a look at John 15 and talk about fruitfulness and pruning. Most importantly, chat about what you each plan to do over the time to draw close to Jesus. Keep talking about it, and encourage each other over the next few weeks.

Plan a lent event
So your community might have eaten pancakes together on Shrove tuesday. Maybe you could meet together for some kind of Lent reflective service too. We’ve done retreat days, quiet services, services of ashing, and things that don’t quite fit into any of that and they work great! You don’t have to do any of it on Ash Wednesday itself, just choose a time that fits your community and get thinking. What would help the people in your community best engage with repentance, rest, fasting? We’ve often found that playing creatively with the symbols of ash, water, deserts can help you make some really significant times of worship. These kind of events don’t have to just be about up and in, they can be a good for spiritual seekers and people of peace to encounter God as well. A great place to start looking for ideas is the creative worship site Proost.

Agree to take on a discipline together
What could you all do together that could help you grow closer to Jesus as individuals and a group? Try doing that each day for the next 40. Helpfully there are loads of apps and websites that offer simple actions and practices. You could try 24-7′s lent podcasts or Christian Aid’s count your blessings programme. You could pray for the world with Operation World, or engage with 3dm’s daily devotionals. If you can’t find something that works for where your community is right now, then create your own.

Play Lent Angels
We used to do this each year on the discipleship year I led. It’s a great way to get your community connecting more deeply with each other and making sure Lent stays full of grace and blessing. Give everyone someone else in the community’s name and ask them to be that person’s “angel” for the next 40 days. Get them to pray for that person, listen to God for them, send them little encouragements and gifts (although check they haven’t given chocolate up before you shower them with that blessing). Basically take every opportunity you can to bless them. This in itself can be quite a discipline, but is often also lots of fun.

They’re just a few ideas, and they are all on the lighter side really. That’s important, if you’re going to engage with this season of fasting and repentance then make sure you do it with joy and grace fully intact. Have a happy Lent!!!

ben and helen askew

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 over 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 while Ben is also training for ordination.  You can connect with him more at benaskew.tumblr.com.

Dec 11 2012

Autumn Round-Up

 

This week, a round-up of some interesting posts from other blogs and other places in the last few weeks – just in case you missed them!

alex absalom

 

Who Can Lead a Missional Community? – 5 things RiverTree Church in Ohio, USA look for when looking at potential Missional Community Leaders, by Alex Absalom

 

 

 

3dmuk logo

 

An interview with 2 mums on how they do discipleship and mission as a family from 3dmUK.

 

 

 

jo saxton

 

Jo Saxton ponders What does it take to inspire a generation?

 

 

pinterest

 

The 3dm Pinterest board has boards for UP, IN and OUT ideas for MCs as well as meal ideas and other inspiration. Check it out!

 

 

 

anna robinson

 

and finally, a reflection on Jesus as The Ultimate Incarnationalist from Anna Robinson at 3dmUK.

Dec 4 2012

Lessons in Mission…The Gift of Christmas

 

In today’s blog we’re thinking about Christmas and how it applies within the context of Missional Communities.

giftChristmas is a gift to the world because it’s God’s generous action towards his world – the gift of himself in Jesus.

It’s a gift to the church because it’s a time to celebrate and to worship the King who became a man and look forward to the hope of heaven which awaits us in eternity when He will reign and all will be well again.

It’s a gift to individuals and families as it gives us a time to be together, to take time off, to finish the year well and spend quality time having fun and to say thank you to each other with hospitality and presents.

And it’s a gift to communities engaged in mission – because the message of Christmas contains great story that is bursting to be told again today.

I’m part of the Saint Aidan’s Missional Community living in north Coventry in the UK and I’m going to share a few ideas of how we’re choosing to connect what we’re about with the season of Christmas this year.

First up, and we’re doing something a bit different for our prayer rhythms as a community this advent in the run up to Christmas.  We’re following 24-7 Prayer’s Advent podcasts which each week day give you a 5 minute video looking at God’s encounters with us throughout the biblical narrative.  This is a great starting point to get your core community thinking about the Christmas story and the themes of hope and redemption, and hopefully help you carve out time each day to encounter God in this busy time of year.  If you have connections on social media, why not post or tweet about each day and start some conversations with your people of peace – or encourage them to join in?  All our team have an advent calendar to remind them to stop and pause each day to know that God invites us to encounter him.

mulled wineNext up, we’re going to be hosting a Christmas Mulled Wine Party at our house for all the people we’ve met and connected to over the past few months – this is about trying to create the extended social space that is key to allowing new people to join your community in a non-threatening way.  We’ll host it in our house, provide the drinks and ask neighbours, friends and contacts to come and bring something to share.  Think about the environment – what music could you play, and what sort of mix of churchy/non-churchy people would allow people to mix and chat?

Finally, we’ve just started up a Kidz Klub in the estate and on the Sunday before Christmas we’re joining with the local parish church to host a Family Nativity event based on re-telling the Christmas story through drama, music and food (of course!).  We hope that the kids will bring their families and get to hear a message of hope (big on invitation) and offer some further opportunities to connect (gentle challenge) in the New Year.  If you’re a smaller missional community that is very loosely connected with a more gathered expression of church, be it your local parish congregation or a large resourcing centre, it can be helpful to think about how you could connect with a larger expression of gathered worship. Invite your friends and contacts along who may well appreciate something and respond to the presence of God in a more structured event– be it a nativity, a Carol or Christingle service, or a  Christmas Eve service around the crib.  If you’re a missional community at the early stages of working out how to meet new people of peace, look out for newcomers at Christmas services and make sure they’re given a great welcome.

After the event (if it’s a big one) why don’t you suggest that you go out for a gingerbread latte, mince pie or a glass of mulled wine and chat about what people experienced?

Christmas is a great time to get creative in lots of ways – and thinking creatively and missionally as you lead your community through this season can be lots of fun.  It can allow you to celebrate together, reconnect with contacts that you’ve not seen for a while, and for more dispersed communities that maybe are still on the journey of becoming ‘church’ can look to the everlasting reality that is proclaimed at Christmas time in churches – that God is forever present with us and that he invites us to come and encounter him.

gareth irvine

 

Gareth Irvine, together with his wife Jenny and baby daughter have just planted a new missional community base called Saint Aidan’s in the north of the city of Coventry.  They took a small team of young adults with them, to live as an incarnational community focused around prayer and mission.  They’re currently involved in Kidz Klub which works with children from challenging housing estates, and visit about 30 families each week on the estate where they live.

 

Nov 12 2012

Celebrating Festivals as a Missional Community: Advent

All churches will differ in the way they celebrate the different festivals in the church calendar (Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, Pentecost etc), but engaging in these can be a really helpful way to add rhythm to your MC, and often these things can become part of your identity or like ‘family traditions’. They can also be a great way to involve your people of peace in your MC.  Liz Lovell, Campus Chaplain at St Thomas’ Church Philadelphia in Sheffield, shares some of her tips and ideas on this topic.

The Liturgical Year is not about Sundays, rules and regulations, but about rhythm and creativity, richness of symbol, Word and Spirit, highs and lows. It is about celebration and memorial. Festivals help us celebrate our relationship with God, relationships in households and belonging community. They are opportunities for inviting others into our rich celebratory lifestyle. This was something I experienced when I was 12 and a Jewish school friend invited me to celebrate the Jewish ‘Feast of Tabernacles ‘with her family.

A festival is like a good meal – unhurried, joyful preparation, a celebratory meal followed by relaxation.
The challenge of Advent is choosing to ‘go against the flow’ of the world, making time for relaxed, enjoyable preparation, and using the period after Christmas to reflect and make life changes before the New Year.

Below are ideas used by households and Missional Communities – celebrating tradition yet bringing in the new.
• De-clutter before Decorating. To receive the new, first get rid of the old and make it fun! Items in good condition can be donated to charities. For children (as for all of us) it is discipleship in ‘simplicity’ and ‘generosity’.  Are there things in your community and household lifestyle which need simplifying?

• The Advent Crown – with community, friends and neighbours make simple advent wreaths – 4 candles with a central candle set in greenery. Seasonal food, music and a simple ‘devotional time’ set the scene.

• Assail the Senses – find creative ways of doing this – scented candles, mulled wine, spiced biscuits, the Christmas Greatest hits CD, Christmas lights inside and out. Even making a Community Christmas Cake together is symbolic of the rich ingredients of a life lived together with Christ.

• Do things differently – food, music and decorations. Create new traditions and memories. Our children came to enjoy the classical albums and carols played in December. During Advent they came downstairs in pyjamas for bedtime stories, hot chocolate, spiced biscuits and candlelight. These simple pleasures can help us all engage with the ‘deep magic’ of the Narnia stories.

• Try something unusual – on the Christmas dinner table I put a small ‘gold’ bowl with tiny amounts of frankincense and myrrh. Others may not notice, but the symbols of someone else’s birth and death are there for me.

• Santa’s Grotto or Prayer stations? Yes – your home can be like a series of prayer stations!

o Well-worn decorations trigger memories. Use them to give thanks for these and for people who have helped your spiritual journey. Particular tree decorations can remind us of family and friends who we miss.

o The Nativity Scene was never static – try putting 1 item out each day or move the Wise Men gradually towards the stable each day.

o The Advent Calendar – along with chocolates or small gifts put verses of scripture in the pockets – one for each member of the household. How about a community calendar – each person responsible for one day?

o Put decorations, story books or Bibles open at the Christmas story in unusual places- as you move around the house they are reminders of who we celebrate. Yes – even the loo can be a place of reflection! Scented candles are particularly useful in this context!

o Use your home prayer stations when you gather as a community.

These ideas may be helpful but I would encourage you to create traditions which help you to look back yet eagerly look forward, so that like the Wise men you too can ‘go back a different way’. (Matthew 2:10 – 12)

 

Liz Lovell is married to John and they have 2 grown-up children.  Liz is the Campus Chaplain for St Thomas’ Church Philadelphia, Sheffield. 

Aug 7 2012

August Blogs: Growing your Missional Community’s Walk with God

Over August the MC Blog team are taking a break from writing whilst we abide and rest. To give you some food for thought and things to chew on whilst we do that we are posting a series of links to other blogs, articles, downloads and books we want to share with you. We hope you enjoy them!

N.B. These posts have been pre-set to automatically post so any comments might not be moderated until a later date.

This week, why not take some time to read Alex Absalom’s 2 posts on how to grow your Missional Community’s Walk with God.

Part One

Part Two

Jul 24 2012

Abiding: as a community

 

So far we have explored the idea of  ’abiding’ in an individual, personal context – and this certainly needs to be part of the story – but it’s not the whole story.  Since we believe in a 3-dimensional lifestyle we also believe that ‘abiding’ can happen in the ‘in’ and ‘out’ dimensions as well as the ‘up’ dimension.*

So, how do you abide with others, in community?

Firstly, set aside 4-6 weeks of the year (often the school summer holidays) which is going to be ‘abiding’ time for your MC.  This is a time to stop the regular meeting pattern you might have and adopt a new rhythm for this time.  Abiding doesn’t necessarily mean stopping meeting altogether (although it might if that was appropriate), but rather to slow down together in fun, laughter and in a much more relaxed pace of life.

Eat together – lots!  If the sun is out, BBQ or picnic with everyone bringing things to share. If it’s wet, well eat indoors!  If it’s not a financial barrier to anyone, eat out.  Do day trips together – explore new and familiar places together.  Go to conferences or festivals together. Some Missional Communities have even been known to go on holiday together!

If you have children in your MC use this as an opportunity for them to spend more time together – especially good if they go to different schools.  Book playdates in your homes, the park or elsewhere…you could even use this as an opportunity to invite other friends along.  Invite those who don’t have kids to be part of this too, they and your kids will both benefit from this, and parents might appreciate some respite whilst someone else pushes them on the swing!

Look for simple opportunities to serve each other.  Offer to feed people’s pets or water their plants whilst they’re on holiday.  Leave a meal in their fridge for when they return.  Take their kids out for the morning.  Trade your glut of runner beans with their glut of tomatoes! If people can’t afford to go on holiday see if you have friends in other parts of the country who could house swop.

You don’t need to stop doing any ‘God stuff’ over the summer…why not all agree to read the same book together (biblical or other Christian) as holiday reading material, or do some informal, spontaneous prayer and worship times. Use 1 Corinthians 14:26-33.  You might decide that some of you want to all want to study the same theme through the Bible over the summer and compare notes as you go.  Share what God has been speaking to you personally too and encourage each other. Remember to keep it low-key.

Above all, invest in friendship with each other.  Fun is an important part of that!  Sowing into friendship in this time will reap rewards when time is tight and life is busy. Be spontaneous and informal as much as possible.  Feel free not to meet.  Get others to organise anything you are doing.  Respect people’s need for rest and introvert time so don’t worry if they need ‘time off’ from other people. Don’t do anything that requires much more than 10 minutes planning!  If you are a church leader, strip back all evening meetings to allow people space to ‘be’ community together and keep services shorter, more family friendly and relaxed.

Hopefully that has given you a few thoughts on how to abide together as community. Doing this will also give you an idea of how well people are operating as ‘oikos/extended family’ together, and help to build on it more.

Helen Askew lives in Deal, Kent along with her two young children and husband Ben who is training for ordination. She works for St George’s Church with responsibility for everyone under 30. They have just planted a new MC for young adults there, are working to establish youth MCs and also work with 3DM UK from time to time!

 

 

* For more on Lifeshapes go to www.weare3dm.com

Jul 16 2012

Abiding: as an individual

 

This week we continue our series on Abiding by looking at how we might ‘abide’ as an individual.  You can read previous posts on this subject here and here.

Abiding for me is about being before doing. It’s about being pruned back to the essentials of who I am so that I can connect with who God is.

It’s about coming back to the God whose name is ‘I AM’, connecting with His character and hearing His voice. It’s about being reminded of what God has done and how that reflects who he is. Abiding is about celebrating His goodness in the previous season, reflecting honestly on its challenges and seeing that He was always there. It’s retreating into the safe harbour of His person and allowing His word (written and spoken) to build into the wind that will move me forward into the next adventure.

It’s a place of rest, retreat and re-creation of everything that He says I am. It’s about reminding myself of what God has already said about me. It’s about taking the time and making the space to reflect on what He has done and grown in my character over the previous season. It’s about listening for His right-now word in my life. And it’s also about working out what He’s saying over me for the next season.

Abiding is not a stand-alone time, disconnected from the rest of life. In the winter there are always remnants of the previous season (the autumn leaves lying on the ground) and signs of the season to come (the lightening days, the green shoots that hint of spring).. In the same way, abiding is always about looking back and looking forward. It’s about making space to store up the already-won fruit and allowing seeds to be planted for the next crop.

But how do I do this? What does it actually look like for me?

Being before doing doesn’t mean doing nothing! It means doing those things that express who I am – the gifts, skills, and passions that God has given me. For me, it’s things like sitting in coffee shops, walking round a park, cooking, and hanging out with friends. Doing the things I enjoy, the things which come naturally to me, often helps me let my guard down. As I stop striving to get things done or achieve certain goals, I relax – and that’s when I open up to God.

Abiding also doesn’t have to mean ‘in a room on your own.’ The degree to which that is helpful will depend on how introverted/extroverted you are. As an extrovert, part of abiding is learning the discipline of being with God on my own, learning to be comfortable with myself. However, I also need the life that comes from being with others.

The people that God has put around me can be so helpful in helping me reconnect with who I am – reminding me of what God has said, asking me questions to help me dig deeper, talking over the previous season and pointing out what God has done, mourning over the disappointments, celebrating the successes, and helping me see what He’s saying for the future.

There does need to be an intention to it though – a choosing to make the time and space for this, without the need to rush on to the next thing and the next thing. It means I can linger over a coffee if God is revealing something to me as I talk with a friend. Or that I can push myself to climb that next hill and learn something about how God is calling me to persevere, without worrying about being late back. Or that I can take the time to express the creativity I’ve been given by a creator God by experimenting in the kitchen, without stressing about how successful the end result is.

I’m really looking forward to making some time to abide over the next month or so and seeing what God says and does in me. What about you? Will you be abiding? How will you be connecting with God’s character and who He says you are?

 

Pip Martin lives in Sheffield and works for 3dm UK as Operations Manager. She has led several Missional Communities with a heart for internationals.

 

 

(Picture taken by Pip in Aix-les-Bains, France)

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 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.