As we continue to form around around the gospel, mission and community one of the questions we are asking is who is qualified to lead a missional community?  What are the characteristics, competencies and convictions of a MC leader?  Soma has provided us with their Missional Community Leadership Assessment Interview where they meet with individuals or couples if married to interview/assess 

1. Personal History/Stories
2. Spiritual Formation
3. Gospel Understanding
4. Identity in Christ
5. Marriage and Family
6. Mission
7. Teach-ability
8. Finances

What are your thoughts?  Any other areas you would assess?  

Download: Missional Community Leadership Assessment Interview (pdf)

MISSIONAL COMMUNITIES DEFINED

A Missional Community (MC) is a committed core of believers who live out the mission of God together in a specific area or to a particular people group by demonstrating the gospel in tangible forms and declaring the gospel to others – both those who believe it and those who are being exposed to it.

To Clarify…A Missional Community is not PRIMARILY:

1. A Small Group
2. A Bible Study
3. A Support Group
4. A Social Activist Group
5. A Weekly Meeting

Download: Leading a Missional Community (pdf)

Document Includes:

How to establish a Missional Communities Direction including the 'mission' of the community, how the community should be led, MC responsibilities, activities and more.  Created from a gospel-centered, triperspectival angle.  

Credits: Soma Communities, edited for Kaleo by David Fairchild. 

Here is Multiplying Missional Communities that expands on the Leadership Development in Community series focusing on the Missional Community Leader.  (Eugene gets credit for the this one.)  He writes regarding when/how to replicate:

Expect the Spirit to work in and through Community

As our communities gather rdinary people doing ordinary things with gospel intentionality, we should both pray for and expect the Spirit to work among us.  Asking for Wisdom: As your MC reaches 18-20 you should begin to pray for wisdom, guidance, and direction in earnest.

Organic Cues: Like those who disbelieved Peter stood at the oor (Acts 12) we can often pray without faith. When the right time to plant comes we can expect the spirit to use
organic cues or natural signs.

- Major life changes (i.e. –having a baby,)
- Mercy opportunities arising
- People moving into areas of the city your MC hoped or needed to plant anyway.

Kaleo Church is examining what it means to be the church, through this, Kaleo has shifted our emphasis to people living together being the church in the neighborhoods and patterns of life they are already in. We have re-oriented our leadership development & discipleship to be done in community.  Our goal is to create a systemic discipleship process for the people of Kaleo as well as bring systematic development to those who seek to grow in using their gifts in the community.  We see the people of God exercising their gifts as Prophets, Priests & Kings.

From these Prophet/Priest/King posts discussions arose about the value of centralized & decentralized leadership development.  For the sake of clarity, I wanted to unpack the three elements that we seek to use to addresses both.   

Classes - In the document systematic development is mentioned.  What was not shown visually is this systematic development will include coaching (see below) as well as more formal instruction around specific topics.  For example, we plan on doing a training on leading gospel discussions and asking questions to get at heart issues in March for our Missional Community Leaders & Apprentices. 

Community - Leaders are found and developed systemically through the life of community.  These Missional Communities are where people live as a one-anothering community and express mercy, hospitality, love and mission to the city. The developing leaders exercise their gift in community.  It is in this context individuals come across front-line situations that require them to respond, therefore the ongoing coaching & development is practical and has a target in mind rather than it just being theory.  The Missional Community Leader takes an active role of observing and developing leaders gifts and creating a culture of discipleship.

Coaching - Emerging Leaders are paired with a coach.  For example, deacon candidates work directly with deacons who develop these apprentices.  This coaching allows the apprentice to learn but more importantly be coached with specific and measurable goals in mind.  The coach tailors the development track to the unique strengths & weaknesses of the apprentice to shore up any areas that may not be covered in more systematic classes.

I'm working on a couple new posts for after the new year, until then enjoy a couple posts from others:

The Tyrannus Effect - Paul’s Neglected Strategy for City-wide Discipleship : Jeremy Pryor writes that "In a little known passage in Acts 19 we get the clearest glimpse of what Paul spent his days doing when he wanted to plant churches in a city."

Seven Principles for Planting Organic Churches : Tim Chester continues his reflections on Organic Church.

This is the final post dealing with individual leadership development toward a missional ecclesiology.  As stated, Kaleo Church seeks to create organic (systemic) leadership development as well as deliberate/intentional (systematic) discipleship to those who seek to grow in using their gifts in the community.  We see the people expressing these gifts as in three categories of Prophets, Priests & Kings. 

You can download the example of a Deacon (pdf), which are typically more Kingly oriented.  The Kingly track would also lead to Ministry Leaders and Domain Engagers. 

See also: Priests & Prophets

Definitions

Prophetic type – an emphasis on the unchanging truths of God’s character, the gospel message and the mission of the Church.
Priestly type – an emphasis on the care of the soul and caring for one another.
Kingly type – an emphasis on the tangible working out of the mission through structures, strategic thinking and hands on activity

Kaleo Church has re-oriented our leadership development & discipleship to be done in community.  Our goal is to create a systemic discipleship process for the people of Kaleo as well as bring systematic development to those who seek to grow in using their gifts in the community.  We see the people of God exercising their gifts as Prophets, Priests & Kings. 

You can download the example of a Gospel Counselor (pdf), which are typically more Priestly oriented.  The Priestly track would also lead to Ministry Leaders and Deacons (internal). 

See also: Kings & Prophets

Definitions

Prophetic type – an emphasis on the unchanging truths of God’s character, the gospel message and the mission of the Church.
Priestly type – an emphasis on the care of the soul and caring for one another.
Kingly type – an emphasis on the tangible working out of the mission through structures, strategic thinking and hands on activity

Kaleo Church is a movement of people seeking to change San Diego by the power of the gospel.  As we have examined what it means to be the church, Kaleo has shifted our emphasis to people living together being the church in the neighborhoods and patterns of life they are already in.  These Missional Communities are where people live as a one-anothering community and express mercy, hospitality, love and mission to the city.  Corporately groups of Missional Communities gather together weekly to celebrate together, worship and share in gospel-learning.

As such, we have re-oriented much of our leadership development & discipleship through these communities.  Our goal is to create a systemic discipleship process for the people of Kaleo as well as bring systematic development to those who seek to grow in using their gifts in the community.  We see the people of God exercising their gifts as Prophets, Priests & Kings.  You can download the example of Missional Community Leader Development (pdf), which are typically more Prophet oriented.  This track would also lead to Elders, Teachers and Church Planters. 

See also: Priests & Kings  

Definitions

Prophetic type – an emphasis on the unchanging truths of God’s character, the gospel message and the mission of the Church.
Priestly type – an emphasis on the care of the soul and caring for one another.
Kingly type – an emphasis on the tangible working out of the mission through structures, strategic thinking and hands on activity

Last night, David Fairchild and I spent the evening with Bob Roberts.  He had just returned from Hanoi to speak at a conference here in San Diego.  He laid out a vision for how he believes churches will truly change culture, grabbing a piece of paper and pen he began to draw different diagrams of how this connected.  (These diagrams and the ideas will be included in his next book, so I'll leave that alone.) 

One of the larger parts of our conversation centered on the churches ability to transform society through Christians living their beliefs out in the 'domains' of society.  (Something I blogged similarly about in The Church as Movement – Organizing Decentralization and Transforming Cities - The Church beyond the Spiritual Box).  While most of the Western church is talking about being missional through engaging culture, we should be focused on changing culture.  Non-Western countries have been doing domain engagement for a long time.  Bob shared a story of South Korea and how the gospel radically changed that culture.  In both Ghana and South Korea Christians attempted to do mission through crusades and traditional means at about the same time in history.  This failed miserably in South Korea and so missionaries began to establish schools and health clinics.  Later, these became universities and hospitals.  It was through entering these domains, South Korean society changed.  The long-term difference of the gospel change in the cultures of Ghana and S. Korea are starkly contrasted based on this domain engagement in S. Korea.

Bob believes to truly redeem society Christians must engage these domains.  The primary thrust of this is done through community development.  (Kaleo Church has partnered with churches around the country to begin Re:Novo City Group aimed at this very idea.)  Planting churches is the means, seeing cities changed by the gospel is the goal.  

Read more about Bob Roberts Philosophy & Ideas on Mission, Church Planting & Being the Church > 

BONUS: Bob Roberts may be the Kevin Bacon of church planters/pastors.  Through him we can connect (within a few steps) to everyone in the world.  Here's a few examples of people he knows: 

Ed Stetzer, Bono, Nguyen Minh Triet (President of Vietnam), Condoleezza Rice (Secretary of State) & Abdullah Abdullah (former Foreign Minister of Afghanistan).  I could have mentioned dignitaries, business men (execs at Disney & Facebook), emerging guys, conservative pastors, church planting network leaders and other church planters.  But this guy is a connector.

I look forward to our continued relationship with Bob and his glocal vision. 

Session: Things that make (Steve Timmis) go 'Hmmmm…'

The first thing that makes Mr. Timmis go hmmm is the fascination with new ways of 'doing church'.   It doesn't take much to see a number of new books, blogs and conferences speak to the changing nature of the church.  (In fact, it's a subject I've posted on many times.)  Timmis quoted J.C. Hoekendijk, a Dutch theologian.  In Hoekendijk’s view, a keen ecclesiological interest was generally a sign of spiritual decadence.

"Our God is not a temple dweller. In the strict sense of the word he is not even a church god. He advances through time; ever again he lets the new conquer the old. He is not a God of the 'status quo,' but rather the Lord of the future, the King of the history of the world, and, as such, also Head of the church…We must maintain the right order in our thinking and speaking about the church. That order is God-World-Church, not God-Church-World" (J.C. Hoekendijk). 

Much of what Timmis sees in the contemporary fascination with ecclesiology is an obsession with the church itself.  Timmis warned that the emerging church, can in it's restoration attempt end up recovering the form of church rather than the heart.  As they lead the Crowded House (a house church movement) they see the nature of what they are doing as a gospel initiative not an ecclesiological experiment.  Timmis states, "Any non-gospel initiative is an exercise in self-indulgence."

Reflection: How is the nature of your church a gospel initiative?  

Session: Elders & the Local Church

One of the sessions Steve Timmis led at the Total Church conference centered around the challenge to plant missional churches and develop leaders fast enough to plant additional churches.  The Crowded House, Timmis' said, like many churches is leader hungry.  One of the Achilles heels of house church movement is the need for a higher leader ratio.  In fact, this same inability to find good leaders is a common rationale behind video venues or large churches.  In this, Timmis quoted Darrin Patrick (who is defending video venue strategy) who struggled finding people to plant churches (in the 250 people range) in his city:

One reason it didn’t work was that we couldn’t find enough planters with a heart for our area who could plant a self-governing, self-supporting self-reproducing church….I believe that there are few guys with the calling and requisite skill set to plant a reproducing incarnational/attractional church. This is evidenced by the 70% failure rate in church plants. I saw this in our own context as we simply couldn’t find the guys with the calling and skill- set to give people to. Now, this has not stopped us from planting locally as we just sent out an elder and people to plant about 45 minutes out in the burbs. We have another intern who hopefully will plant in the next two years. My point is that if your church is experiencing growth like ours, you cannot plant fast enough, chiefly because of the lack of called, qualified, church planters.  

Read full post: Darrin Responds at Bob Hyatt

Timmis, upon reflection asked is the problem we face the leaders or the types of churches we are planting? When he examined Paul's missionary journey, Paul traveled through cities where people converted.  Paul returned in under two years and more likely after a couple months to appoint elders.  Timmis surmised that the problem then cannot be our leaders but the types of churches we are planting and the leader requirement necessary to run them. 

Is is because of our Western idea of church that we seek leaders who can create reproducible, incarnational/attractional churches that grow to 250+ in order to split and start over again?  Where do we read these requirement of elders in Timothy & Titus, asked Timmis.  These are two conclusions Timmis came to:

1. We need to re-think leadership in the local church.  Much of our leadership shortage stems from wrong assumptions.  Churches can appoint elders, who fulfill all that is required in Timothy & Titus.  This means we select elders by the grace evidenced in their life, not by the attractional qualities they hold.  How many of these guys are in your church right now?

2. Church Planters have a unique set of gifting that are best served planting churches.  (Timmis called church planters 'apostles') Since there are fewer of these 'initiators/gatherers'  they ought to do more missional church planting (often done in a team setting where people travel with them) to plant churches.  The skills these 'apostolic leaders' possess include: Visionary, Creative, Adaptable, Productive, Impatient - always wanting to move things forward, self-starters and a bit of a maverick.  These skills serve the planter well to create new works, but often these skills make them poor leaders of established churches.

Throughout the conversation, Timmis stressed that he was 'thinking out loud' and hadn't firmed up on these conclusions.  But I post this because these ideas are something we all will need to think through as we seek to change cities by the power of the gospel.

I returned last week from the Total Church conference in England.  (I wanted to post earlier, but was having some technical difficulty).  In attendance there were 50 church planters from around the world, many were hybrids, traditional churches looking to become more missional or house church movements.  The central theme was gospel & community.  Tim Chester led excellent morning devotionals that were portraits of Jesus life.  The first was dealing with Jesus came eating & drinking, dealing with messy community life reaching to the margins.  The second devotional was Jesus at the table, which sprang from the women washing his feet.  The final devotional dealt with Jesus' interaction with the men on the road to Emmaus.

Steve Timmis led mid-day sessions that sparked conversation.  Over the next few days, I'll post a few summaries on the sessions.  Some highlights of the posts to come:

Things that make Steve Timmis go 'Hmmmm…' -  Steve held a session where he brought up a few issues that churches have to think through and offered commentary on these.  I'll post a few of the ideas which included people's fascination with new ways of doing church, preaching workshops, gender specific ministry, video venues & big churches.

Leadership Development in the Local church - A discussion on developing leaders, church planting and the ongoing role of elders leadership in local churches.  

Sharing Lives - More on how the Crowded House makes decisions with the community in mind.  Something that will always rock our American sensibilities.  

I haven't posted in a while, but wanted to share some of what is going on:

Total Church Conference - Monday, David and I leave to England to participate in this conference.  We will be joined by kindred-spirits from Acts 29, including Jeff at Soma Community in Tacoma and James and team at Providence in Dallas.  (All of us are doing multi-site, multi-congregational missional movements).  You can read more about the Crowded House Values that shaped the concept of Total Church.  Or here is a quick summary from one of the authors, Tim Chester:

Two key principles should shape church life: gospel and community. Christians are called to a dual fidelity: fidelity to the core content of the gospel and fidelity to the primary context of a believing community. Whether we are thinking about evangelism, social involvement, pastoral care, apologetics, discipleship or teaching, the content is consistently the Christian gospel and the context is consistently the Christian community. What we do is always defined by the gospel and the context is always our belonging in the church. Our identity as Christians is defined by the gospel and the community.

While we are there we will be staying in the homes of people in the community.  I may be able to bring back a handful of copies of the book since I don't know if it has been released in the US yet.

Global Church Advancement (GCA) invited me back to do a couple sessions at their North America Church Planting Conference in Orlando, FL: January 28 - February 1, 2008. The North America Church Planting Conference is an inter-denominational training event designed to equip church planters, coaches and supervisors to start, grow and multiply healthy, gospel-centered churches that result in the spiritual, social and cultural transformation of entire cities and regions. Christian leaders from more than 30 countries, representing over 100 denominations and mission agencies, have taken this church planter training.

National New Church Conference (NNCC) Todd Wilson informed me there will be sessions on city transformation.  City transformation is something I've been very excited about.  Don't just plant a church or start a movement, change a city.   Plus, I'd love to hear Keller & Hirsch who both are main speakers.

Bob Roberts (GlocalNet & Vision 360 ) is flying into San Diego and I will be picking him up on the 11/8.  I look forward to spending some time with him.  He is one of the nations leading church planters and I would like to learn more from his experience as he engages his city and plants churches.

David and I continue to meet with the team from Strategic Focused Cities.  The Southern Baptists have selected San Diego as next on the list.  In addition, we have met with the local Vision 360 guy, where they are beginning to raise funding and seek to support, asess and fund church planters.

It's been a busy season with the city transformation movement we are starting called Re:Novo City Group.  A big piece of this initially is our Tentmaker concept.  We've trained four classes of Tentmakers, with our fifth shaping to occur in early November. I'd estimate 50+ people will be trained by the end of this year.

Lastly, Monk Development continues to expand our Ekklesia 360 Church/Ministry CMS.  Monk is now opening an office in South Africa for international sales, support and development.  I hope to make a trip there next Fall to meet with our new team.  

How do you lead a church as movement rather than a program-centered church? While most churches have a centralized program-oriented approach to ministry, we continue to explore how to be a decentralized church.  Why?  We want to transform our city and believe a centralized church is inadequate to address the challenge (read Leading a Transformational Community).  

How do we examine our ecclesiology and organize the church for decentralized movement?  We see the church as corporation, cause & community.  (You can read more about this at Leading a Transformational Community and Leading a Movement Not an Institution.)  Staff should be focused primarily on corporation issues.  We want ministry/outreach to come from and by the people of the church.  Here is how we plan to proceed:

First, we are going to ask that people pray about their calling.  (Kaleo recently preached a 3-part series on calling Kingdom, Calling, Suffering, Transformissional Calling & Transformissional Calling Part II)  A sense of calling is a critical element to address the postmodern apathy of today.

Second we are asking people to learn more about their gifting.  For our church we will have people fill out a Divine Design Gifts Assessment test created by Phil Douglass at Covenant Theological Seminary.  David Fairchild took it recently and it's a pretty elaborate gifts assessment test primarily used by people in seminary. 

Lastly, we are creating an equipping/mentor development program.  Ministry and outreach should be driven by the people of the church.  Inasmuch as people are being transformed by the gospel they will engage in outreach & ministry. (We believe You Can’t Program the Gospel.)  At Kaleo as people come up with ideas, they will propose these.  We will evaluate the ministry idea and provide guidance to ensure it fits our gospel/city transformation vision.  In addition, we will gather information to help hold people accountable whether it is an ongoing ministry or one-time event.  We also will assess the person to help understand how to best equip them and pair them with a mentor. This mentor will help them with vision/theology (normative), gospel encouragement/motivation (existential) and/or practical wisdom/coaching/resourcing (situational) as necessary.  Our goal is to train many of our missional community leaders & deacons to provide this ongoing relationship.  Elders will assist but will primarily focus on discipling people in the area of their calling/ministry. 

This means most of our leaders should be externally focused.  The leaders of the church should either (1) coach people in the church who feel called to engage in a new ministry.  Or (2) lead people by calling them to participate in active ministry areas. 

Our goal is to launch this in November.  People at Kaleo who want to participate would pray about calling and fill out the gift assessment in the month of October.  In early November we would unpack the gift test and explain the process to start new ministries.  Also in November we would hold a training for the mentors.  More to come…

We believe it is important to provide potential church planters a new kind of missional training through the Tentmaker Group and discussions with the Porterbrook Network (created by the authors of Total Church and the pastors of the Crowded House.  They have put together a great 2-year program to equip a person to plant.  Porterbrook Curriculum pdf).  Our goals would be the following:

Planting a different kind of church

We want to create a different kind of church – one which is gospel-focused in every area of church life and at the same time emphasizes the centrality of the Christian community as the context for Christian life and mission. (source: Total Church Conference documents)

Equipping a different kind of leader

We want to equip missional leaders (eg see: Missional Movements, Plurality of Leadership) who are triperspectival.   This means we are equipping them NORMATIVE with gospel applied theology (not just theory/systematics), EXISTENTIAL we are applying the gospel to their lives to bring gospel transformation and SITUATIONAL we are working along side them as they do this in a real church planting context.

Sending for a different type of model

Through the Tentmaker connection, we want planters to leave with 3-5 years of their salary covered and with money to plant.  The model we want to send people with isn't to plant a church, but to start city movements that seek to address every area of life with the gospel. 

We are excited that so far 7 cities are represented in our Tentmaker Group launch, which is a key component in the plan.  The goal is the have this training in every city interested…