Category: missional community

This series of posts provides an overview of each of the missional community practices we foster at The Austin Stone:

• An Overview of the Practices and a Story
• Different Kinds of Gatherings
• The Family Meal
• Life Transformation Groups
• A Third Place
• Putting the Gatherings Together

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The Family Meal – Gathering as a Family

Most people in our church are familiar with a typical small group meeting…so began with a gathering that resembled it.

The small group movement laid a helpful foundation, but it wasn’t complete. It’s a really good thing that we have cultivated a value for gathering weekly outside of Sundays.

But the gathering typically was an event someone attended that focused on a felt need. Sometimes it’s the Bible. Sometimes it is common crisis. In my personal experience, vital things like sharing everyday life and prayer for one another are pushed to the margins.

When we as Christians believe the gospel, God has adopts us into His family. We are in fact now brothers and sisters in Christ. We’re not just transactional partners in learning. Most small groups are a far cry from resembling a family.

This provoked us to ask a question: If missional community is about obedience to Jesus, what should we do when we gather?

Obedience, for us, is acting like a family.

If obedience is acting like a family, what do families actually do?

Families share life around a meal. The dinner table is a critical time for my family to connect. It takes intentionality to ensure we do it, and sometimes there is formal instruction. More often than not it’s a dynamic conversation. We talk about what was good and hard in our days over dinner.

So what if we asked our leaders to host a meal, rather than prepare a lesson?

Gathering around a meal

In my experience, the best conversations happen around the dinner table, or while we’re washing the dishes. Real life conversation happens in real life situations.

Also, eating a meal together will quickly reveal what kind of community you have! You’ll need to learn one another’s stories, vocations, and passions. Quite simply, you will NEED to become friends.

Participating in a meal together – one that requires a recipe, not a microwave – is a symbol of your fellowship and relationship with one another. We think it is a helpful practice for every community, because it’s a regular practice of most families.

The Advantages of Gathering this Way

One of the great advantages in gathering this way is frees people up to be people. You don’t have to act a certain way, have a certain knowledge set. You don’t need to have listened to a sermon or have a curriculum. Anyone can join in – even an outsider who doesn’t know Jesus.

What do we have to give up?

Gathering like this is a big change for some people. Inevitably, if you start removing Bible study as the central event you gather around, you’ll get push back.

I’m so glad when someone who asks the question “where can I dig deep?” because we really value the bible too!

In fact, we value studying the bible as much as we value acting like a family, but where should we do that?

I’ll answer that in the next post – Life Transformation Groups.

This series of posts provides an overview of each of the missional community practices we foster at The Austin Stone:

• An Overview of the Practices and a Story
• Different Kinds of Gatherings
• The Family Meal
• Life Transformation Groups
• A Third Place
• Putting the Gatherings Together

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I’m eager for this series because it is primarily focused on the practical side of missional communities.  Often times we stay in the theoretical world in the missional conversation.

That’s what I did with my talk at Verge 2012. I shared the idea that a missionary is someone who sacrifices everything but the gospel for the sake of the gospel.  From there, I argued that we need new forms of gathering to be effective missionaries in our cities.

After that talk, the single most asked question I received was:

“What do missional communities actually do?”

So my aim in this series is to answer the question “how?”, rather than focus on “why?”.

Before we get practical, can I just say this though?  Practices without a foundation of the gospel will ultimately produce self-righteousness or self-loathing.

The gospel does have implications for our lives though. If we’re rooted in the gospel, our communities will do different things.  The practices we utilize flow out of our theology and philosophy of ministry.

We want gatherings that foster obedience, not just information transfer.

And in order to fully obey Jesus, we need to build different kinds of gatherings into our communal rhythms to transition people from a “small group” mentality.

Any gathering or practice that we teach or cultivate is therefore aimed at obedience that flows from our identity in Christ. Who we are will dictate what we do.

What different ways have you tried to gather in your community? What has it produced?

Share in the comments!

The next series I want to work through are the practices of missional communities.  I’ve worked through why The Austin Stone pursues missional communities, and how we define them, and now I want to get to the nuts and bolts of what we actually do.

Briefly, missional communities at The Austin Stone:

• Gather as a community in a Family Meeting
• Gather as disciples in a Life Transformation Group
• Gather as missionaries a Third Place

The video below is a story of a missional community from our church that has been living these practices out:

I’ll unpack these in the coming posts – what are the practices you have found useful to cultivate in missional community life?