A City Group leader and all-round enjoyable guy, Dave Hampton, produced this video for our Renew the City with 11 City Groups in 2011 Vision. It’s raw, real, substantive, fruit of the gospel in the lives of Ginger, Rita, Nate, & Wheels.
I love this quote: “The Gospel is when Jesus pursues me even when I don’t feel like I deserve to be pursued.” – Rita
In Austin City Life, we like to say that City Groups are where the church is the church to one another and to the city. This kind of “church” is rare. Unfortunately, much of American ecclesiology has devolved into an inflexible structure that facilitates attendance—a church building. Church equals building or Sunday service. This defective ecclesiology approaches “church” as an event not as a people. Tim Chester and Steve Timmis offer a helpful corrective: “Church is not two events during the week. It is a gospel-centered community on mission.”[1] City Groups are meant to facilitate gospel-centered community on mission. They are where we can be church to one another and the city.
Why Sunday Isn’t Enough
While Sunday gatherings of the church are important, they are an incomplete experience of what the New Testament describes as church. It is impossible to carry out Paul’s “one another” instructions to the church in the context of an hour and a half on a Sunday morning. Therefore, we need some kind of structure to facilitate loving one another, bearing one another’s burdens, encouraging one another, forgiving one another, forbearing with one another, weeping with those who weep and rejoicing with those who rejoice. City Groups are meant to facilitate this kind of “life together.”[2] They are flexible church structures designed to facilitate the people of God living out their intended life together. While City Groups are not a “purer” expression of church than Sunday gatherings, they are a much-neglected expression of church in North America.
Steady State Community
What then does “life together” look like? City Groups are encouraged to view church, not as two events during the week, but as a steady state of community.[3] Instead of seeing community as something that primarily happens during a meeting, we need to adjust ourselves to see all of life as community. Steady state community is a constant flow of social, gospel, and missional connections throughout the week. It’s not adding special “community building” events to your already full calendar. It’s inviting people into your existing calendar. Invite people into your life not just to your City Group meetings.
*This is an excerpt from my forthcoming book: City Groups: Gospel-centered Missional Community.
Through failure and success we’ve developed three clear criteria for health gospel-centered missional communities. Whether a new missional community is formed “out of nothing” or one of our existing groups is ready to multiply, there are three things new groups must have in place before forming: LEADER, a CORE, and a MISSION.
1 LEADER/ A called and qualified leader.
This leader must sense a) God’s call, b) complete the Missional Leader Readiness form, c) meet the leadership qualifications and d) complete City Group Leaders Training.
2 CORE/ A healthy community living out gospel-centered missional community.
Healthy communities are a core of people that a) practice steady state community b) are engaged in mission, c) share leadership and d) keep the gospel central. An initial core size must be at least 6-8.
3 MISSION/ A new group starts with a clear missional focus.
The City Group should be aligned with a local non-profit to serve monthly, or focus on engaging a particular group of Austinites. This clearly defined mission must be accompanied by a plan for engagement. Whether you work with a non-profit or not, your ultimate missional focus should be people. Identify a people group and develop a plan to engage them with the gospel.
Thanks to the tremendous work of Jesse, Dave, and Ben, Austin City Life now has several equipping and interactive blogs embedded into our website. You can visit our site and click through to this changing content or you can visit specific blogs and bookmark them in your browser.
The following post was written by Nate Navarro, Director of Missional Community for Austin City Life.
Too Busy to Lead
If you lead a missional community then chances are you are tired. You are doing your best to be a pastor and friend to your community, a missionary in your neighborhood and workplace, lead your family in a steady state of community and mission, and praying your community will grow in their understanding of the Gospel, all while struggling to believe the good news yourself.
While youre at it, don’t forget the never ending task list. I mean, who is gonna bring the main dish and the desert on Wednesday night?”, where are we serving our neighborhood this month?, who is lining up childcare this week?, who is keeping track of the prayer requests? It goes on, and on, and on, and on.
Oh yes, did I mention you probably have a job. In Austin you most likely are holding down a high stress gig putting in about 50 hours a week. Oh wait, you have a family too! That’s right, your son wants a ride to soccer practice and is secretly hoping you volunteer to coach the team. Your daughter would like you to read 15 princess books to her before bedtime, and your wife actually wants to go out to dinner and talk about something other than your ministry. Imagine that!
Reasons We Lead
If you are a leader chances are you do too much. Some of your reasons are good: you love God; you love the church; you’re a natural leader. Leading is a way for you to serve the Body and build the Kingdom. Some of your reasons are not so good: you love being heard, love feeling important, and you’re identity is so wrapped up in what you do as opposed to who you are that you simply cannot stop working and leading. In all of this, we desperately need the Gospel, and the gospel is probably telling us we need to lead less. Lead less for more ministry.
Rethinking Missional Community Leadership
Two years and 8 missional communities since our very first City Group (Core Team), Austin City Life is revamping our City Group leadership structure. Previously, we had a CG leader responsible for the pastoral and missional leadership of the group. We told them to share leadership, get a leader in training for multiplication, and rely on Jesus and the Spirit for strength. Now, we are moving towards appointing 5 leaders, not one. They are:
Benefits of Shared Leadership
This new model of shared leadership in our missional communities will produce healthier communities and leaders, and ultimately will be good for our church, our city, and the kingdom. How?
Let’s get honest, tired leaders are not attractive. Even the most gifted, charismatic, God and people loving leaders can lose the vision of what it means to lead a missional community under the burden of too many responsibilities and a never ending to do list. Sadly, this leads to duty driven (rather than joy filled) leadership, and when that happens, we are in danger of leading already busy Austinites in more busyness , while creating a new legalism called Missional Community.
More Leaders; Less Work. Share Leadership; Grow in Community. Strengthen Mission; Advance the Gospel.
What do your missional communities do when they aren’t on mission together? What do they discuss? How do you reinforce your values? How do you promote their discipleship alongside mission?
Story of Scripture with Soft Apologetic
When we started our MCs, I wanted our people to become familiar with the big story of Scripture, engage non-Christians, and promote practical discussion, not theological debates or Bible studies. Inspired by The World We All Want, I wrote an 8 week discussion-driven material that begins with New Creation and ends with Mission. I chose to focus on different texts, simplify the approach, and provide a leaders supplement.
The first session starts with a question posed by Chester & Timmis: “If you ruled the world how would it look?” Starting each session with a soft apologetic engaged people across the spectrum of faith, while promoting an understanding of the whole story of Scripture. It keeps the unbeliever in mind while challenging the believer.
See Overview and Sample session.
Sermon Discussion
Once this foundation was laid, we began discussing sermons. Again, our approach was to keep it simple, discussion driven, gospel-centered, and missionally focused. We sensed a need to gather our church on the same theological and visionary page, to promote true gospel-centered living. So, each City Group leader gets five questions each week that move from a soft opener to the problem of application, to the solution of the gospel. All this after a meal together and lots of talking, laughing and so on.
This has been very successful. Our City Groups are starting to pastor one another by speaking the truth in love. We are experiencing some substantial gospel change, but it takes a while for people to a) Trust one Another b) Confess and Repent c) Counsel one Another d) Understand How the Gospel Applies not just saves.
What have you found helpful in promoting gospel-centeredness, community, discipleship within your missional communities?
New Pilot City Group
We are considering starting a pilot City Group that runs 6-8 weeks for non-Christians to get exposed to Gospel, Community, and Mission. Kind of like a short-term Alpha Course that is missional and apologetic. Anyone else done anything like this?
As the Western church becomes increasingly missional, in the social sense, partnerships with non-profits are increasing. There’s a lot of sense to this. However, we must be leery of thinking that social partnerships with non-profits produces missional churches. In fact, we need to be more thoughtful about the “if”and “when” we partner with non-profits, especially if our churches are driven by missional communities.
Tim Chester’s blog entry on “shifting missional foci” is spot on for determining the focus of missional communities. Austin City Life has discovered that if we lock into a strategic social partnership, without being willing to revisit or review our missional emphasis, we run the risk of not following the Holy Spirit. God could be doing something very significant in an area that we refuse to examine because a MC is already committed in one place. The question that “shifting missional foci” raises, then, is what criteria do you use to evaluate your missional focus? Do you pull out of a long-term partnership? When? Why? How do you do that without offending the non-profit you are working with? These are important questions for both MC leaders and church planters to answer.
To be sure, non-profits often have more wisdom, experience, and legal structures to facilitate effective social mission. However, we have come to the conclusion that working with a non-profit just because you believe in their vision and work isn’t sufficient. For example, if you have to drive 30 minutes to serve you may be neglecting needs in your own community. ACL is in the process of recalibrating our City Group missional foci along increasingly localized lines. By focusing more on “neighborhoods of the city” as opposed to the “city of neighborhoods”, missional communities can more effectively renew the peoples and cultures of your city. For us, this means that we won’t be “non-profit driven”, but will try to follow the Spirit as missionary communities in our own neighborhoods.
So the question is not should we partner with non-profits, but when and where should we partner with them. Sometimes it will be best to not partner and other times it will be best. In all this, I believe the quality of missionaries in our churches needs to go up and default reliance on existing social structures go down. What do you think?
In 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.
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.
Austin City Life has been planted with the conviction that in order for our community to “be the church to the church and the church to the world” we must live in the tension of mission and community. As a very new church plant, we have felt this tension from the beginning. At times I could feel the need for more connectivity, prayer, and sharing. Other times I could sense the decline in missional passion and practice. Instead of creating two meetings, one for community and one for mission, I shared the tension I felt with the group but told them that I thought the best thing to do was to live in the tension of imperfect community and mission, not to resolve it. As a result, core team meetings eventually became a hybrid of community and mission (though there were several months of organic community before official core team meetings). Some nights we would connect relationally other nights we wouldn’t. Some nights we strategized mission for two hours with very little interpersonal connection. However, both forms of core team meetings afforded us the opportunity to develop and experience missional ecclesiology, to understand and experience what God has called us to as a church: Jesus-centered, missional community.
Now that our church has moved beyond core team meetings and into structured, organic growth we have launched our City Groups: local, urban missional communities that share life and truth and redemptively engage people and culture. City groups are geographically-based, inter-generational communities of Christians and non-Christians that gather together weekly to share food, discussion, and mission. Each CG develops a Social Strategic Partnership (SSP) with an area organization, i.e. Capitol Food Bank, Ronald McDonald House, in order to bring the whole gospel to the whole city.
City Groups face the same tension of community and mission as our core team did. It is up to the me and the City Group leaders to learn how to shepherd others through this tension. One way we deal with it is thru our current CG material. I have written an eight week study called The Story of Scripture and Our Place in It, which is intended to acquaint those old and new to the faith with the basic plotline of the Bible: Creation/Fall/Redemption/New Creation. The material is largely discussion-driven, tapping into the felt needs such as sense of brokenness (Fall), longings for justice (New Creation) and so on in order to show that God in the Word offers us a world and life that fulfills and surpasses what we all long for. So, the material is both missional and communal in theme. It’s like we are constantly reinforcing the mission-community tension. Some groups are more missional than others and others more communal than others, but we don’t expect perfection; we expect tension. However, this tension can be peaceful; if embraced from the position of our acceptance and salvation in the gospel of Christ. So, we keep coming back to Jesus…for forgiveness, direction, community, grace. It’s an imperfect model that is in desperate need of a perfect Savior.
