Ben Sternke

Field notes on life and mission with God after Christendom

alex absalom

Launching Missional Communities: A Review

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A few weeks ago I read through Launching Missional Communities, a new book by Mike Breen and Alex Absalom. The super short review: it is the single best resource available on Missional Communities (MCs). I absolutely loved it.

The main reason this book is so good is that Breen and Absalom are practioners, not just theorists. Now, as an INTP, I can certainly get excited about a robust and elegant theory! But I shared the frustration of the church planter who wrote the introduction to the book. As he was searching books and podcasts for help on cultivating and implementing MCs, he found

There were a lot of people writing about the social theory and theology of movements and mission, but no clear practices for doing it… It seemed like there were a lot of thinkers who didn’t practice and a lot of practitioners who didn’t think.

The authors of LMC step into this void as practioners who think. Breen practically invented MCs 15 years ago when he was leading St. Thomas’ Church in Sheffield, England. Absalom was there with Breen, and has since planted hundreds of MCs and worked with several established churches at a more strategic level, helping them transition to a MC model. Because of this, this book is dripping with wisdom that comes from the blood and guts experience of actually doing this stuff for many years.

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Why I Believe in Mid-Sized Communities, Part 5

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Previous posts in this series:

Part 1: What’s the Big Deal?
Part 2: What Does It Look Like?
Part 3: The Early Church
Part 4: Oikos in the Bible

Previous posts have defined what a mid-sized missional community is, why it’s important, and some of the biblical and historical evidence of their effectiveness.

Now we turn our attention to some of the sociological dynamics at play in mid-sized groups, and how they play into a larger whole of spiritual formation and mission in the Body of Christ.

Awhile back I read (and blogged: Part 1, 2, 3, 4) Joseph Myers’ book The Search to Belong [affiliate link]which uses sociological research to suggest that people experience a sense of belonging in four different spheres: public, social, personal, and intimate.

  • Public belonging is like being a Mac owner, or playing bingo every week with 200 others, or being a Hoosier basketball fan. It occurs when people connect through an outside influence.
  • Social belonging is like knowing the barista at the local coffee shop or a neighbor you might ask to pick up your mail while you’re away on vacation. It occurs when we share “snapshots” of ourselves, of what it would be like to be in personal space with us.
  • Personal belonging is like a good friendship that just picks up where you left off no matter how much time you may have spent apart.
  • Intimate belonging is like marriage, or a very few close friends with whom we share “naked” experiences, feelings, and thoughts.

A few rough analogues to this model: In the Old Testament, temple worship was public space, synagogue was social space, family Sabbath was personal space, and the husband-wife relationship was intimate space. For Jesus, you could say that teaching the crowds was public space, Jesus with the 72 or attending weddings and parties was social space, Jesus with the 12 was personal space, and Peter, James, and John were part of an intimate space with Jesus.

It seems to me that most churches facilitate public space (worship services) and a blend of personal and intimate space (small groups). Most churches don’t have a specifically structured environment for people to experience the kind of social belonging they’re longing for. Mid-sized communities are a kind of “missing link” for most churches.

Additionally, mid-sized communities seem to be revived during times of massive cultural change, when those who used to be at the center get pushed to the margins. This is how the synagogues were developed. Alex Absalom writes:

The synagogue gathering was something developed during the Babylonian exile, when the Temple was not physically available as a center of worship and community life… for the people of God, the question was how they should worship and gather. “How can we sing the songs of the Lord while in a foreign land?” What does faith look like beyond the existing institutions?… For the early church, their answer to the challenge of being excluded from Temple worship was to draw from the wisdom of synagogue ? or oikos ? life, and do what they experienced there. Thus they gathered in natural relationships around food, Scripture, worship and listening to what the Lord was specifically saying to them and their context. They sought to be a blessing to the wider world through service, especially of the lost, the last and the least, and found authentic ways to proclaim the Good News of God’s Kingdom.

Because Christians are again needing to learn how to function on the margins of society instead of the center, and because Western society as a whole has largely lost the social space/extended family dynamic that has sustained most human cultures for most of human history, I suggest that cultivating and multiplying mid-sized missional communities that are networked together in accountable relationships is a way of “doing church” that fits our new post-Christian context beautifully.

Mission becomes a corporate way of life instead of an individual effort, something that is woven into the fabric of everyday life instead of simply a program to participate in on special occasions. Mission, discipleship, worship and friendship are woven together into a way of life that is lived out together in public as we seek to incarnate the life of Christ in neighborhoods and relational networks.

Next time I’ll look deeper into the benefits of mid-sized missional communities, addressing some of the excellent questions people asked in the comments on the first post in this series, and quoting David Fitch, who OFTEN WRITES IN ALL CAPS FOR EMPHASIS. Don’t miss it!

Next post –> On Being the “Right Size”

Why I Believe in Mid-Sized Communities, Part 4

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Previous posts in this series:

Part 1: What’s the Big Deal?
Part 2: What Does It Look Like?
Part 3: The Early Church

My contention in this series is that organizing a church as a decentralized network of mid-sized missional communities holds tremendous promise for seeing the good news of Jesus spread in post-Christian contexts.

In this post I’ll continue to look at historical and biblical evidence that indicates that the current movement toward what we call missional communities is really a re-discovering of something very old that God has been using for centuries to renew the church and see the good news of Jesus spread.

Like I said in the last post, the early church gathered in oikos, or “household,” a network of extended-family like relationships that “did life together” rather than just met one day of the week for programmed activities.

You can see this pattern in many of the New Testament letters. In Romans 16, Paul seems to be greeting numerous oikos communities that met throughout the city. Most scholars believe this to be the case in Corinth as well. In one of his letters, Paul tells the Corinthian Christians they need to stop getting drunk at the worship gatherings. Can you imagine this being a problem at your church? The environment was obviously something that made it possible for people to show up before others and drink all the wine and eat all the good food! Much of 1 Corinthians seems to be Paul laying down potluck rules! It was an oikos community that needed some help honoring and loving one another in practical ways (don’t hog all the food when you get together for your worship feasts!).

Of course, none of this is really controversial. But when we start to think about differently we function today as the church, the ramifications start to sink in.

Alex Absalom comments that “it seems that from a Biblical perspective, oikos evangelism is God’s natural method for sharing His supernatural message. It is trans-historical and trans-cultural. It is integrity based evangelism, since it stands or falls on the quality of the relationship, which of course reflects the relational core of the Gospel… they were highly decentralized units, held together by traveling apostles and prophets who were invited to speak into the community on an ongoing basis. Their unity was neither created nor expressed through all meeting in one place at one time…. The New Testament’s instruction and pattern seriously reveals a church that is more appropriately summarized as a household of people on a mission.”

So today’s post is simply a little more wood for the fire! Next time I’ll be looking at why mid-sized communities make sense from a sociological perspective, which is where it gets really interesting! See you there.

Next post –> Sociological Matters

Why I Believe in Mid-Sized Communities, Part 2

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I started this series by nailing my colors to the wall, saying that organizing a church as a network of mid-sized missional communities holds tremendous promise in reaching post-Christian contexts. In response to some of the questions on that first post, today I’ll set the stage a bit and define what I mean by “missional community.” Later posts will get into the biblical, historical, and sociological rationale for missional communities.

It’s helpful to understand some of the seismic shifts we’re experiencing right now in the Western world. Church attendance has been falling steadily over the past few years. The stats are fairly staggering. The weekly church attendance among the Builder generation is around 65%, Boomers are at 35%, Generation X is at 15%, and among Generation Y only 4% attend a church service regularly.

These statistics indicate the kinds of cultural shifts we’re experiencing right now. What was once a fairly important activity (church-going) is now something 96% of the emerging generation doesn’t do! So is this “missional communities” stuff about getting those people “back in church?” Not really. When I talk about “reaching” post-Christian contexts, I’m not talking about getting them to come back to church services. I’m talking about bringing people to experience the “eternal kind of life” that comes through trusting Jesus and walking with him. Missional Communities are a fantastic way to do this for post-Christian contexts.

Some of the questions readers asked revolved around whether or not this talk of “missional communities” was simply a new way to talk about things the church is already doing. What I am talking about is not more of the same with a new name, even though I’ve seen some “missional communities” that are essentially small groups with a mission focus. But the way I’m using the term, there’s a big difference.

Here’s a brief definition, taken from Wikipedia article on Missional Community:

A Missional Community is a group of anything from 20 to 50+ people who are united, through Christian community, around a common service and witness to a particular neighborhood or network of relationships. With a strong value on life together, the group has the expressed intention of seeing those they impact choose to start following Jesus, through this more flexible and locally incarnated expression of the church. The result will often be that the group will grow and ultimately multiply into further missional communities. Missional Communities are most often networked within a larger church community (often times with many other Missional Communities). These mid-sized communities, led by laity, are “lightweight and low maintenance” and most often meet 3-4 times a month in their missional context.

Because missional communities are larger than small groups, they can do some substantive things in their mission context. Because they are smaller than a whole church, everyone can be known and loved and contribute to the community. Check out the whole article for more information and a brief history of their genesis and development.

To put it another way (bullet points!), here’s how Alex Absalom, who has been working with MCs for 15 years, defines them in his upcoming book Missional Communities:

  • A group of between 20 and 50+ people
  • Can be either a new church plant, or more commonly a sub-set of a larger gathered church
  • Centered around Jesus
  • The defining focus is on reaching a particular neighborhood or network of relationships
  • This takes place in community, with lots of food and fun!
  • There is a healthy balance of UP (relationship w/ God), IN (relationship w/ one another) and OUT (relationship with mission context)
  • You don’t need to be a professing Christian to belong
  • The group is unashamed about following Christ, both in values and in vision
  • As disciples of Jesus, worship, prayer and Scripture reading are core practices
  • The group looks outwards through a mixture of service and witnessing
  • This common mission focus is a key glue for the shared sense of togetherness
  • People gather informally throughout the week, not just at formal meetings
  • Life together includes a high value on small groups for support and encouragement
  • Leaders receive ongoing help, coaching and accountability
  • Leaders do not do everything, they facilitate and release others to serve and lead

Any thoughts or questions strike you as you read this?

Next post –> The Early Church