How to Keep Missional Communities Healthy

Posted on October 28, 2011

One of the questions I’m asked most is: “How do you keep missional communities healthy?” “How do you help them grow?” At Austin City Life, we’ve learned this one the hard way. Among the many mistakes we’ve made, you can include:

  • Installing (unqualified) leaders too fast
  • Multiplying without vision or a clear process
  • Making mission a project and unclear in focus

We’ve rectified these failures through listening to our leaders, developing several tools, and then training them accordingly. Before pointing to the tools we’ve found helpful in nurturing healthy missional communities, I’d like to stress two key things.

Missional Communities Talk About Missional Community

If church really is a family, then there’s no taboo topic. Healthy families hash out problems, confront challenges, resolve conflict, reflect on their relationships, and plan to be better families. Healthy missional communities must do the same. Growing missional communities talk about their missional community (not theoretical ones). They celebrate the evidences of grace, encourage one another in their strengths, affirm growth in grace, and they talk about their areas of growth. We talk about the growth of our relationships and collective mission in terms of how we’re doing at having gospel conversations, practicing steady state community, and living around our identified mission. These conversations keep legalism from creeping in, or help us ferret it out, where we’ve come to judge one another based on missional community performance. These conversations also create space for repentance over selfishness or indifference.

Missional Communities Talk to God Together

Missional Communities that don’t pray practice a kind of missional self-righteousness. Prayerless MCs believe the lie that they can handle mission on their own. If they have the right conversations, do the right planning, and identify the right mission, then “Boom” they can have missional success. Last time I checked Luke 10, Jesus is the Lord of the harvest, not me, my missional community, or my strategies. As Lord, he calls us, not just to pray, but to plead with him. He instructs his groups of disciples to plead for more workers in his ripe harvest field, to pray for more people to turn from merciless lords to the one, true Merciful Lord.

Even Jesus prayed for the harvest. He asked the Father for strength, guidance, and grace throughout his ministry. Most of all, he prayed to the Father because, quite simply, he loved the Father (John 17). If it’s true that Jesus prayed a lot because he was the most dependent human being that every lived, then doesn’t it follow that we, not only imitate his practice, but also join him in prayer in pursuit of the harvest of his death?

If it is also true that he prayed because he enjoyed the Father’s presence, then shouldn’t love compel us to pray? And wouldn’t it be love that would compel us to go, to share the gospel when we are embarrassed, to serve the poor when we are tired, and to life up the name of Christ in the fellowship of the Father, Son, and Spirit? Jesus put it like this: “If you love me, you will keep my commands.” Love gets white-hot in prayer. It glows. That’s what happened in the Transfiguration. Jesus glowed with white-hot joy in the presence of God, and then turned his face toward Jerusalem to secure God’s mission with his very own blood.

Prayerless mission is the height of self-righteousness. Plus, its pretty loveless. Its saying to God, “I’ve got your mission covered. I can handle hardened hearts. Why don’t you do something more important, like applaud at my missional ingenuity.” I don’t need your love; i’ll just use your mission to love myself. Get a whole group of prayerless people on mission together, and we’re asking for it. We’re asking for failure, humility, and sickness. Unhealthy missional community results from loveless, prayerless missional community. The good news is that the Father is waiting, not with his arms crossed, but with them wide open to receive our repentance and to hear our pleas! What a gracious God we serve!

3 Tools God Can Work Through

Here are three tools for the three issues I listed up top. They are imperfect but God has a history of working through imperfect people, especially when they bank on his perfection.

Lord, help us. Lord, use us. Lord forgive us. Lord reap your Harvest. Lord, be glorified. Amen.