I also appreciate a good mashup…someone else did great work incorporating Bambi:

Enjoy

I often have conversations about missional communities, and the most asked question I receive is “what’s different about a missional community?”.  I wanted to provide some distinctions from other forms small groups have often taken in this series:

• Missional Community vs. Bible Study
• Missional Community vs. Community Group
• Missional Community vs. Small Group

In my last post, I talked about the difference between a missional community and a bible study.  Here, I want to address the difference between a missional community and a community group or fellowship group.

One of the greatest felt needs of attenders in many churches is “community”.  We talk about the value of it, tell people they need it, and provide lots of ways for people to engage it.  As I have engaged in connecting a lot of people, mostly what they are after is finding friendships that will spur them towards Christ.

That desire is good and godly…I want the same thing!

The danger in the church aiming for “community” though, is that it typically becomes the destination.  Once relationships have been established and the need for friends has been met, that’s the way a community group stays.  Community groups love to spend time together and have rich friendships, and the concept of “doing life” together is easy and appealing.

But these kinds groups often struggle because they lack the imperative of mission.  They meet and live life in community but do not engage in missionary activity.  Once more appealing friendships or changes in life circumstances occur, a community group often dies out.

Community on this side of heaven isn’t primarily about us though. It’s about God’s glory being displayed to the world!  Jesus clearly explains that the purpose of Christian unity and community is so that the world would know God the Father sent Jesus to this earth in John 17:21-24.

A missional community is different, in that they primarily see the purpose of their friendship, love and unity is to be an apologetic for the gospel to their neighbors.  Community isn’t the only purpose of the group, but community has the purpose of mission.

I often have conversations about missional communities, and the most asked question I receive is “what’s different about a missional community?”.  I wanted to provide some distinctions from other forms small groups have often taken in this series:

• Missional Community vs. Bible Study
• Missional Community vs. Community Group
• Missional Community vs. Small Group

Many of us have been a part of a bible study at some point in our Christian lives.  Typically, these groups gravitate to reading the bible for a set period of time on a specific day of the week.  Bible studies are often great things, but they don’t constitute a Christian community in it’s entirety.

I am often asked “how is missional community different from bible study?”

The short answer is that a missional community is not a bible study, but a missional community studies the bible.  So what’s the difference?

A bible study is often defined by gathering for the event of learning.  A missional community is seeking to engage God’s word on a daily basis through a Life Transformation Group and seeking to obey.

The distinction is primarily in expectations – a missional community has the expectation that an individual is participating in the community to contribute something (1 Corinthians 14:26), whereas someone comes to a bible study to consume something.

People need to study the bible for sure, but to study the bible without engaging in an authentic community on mission is a fool’s errand.  The purpose of studying the bible is to teach about God and conform us to the image of Christ, but it’s also to equip us for the work of ministry in the church (community) and outside the church (mission)!

If we are going to be a compelling communities that fosters obedience to the bible, our community should be natural, neutral, and regular, in the pattern and rhythm of everyday life, not a one-hour, drive-through bible study.

The typical bible study sets the bar way too low – don’t make a part of the Christian community the entire thing!

If the mantra “what you measure is what you value” is true, then we need to have a way to measure and assess the health and effectiveness of missional communities.  The series that follows will summarize how we assess missional communities at The Austin Stone.

• Philosophy of Assessment
• Leader Self-Assessment
• Coach Assessment

Coach Assessment of Missional Community

In addition to leaders self-assessing, we also add a second dimension to the assessment which comes from our pastors and coaches.  We have noticed that often times leaders will have either an overly optimistic understanding of the health of their group, or conversely they are a little too hard on themselves. 

In order to provide some balance and additional perspective, our leadership and coaches provide interpretation of those assessments. They also provide assessment of the stage of the group based on coaching conversations and group visits.

The coach evaluation is based on classifying groups into one of four categories:

1. Community Group – an internally focused, bible study or fellowship driven group.  No evidence of mission.
2. Small Group – a group that is serving together occasionally, but is not yet focused on making disciples
3. Team of Missionaries – a group of individuals who are on mission to make disciples, but lack a cohesive pocket of people that they are intentionally seeking to reach.
4. Missionary Team – a full-fledged incarnational/missional community with a defined pocket of people and communal practices that are oriented around lost people.

We don’t typically share the information above with groups, but use it as leaders and coaches to know what steps we need to take with communities and leaders.  This progression to help us know where we need to push on groups and where our leadership needs to invest time.

For more on coaching, you can find resources here.  For more on the data trends in missional communities, you can go here.

What have you found helpful in providing insight to your groups?

This Sunday, The Austin Stone joined with many other Acts 29 Network churches to preach to our congregations about church planting and support the mission to make disciples and plant healthy churches.

I continue to be grateful for the Lord’s grace in my life to participate in church planting.  As we prayed for our entire church to engage in the Great Commission, two of my friends and their church plants came to mind:

• Jeremy Hager and Providence Road Communities in Norman, OK
• Steve Jennings and Immanuel Church Fujairah in Fujairah, UAE

Would you join me in praying for these men, their families, and their core teams as they seek to make disciples in their cities?

Additionally, I will be launching a two year residency for aspiring pastors and church planters in this coming year (see below for an overview).  Would you join me in praying for this cohort of men and their families in the coming year?

Pastoral and Church Planting Residency at The Austin Stone – PDF

If you’re interested in learning more about how you can be involved in church planting, let me know and I can help you plug in!

If the mantra “what you measure is what you value” is true, then we need to have a way to measure and assess the health and effectiveness of missional communities.  The series that follows will summarize how we assess missional communities at The Austin Stone.

• Philosophy of Assessment
• Leader Self-Assessment
• Coach Assessment

Leader Self-Assessment of Missional Community

The leader self-assessment was written to measure the values of the community.  We have four core values (Word, Prayer, Demonstrate, Declare), and the questions are getting to the heart of what the group truly values in their communal and missional life together.

You can find the assessment we have our leaders do in PDF form below:

MC Assessment Tool.pdf

In short, we are asking a series of quantitative and qualitative questions to gauge the overall health of the core values of a community, which provides us with a decent picture of how a leader sees their missional community.

To communicate assessment to our leaders, we always include the following:

There are two primary reasons that we want you to assess your group on an ongoing basis: so we can know how to better equip you to lead, and so that we can continue to strive together to more faithfully make disciples.

In the same way annual partnership renewal is an opportunity to both reflect on God’s grace in our lives to obey and to seek repentance for where we have fallen short, so too it is helpful to have a set of things to examine our own hearts and calling to lead.

Toward that end, this assessment is not a “checklist of righteousness”, but an opportunity to remind ourselves what God has called us to and how we can more fully depend on His grace to accomplish the vision he has given us. I pray that it is a tool that encourages you!

Additionally, we do our best to follow up personally after someone has completed an assessment to ensure they know we value their input.

What do we do with the data?

After you have completed assessments, it’s important that you actually do something with the data!  We track how groups change over time so we know where to focus our training for our leaders corporately.  You can see our data trends here.

As you’re considering assessments, what would you add?

• Philosophy of Assessment
• Leader Self-Assessment
• Coach Assessment

Philosophy of Assessment

As our missional community team was thinking through how to assess missional communities, we grappled with a number of different questions.  How do you quantify a missional community? Why should we measure things at all? What things can we measure besides attendance at events?

I processing those questions and many more, we arrived at a few fundamental convictions. 

First, we wanted to balance stories and metrics – stories encourage the soul, and metrics inform your strategy.  In order to gain both a subjective understanding of the community, as well as some objective measurements, we had to include stories and data.

Stories are encouraging, but are easily used as anecdotal justifications for something that may not really be working.  Data, without stories, is to easy to misinterpret or make say what you want it to say.Second, we wanted to involve pieces of self-assessment from the leader of a particular missional community, as well as outside assessment from a coach or an area pastor.

The second conviction we had was that we didn’t want to ask for data we wouldn’t use.  Nobody enjoys a long, meaningless, exhaustive survey, so we wouldn’t ask a question unless we really needed to know.  This drove us to ask questions that get to the level of understanding group values, and was simple enough to be completed in a short period of time.

Also, as we processed through assessment, we wanted to take the opportunity to not only do reporting, but recast vision for why we do what we do.  We made sure to always explain the heart behind our assessment, as well as stick with consistent language.

Finally, we wanted to have multiple perspectives involved, so we didn’t make poor judgements about our data or work from presumption.  Our strategy of assessment involves a leader survey every 6 months, coach assessments regularly, and thorough campus metrics yearly.

I’m a scientist by training, so good data sets are really important to me.  What do you measure as you lead or practice communities?

Summertime always prompts images of grilling in the backyard, vacation road trips, watching baseball, and adventures in the neighborhood.

In the church, it’s often a season where we “take a break” from ministry and community. I’ve always found that idea somewhat odd when I consider my identity in Christ. I don’t really ever “take a break” for an entire season from my earthly family, so why would I skip out on my spiritual family for three months?

My family rhythm certainly changes in the summer, but it doesn’t disappear entirely. The kids are out of school, and we’re on the go more, but we don’t stop teaching our kids about Jesus and His Word. We certainly don’t cease to be brothers and sisters in Christ with our church family during the summer either.

What if your community continued striving to be a spiritual family this summer, rather than pushing pause?

In my experience, there are a few things that will help a community thrive in a season where many fade away. Here are three ideas to consider implementing:

Gather in new ways.

Because summer is a new season where rhythms change, take the opportunity to change up your gathering. Instead of the regular weekly routine, try gathering on Friday evenings for a BBQ on the deck and some low-key conversation. If you have younger kids, let them have a sleepover and stay up way too late, while the adults enjoy some conversation outside.

Summer is also a great time to connect your community with those who don’t know Jesus. Try gathering at the park or the pool, and intentionally have folks invite their neighbors. We call this a “Third Place” at The Austin Stone, and it’s our primary way of engaging in God’s mission with our community.

Study something new, and in a new way.

Because of vacation schedules and other events, most people will end up attending a group, on average, 6 times over the summer. The flow of a group will inevitably be interrupted. Rather than trying to have a cohesive study plan that requires consistent participation and builds week to week, try something that is a little more self-paced.

I’d recommend using a study that someone can easily do on their own, and then utilize a group gathering time to discuss the takeaways from the material. Focus on questions like “what was the most helpful thing you learned?” and “how did this change the way you interacted with your family/friends/neighbors this week?”

Summer is also a great time to incorporate the use of digital technology to help foster conversation. Rather than depending entirely on the face-to-face gathering, try having an ongoing discussion through email, a Facebook group, or by using church communication software.

Vacation together.

This one requires planning, but it’s the best thing my community does – we enjoy vacation with one another. We’ve done it a number of ways – going to a lake house, road tripping to the mountains, and going to family camp together.

Having our entire families interacting and creating memories with one another fosters such unique and authentic community that it’s compelling for our neighbors who don’t know Jesus.

A week of community vacation also presents an opportunity for more intentional time for discussion, as well as much more informal time for sharing life and dreaming about the future of your community. You can do so much more in one focused week than you can in an entire semester’s worth of group gatherings!

Enjoy your summer to the glory of God.

Summer is a hard time to start new things, but it’s a great time to adapt a lot of your existing practices to the challenges of a summer rhythm. Most importantly, though, is to rejoice in this season that God has graciously given for His glory and our good. Summer is a blessing to be enjoyed, and an opportunity to change up your normal rhythms.

Enjoy it!

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This post was written for The Gospel Project’s “Don’t Waste Your Summer” series. You can find more here:

http://www.gospelproject.com/blog/

I am in a series of posts on coaching, specifically as it applies to missional communities. The posts in this series are:

• Philosophy of Coaching
• The Gospel and Coaching
• Coaching Questions
• Who Coaches?

Who Coaches?

In order to provide quality coaching that is effective for missional community leaders, it is critically important that a coach has two primary qualifications:

1. A working knowledge of the Missional Community DNA and practices at The Austin Stone
2. Practical experience leading a healthy missional community in the past

The first is a pretty obvious qualification – you want someone coaching who has the same vision and speaks the same language.  The second is a key quality for us because we want folks who coach using their own stories as examples.  It’s one thing to know an idea, it’s an entirely different thing to tell a story of how that idea played out.

Within our current structure, our coaches consist of three sets of people:

1. Campus Leadership Team – These individuals (Campus Pastor, Leadership Director, and Connections Director) are responsible for the oversight of ~100 missional communities per campus. They are coaching missional communities themselves, as well as overseeing other coaches within their campus network.
2. Campus Deacons – These men and women are helping coach in the region through the oversight of up to ~5 missional communities.  They are typically volunteer leaders who have led healthy missional communities, and are continuing to engage the mission of God in their own lives with a community.
3. Coaches – This men and women, although not yet tested and qualified for the deaconate, are capable leaders who have multiplied healthy missional communities and are typically overseeing networks they themselves have started.

There are others who coach missional communities, but these three groups of people carry the largest load of coaching within our church.

In my experience, it’s hard to coach well more than about 6 missional communities, and I strongly recommend that coaches gather leaders in groups, rather than just individually, to foster peer to peer learning and to create a relational network of leaders.

If you would like to know more about the practices of healthy missional communities, please consult the “Practices of Missional Communities” series and the “Missional Communities Roadmap”.

• Philosophy of Coaching
• The Gospel and Coaching
• Coaching Questions
• Who Coaches?

Basic Coaching Questions

In addition to providing a grid to interpret and counsel, we also have a standard conversation template we have found to be very helpful for coaching.

How are you doing?

Beginning with this question sets a tone of relationship and care, rather than simply getting down to business. The answer to this question also helps you to know what tenor to take in the conversation.  If someone is discouraged, then you can focus on encouraging them in the gospel.  If someone is neutral, use it as an opportunity to inspire them.  If someone is really doing well, then use the conversation to challenge them provide some new direction.

What are you celebrating?

Listening to the answer to this question helps you understand two things.  First, it helps you identify and encourage the leader in what things are currently going well.  Secondly, what people celebrate tends to indicate what they value.  If an individual consistently talks through the excellency of relationships within the group, but rarely celebrates outsiders participating in community, they likely value intimate relationships above mission.

What challenges are you facing?

This question also gives two perspectives on the individual and the group.  First, where sinners gather, there are always challenges.  If there isn’t a response to this, or they are consistently shallow challenges, it is likely the group isn’t pursuing the vision for missional community particularly well.  Second, this question is also indicative to where there are misplaced values within the community.  If “dealing with children” is consistently a challenge, it’s likely that there is an overemphasis on the meeting and a lack of valuing demonstration of a missional community to children.

What are you doing about those challenges?

This question is vital because you first want the leader to address the challenges on their own and present creative solutions before the coach chimes in.  Ownership in leadership is expressed through problem solving…resist the temptation to solve problems for a leader!

How can I help you?

This questions helps you respond in a constructive way and meet any needs of the leader or the community.  It is also an opportunity to listen for both the strengths and weaknesses of the leader.  If they are consistently requesting articles or books, it’s likely they are a learner and predominantly lead through teaching, for example.

How can I pray for you? 

Finally, you can care best for a leader by committing to and following up with prayer.  Additionally, this question helps identify particular areas of concern that the leader has which may not be skill-based issues.  Often here is where a leader will reveal a deep issue that is plaguing their community or express concern for an issue that needs to be addressed by an elder or pastor.

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This conversation pattern has been tremendously helpful for me in coaching missional communities, leading ministry teams, and in many circumstances where I’m just getting to know someone.  They aren’t foolproof, but it’s a really helpful template to follow!