Insight and advice on how to practically launch, sustain and multiply Missional Communities, from the authors of the new book, Launching Missional Communities– A Field Guide.
Don’t miss Mike Breen and the 3DM crew at Verge 2012!
For the past few years the term “Missional Community†has all but become a ubiquitous Christian buzz word/phrase. The interesting thing is that for all the people writing about and using the term, very few people have experience with the practical nuts-and-bolts of launching, multiplying, growing, and discipling people with MCs. This book is not only a practical guide in all things “Missional Communities†related, it is written by the people who pioneered them over 15 years ago and through their leadership have overseen the launching of more MCs than anyone else in the world.
Historically, MCs have been at the forefront of a revitalization that is happening in many churches in England and the rest of Europe for the past 15 years and now in the United States. St Thomas Sheffield, who have been experimenting with Missional Communities for over 15 years, is today one of the largest churches in Europe (the Philadelphia campus) and also one of the fast growing (the Crookes campus), seeing more than 500% growth in the past five years.
For those unfamiliar to Missional Communities, a MC is a group of anything from 20 to 50 people who are united, through Christian community, around a common service and witness to a particular neighborhood or network of relationships. With a strong value on life together, the group has the expressed intention of seeing those they impact choose to start following Jesus, through this more flexible and locally incarnated expression of the church. The result will often be that the group will grow in size and ultimately multiply into further Missional Communities. They are most often networked within a larger church community (often with many other Missional Communities). These mid-sized communities, led by laity, are “lightweight and low maintenance†and most often gather both formally and informally numerous times a month in their missional context.
This video takes more than 15 years of experimenting, successes, failures, honing and puts the best practices into one, centralized resource. The vehicle of Missional Communities were pioneered and are seeing significant success in post-Christian Europe, but have also been further developed and fleshed out in the context of the United States.
Most leaders seem to be asking three simple questions:
1) What does the church of the future look like?
2) How do we reach people who don’t know Jesus?
3) How do we make missional disciples?
This video is about these three questions.