leadership
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Caring for Missional Community Leaders
Care is where the missional church struggles, and I am no exception. Proactive care is coaching and celebration, the ordinary rhythms that tell a leader someone is paying attention. Reactive care is crisis, and it works…
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Ongoing Training for Missional Community Leaders
Discipleship is the backbone, but it does not scale to everyone. For the leaders we cannot disciple personally, we run a rotating annual rhythm of training on the gospel, on community, and on mission, paired with…
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Basic Training for Missional Communities
After five years of trying nearly every training method available, the most useful thing we learned was to train the whole community rather than the leader alone. Leaders trained by themselves struggled to pass the material…
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The Basic Qualifications for Leadership
Our bar for leadership is five things: attend the four week training, tell your story to an elder or deacon, name who you want to reach, gather three or four people to that mission, and launch.…
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Questions to Ask When Considering a Leader
Before placing someone who has volunteered into leadership, five questions need answers: what our ministry is for, what we are asking of a leader, what that person actually wants to do, whether the two visions are…
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Two Ways to Identify Leaders
There are two ways to find new leaders, and most of the advice on offer is theory rather than practice. Selection sets a high bar and produces alignment at a slower rate. Self-identification sets a low…
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Discipleship and Leadership Development
Leaders are made primarily through intentional, life on life discipleship, and only secondarily through the systems that help a church accomplish ministry. That distinction gets tested when the numbers do not cooperate, when 500 people want…
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Leadership Development Systems for Missional Communities
Systems do not make disciples, people do. What most churches diagnose as a systems problem is usually a culture problem, and a good system practiced in an unhealthy culture will not produce results. This introduces the…
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The Lobby – Day 2
Today has been another encouraging and challenging day of conversation, and has left me with some good thinking to do. Session 5: Mission and Community We began the day today talking through the idea of mission,…
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The Difficulty of Balancing Ministry and Discipleship
I’ve found that it can be extremely difficult to continually cultivate the centrality of discipleship, or the process of selectively investing a small number of individuals in order to teach obedience to what Jesus taught (Matthew…
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Upcoming Series and New Ideas
It’s been a joy to unpack some of the nuts and bolts of missional communities, and I’ve loved the feedback I’ve received from many of you. I’ve compiled the different series together on my resources page…
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2012 Verge Talk – Who is the Missionary?
At Verge this year, I referred to the video above from Verge 2012 as the reason why we are pursuing missional communities. It’s a simple argument for the need for new forms to engage our cities…