Tag: gospel communities

4 Reasons I’m Excited about the GCM Conference!

Here are four reasons why I’m excited about the GCM Collective Conference, which is just two months away Oct 28-30!

(1) Practioner-tested Missional Community Training: There’s a lot of talk about missional communities but few are planting, multiplying, and leading missional communities with time tested results. Drawing on years of experience, many of the breakouts specialize in training people in missional community leadership. Whether you have missional communities or not, these breakouts will equip you to lead a more missionally effective church.

(2) Top Notch Theological Reflection on Mission: With the emergence of the Missional Church, do we truly know the state of mission in America? Who do we need to engage with the Gospel? How can we engage them effectively? Are there missional structures and approaches to discipleship that have proven effective? Ed Stetzer and Jeff Vanderstelt will address these issues from the stage, while breakouts push these insights through into everyday practice.

(3) The Collective Experience: The Collective experience has the power to equip and galvanize gospel movement well beyond the conference! It groups missional leaders together who share an affinity in their mission, i.e. megachurches, urban context, small church plants, house churches, suburban context, helping them to process GCM conference content through their similar challenges and experiences. This shared learning will encourage and strengthen people in their mission. Plus, an online community will be available for the shared learning to continue!

(4) The Centrality of the Gospel in Mission: The conference will not make best practice central to mission but our grasp and communication of the Gospel of Jesus Christ! We will devote an entire plenary to clarifying what the Gospel is. In confusing times, this will help us clarify and clasp this remarkable good news we have been entrusted with.

How to Start Missional Communities

A lot of people are asking me for training on how to start Missional Communities, so I thought I would mention several resources. In the past couple of months I have done variations of the talk Missional Communities in Cities and Suburbs. (Note: I went more generic/urban than suburban in this one.) Also Leading Missional Communities from LEAD ’09. This training covers three main areas:

What are Missional Communities?
How to Form Missional Communities
How to Lead Missional Communities

Also consider coming to VERGE: a conference on missional community. I’ll be there!