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July 10, 2009
Church to the People (part 2)
A church’s goal to get groups into the world
As I described in my last blog post, our local church is re-purposing our Sunday worship and small group gatherings over the summer and taking "church to the people" through a series of missional activities.
The process of turning an individual, small group, or entire church from being internally focused to externally focused is a matter of changing values, casting vision, and doing lots of training.
As far as resources we've used in developing values, vision casting and training, here are a variety of things we have found helpful:
New Hope Oahu – This church in Hawaii has been a great resource and inspiration for taking church to the people. See a clip from pastor Wayne Cordeiro recent conference below:
Shapevine - A gathering place of missional (church to the people) resources including online training, networking, and resources. We've cherry picked several different helpful resources from this site.
Irresistible Evangelism – This is a training course built around a relational evangelism strategy. We brought in the folks from Equipping Ministries International to do this training for us as a retreat-style experience. "Irresistible Evangelism" progresses through 4 active processes:
1) Active Kindness: show the message, don't tell the message.
2) Active Friendship: listen and learn, not turn or burn.
3) Active Wondering: dialogue, not monologue. Questions, not answers.
4) Active Sharing: Persist, not insist. Be available and involved.
All these resources (and more) have been helpful, although we have found that missional resources will fall short unless the lifestyle of "church to the people" is continually modeled. If we can begin with the end in mind, then we can establish the culture of our small groups and the church as a whole that emphasizes: being the church rather than going to church, serving people with no strings attached, being a friend who listen and learns and cares about others, engaging people in wondering questions about their life and spiritual story, and honestly sharing our life and God-stories with one another.
posted by Dan Lentz on July 10, 2009 9:24 AM
