Ben Sternke

Field notes on life and mission with God after Christendom

church planting

Announcement: A New Season of Mission

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When we planted a church three-and-a-half years ago, our vision was to cultivate and multiply communities of mission and discipleship, seeing new expressions of the good news of Jesus planted in every cultural nook and cranny of Fort Wayne and beyond.

Early on in this journey we connected with 3DM, an organization that represents a movement of putting discipleship and mission back into the hands of ordinary people through investing in leaders and churches all over the world. They really helped us gain traction in implementing the vision God had put in our hearts.

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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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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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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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