Here are the Stages of Growth we followed as a Missional Core Team (see separate document Stages of Organic Growth for further explanation)

1. Meals & Mission: time spent cultivating community over shared meals, missional conversation, and being on mission together socially and evangelistically.
2. Vision & Mission: time spent in community discussions around vision and values, while continuing to practice mission.
3. Commitment Night: an evening in which I gave a charge, we prayed for our city, had first communion over a meal, and celebrated God’s work in our Core Team.
4. Bible Study & Mission: spent time teaching through Luke-Acts, identifying the themes and challenges of gospel, community, mission.
5. Strategy & Missional Community: time spent in more strategic conversation and planning to be a church in the city and for the city through what came to be called City Groups (aka Missional Communities).
6. Low Profile Public Gatherings: our first public gatherings which included preaching and primarily built up the existing Core Team
7. High Profile Public Gatherings: our first attractional, public gatherings in a city centre location
8. City Groups Multiply: existing City Groups multiply through mission and leadership development

Tim Chester lists several differences between House Church meetings and Missional Communities. Read them over. Are there any missing?

Community

House groups often tend to be a weekly meeting. People talk about ‘house group night’ – the evening in which they ‘do’ house group by attending a meeting. A missional community is about a shared life, a network of relationships, a genuine community of people.

Bible-centered

House groups are often centred around a Bible study. The Bible is central to the life of a missional community, but the Bible is read, discussed and lived throughout the week in the context of a shared life.

Pastoral Care

House groups are often insular and focused on the mutual care of their members. Pastoral care is a feature of missional communities, but they are also groups with a strong sense of mission. They can articulate their vision for mission and identify the specific people they are trying to reach.

Leadership

House groups are normally managed centrally by the church leadership. Leaders are often fearful of house groups becoming independent. Missional communities are given a mandate to reproduce organically or spin off into church plants.

Read this story of “Acts 2″ community

Steve Timmis is an innovative leader in The Crowded House and Porterbrook Traning Centre and now European Director for Acts 29 in the UK. I’ve had the joy of working with Steve on a few things and my respect for him grows each time. Here are some outstanding resources on cultivating gospel-centered missional communities.

Resurgence has provided three sessions on Total Church traning on Gospel Communities.

• Session 1: Gospel-centered Principles – an outstanding explanation of the Gospel summarized as: “Jesus, God’s promised Rescuer and Ruler, lived our life, died our death and rose again in triumphant vindication as the first fruits of the new creation to bring forgiven sinners together under his gracious reign”.
• Session 2: Gospel-centered Practices – focuses on the “how tos” of GCs, addressing language, structure, mission.
• Session 3: Gospel-centered Practices – focuses on more best practices on leader development, etc.

The Austin Stone Missional Community blog is putting out some good posts. This post helpfully raises missionary questions that will promote MCs that think and act more wisely, communicating the gospel with greater missional savvy. Here are some questions your MC can ask in the process of understanding your culture and mission:

1. What are the emotional needs of the elderly, families, teens, singles, men, women, children?
2. What are the social, economic or educational needs of the same?
3. What are the flaws and difficulties with the systems of the community?
4. What is their worldview?
5. What redemptive analogies best fit this culture?
6. What does this culture understand about the basic components of the gospel story?
7. What questions are being asked in the culture that point to their need for the gospel?

This is an important question: “When is a missional community a church?” It gets at the root of our essential ecclesiology—what makes church, church. Some would emphasize the presence of elders, others would emphasize the presence of people, others the gospel and sacraments, still others a people on mission. Where do you fall? When are missional communities considered churches? When are missional core teams considered “a church”?

Check out the answers to this question here.

J.R. Briggs has a creative post on how he has trained his house church leaders with an ashtray.

Our church is trying to shake sinful individualism and move into steady state communities. We are having some success and some failure. The success is very life-giving, exciting, church-like. I ran across this quote by Dallas Willard that gets at our aim in cultivating steady state community:

Among those who live as Jesus’ apprentices there are no relationship that omit the presence and action of Jesus. We never go “one on one;” all relationships are mediated through him. I never think simply of what I am going to do with you, to you, or for you. I think of what we, Jesus and I, are going to do with you, to you, and for you. Likewise, I never think of what you are going to do with me, to me, and for me, but of what will be done by you and Jesus with me, to me, and for me. – The Divine Conspiracy, 236

If we would think of ourselves less as individuals and more as persons in community, our decision-making and discipleship would change radically. It has been said there is no pure individual. Its’s true. No man an island to himself. We all possess the seed of community, but supress or substitute it for other things. Solitary experiences and virtual forms of community, no matter how wonderful, do not sum up or satisfy our social identity as persons-in-community. The Triune God saw to that when he made us. If the American church could recover that social identity and harness it to gospel-centered mission, the world would be a very different place.

Fortunately, failure in Christian community points us back to the sufficiency of the Jesus. Our success reminds us that the Spirit of Jesus is powerful and counter-cultural. Jesus is strong for our successes and sufficient for our failure in striving for steady state community and gospel-centered mission.

Tim Chester offers a great diagnostic list to determine whether our communities are communities of performance or grace:

Neil Cole’s Organic Church was an overnight success. I have referred back to several times for organic church principles that have shaped Austin City Life. However, Cole’s newest book Search and Rescue: Becoming a Disciple Who Makes a Difference struggles to stay afloat.

The hyper-sensitive Calvinist shouldn’t judge the book by its cover. This is not an Arminian tirade on Calvinist failures at mission, though recent research appears to support such conclusions. Using the metaphor of “search and rescue”, Cole is not trying to make a statement regarding Total Depravity, that we are alive and afloat in our sin, versus dead and drowned in depravity. Rather, Cole uses his lifeguard experience as an illustration of how the church should make disciples, which includes “seeking and saving the lost”. And here is his where the book begins to drown.

Part 1

The book is littered with pictures and inundated with stories from Cole’s lifeguard days in California. I’m all for a good illustration, but Cole takes this way too far, dominating the entire book. Not only is this filler, it obscures some of his helpful comments on discipleship. In addition to riding the wave of lifeguard stories, in the first half of the book, Cole also attempts to surf 2 Timothy for discipleship principles and insights. Unfortunately, he offers mainly superficial observations and poor exegesis, particularly his comments on why we should not follow the reward structure of farmer/athlete/soldier in 1 Timothy 2 at a motivation for discipleship. He doesn’t seem to get Christian Hedonism. However, it’s great to see him addressing the notion of motivation in discipleship, in which he deconstructs religion and other forms of external motivation, pointing to the gospel as “that which transforms the soul” (97). You can skip the first four chapters of the book and go straight to chapter five, where he develops his insights from Organic Church on building the church by multiplication, not addition. If this is new to you, its worth reading about in either book.

Part 2

The second half of Search and Rescue is self-admittedly a rework of Cultivating a Life for God, which rehearses the story and structure of Life Transformation Groups (LTGs). These groups of 2-3 are formed around three practices: 1) Confession of sin 2) Reading lots of Scripture 3) Praying for the lost. They are simple, reproducible, and strategic. Before I came across Cole, I had been doing something similar with friends for several years. I really like the simplicity and reproducibility of the LTG concept. Cole has inspired me to implement my own version—Fight Clubs—in our church. A summary of LTGs is found on page 175.

Conclusion

Cole’s strength is questioning the status quo. He doesn’t do a lot of that in this book. However, when he does it is refreshing and edgy. Like saying that we slow down the obedience of disciples when we run them through content heavy discipleship material. Or that the Early Church met in accountability groups. Or that when pastors talk about Greek and Hebrew from the pulpit they separate themselves from the flock and distance the church from the Bible.

All in all, the book isn’t worth buying, especially if you have read Cole’s other stuff. I’ve shared most of the nuggets and purchased it in hope of finding much more. In fact, the richest paragraph in the book comes from Alan Hirsch’s preface:

It was Oliver Wendell Holmes who said, “I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity the other side of complexity.” Simple answers, offered without taking into account the vast intricacies of human life in an infitine universe, are close to being out right worthless to any human being in need of real truth that addresses real, live situations. Simplicity this side of complexity simply doesn’t fit or resonate with our condition and is not worth a dime. However, when simplicity presents itself beyond the complexities that we all face, and it takes into account the nuanced and often perplexing situation we find ourselves in, the these truths are worth all that we own.