Ben Sternke

Field notes on life and mission with God after Christendom

Christ Church

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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Strategy, Synergy and the Spirit

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This post is the second 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 post to get the full scoop.

As I said in the first post, 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 most important factor in this is that we are sensing God’s direction, but as we’ve discussed and prayed together about it, there are a number of practical and strategic considerations that seem to confirm this as a Spirit-inspired move.

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Kingdom-Minded & City-Focused

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Three years ago our family and a few others embarked on a journey of planting a church. Our hearts’ desire was to cultivate “kingdom beachheads” all over our city, attempting to put discipleship and mission at the center of what we were doing. Like many, we found out that it was more difficult and humbling than we imagined, but God has been faithfully leading us into fruitfulness as we follow the promptings of his Spirit.

Some interesting recent Spirit-promptings have led us in a direction that was initially surprising to us, but in the end felt natural and right. As so often happens when the Holy Spirit is involved, no one could have guessed it from the beginning, but in the end we laugh about how God is accomplishing his will through it all: we are in the process of grafting our church together with another to form one network of Missional Communities in Fort Wayne.

Since this blog is dedicated to sharing what we are learning in church-planting and disciple-making, I wanted to take a few posts and outline what has been happening and how we came to this decision.

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The Key to Recognizing a Person of Peace

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When we train leaders and begin to focus on evangelism, we always start with the practice of identifying “Persons of Peace.”

This is the strategy Jesus seems to lay out in Luke 9-10, when he sends his disciples out with his authority to do the same stuff he has been doing (you know, “heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons…” Beginner stuff 😉 ).

A Person of Peace is simply someone that God has prepared ahead of time to hear the message of the gospel through you. We recognize Persons of Peace as those who welcome us, like to be with us, and attempt to serve us in some way.

Which is all fine and good in theory, but as we’ve been working with people on this, we’ve noticed what we think is a key element to recognizing a person of peace, without which we will remain blind to what God is doing around us.

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Questions for Self-Examination

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In the huddles that I lead (both local and coaching), one of the more powerful practices we return to again and again is submitting ourselves to carefully-crafted questions for self-examination and reflection. It’s a simple way to stop and pay attention to what God is trying to do in our lives. Wesley did this in his small groups, as have many others who have sought to follow Jesus intentionally and consistently, including St. Ignatius (pictured above).

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