Ben Sternke

Field notes on life and mission with God after Christendom

3DM

Favorite Posts from 2012

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This blog is a way for me to “process out loud” some of the things I’m learning, and share them with a wider audience. I get to process unfinished thoughts, hunches, and bits of intuition in a public forum that allows for some communal refinement and discussion. So thank you to those of you who comment! It’s quite helpful for me and I find the whole process to be loads of fun.

Listed below are a few notable posts from 2012. Some are notable because there were a lot of comments, others are notable because they were important for my own development and growth. (Also, I created a Recommended Reading page!) Here are the posts, in chronological order:
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Is Your Lack of Competency Actually Revealing a Character Issue?

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One of the basic tools I come back to again and again in the coaching I do with 3DM is called the Character/Competency Matrix (more here). Jesus makes it clear that the people who follow him will be equipped to do the same things he was doing, and, remarkably, even greater things (John 14:12)!

Character - Competency Matrix
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Thus disciples of Jesus are learning to both be like Jesus (character) and do like Jesus (competency, or skills).

Sometimes in a coaching huddle we are focusing on character, other times on competency. However, one thing I’ve noticed is how interconnected and interwoven character and competency are. They aren’t isolated aspects of our lives that we can focus on independently. They are intricately connected, like a tightly woven fabric. I’ve seen this play out in two distinct ways.

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A New Church-Planting Initiative

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I am excited to share with you a new global church planting initiative that I am helping to catalyze.

The initiative is being organized by members of a neo-monastic order I am part of called The Order of Mission (TOM). TOM is a covenant family of Kingdom leaders living into the mission of God on six continents. It is a group of people who see their primary vocation as missionaries, have taken lifelong vows of simplicity, purity and accountability and all live by the same Rule of Life.

It’s with this missional order that we are starting a church planting movement simply called The TOM Project, beginning in the United States and Europe. We are specifically targeting college campuses, our goal being that in 20 years, there will be fruitful Kingdom expressions on every college campus in the United States and Europe.

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People Can’t Imitate Your Intentions

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One of the most important lessons we’ve learned through being involved with 3DM is that imitation is a vital component of discipleship. It’s not enough to give people the right information and then send them straight out from there to try to implement it. There is a necessary experience of imitation in an apprenticeship environment that must take place.

When I first heard this, I instantly realized I was really good at giving people the information, but I was not very consistent in providing people with an example to imitate. I realized that people couldn’t imitate my intentions, they can only imitate my actions, which meant I had to lead by example or I was never going to make a disciple.

So we’ve slowly been developing new rhythms in our life that we can invite others into, so they can “imitate us as we imitate Christ.” My friend Jason Smith asked me awhile ago about what these rhythms looked like, and I promised him a blog post on it! Here we go.

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What Does Grafting Look Like?

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This post is the third part of a short series detailing the process grafting our church plant together with another to form one network of Missional Communities in Fort Wayne. Check out the previous posts in the series to get the full scoop:

  1. Kingdom-Minded & City-Focused
  2. Strategy, Synergy, and the Spirit

We began this process by simply talking and praying together with another 3DM-influenced church in Fort Wayne, and in the end felt like God was daring us to think outside the box in terms of partnership. As surprising as it was to us, this feels like the next natural step in our original vision, which was to cultivate and multiply communities of discipleship and mission all over the Fort Wayne region (and beyond).

The idea feels like it’s from God, and we’re excited about the big picture, but we also needed a process to help our communities graft well. In horticultural terms, grafting living things together must be done carefully and with great skill if it is to be successful. We felt the same care must be taken in our spiritual/relational grafting situation. After a lot of prayer and conversation with others, this is the grafting process we are implementing:

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