The Tension between Organic and Structured Disciple-making
This is an excerpt from a live Question + Response session in our newly launched Missional Church Transition Starter. Did your team ever experience tension between people who want to make disciples, but want it to be organic vs. structured?…
Proactive Leadership Development for Multiplication
This is an excerpt from a live Question + Response session in our newly launched Missional Church Transition Starter. How do you get ahead of growth? How do you get new leaders ready in order to multiply your missional communities?…
This is an excerpt from a live Question + Response session in our newly launched Missional Church Transition Starter. Coming from Soma Tacoma to Doxa, you had a lot of experience as a leader in a missional community. What was…
This is an excerpt from a live Question + Response session in our newly launched Missional Church Transition Starter. How do you continue to move your church into the missional mindset when thirty percent of your church doesn’t want to…
Where do you begin when transitioning your church from Sunday to everyday? What small shifts are essential? Has anyone tried to move their churches from attractional or traditional models of discipleship toward missional communities? What are their stories? What did…
This is an excerpt from a Question + Response session in our newly launched Missional Church Transition Starter. Question: As you transition towards missional groups, how has that affected what you do on Sunday morning? Ah, that's a great question.…
This is an excerpt from our newly released, Pilot Group Guide. This resource is available through the Missional Church Transition Starter. If you are a church of missional communities that is growing numerically through Sunday attendance or…
When your focus is activity, you can get people to do good things. But what happens when they are done doing those things? Our experience has been that they’ll come back for instructions on what to do next. In this…
Read Part One of this series here. I was sitting across the table from a sister in Christ, processing how life was going and how she was doing. During the course of our conversation, she shared a number of areas…
Our journey towards transitioning our church culture from activity to identity began over six years ago. Another pastor and I, both on staff at the same church, were wrestling through some troubling trends we each saw as we sought…
This post is part of a teaching series on Catalyzing Mission through Preaching. Read part one, part two, part three, and part four. Preaching to catalyze mission requires the preaching to be thinking about the mission of God, the particular nature of mission in their church,…
This post is part of a teaching series on Catalyzing Mission through Preaching. Read part one, part two and part three. When you preach to catalyze your congregation toward missional effectiveness, you are modeling what it looks like to speak the gospel to neighbors, coworkers, and…
This post is part of a teaching series on Catalyzing Mission through Preaching. Read part one and part two. Your church will never be more missional than its leaders. Your preaching will not be fruitful in leading people into mission if you’ve…
This post is part of a teaching series on Catalyzing Mission through Preaching. Read part one here. I believe the goal of preaching must be mission; the mission of making disciples who make disciples. When you preach you have to…
This post is part of a teaching series on Catalyzing Mission through Preaching. We Need Each Other Corporate worship gatherings matter for mission. We’re called to not give up meeting together, but to encourage one another and spur each other toward love…
I was raised in a Catholic European city. My neighborhood was littered with cathedrals. They were statues of the past more than they were pillars of the present. Except for major holidays and the incredible buildings, it was hard…
With Summer just around the corner our team wanted to share with you a few of our current favorite books when it comes to leadership, missional living, and everyday discipleship. If you're on the search for something to read…
This is a guest post by Paul Whaley. Paul is the Lead Teaching Pastor of Summit Crossing Community Church. He has helped to lead out in transitioning Sc3 community groups from primarily being inward focused to becoming missional communities over…
My name is Marshall Benbow, and I am the discipleship pastor at Grace Community Church in Greensboro, NC. We are a church of about 500 in a Bible Belt city of about 250,000 people. Over the years through the…
After experiencing the joy of life together on mission, there is no going back to an isolated life or a faith that only has an expression for a few hours on a Sunday. Eight years ago our church, Soma…
Getting the church to be what it was meant to be—a family on mission—doesn’t happen only through teaching and talking. People already have enough information; they need application. One of the first ministry opportunities I ever had was to lead…
Transition - noun: a movement, development, or evolution from one form, stage, or style to another. That’s our hope for the upcoming Transitions Conference in August! That every leader and church attending would gain clarity on how to effectively equip…
This is a guest post by Aaron Kampman. As a former NFL athlete, Aaron has a lot of experience with coaching and its benefits. From high school through the professional ranks, he has had a number of coaches in…
This is a guest post by Brian Mease. Brian is a husband and father of three, has been in Pastoral Ministry for over 15 years. As a graduate of Liberty University and a seminary dropout, his truest ministry passion…
This is a guest post by Johnathan Schroeder. Johnathan is husband to Jill and the father of Judah (7) and Jessah (2). In 1995 God began a work in Johnathan, God showed Johnathan his useless pursuit of acceptance and…
This is a guest post by Nick Crawford. Nick serves as the Family & Groups Pastor at Fondren Church in Jackson, Mississippi, where he works to see disciples made, matured, and multiplied across all generations. Nick came to Jackson from…
Where Are We Now? So we killed missional culture by assuming the gospel, by casting vision without practices, and finally by not loving consumers. Here’s what you can conclude from this series – The Austin Stone is one messed up church. We’ve made…
So to this point, we’d committed two cardinal sins – we assumed the gospel, we cast vision without practices. But what about the final group of people we had, that 30% who stuck their heads in the sand when we cast…
The first way we killed missional culture was assuming the gospel. Keeping the gospel central also helped the 60% who were frustrated, but we learned another lesson with that group of people.
Read the first post in this series here. May I implore you to learn from our mistakes – don’t ever assume the gospel. In your pulpits, in your core team gatherings, in your elder meetings, or in any ministry environment…
We had the best of intentions, but had some pretty poor results. In our zeal for movement, we did some serious damage to the people God had entrusted us with. I have been a part of The Austin Stone for almost…
This is a guest post by Hunter Benson. Hunter serves as the Missions and Mercy Pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in San Diego. Hunter also supports Tim Keller’s church planting network, Redeemer City to City, as the City to…
If there is one thing I have learned in the transition to missional community, it is “practice the art of assuming nothing”. Never assume that you, your team, your leaders, or your church have it figured out! To make…
Catch part eight of this series here. More important than desiring the fruit of missional ministry is a core conviction that you can’t do ministry another way. At a certain point in the transition to missional communities, you have executed…
Catch part seven of this series here. If you simply report out percentages without stories attached, it is far too easy to forget that you are leading and discipling real people with real problems and the real Jesus is…
Catch part six of this series here! One of the greatest barriers to the vision becoming reality is leaders not providing a simple, understandable way to live out the vision for missional communities. If you follow these steps and…
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