Ben Sternke

Field notes on life and mission with God after Christendom

church plant fort wayne

Vision Night 2.0?

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Last Sunday’s Vision Night was an invigorating time of eating together, worshiping together, and conversing together about the vision of Christ Church. I am more stoked than ever about what God has in store for us.

I also know that some of you expressed interest in attending but, for various reasons, couldn’t. I’ve emailed some of you, but wanted to put out an A.P.B. as well, just in case there were interested parties that I wasn’t aware of!

So if you’re interested in attending a vision night, let me know by contacting me or just commenting below. I am thinking this one will be on a smaller scale, and probably should happen fairly soon. Four meeting times that I am pondering:

  • Friday night dessert, Sep 4 (short notice!)
  • Friday night dessert, Sep 11
  • Saturday afternoon cookout, Sep 12
  • Sunday morning brunch, Sep 13

So let me know if you’d like to attend, and which of those meeting times would work best for you. We’ll coordinate from there!

Freedom and Responsibility

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The 128 slides below will take you through what is called the “Freedom and Responsibility” culture at Netflix, and they would be well worth your time to read through.

For example, there is no “x number of days per year” vacation policy. Seriously, they just don’t track how many days people take for vacation at all (the exact words are “there is no policy or tracking”). Instead they measure results. Freedom and responsibility. Another example: their policy regarding entertainment, expenses, travel, and gifts is five words long: “Act in Netflix’s best interests.” What a breath of fresh air.

It’s kind of like the culture we’re wanting to cultivate in our church plant, as well: low control (freedom), but high accountability (responsibility). As we cultivate disciples of Jesus, we want to empower people to pursue what God has placed in their hearts, and then provide the support and challenge they need to go there.

Culture

A Missional Proposal, Part 10: Ministry Philosophy

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We’re continuing to post on the vision and values of our church plant.

So far: 1. “Why?” – 2. Our mission – 3. Skeptics and Dreamers – 4. Missionary communities – 5. Journey, Honesty, Community – 6. Participation, Oikos, Simplicity, Wonder – 7. Creativity, Roots, Justice, Truth – 8. 3D Church – 9. Gatherings

Today: a sketch of our philosophy of ministry

This stuff is perhaps for the more technically-minded. But reading it will definitely give you a good picture of the ethos we want to cultivate as a community (shout-out to my friend JR Briggs, by the way – I based much of this on the community he planted).

MISSION/VISION/DIRECTION

  • Our desire is to be known more for our sending capacity than our seating capacity (a friend came up with that phrase, love it!). Therefore, we desire to send regular people out into the world as missionaries: teachers, students, plumbers, businessmen and stay-at-home moms in the name of Jesus.
  • We desire to connect more with the de-churched and the un-churched than the overly-churched.
  • Our desire is to reach people who are skeptical or cynical towards Church, have left the church or have never experienced a meaningful, authentic relationship with Jesus Christ.
  • We desire to communicate, embrace and live out a more robust gospel, holistic in understanding. We believe the gospel renews us as individuals, it renews us as the Church, it renews the communities in which we live, work and play and it renews the systems and structures that operate in our culture.
  • Our evangelism strategy will be geared specifically to post-Christian culture: to make clear the meaning of the word of proclamation (kerygma) by means of a life lived in fellowship (koinonia) and finding its expression in simple service (diakonia). These are not isolated “ministries” of the church but vitally integrated aspects of a holistic understanding of the gospel.

LEADERSHIP

  • Our approach will be much more “relational-familial” than “business-corporate” in its structure.
  • We desire to lead out of our unofficial influence rather than out of our job titles or positions.
  • We will lead by both our strengths and our weaknesses, believing that God is honored by our willingness to obey.
  • While structure and order are important they are not the end-all sign of health. After all, a graveyard is extremely orderly. So we desire to lead in the midst of a healthy chaos. We embrace the chaos, rather than run from it, trying to adopt a playful attitude toward the mess we will often experience.
  • While there will be appropriate assignments of responsibility, authority, and leadership, the hierarchical structure will be much more “flat,” taking more of a team approach to decision-making.
  • We will place a high priority on identifying, building into, training, equipping and unleashing new and younger leaders in their passions and giftedness.
  • Communication will be honest, transparent and forthright with the faith community because we are family.
  • We will take risks in leadership, not simply seeking to “play it safe.” We will seek to cultivate a culture that gives people permission to take risks and to fail.
  • We desire to lead not as experts, but as fellow journeymen. We desire to lead with our questions, not merely our answers, and won’t hesitate to admit when we don’t know the answer.

[Read more…] about A Missional Proposal, Part 10: Ministry Philosophy

A Missional Proposal, Part 9: Gatherings

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We’re continuing to post on the vision and values of our church plant.

So far: 1. “Why?” – 2. Our mission – 3. Skeptics and Dreamers – 4. Missionary communities – 5. Journey, Honesty, Community – 6. Participation, Oikos, Simplicity, Wonder – 7. Creativity, Roots, Justice, Truth – 8. 3D Church

Today: the specific kinds of gatherings we envision.

Remembering that we are committed to being a church that is both small enough (everyone is known and contributing in ministry) and big enough (resources are leveraged), and that we are committed to a three-dimensional expression of church, (worshiping God together, being formed as disciples of Jesus together, and engaging in Spirit-empowered mission together), we imagine the following types of gatherings…

JOURNEY GROUPS for SPIRITUAL FORMATION

Journey Groups are made up of 6-12 people who meet specifically to “grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Pet 3:18). These will be more than just “hang-out groups,” (but we anticipate that quite a lot of spontaneous “doing life together” will happen in these contexts). The focus of these groups will be placed firmly on the formation of character in the likeness of Christ, and will probably meet in homes.

Journey Groups will be where people are known deeply, where friends share their lives with one another: their stories, their joys and sorrows, their stuff, their money, their faith, their decisions.

MISSIONAL COMMUNITIES for MISSION (duh)

Missional Communities are medium-sized groups consisting of 20-50 people (that could contain several Journey Groups within them) who meet regularly around a mission focus or vision. This mission focus could be:

  • a people group (e.g., young professionals, refugees, stay-at-home moms)
  • a place (e.g., a neighborhood or school)
  • a passion (e.g., soccer, racial reconciliation)

Activities and meetings for these groups would be determined by whatever seems to make sense based on the mission focus. A potential pattern would be gathering twice a month as Missional Communities (to serve, to celebrate, etc) and twice a month as Journey Groups (to explore Scripture, to pray, etc).

Missional Communities will provide an ideal “entry point” for many into the community, because they are larger (and thus less intimidating) than Journey Groups. They provide an ideal place for relationships to be cultivated while connecting to the heart and mission of the church. The Missional Community is also small enough to allow every member to be actively involved in ministry, using his or her gifts to further the mission of the church and the renewing work of God in Fort Wayne.

We also expect a lot of “doing life together” to happen spontaneously in missional communities; people eating in one another’s homes, inviting neighbors and friends over for parties, laughing together, babysitting one another’s kids, etc.

A lot of energy and resource will be directed toward establishing the Missional Communities and helping them thrive. We anticipate these communities will be the heartbeat of the church and the key to helping us become a church that is both “big enough” and “small enough.”

WORSHIP GATHERINGS for CELEBRATION

We will also meet regularly as one church community for worship gatherings, which will serve to build up, encourage, and equip the church to continue its work of transformation and mission by engaging in proven, communal worship practices that form us as missional people.

While there will be room for creativity and variety at these gatherings, we will seek to maintain a loose liturgical structure of:

  • Singing together
  • Listening to the Story of Scripture together
  • Responding to God’s Word together (consecration, repentance, etc)
  • Telling stories of what God is doing in our midst
  • Praying together
  • Celebrating the Lord’s Supper together
  • Being sent as God’s people together

We will value simplicity over sizzle, and strive to cultivate an expression of worship that invites participation instead of consumerism, that immerses people in God rather than awes them with our technical brilliance.

We want these gatherings to be meaningful but also sustainable for the long haul. We do not want them to become the “tail wagging the dog,” and will strive to keep simple enough that we have lots of energy left over for missional engagement the other six days of the week.

AND BEYOND?

As the church grows and Missional Communities multiply, there may come a time when it makes sense to plant another congregation with its own worship gathering. In keeping the mission central, we trust we will be able to discern these issues when the time comes. We intend to continue to multiply these kinds of communities in whatever way the Spirit seems to be leading.

We will be seeking to partner with other churches as well, for the purpose of instigating and participating in a movement that sees the Gospel run amok in Fort Wayne and beyond. In essence, what we’re interested in and what we dare to pray for is nothing short of revival, in the technical definition of the term: seeing the spiritually dead coming to life in great numbers. Nothing would delight us more than being able to be part of something like that.

Next post – Our Philosophy of Ministry

A Missional Proposal, Part 8: Three-Dimensional Church

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We’re continuing to post on the vision and values of our church plant.

So far: 1. “Why?” – 2. Our mission – 3. Skeptics and Dreamers – 4. Missionary communities – 5. Journey, Honesty, Community – 6. Participation, Oikos, Simplicity, Wonder – 7. Creativity, Roots, Justice, Truth

Today: The VEHICLE for the Vision (how we plan to “get there”)

This is where the rubber meets the road. Think about it like this: If our vision (who we want to become) is a distant land, and our values (what’s important to us) are how we’ll behave toward each other on the journey, we also need a vehicle to move us toward our destination. “Vehicle” is just another way to talk about the specific actions we plan to take to propel us on the journey. Vision is one thing, but implementation is another. It’s easy to dream about an exotic vacation, but harder to actually take one. Saving money, booking flights, finding hotels, making plans, packing bags, and making arrangements are way more difficult and messy than daydreaming about lazy afternoons on the beach.

It’s the same with our vision: it looks great on paper! But actually moving toward it will be a messy, chaotic process. What follows is a rough outline of the vehicle we think will move us toward our vision, the structure we think will properly support the life we want to see expressed. In this post I’ll give a general description and in the next I’ll write about some of the specific types of gatherings and activities we envision.

A church will always be a combination of organism and organization, like a body is both flesh and bone. Our belief is that the organization ought to serve the life of the organism like a skeleton supports the life-filled flesh and tissue of a human body. We will strive to keep our organizational structure agile, lightweight, low-maintenance, open to critique and change, with power being vested at the edges of the community as much as possible. To use a metaphor from the music world, people who create “beats” to use in hip-hop music give this advice: Start simple and make sure every single thing happening is contributing to the groove. We are going to strive to make sure every single thing happening in this church plant is contributing to the “groove” God has called us to.

While we will certainly be in a very experimental mode as we begin this church plant, we believe some version of the following will be how our community’s life together will be structured to enable the life and mission of the church to thrive and allow us to be a church that is both small enough to allow everyone to contribute meaningfully in ministry and be known by others in the community, and big enough that we can leverage resources to do better and greater kingdom work in an effective way.

THREE-DIMENSIONAL EXPRESSION OF CHURCH

We see the church community gathering for three main purposes:

  • Public celebration and worship of God
  • Missional engagement in the power of the Holy Spirit
  • Spiritual formation in the image of Christ

All three of these purposes are carried out in the context of covenant community, which implies a deep level of commitment to and sharing with one another. We believe if we are intentional about worship, formation, and mission that the reality of community will come as a by-product and will be all the richer because of it.

Next post – Three Kinds of Gatherings