Missional Leader Readiness
By Jonathan Dodson | September 16th, 2008 | Category: Missional Church | 11 commentsIn an effort to cultivate Missional Leaders, we have identified some key qualities and questions.
Qualities: Some of the qualities we are looking for are presupposed by the questionnaire below. However, here are a few, very practical questions to ask that will reveal missional leader readiness.
- Can they articulate both the Gospel and your vision?
- Are they embodying the gospel and mission in community?
- Have you known them long enough to trust their character and skill?
- Have you spent enough time with them to know whether or not they can say to their missional community, “Imitate me.”?
- Are they imitating you?
- Do they have an increased grocery bill from sharing meals with Christians and non-Christians (stole that from Mark Moore)?
- Do they demonstrate a willingness to be inconvenienced by community and mission?
Questions: We created a questionaire that I adapted from Drew Goodmanson. Each prospective City Group leader filled it out and then met with me to go over it. It has been very helpful in screening, cultivating, and shepherding leaders.
What about ability to teach the bible?
I see that as a requirement for elders, not for all missional leaders. We are cultivating missional leaders across all ministries, from setup teardown to worship. Not all of those people need to have facility in teaching the Bible.
As for our City Group leaders, even those leaders don’t need to great Bible teachers as their primary aim in to facilitate gospel-centered missional community, not study the Bible.
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I know this is an old post but I’m thinking about these issues at the moment as we set up our gospel community groups for our church plant so I want to probe a little more if that’s ok. You said that in your city group (which are your missional communities?) leaders have the primary aim of facilitating gospel-centered missional community, not study the bible. But doesn’t Ephesians 4 suggest that they way to facilitate gospel-centered missional community is by teaching the word, or making the word known in its various forms (apostle, prophet, evangelist, pastor and teacher)?
I’ve just posted about mc’s being lead by elders – Am I missing something here?
http://stephenmurray.wordpress.com/2008/12/11/communities-led-by-teachers/
BTW – your blog has been just about the single most helpful blog to me as continue to study and think through church planting. Blessings.
I appreciate where you are in the process and your good questions, Stephen.
Yes, our City Groups are missional communities. Philosophically, they are not Bible Study groups, Therapy Groups, Missional groups or Social Groups. However, this does not mean that they do not discuss the Bible or engage in mission. City groups are where the church is the church to one another and the city. They are mission-focused, community-buliding, and gospel-centered.
These groups are geographically based and strive to share life and truth together, which translates to steady state of connectivity around Jesus and on his mission, not weekly meetings focused on building up Bible knowledge. Currently, the discussion is based on robust, gospel-centered sermons and aimed and pushing the Bible through every nook and cranny of life. The questions are very practical and move from visitor-friendly to gospel-centered.
We do not have elders leading each group. This is not realistic for most church plants, especially if you start your church with MCs, which we did. We do not want to rush anyone into eldership, but have just finished a Deacon training process whereby 99% of our CG leaders are qualified and approved deacons.
Eph 4 is a paradigm for church leadership, not small group or MCs. Your question gets at the root definition of church. Is a MC a church? It would appear that all or most of the equippers from Eph 4 need to be present in a community for it to be a church, including eldership. For us, CGs are not churches, but they are trying to get as close as possible. So CGs are deacon led not elder led. In our next phase of leadership growth, we will start teh elder training and approval process, but we will not rush unqualified men into this role. We prefer for them to be seasonally tested, watched, and equipped so that the eldership potentiality can emerge.
I’ll check out your post. Feel free to keep the conversation going. Excited about what is happening in S. Africa!
Thanks Jonathan that’s helpful. Next question (building upon the last one): my impression from the Crowded House guys, and maybe the Soma and Kaleo guys too, that they see their missional communities/gospel communities as fully functioning churches – is that different from what you’re doing?
Crowded House, I believe so but they call them house churches.
Kaleo, not fully functioning churches but I am pretty certain they are moving in that direction. Ask Drew or David.
Soma, I think they fall somewhere between CH and Kaleo. Ask Caesar or Jeff.
Drew, can you weigh in here?
In many ways they do function as the church but at this point we believe they aren’t doing so autonomously but require the elder/deacon leadership installed by the community. As a local MC develops and installs elders/deacons as their own they would create a ‘site’ that is more autonomous with a local leadership serving a collection of these MCs.
To clarify, Drew means that as an aggregate mass local of MCs (plural) develop in maturity and number, they will install an elder, leading them to become an autonomous site. This is the direction Austin City Life is going also, akin to JR Woodward/Kairos’s notion of “Canvases” and Soma’s “Expressions.”
Through our discussions and emails I feel like I have a read on your trajectory, but please correct if I am off Drew.
Stephen,
Great thoughts and questions brother!
To answer your question about our Missional Communities… this may seem like a bit of semantical wrangling, but here’s how we see it:
No one single “church” in any form makes up the Church (capital C), they/we are all parts of the one true Church. Obviously. So while in Soma Communities we have missional communities that come together to form Expressions (uniquely expressing the gospel in their context utilizing the many gifts contained across several missional communities), we do see each of the parts as the/a Church. We are to be functioning as gospel communities and fully living out our identity in Christ within our context.
So we do encourage each missional community to grow in all of the gifts and graces of the Church and to function out of their identity in Christ as the Church.
However, we do believe that together, in what we call Expressions/new plants, the coming of multiple MCs, with many more and developed gifts represented, we see a more fuller expression of the Church. Additionally, all of these Expressions are all a part of Soma Communities–one church.
Clear as mud, right?
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