We recently spent an evening in discussion (mostly listening) with a normal French woman regarding her views on Christianity, scripture and spirituality in general. Here is a brief report of what was shared. There may be no original ideas in all this, but I thought it could be a good to circulate further as my feeling is that these views are quite representative of a large part of the French population. I should clearly write this up in French too, and I hope to get round to that one day but it would take me too long right at this moment.

What is scripture for you? Where did these books come from?
 – Well Jesus was a great moral teacher with a influential way of life. Various texts were written about him, and the ones we have today as ‘scripture’ were selected by some central authority with an agenda to get people to believe what they wanted them to.

Regarding spirituality…
 – I pray every night. In fact I spend about 15 – 20 minutes in prayer every night praying for protection and for family. I don’t believe in God – I mean I don’t imagine some human type figure sitting there listening to me – but I believe that my prayers are listened to all the same.

Regarding Christianity….
 – Religion seems to be men in authority trying to get other men to believe their ideas, and using violence, oppression, or other dubious methods to achieve it.
 – Authority, in general, is a big problem in France, as we are taught not to question it, not to challenge it. The expert is always right and we, simple children sitting at his feet, are taught to nod and smile. For example, genuine questions asked during childhood catechism lessons were simply ignored.
 – The historical Church [in France] was a mechanism for getting people to behave in a certain way.
 – The christian church in France just seems to be all about judgement. “You’re a sinner”, or “your values are not right”. There are people in the next town, Christians, who display their [anti-homosexual marriage] banner in the window.  What about love and tolerance?

So in summary, the main reasons that this person says they aren’t a Christian, and considers that they can’t participate in such a faith, are :
i) The Church (whether manipulating scripture in the 2nd century or ignoring questions at catechism in the 20th)
ii) Christians (specifically those active in society trying to push a specific moral position to the detriment of those who hold a different moral position)
iii) Men in authority (all of them apparently!)

I thank God that she doesn’t identify us with any of the above, which means that we could start this conversation in the first place. Now where to take the conversation from here?

How did he build this momentum? For the first few months, he really struggled to get enough players for even a five-a-side.   But he had a very simple approach that worked:

• a clear invitation – you know what to expect (a friendly kick-around), the benefits (fun, fitness, friendship), the commitment (an hour early on Sunday morning)
• consistency – the time slot was regular and consistent.  You could plan on it happening
• repeated approach – I received his weekly email about 30 times before finally summoning up the energy to go!
• personal enthusiasm – he kept encouraging me to come and saying how much fun it was
• viral effect – he actively encouraged players to spread the word to their friends

It made me think:  as a Missional Community, do we have a clear invitation as to what we do and why we do it, a predictable consistent rhythm, repeated approaches to invited our friends along, an enthusiasm in explaining what we do, and the courage to ask our friends to think about who they know that would find us of interest?  The “Sunday morning football” model has stuck itself in my mind as a simple way to remember how to grow something. Hope it helps you too!

The book comes out of the couple’s experience of leading churches and watching other pastors try to juggle family live with their ministry and mission.  Their conclusion: Family or mission is an impossible choice. Family and mission is unsustainably exhausting. Family ON mission – moving as a pack, inviting people into our lives and living an integrated life – made things manageable, fun and fruitful.

Content

The book is trying to correct the tendency to put all the “bones” of missionary discipleship in place (missional communities, huddles, etc.) in place without the texture (“skin”) of family on mission, because one without the other doesn’t work.  I agree with this – we often focus on the structure because it seems simpler to figure out, to our loss.

The book covers why the idea of “(extended) family on mission” is so important:  because God as Trinity is a family on mission, because we were created to be, because Jesus created a family on mission as his approach, and because our culture is longing for this mix of intimacy and purpose.  The book unpacks all of this in quite some depth, with the highlight being a fascinating exploration of Jesus’s rejection by his own family and his constitution of a new family on mission with the disciples and women followers.

The second part of the book provides a framework for understanding how a family on mission can work.  As anyone familiar with Mike Breen will expect, it involves lots of triangles!  Firstly,the “up, in and out” aspects: spiritual parents, predictable patterns and missional purpose. Then each of these get their own three points (and hence a triangle).

A few quotes to give you a feel of this section:

“Am I called to be a spiritual parent in this season, leading a family on mission? Or am I called in this season to be part of someone else’s family on mission?”

“Try making a list of people who seem to be orienting themselves toward you, and then rank them in how “close” they are. Are they functioning as friends? Are they followers? Are they family?”

“Predictable patterns are a way to show love to family”

“Missional Purpose is always multiplying the life of Jesus into that neighbourhood or network. Our missional purpose is to reproduce Jesus by making disciples who make disciples.”

Assessment

I enjoyed the book and will return to it.  Mike provides his usual structure and clarity of thought, and Sally brings a personal touch and perspective.  It does a good job in setting out a theological rationale for functioning as extended families on mission.  It also provides some good frameworks to assess where we are in that process. As someone who is trying to live on a family on mission, it also provided some good challenges in certain areas.

Some unanswered practical questions

I did also have some unanswered questions and some frustrations with the book.  Whilst making the point that “family on mission is for everyone, not just nuclear families” it often DOES conflate the two, with many of the examples being around what seems very much like nuclear family life.  Also, how does “oikos” (family on mission) relate to “missional communities”?  Breen has said that the latter are a waypost towards the former.  What are the differences between the two and how do we move from A to B?

It would have been helpful to understand how families on mission can be formed.  It seems the Breens figured it out in Sheffield, a large university town, where there are presumably plenty of (hungry!) students willing to attach themselves to the family life (and dinner table!) of a high-profile church leader!  From what I can understand (I may be wrong) they are now building a “family on mission” at 3DM of super-committed missional types who also happen to be their employees!  That is great, and very inspirational, but as someone living in suburbia without the status of “church leader”, with a young family, with only a couple of students in the entire church, it all seems much easier said than done.  Asking a student or young professional to join you as you live your life, go shopping, grab a coffee and so forth is one thing – asking another young family, or mother with young kids, or senior executive to do the same is another.  Inviting another family to join you in your daily rhythms is well integrated into your life but not theirs!

Another example: community prayer.  The 3DM “family on mission” gather for daily devotions Monday to Friday every week, and this is held up as a good example of a predictable prayer pattern.  But that’s the 3DM “family on mission” are all employees and work in the same building! I could start daily prayer in my kitchen at 7:30am which would be very “integrated” for me but unimaginable for the other people in my missional community to attend.

Summary

So, “Family On Mission” (buy on Amazon here) paints a desirable vision, but could have gone further in how “regular ol’ missional community leaders” can realistically make this happen. Or is the vision as painted really only achievable by church leaders in a context with plenty of single people or couples without children who can ‘attach’ themselves to your family and mission in this way?  I yearn for the vision and it has been a driving force in our experiments with missional community, but the practical constraints I’ve mentioned above do get in the way and the book didn’t really address these.

Overall, I enjoyed the book and I would recommend it to those who are super-focused on nuclear family to the detriment of ministry and mission, and vice versa.  It is also a great reminder for missional community leaders about the “family feel” we would like to create, and to avoid missional communities being a set of events or ministry program. I would love some more of these practical questions to be addressed in a second edition or on the 3DM blog.

The name Oikonomics is a play on the words oikos (extended family) and economics.  The overall theme of the book is that the call of discipleship involves making wise investments to grow commonwealth – wealth that can be shared around – and not just financial wealth at that.

Jesus talked a lot about investments that grew 20, 50, 100-fold.  The book recognises that God does seek human flourishing in every sense of the world: people enjoying intimate relationships with God and others, unencumbered by sickness, abounding in creativity and ideas, and with resources to hand.  It is not a ‘prosperity gospel’ theology – equating financial wealth with spiritual wealth – and the authors address the pitfalls of ‘prosperity gospel’ at some length.

Jesus had much to say about how to flourish in life, and the book identifies five sorts of ‘capitals’ (types of wealth) and a perspective on how Jesus assigns different relative values to each of them. The book argues that the most important capital is spiritual (wisdom and power), followed by relational (friendships), then physical (hours and health), then intellectual (ideas and creativity) then financial (money).  These five capitals come across in Jesus’s different parables, and the them of investing lesser capitals to develop more valuable capital is a recurring one.  Much of Jesus’s teaching is about setting out this set of priorities against competing value systems we see around us: many people would put financial and intellectual at the start of the list, and spiritual at the bottom, for example.

The book them moves on to how we can grow the different capitals: by investing the capitals we do have to develop those we don’t, and concludes by suggesting how we might develop our own investment strategy.

I enjoyed the book and read it in no time. I appreciated the clear theme, the good examples of how people have invested different sorts of capital to grow another type, and how lives can be seen through the lens of making wise investments in the different capitals.  The book is short, and to the point.

It is a little theoretical at times, and a bit light on some key areas, such as justifying some of the priorities assigned to the different capitals.  For example, relational capital is placed above physical capital on the grounds that “you need relationships to do anything with your physical, intellectual or financial capital” – but equally, if your health is bad then you won’t be able to do much with your relationships either.  Also, what it means to invest spiritual or intellectual capital is unclear.  If you spend money or give time, it is gone, and if you make too many demands on your friends the relationship will be stressed, but if you come up with an idea or a piece of wisdom you don’t lose it when you give it away. So what does investment of these categories look like? Finally, the book asks you to estimate the relative equity of your five capitals.  But measuring money versus creativity or health is not an easy assessment and this could have been thought through more.

Overall, then it is a helpful framework and a good lens through which to look at life and decisions. I can see it being a helpful discipleship tool.  It feels very much like a starting point for thinking about these things, and I could imagine a second edition where the ideas get fleshed out, more examples given, and practical questions and dilemmas worked through.

3DM has been a wonderful resource over the last 4 years, and I am deeply grateful for their wisdom and experience. This is an interesting addition to their portfolio.  I would recommend you pick up a copy: you can buy it from Amazon here.

If you have read the book, I would be interested in your perspectives: do you agree with my evaluation? If not, does the concept of the five capitals make sense to you – and what questions would you have? Would be fascinated to hear from you…

To anybody who has stumbled across my site as a result of that article – welcome!  This blog (‘The Untaming’) is active, although I do post slightly sporadically, as I try to avoid running away with too much theory and want the blog to reflect our real learnings, successes and failures… which all takes time!

If you would like to sign up to email notifications when I do post content, please use the ‘follow’ button to the right.

Over the last few years, we have struggled to find the right rhythm for our missional community. How do we give quality time to discipleship, to community AND to mission without overloading everyone’s diaries?

• In year 1, we morphed from a classic home group approach to a missional community vision. We actually got going on the MC adventure, but changed too many things at once as we overcorrected toward an outwards focus at the expense of community and discipleship.
• In year 2, we went back to basics and put discipleship and living daily on mission back on the agenda. This was worth doing and we did see an important change in perspective. I was frustrated that “my” plans for outward focused activities were not happening – even though we were deepening relationships with our friends and actually doing OUT in more organic ways.
• In year 3, we discovered the power of focusing our attention on one innovation in our group pattern of meeting: a monthly Sunday family gathering in our case. But we felt people wanting to join us still had quite a barrier to jump over between our social gatherings and our ‘spiritual’ gatherings.
• In year 4, we put together a schedule that we believe fits in with the rhythms of the people we know and that gives people events of progressive spiritual depth to join us at.

A very helpful set of articles by Todd Engstrom (do check out his blog!) clarified things for me. In a nutshell, he suggests “gather as family over a meal, as disciples in an LTG (Life Transformation Group, as defined by Neil Cole), and as missionaries in a third place.” I shamelessly took and expanded on a simple venn diagram that he drew to explain this, and you can see my version below.

This picture gave us a simple way to think through our rhythms.

Firstly, let’s look at the ‘third places‘ – natural, neutral and regular places where members

of the group gather alongside non-believers. For us this includes the mens’ “beer and curry nights”, the mums and toddler group, the Scout troop, and a variety of local events such as fêtes and festivals. We don’t all need to go to one third place all together as one big group. Let’s value and pray for those things that we are already doing together and where our lives are already crossing, and use those as places to spot new people of peace. This covers the ‘community in mission’ side of things, so to speak.

Secondly, let’s gather as an “extended family” (with or without the kids) over a meal. We decided to do this once a month on a Friday night (with the host inviting their people of peace too) and once a month on a Sunday afternoon for afternoon tea with all the kids. We will have some kind of minor spiritual content at these events – giving thanks, asking for prayer requests, or similar. This covers the ‘community together’ side of things.

Thirdly, let’s makes sure we are growing in our discipleship and ability to make disciples. For us this is working itself out through the use of LTGs – groups of 2 or 3 who meet regularly to reflect and respond to what God is saying in their lives and to pray for others , in our monthly ‘core team meeting’ where I will encourage further reflection on our discipleship. It also includes the women’s Bible studies and mens’ pub discussions we will hopefully be running too. This covers the ‘community of learners’ side of things.

As you can see, new people could progressively engage with us in each three of these ways: firstly in a third place, secondly in a ‘family gathering’, and thirdly in things with more spiritual content such as LTGs or Bible studies.

As people flow (in diminishing quantities!) from right to left in the diagram, and spiritual vitality and energy for service flows left to right, we really do need to cover all these three bases we feel!

I described this as “secret sauce” as we felt it really simplified things for us. However, perhaps we theoretically knew most of this at the start, and it was simply that we had to go through the learning curve ourselves before it all clicked.

Epilogue

So that is where we are in our thinking today. No doubt it will evolve. I hope you have enjoyed this series on missional community rhythms / routines / schedule – and found some of it to be helpful. I would love to hear what you have found work, and what problems you have had to overcome in your context.

YEAR 4 – Opening up

In mid 2013, we re-planned again for the coming academic year (as families with kids our years revolve around the school calendar).  We planned to revert to three Monday nights and one Sunday afternoon per month: keep the “Sunday celebration” format we had pioneered the year before, reserve one Monday for prayer and for planning the Sunday celebration and then have a meal on one Monday and a Bible Study on the other. We are also encouraging people to be part of LTGs for closer-knit discipleship.

However, what has been really encouraging is the way the team thought about each of those activities and tweaked them to make them more missional.

Our core team night will stay on a Monday as that is a day we have traditionally reserved for MC activity.

Our meal night – originally slated for Monday too – will move to a Friday, with a different host each month.  This allows the host to invite both the MC and their people of peace, and Friday is a much easier invitation in our context than a Monday night for most people. Only Christians go out on a Monday

Our family gathering will stay on a Sunday afternoon.  However rather than stick with the “informal version of a church” that we were trying out earlier this year, we are considering more accessible activities for our people of peace.  Our “pray for the kids before school term” event earlier this month was well attended and a lot of fun… whereas we have struggled to get people outside of our core team to join us for “informal worship”.

The core team had been asking for a bit of dedicated Bible Study in the mix… originally, this was going to be for us plus anyone else we wanted to invite, but encouragingly the team decided that it would be more accessible to others if we ran separate men’s and women’s Bible Studies/discussion nights.  In the week, it is a lot easier for one parent to pop out rather then hiring a baby sitter.

What I like about this is that it offers a clear path to getting more involved in the missional community life.  Start off as friends… then perhaps come along to a Sunday afternoon gathering with the family (a fun time with just a dash of spiritual content) or a meal or two on a Friday night… then decide to come along to a Bible Study… then potentially join an LTG and then commit to the core team.  In previous years we had “socials” and “intense discipleship sessions for the committed core” (!) but not much in between. This new set up hopefully addresses that.

• Rhythm: Girls Bible Study (Monday), Core Team Meeting (Monday),  Afternoon Family Gathering (Sunday),  Community Meal (Friday)
• Verdict: I’ll tell you in a year!

Learning:  Find a rhythm that allows people to gradually increase their level of involvement/spiritual depth.  Avoid too many meetings with a high bar – keep ‘core team’ meetings balanced with simpler, more accessible events with an ‘easy invite’.

In the next post I will summarise what we’ve learned so far, and provide a model for gathering that really simplified and clarified things in our minds.

YEAR 3 – The power of focus

By mid 2012, after two years of the MC, we re-planned our diaries again and made three changes.

Firstly, we introduced a once-a-month Sunday family gathering to act as a core act of worship for the MC with all the kids all together. Everybody focused on making this work and it was a success in many ways: we managed to make it lightweight and low maintenance, we enjoyed it, our kids enjoyed it. However, perhaps unsurprisingly, we got very little attendance from anyone outside our core team… it felt a bit too much like inviting people to a church service, even though it was actually super-relaxed and informal.

Secondly, we also recast two Mondays a month as a prayer night and a ‘community night’ (to include a mix of eating, Bible, prayer, planning). They ended up being a bit too unfocused for various reasons, mainly as a result of me feeling rather unsupported in the MC leadership, but also because attendance was often small due to our group having lost a couple of members for various reasons during that season. This speaks to how helpful critical mass is in MCs. Over the course of the year, the Monday meetings started to feel a bit flat – we didn’t exactly know why we were coming to each session and people’s motivation dipped.

Finally, we stopped meeting of a third Monday in the month, and gave this week back to people to give them time to interact more intentionally with their friends etc. on that week. That didn’t really happen, mainly because I wasn’t getting a lot of excitement from the team and I didn’t push it. So once again a mission component didn’t quite happen – I think because it was too vague an idea, I didn’t follow it up enough, and quite probably people felt they were already trying to live a missional life and didn’t need to add ‘an event’ to prove it.

One problem with this set up was that with only three scheduled events per month, it was hard for people who were not naturally seeing other people in the group on a day-by-day basis to grow closer to the life of the group and feel more ownership.   I think in our context four scheduled things per month is a good number to ensure people can stay plugged in to the community even if they have to miss the odd one for work or family reasons.

Despite slightly floundering with the organised side of MC life, the organic life of the group was continuing to grow. Some highlights were:

• the monthly pub nights for the men that two of us started, which took on a life of their own in many ways and have become a popular entry point for new arrivals to town, and a good way for us to build friendships.
• many people in the group really identifying people of peace and focusing on them
• three families choosing the same after-school activity for their kids to provide a touch point in the busy week to be all together
• another ‘hot spot’ emerging in the local scout troop, where three of the group ended up having leadership roles
• increasing visibility of the group amongst our non-Christian friends, and an understanding of the community we were building

So in summary:

• Rhythm: Two Mondays and one Sunday ‘family celebration’ per month.
• Verdict: The family celebration showed we could make something happen if we put our minds to it! The Mondays suffered from lack of critical mass and a lack of investment on my part. And with no follow up from me, the idea of a ‘mission week’ never came to pass. Oops. But despite this, the organic side was building up some nice momentum.

Learning: Make once change to the rhythm at a time if possible, to allow people to help make the change stick and be successful. Make sure each event/meeting has a clear purpose and everyone knows what success looks like. Keep remembering that not everyone in the MC will engage with the same frequency, but keep encouraging those aspects of shared life and shared friendships that are emerging, and look for ‘hot spots’ where God’s grace seems to be on the situation.  

As we went into year 4, we started to get some clarity about the rhythms that might work. Stay tuned for the next episode!

YEAR 2 – Back to Basics

As a result of our changing too much at once, by early 2011 we felt that we were spending too much time with crowds and not enough on maintaining community and discipleship, so we moved to meeting three Mondays a month (a ‘huddle’ for discipleship, a meal, then another huddle) and one Sunday afternoon for mission and service.

However, in reality, the Sundays didn’t really happen. We did a couple of things but nothing really stuck – mainly I think because we hadn’t landed on a simple and replicable idea – and also because people still weren’t use to putting non-Monday events in their diary!

Also, a couple of key families in the group also had babies in that period, so things slowed down naturally.

As a result we were back to UP and IN, not much OUT it seemed… I found it quite frustrating as we seemed to be so far from the vision – and when I described our “missional community” to a friend she said “sounds like a home group to me!” which was gutting!

EXCEPT… that things were happening after all, things I wasn’t really celebrating and valuing enough:

• We did experiment with ways to share our lives in different ways. So Saturday mornings at the local toy library were a good place for us to hang out and invite people to.  It was mainly social, but OUTwards focused too and it did help us build inclusive community. Looking back it was a significant development in the life of the group.
• Also during this time a couple of the women in our group were running a parenting course with some of their friends (…a group that morphed into a Bible study!) that was a great outward activity right under our noses, that we didn’t really value as much as we should have.

So it felt frustrating but looking back it was God’s timing and it encouraged us to focus on discipleship, to really understand the implications of a more missional lifestyle, and to get more organic with relationship-building.

• Rhythm: three Mondays a month (discipleship ‘huddle’ – meal together – and another ‘huddle’) – plus informal ‘life together’
• Verdict: Important time of investment in ‘the team’ and building a sense of being an extended family on mission – and in building relationships with friends and neighbours.

Learning: Give people plenty of time to change their perspectives and start thinking as missionaries.  Look for what is already happening and support and value that – perhaps you don’t need to change as much as you might think! Definitely include a small bit of outward focus together, but do keep vision-casting and discipling the team on a regular basis.  Material like Building A Discipling Culture is very helpful here.

For that outward focus, I suggest you find an easy “natural, neutral, regular” third place for the group to invite their friends to. I think we would have more successful if we had just focused on one easy outward thing such as being more regular at the toy library on Saturdays.

In the next post, I’ll explain what happened in year 3 as we tried to restore more outward-focused rhythms.