Tag Archives: young adults

Mar 14 2013

Lessons in Mission: Young Adults

 

Over the last few years of being involved in mission with young adults, I have always had it on my heart to lead and help others grow communities where people know that they are “sent”. I can remember long conversations – with both those who are Christians and those who are not – about how God is a sending God, that He sent Jesus to die for us and that He has now sent us into the broken world around us to represent Him and help see it restored into His image.

Within this, lots of us have (slowly!) learned how to get better at knowing who God has sent us to and how we can be good news to those around us. However, what I have realised along with others that have shared this journey with me is this: it’s not just who He has sent us TO, but who He has sent us WITH that’s important.

I think there are 2 key things within this that God has taught us:

1. We PARTNER WITH HIM

Matt 28:19 – “Go and make disciples… and surely I am with you, even until the end of the age.”

So there is this great paradox with living in the Kingdom – that God sends us, but is also with us. Confusing? Maybe. Reassuring? Definitely! I suppose what I have missed out from the long conversations I mentioned earlier is the realisation that God has sent His Holy Spirit to live in us and lead us. No longer do we go anywhere on our own.

I remember being part of a young adult/workplace focussed missional community years ago when God first spoke to me about how much He wanted to come to work with me! My whole outlook on my work changed; I started looking to go on little adventures with God, and I can honestly say that it marked a turning point in seeing numerous opportunities to share Jesus with people and see them discipled in various ways.

2. We PARTNER WITH OTHERSteam-huddle

Why did Jesus bother to recruit 12 down-and-outs at the start of His ministry? Why did He send the apostles out in 2’s to the towns and cities ahead of Him (Luke 10)? Why did He get 2 people to fetch a donkey (Mark 14)?? There’s a common theme – we don’t work alone!

Again, I think choosing to partner with others in mission is one of the best things some of us as young adults have learned to do. Missional communities are about being on mission together! In our current community, we are really enjoying the opportunity to introduce our people of peace to each other and inviting them to join in more with the whole community, through various things that we do. Maybe it’s just me, but sharing the Good News with others and trying to disciple them can be really tiring and hard when I do it alone! I need other people to encourage, challenge and inspire me in mission. I’m fairly convinced that going alone also prevents people from experiencing the fullness of the Gospel message: God IS COMMUNITY – He shares 3 relationships within Himself – Father, Son and Holy Spirit. They partner together in relationship with us and so when we go with others, we represent this to the world around us.

Two of the biggest giants that we have seen in young adult culture are probably individualism and consumerism. In essence, both of these are about putting “me” at the centre. What we have found is that if, as those trying to reach young adults, we buy into either of these 2 ways of thinking, we cease to be effective in mission. This is because mission isn’t about putting “me” at the centre – rather, it’s about God and others around us. So when we choose partnership it allows God’s natural grace for mission to flow and for others to experience God for who He really is – the One who is committed to relationship and adventure with others, no matter what. To a broken, lonely and frustrated generation, that’s incredibly Good News.

Who has God sent you to?

Are you partnering with Him?

Who are you taking with you as you go?

 

si ford

Simon Ford lives in Sheffield, is part of the King’s Centre Church and works for 3dm UK. He has been part of and led various young adult and workplace-focussed missional communities over the last 9 years.

Sep 27 2012

Oikos: Helen’s story

 

 

Over the past couple of weeks it’s been great to read some of the very practical ways that Oikos can be lived out in Christian community. As I’ve reflected on my experience of Oikos I felt it was important this week to share a more personal testimony of how this lifestyle principle can have a significant impact, in practice.

Two years ago, when I was first invited into an Oikos in Sheffield, my understanding of what it meant to ‘do family’ with people was pretty sketchy. My Mum had died when I was 18 and my Dad worked away most of the time. As a young adult, family life meant ‘responsibility’ to me; I was afraid of taking on the burden of family relationships and I was also afraid of becoming burdensome to others.

 

Communicating invitation

One of the first challenges I faced with Oikos was believing that I was actually invited. Rich and Anna who lead us told me time and time again that they loved having me involved, that I was always welcome at their house, that they considered me to be part of their family. Despite such clearly stated truths, I was always slightly apprehensive about whether they really meant it. My life was so geared towards independence it was hard to readjust to the idea of daily and weekly connection with a particular community of people.

It took about a year for the message to finally sink in. But the culmination of trips to the park, dinners, cups of tea, bathing the kids and being told umpteen times ‘we want you here’, finally led me to a place where I no longer questioned whether it was really true.

 

The good, the bad and the ugly

Another key shift was learning that life in Oikos means that people see your good bits and your bad bits.

Before I joined our Oikos I guess most people who knew me probably thought I pretty much had it together. And to a certain level I probably did – I was just keeping the broken parts of me very well hidden(!) Being in Oikos made it very difficult to ignore the grief, the disappointment and the loneliness that was really there. When you do life-on-life discipleship it’s hard for people not to spot your reactions and it’s hard to avoid clashing with each other at points. For years I’d been part of a church with amazing support structures, discipleship programmes and leaders who had invested in me, but it has been the true experience of being part of a family that has both brought brokenness to the surface and allowed God to bring healing to it. What excites me for the future is beginning to look at how I can offer this same investment to other young adults around me.

 

Belonging not obligating

The level of healing that God has brought me by being part of an Oikos is revealed in the way that I operate in my marriage, my community and within the wider church. Whereas in the past ‘family’ had conjured up a sense of responsibility and obligation, I now have such a strong sense of belonging that opportunities for service are both a normal part of life but also a real blessing to me. It’s fun to be in a family where you get to help assemble Ikea furniture for a new home, stack the dishwasher together at the end of an event, or help the youngest member of Oikos spoon peas onto their fork at dinner.

 

When you first look at the concept of Oikos it’s easy to wonder whether as a leader it’s going to be really hard work and quite a risky venture to pursue. And to a certain extent Oikos is hard work – it involves real people, with real issues, who need real love and investment. But my testimony is one of breakthrough and healing – which leads me to wonder what the church would look like if we all lived in family-based community?

My conversation with God is now about who I can invite into an Oikos where I can invest in them and get to see God’s transformation and breakthrough in greater measure.

 

Helen and her husband Jon  live in Sheffield and are part of St Thomas’ Church, Philadelphia.  They’ve been part of and led missional communities for the past 5 years and are passionate about seeing young adults released into their missional vision.  Helen works for 3dmUK, a ministry which trains and equips church leaders in missional discipleship, whilst doing her MA in Global Politics and Law.

 

 

May 14 2012

Missional Communities Round-up

 

We thought this week we would do a bit of a round-up of various things happening in the Missional Communities movement right now.  Here goes!

3dmUK are busy with another Learning Community in Sheffield this week, the last one in the 2-year cycle for the 500+ churches.  This has been a great Learning Community with lots of people really seeing God breakthrough in new ways in churches right the way from Bournemouth to East Kent to Leicester, Liverpool and Edinburgh!  If you want to find out more about Learning Communities then click here.

 

 

If you haven’t already seen it the 3dm HQ in the US has re-launched their website.  It is full of resources, blogs and reflections on what it means  to be missional disciples and churches in our world today. Their current promo carries the tagline ‘Keep Calm & Disciple On’.

 

 

We know you’re a fan of the Missional Communities Blog, but did you know that the 3dmUK also write a blog for leaders?  Their latest posts have been reflecting on the journey of discipleship and what that looks like, especially about the times when it can feel really discouraging.

“…the process of stepping out requires us to live uncomfortably, to stretch ourselves, and often to experience misunderstanding from others. This process happens personally for us as leaders, but is also something experienced by the congregation. But take a look through the gospels…. doesn’t this sound familiar? Isn’t this precisely the place we often find the disciples?”

To read more head over to the blog here.

Finally, a story about getting started from a new Missional Community based in Deal, Kent.

I lead an MC with my husband called Imagine. We are a community of young adults seeking to share our lives together throughout the week, encourage each other to go deeper in our walks with God and reach out together to other young adults in our town. We have spent time helping one person with her regular craft fairs, another couple with the youth work they are involved in; we have done prayer walks and times of extended worship together, we have eaten together a fair amount and sought to bring those on the fringes of church into our community.

In the next few months we are looking to find the places where young adults hang out in our town (sports clubs, music groups etc) and go and join in. We hope to be able to run some faith-based discussion groups or an Alpha course for young adults. We love bringing people together in a community like this because it is just the right size to be able to get things done together, but not so big that we can’t know each other really well.  We are a fairly young community but we are really excited about all that God is going to do with us and through us over the coming months!

That’s all for this post!  We pray for God’s blessing on you as you seek to reach out to others with His love!
Mar 20 2012

Real Life, Real Discipleship

In 2005 Jenny and myself were involved in leading a Sunday Evening celebration for young adults at our church called Engage.  It was an incredible time of going on a journey of faith, worship, discipleship and asking ourselves ‘What does church look like for this generation?’

We quickly realised that we needed a team.  So we invited about 12 people, mostly in their twenties, to take some sort of responsibility for the week by week running of the event.  Some would host up front, some would lead worship, others would preach, or run the cafe, be on welcome, set down or prayer.

We invited them to a team huddle at our house on a Friday evening, initially once a fortnight, and later once a month.  There was one important rule – for the first hour of the huddle, nobody was allowed to talk about the event.  You could only talk about yourself.  We used a variety of tools – sometimes we’d use a bunch of questions based on character development, or on skills, or on what God had been speaking to us about.

Once we’d gone round the group, prayed and listened to the Holy Spirit together, we’d then feed them all some food.  Over dinner, we’d chat about how the evening service was going, how people were getting on in their roles, and where we thought we should be putting our energies into.  If people complained about things they weren’t happy about, we’d use the Learning Circle* to process what first their response would be, before widening to what the group’s collective response would be, if anything.

A really interesting thing happened.  Initially, lots of the group didn’t like the fact that, in their mind, the ‘business’ aspect of the meeting - the reason we’d asked them into a role - was minimised, and done over an informal setting at the end of the evening.
They’d say things like:
When are we going to stop talking about relationships and talk about the rota?

I’m not a leader – I just move the chairs

I don’t need to hear God as much as the hosts do – I just run the cafe

I don’t need to think about welcome – I’m in the band

But we persisted, and within a short space of time, people got what we were trying to do.  It wasn’t really about the event anymore, although that gave us a common experience on which to reflect and practice being influencers instead of passengers in a culture where consumer church was becoming a real danger for everyone.  It was about shaping a culture of discipleship – of taking a bunch of young people who were wanting to follow Jesus and learning together in the context of a shared task.  What was God wanting to show us, teach us, reveal to us – not just as individuals who have our own part to play in a Sunday service – but as a community of people hungry for the presence of God in our lives?

Over time, everyone in the team opened up and started sharing more of their lives with each other, and the group moved from the slightly awkward and unsure to an amazing sense of co-ownership and mutual inter-dependance, and a desire for deep discipleship.

Six years on, and although Engage no longer exists as an evening service, the culture has multiplied across the church.  Many of the original team are now leading missional communities in their own right, some of the team even got married to each other and have started families, and others are now on core staff at our church.

Our story has taught us some key principles in leading individuals and teams into an environment where missional communities thrive:

  • Relationship between the leaders/followers is more important than the Role they might perform
  • Time spent together socially is more important than the Task we do together
  • Invest in the Culture not just the Event - Healthy culture thrives and multiplies yet events come and go
  • Perseverance is more important than Consensus when we’re trying to catalyze a shift in culture.
How would these inform your current practice of leading and growing healthy missional communities?

Gareth Irvine
We’re Gareth & Jenny Irvine, and in 2012 we will be planting a new missional community base called Saint Aidan’s in the north of the city of Coventry.  We’re taking a small team of young adults with us, to live as in incarnational community focused around prayer and mission.  We’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 we’ll be be moving in July.
* For more on the Learning Circle please visit 3DM.

Image: photostock / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Mar 13 2012

Our Mission, Our Story: Roots Missional Community

The Roots story began whilst we were expecting our first child. We knew another couple who were in the same boat; we weren’t in an MC at the time and we knew our lives were missing something….community, family, the sense of ‘being in it together’ with people.

And so we started to have a meal once a week with this couple with the intention of pursuing life together and drawing others into it. We knew our lives were about to change completely and that it would bring new challenges and missional opportunity and we needed others to be in that with.

As we continued to eat weekly we began inviting others in and we grew. We sensed that there were some people for whom life as part of ‘big’ church hadn’t always been easy…they were struggling to connect meaningfully with others and were on the fringe. We felt a natural pull to invite them into our growing family.

Now, I’m afraid we didn’t quite follow the normal ‘recommended’ route of starting an MC. We didn’t start with a clear missional vision or really any clue about where we were headed longer term, but as we grew and developed the MC we realised that what we had sensed to do naturally we then began to recognise and articulate as our vision. We noticed that God was using us as a place to draw people into for a season, for them to get healed up, grow in freedom and confidence in their faith and then be sent out to run with their own dreams and visions – the things they wanted to be ‘in it together’ with others.

So what about being missional? Well, quite early on we decided that our mission was lived out through people’s individual callings and situations, and our main focus was to support, encourage and pray for each other in those places. Practically that would sometimes look like all of us trouping out to help serve at a kids events that a couple of our MC were involved in; one time a few of us went out onto the streets to help one member who was involved in detached youth work; we fundraised one Christmas to buy refugee and asylum-seeking kids presents whom one of our number had got to know through a midwifery training placement. A few times we did something all together, like the year we put on an Easter egg hunt in the city centre and gave out chocolate eggs.

Over the course of the almost 5-year life of the MC we had over 70 people connected with us, though never more than about 35 at any one time. When we felt the Lord say it was time to end we were able to send out 3 brand new MCs, each with a specific vision, and one more started a year later from that same bunch of people. We count it a privilege and great joy to have been a family of people on mission together with all of those people.

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!

Mar 9 2012

Our Mission, Our Story

 

Welcome to the first of our new blog posts!  Our Mission, Our Story is a theme we will keep returning to as a blogging team.  We’ve asked our contributors to write about the story of the Missional Community they currently lead (or one they have led in the past).  We hope that these posts inspire you as to the variety and creativity that can exist in MCs and encourage you in your journey!  

Please do leave comments to ask questions to the writer – to clarify or ask them to explain more about something they’ve said.

To give a little bit of context first, our Missional Community (MC) is part of St Thomas Church Philadelphia, in Sheffield. There are about 20 adults and half a dozen young children, and we are a mix of toddlers, pre-schoolers, young adults, families and singles. The community is led by a group of 6 (3 couples).

We have chosen to orientate our lives so that we live a life of faith together, seek God together, study the Word together, eat together, celebrate together, cry together and serve together. We aim for a community with longevity, where people are truly known and we want to see God’s Kingdom come in our lives, our families, our workplaces and our local community (we all live in the same part of the city).

One thing we love to do is search for the places where God is making connections between us and stirring the same things in our hearts, and then take steps of faith to bring those ideas and stirrings into being. In this way, we don’t expect that everyone will be involved in everything at the same time, but that different people will connect with different expressions of the life of the community at different times. Some of these expressions are to do with the community’s life of faith (there are groups who lead Bible studies, groups of people who host times of ‘soaking’ / contemplation / prayer etc); some things relate more to building relationships within the community (mentoring relationships, weekends away together); and other expressions that engage with life outside of our community (at the moment there are people leading a craft group for people of faith / no faith, planning a gospel-guerilla-artwork project, visiting another local church to teach and encourage etc).

We don’t want clear cut boundaries around our MC, but hope that there will increasingly be people from the wider community who connect with us through these different expressions, in ways that ‘fit’ well with them. We are already seeing this as friendships are being built at the craft group, relationships are growing through specific ‘mission days’ to the local community, and through friends and colleagues joining us in the activities of community life. A colleague of one member started coming along to eat with us and joining us at social times, and has now started coming to some of our whole-group meetings. He is beginning to talk about God. Another example is a young man in the area who has had a difficult start to life and been in trouble with the police. He joined us on our last mission day collecting people’s rubbish to take to the tip, and the community will now be getting behind him to help pay for him to start an apprenticeship scheme with a local Christian carpenter.

As a final note, we have been really inspired by the New Monasticism movement, and have found a pattern for meeting together based around the patterns seen in monastic communities past and present. If you’d like to know more about this, or any other aspect of our MC, please use the comments facility to ask!

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Sarah Cooper lives in Sheffield, UK with her husband, and their two small children. She works as a Speech and Language Therapist and for St Thomas Church Philadelphia, and leads a Missional Community with her husband and two other couples.