The North City Group of Dell Children’s Center recently visited the hospital to love on sick kids and their families. They spent time painting pumpkins, telling stories, and sharing candy with the kids! You can tell they had a great time loving on Austin and the visiting children!
Hirsch on INCH
Brad Brisco has a nice post on his conversation with Alan Hirsch regarding missional communities. Alan pointed out that Christian Associates International uses the acronym INCH to clarify the levels of missional activity by a missional church. Helpful stuff. Some of this is de facto for true missional churches; however, it provides some nomenclature for missional practices.
Initiatives — This is the very lowest level of missional-incarnational practices. These are simple steps taken by individual people of God who carry the word, life and deed of Jesus into the lives of others.
Networks — These are formed when groups of 10-15 people get together to share what is taking place and to participate in missional-incarnational practices as a community.
Clusters — These are basically networks of networks. There is a bit more structure/organization at this level. There may be certain types of training/resources provided within clusters that might not be available in smaller groups.
Hubs — This represents some type of larger gathering for corporate worship, training and larger missionary engagement. Hirsch argues that hubs are probably necessary in certain American contexts.
In our experience, networks and hubs have been easier to facilitate, while trying to create a culture of “initiatives.” We spotlight a missional community every other Sunday gathering to promote community and mission in our church. This is one way to increase initiatives, along with preaching, teaching, and basic missional church structures.
Communities of Performance or Grace?
Tim Chester offers a great diagnostic list to determine whether our communities are communities of performance or grace:
| Communities of Performance | Communities of Grace |
| the leaders appear sorted | the leaders are vulnerable |
| the community appears respectable | the community is messy |
| meetings must be a polished performance | meetings are just one part of community life |
| identity is found in ministry | identity is found in Christ |
| failure is devastating | failure is disappointing, but not devastating |
| actions are driven by duty | actions are driven by joy |
| conflict is suppressed or ignored | conflict is addressed in the open |
| the focus is on orthodoxy and behaviour (allowing people to think they’re sorted) | the focus is on the affections of the heart (with a strong view of sin and grace) |
Deacon Training – II (Practice of Deacons)
As we continue the process of developing deacons, our most recent meeting focused on The Practice of Deacons. A previous post lists resources for A Theology of Deacons, the focus of our first meeting. In attempting to work out the practice of deacons, we found it helpful to make a distinction between two areas of service—community and mission-focused deacons.
There are two main areas of service community-focused and mission-focused service. Mission-focused deacons serve in ways that change over time. For example, the Early Church probably didn’t have Media or Arts Deacons but they did have deacons that served widows and orphans. As the church expands and contracts throughout history, moving from continent to continent, culture to culture, the expression of the church varies. As a result, there are some areas of service that remain the same and others that change. Consequently, the cultural and historical expression of the church requires deacons that serve the mission of the church and deacons that serve a church of mission.
There are deacon ministries that are pretty standard, transcultural and transhistorical such as: mission/social justice, community/benevolence, financial. These ministries have historical and biblical precedent, focusing not so much on outward mission but more on inward ministry to the community of faith. In summary, there are community-focused and mission-focused areas of ministry for deacons, ministries that serve the mission of the church and ministries that serve the church of mission.