Category: missional community

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Creating Environments for Launching Missional Communities – Part 2

Over the next few weeks, I will be featuring a number of posts from my teammates here at The Austin Stone on a variety of topics related to missional communities.  This is a two part series from our Downtown PM Campus Connections Director, Tyson Joe.  To see part 1, go here.

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Environments Conducive to Missional Communities

Connections at The Austin Stone is not simply giving information that propels individuals towards involvement but rather it meets people where they are or where they begin and moves them toward a greater degree of faithfulness to Jesus in community. In the first part of this article, I wrote about Paul.  In this part, I will provide some practical learnings from his story and ours.

What’s My Next Step?

If the next step happens to be Missional Community for all new people, new people will feel more secure about this significant big step if someone is there to walk with them. With respect to environments, we ask volunteers never to point in a direction but rather walk them there. Additionally, instructions are never indicative, they are demonstrative.  Rather than “sign up over there”, we communicate “I’ll show you how over here.”

Pointing People to One Thing

This is a preference and not a rule. I like funnelling new people to one thing rather than giving multiple connection points. Telling someone, this is THE way to get connected at this church versus, “try nine of these options all of which have nine different people to contact.”

As a result of the “one thing” philosophy, all space and environments can easily “advertise” this next step. For instance at all of our seating areas outside of the Worship Center, on the coffee tables are cards advertising the upcoming “Connect Event.” All of our iPads or displays are opened to sign-ups for that same event and all of our volunteers are briefed on the details.

Involve Missional Community Leaders into Hospitality Teams

One of the best things we ever did was have our best Missional Community Leaders serve and lead Welcome Teams. As they met brand new people, very logically, they invited them to be a part of their own Missional Communities.  It certainly requires some sacrifice on the leader’s part, but I love involving leaders in Sunday hospitality because it also communicates that missional community and Sunday services are not competing with one another, but rather mutually serving one another.

It also helps foster a “same-team” attitude – your teams aren’t working in silos competing for resources with one another!

The Awkward is on You

I have never been the type of person to gravitate to a corner and try to remain unseen and unnoticed. My tendency is to move towards the area with the most activity and make a scene. I’m not everyone. While there is a small minority of people who fit this description and want to get connected and figure it out on their own how to get connected, the majority of people who walk through the doors of a church, while they may want to get connected, don’t have the experience or know-how to get connected.

As a result, there is an element to environments and personnel that needs to disarm and inform. This is where the “Awkward is on You” comes in. It can be terrifying to walk up to a table or a stand and identify yourself as someone who doesn’t know what is going on. Immediately you are isolating yourself as different from everyone else.

Because of this we coach hospitality team to:

  1. Go to them. They don’t come to you. You go to them. (Note: Also rather than asking, “is this your first time here?” ask, “Is there anything you need help finding?” 
  2. Remember names and faces 
  3. Tell good stories and ask for stories. This way, the next time you see them, it’s, “Hey Tyson, how did that job interview go last week?” 
  4. Capture contact information and follow up. This same creed carries into our Missional Communities and again, since volunteer teams and service teams are seeded with Missional Community leaders, the natural disarmament carries into, inviting individuals to Missional Community. 

Gather vs. Go

We face a monumental challenge in our church where a massive, cold, dark high school must be converted into a welcoming, warm environment and up until recently, all of our signage was directional and somewhat confusing. Recently we changed our language with signage from “You’re in the wrong place…go this way” to “Here you are…you’re in the right place.”

So signs that simply said, “Kids with an arrow” now read “Welcome to the Main Entrance, for Kids (arrow sign).” Simple touches like this convey that we want people to feel comfortable and gather rather than feel herded in a direction that is unknown. As a result, spaces give the feel of a living room while info areas take on a more “Apple Store” approach. All of this emphasizes our value for relational contact that carries on into Missional Community.

What are some other things you think can be helpful in cultivating environments that are conducive to missional community?

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Communicating the Vision for Missional Communities

The Austin Stone didn’t begin as a church committed to missional communities.  Through several years, we have transitioned our church from a traditional community/small group model to our current model of missional communities.  This series of posts will help you understand how we made that transition over time:

Much of this framework is adapted from John Kotter’s model for leading organizational change.  I pray this series will help many of you that are leading churches through a season of transition!

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Communicating the Vision for Missional Communities

After working hard to craft a vision for missional communities, you’ve got to start thinking about how you’re going to communicate it well to people.  Hopefully you’ve gotten some practice as you’ve cast vision to your strategic team, and now you are thinking about communicating the vision more broadly.  In my experience, communication consists of three things:

  • The message
  • The medium
  • The audience

We covered most of the “message” component in the crafting a vision post, so I’ll spend most of my time focusing on the medium and the audience in this post.

What you do with your vision after you create it will determine your success in the transition.  You can create the most compelling vision and the most airtight strategic plan, but they remain ideas until you actually communicate them to other people.

Communicate to Leaders

Your first audience ought to be leaders within your church.  Make sure you communicate a vision to leadership before you roll it out to a broader audience!  It’s crucial for long term success that your current leaders have a sense of ownership and buy-in to the vision.

The vision you are communicating will probably have competition from other communications within your church as well.  Communicate the vision frequently and powerfully, and embed it within everything you do with leaders for a season.  Also, consider a time with leaders when you can have their undivided attention. There are often “slow” seasons in the overall life of the church – make use of them!  Whenever you have a captive audience or a free communication channel, use it.  Focus on repetitive messaging, rather than only communicating to the largest possible audience.

Finally, don’t solely do a “vision meeting” or something of the sort to communicate your vision. Instead, talk about it every chance you get. Use the vision daily to make decisions and solve problems. When you keep it fresh on everyone’s minds, they’ll remember it and respond to it.  The single greatest reason change fails is that vision isn’t communicated repeatedly over time!

When considering mediums to utilize, I would aim for in person communication to groups of leaders, and specifically doing it in a way that invites feedback and questions.  Without your leaders having a way to contribute to the vision, it will be very difficult for them to have a sense of ownership of it.

Communicate to the Church

After you’ve communicated the vision to your leaders, now it’s time to start communicating to the entire church community.  With respect to mediums, you should use whatever you have at your disposal.  Particularly, you will want to consider:

  • Preaching the vision from the pulpit
  • Communicating the vision through live testimonies or short films
  • Cultivating the vision through small group curriculum
  • Creating written resources to share with your community
  • Focusing all informational communication around the vision
  • Utilizing all ministries leadership channels to communicate the vision contextually to other ministries
When it comes to the message of the vision, communicate a strategically simple message, but do it in a variety of different ways.  Simply because everyone can articulate the same core values does not mean the vision has taken hold.  Communicating the vision creatively with different hooks, different applications, and different illustrations will provide insight for a variety of people into what you’re trying to accomplish.

Running a Campaign or Alignment Series

Perhaps the most effective strategy for communicating your vision to your church is a church-wide campaign or an alignment series.  The basic idea is utilizing every channel of communication and every place people are gathered for ministry over a prolonged season to communicate the same message – from children’s ministry all the way to the pulpit.  These kinds of series take an extraordinary amount of planning to execute, and clarity in everything we have addressed in this series so far.

Below is the basic communication plan for our most recent campaign to redefine missional community and launch a significant number of new missional communities at The Austin Stone:

Campaign

As you can see, we spent 5 months communicating the vision in different ways to different groups of people, and this was only to reinforce an existing vision!

Conclusion

I probably can’t do justice to the entire process of communicating a vision to the various groups of people inside your church, but here are a few things to takeaway if you’re considering a transition:

  • Talk often about your vision
  • Openly and honestly address peoples’ concerns and anxieties
  • Apply your vision to all aspects of your church
  • Lead by example and live out the vision you want to see

If you’d like more information on a campaign strategy, contact me and I can send you details on how we approach campaigns.  Also, my friend Mark Howell has written extensively on effective campaigns here.

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austin stone leadership megachurch missional community

Crafting a Vision for Missional Communities

The Austin Stone didn’t begin as a church committed to missional communities.  Through several years, we have transitioned our church from a traditional community/small group model to our current model of missional communities.  This series of posts will help you understand how we made that transition over time:

Much of this framework is adapted from John Kotter’s model for leading organizational change.  I pray this series will help many of you that are leading churches through a season of transition!

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Create a Vision for the Preferred Future

After you’ve created a sense of urgency, and while you’re rallying a team, you need to be crafting a vision for missional communities in the life of your local church.  Specifically, there are three areas that you need to focus on:

  • Answering the question “why?”
  • Providing a theological, philosophical and practical foundation for a missional community
  • Crafting a short narrative for the vision

Answering “Why?”

When you first start thinking about change with your leadership team, there will probably be many great ideas and solutions floating around.  I’m the kind of guy that wants to move immediately into problem-solving and execution mode. I crave action!

Before you move into execution though, you need to spend time crafting a vision, and specifically answering the question “why are we transitioning?”  This is often tied to the same threads you utilized to create a sense of urgency and the need for change.

The answer to that question needs to be something that resonates with your general population of people, rather than just a group of bought in leaders.  While every Christian in your church should care that there are lots of people who haven’t heard the gospel, for most of them statistics on the lostness of a city aren’t terribly compelling.  Why should a person who has served faithfully in your children’s ministry for years care about the shift you are making?  What would resonate deeply with someone who has been marginally connected to your church?  To be effective here, consider the things that your most often communicate from your pulpit that has resonated with your people and tie into this thread.  If you have built your church on the foundation of being a safe place for the family, then a good “why?” would be “To become more like God’s family”.  If you’ve built on a foundation of good Bible teaching, then a good “why?” would be “To do what the Bible says”.

At The Stone, we didn’t actually begin our transition by talking about missional communities at all.  We by focusing  on the question: “Why do churches die?”  To this day, it remains one of our most popular sermon series, and was a watershed series for our church body.

Thoroughly Understanding Your Vision

At The Stone, we tend to build almost any vision for ministry through the grid of:

  • Theology – what is true from Scripture?
  • Philsophy – how do I apply what is true into this culture?
  • Practice – what am I going to do based on my theology and philosophy?

We didn’t do this very well when we transitioned to missional communities, but over time our vision solidified into this grid.  Over time we realized that missional community is a “what”…it’s a vehicle for living out the mission of God in the context of community.  Missional community for us is a collection of practices that foster obedience to Jesus as a community.

Cultivating obedience to Jesus is a “how” or a philosophy.  This is a guiding principle that informs what we do – we preach a certain way because we want people to obey Jesus.  We have certain ministries that help us foster obedience to the Word in different ways. We want to help consumeristic, materialistic, individualistic people in our culture see what it means to follow Jesus, because the gospel changes everything.

The gospel changes everything is a “why”. Jesus, who came to earth in the flesh, lived a perfect life, died an atoning death on the cross, and was resurrected from the dead is the fulcrum of human history.  He changes everything – our identity, our community, our purpose, our affections, our ultimate destiny.  

Linking your practice to a philosophy that is driven from a theology integrates multiple concepts to an overall vision that people can grasp over time.  Practically speaking, this is what drove us to our Missional Community Roadmap:

MC Roadmap

Utilizing Narrative to Communicate Vision

The final thing you need to consider is answering the question “why transition?” is to make sure the answer captures the heart, not just the head.  Facts are great for informing the mind, but stories are most effective at stirring the heart.  

Answering the question with something like “we’re going to transition to missional communities because we’ll be much more effective in making disciples in our city” may be right, but it’s not something that people can really grab hold of.  To build on the examples above, consider something like “our families are becoming like God’s family” or “we’re putting the Bible into action”.  More important though, is communicating your vision through a story.  Two great examples of how we have done this at The Austin Stone are our vision for 100 People and a few stories of missional community life (here, here and here).

Stories will powerfully communicate the vision for your transition, so find ways you can tell them compellingly!

Conclusion

A clear vision can help everyone understand why you’re asking them to do something. When people see for themselves what you’re trying to achieve, then the directives they’re given tend to make more sense.  It isn’t just about having a catchy phrase and some branding, but having a fully-formed understanding of why you are making a transition and communicating it in a variety of different ways over time.

On a real practical note, here are some things you can do:

  • Determine the values that are central to the change, and then answer the question “why?”
  • Develop a short summary (one or two sentences) that captures what you “see” as the future of your church
  • Ensure that your team can describe the vision in five minutes or less in their own words
  • Create some visual aids and stories that you can use in different environments to facilitate communication
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Creating Environments for Launching Missional Communities – Part 1

Over the next few weeks, I will be featuring a number of posts from my teammates here at The Austin Stone on a variety of topics related to missional communities.  This is a two part series from our Downtown PM Campus Connections Director, Tyson Joe.

—–

Environments Conducive to Missional Communities

Connections at The Austin Stone is not simply giving information that propels individuals towards involvement but rather it meets people where they are or where they begin and moves them toward a greater degree of faithfulness to Jesus in community. Connections is discipleship.

Connecting a Murderer

One of the best “Connections” stories can be found in the book of Acts. We meet the character Saul in Chapter 7 at the stoning of Stephen. Stephen after preaching a Gospel Message to the Sanhedrin incites such a negative response that he is sent out to be stoned. As people come to grab their stones and wield them at Stephen, they “laid their garments at the feet of a young man named Saul (v. 58).”

This is our introduction to the murderous, scheming, Saul, enemy of the Gospel. The following chapter tells of “Saul’s ravaging of the Church,” outlining a life lived with the sole purpose of bringing unprecedented persecution to the quickly expanding Christian church, but in chapter 9 everything changes and Saul is blinded and then converted. What happens next is where his “Connection” story begins.

Saul, now Paul, overwhelmed with this newfound lease on life begins preaching and teaching the Gospel. People have no idea how to respond. Christians did not know if this was a trap, and Paul’s former associates were even more dumbfounded. For a few more verses, Paul “fumbles” doing the only thing he knew to do which was boldly proclaim the Gospel wherever he went. As he does this, his former associate persectors resort to the only conceivable solution of plotting to kill him while Christians in the Church thought only to avoid him.

It was then that Barnabas broke down the barrier. But Barnabas took him and brought him to the apostles and declared to them how on the road he had seen the Lord, who spoke to him, and how at Damascus he had preached boldly in the name of Jesus. (Acts 9:27) Barnabas went outside of his comfort zone, recognized his brother in Christ, and welcomed him in. I venture to say that this “connections” step in boldness was integral to Paul’s trajectory and ministry.

A Philosophy for Environments

All of our Sunday environments need to carry the philosophy and heart that Barnabas demonstrated to Paul. As people walk through the doors of The Austin Stone Community Church for the very first time, the only assumption we can make is that they are walking through our doors from a past life.

The nature of criminal behavior and debilitating shame and sorrow are probably less horrific than the life Paul was leaving behind (or maybe not?), but everyone on a multitude of levels deals with the ramifications of sin. So we welcome them in as Christ has welcomed us.

Our desire at The Austin Stone Community Church is that the “church experience” not be simply confined to the Sunday worship environment but that the Sunday worship environment work in congress with a Missional Community strategy that engages the people of the Church to extend the values and mission of The Austin Stone Community Church into their work places, neighborhoods, and schools throughout the week. It’s the family of God being a family on mission together.

For this desire to be emphasized and displayed, a significant amount of time is spent ensuring that our “front door” experience and our Sunday environments give a glimpse into a familial bond and fuels a desire to be connected to a Missional Community.

People Over Process – the “Be With” Factor

It wasn’t a really good directional sign or database software that connected Paul. It was an actual person. Barnabas invested time and even risked his own personal safety on “advocating” for Paul. When I was in student ministry we called this the “Be With Factor”. You could never assume that someone knew what the next steps were or that if you told them the next steps, they would know how to take them. However, if by the way you interacted and communicated with people, they understood that there was someone who would “be with” them throughout the next steps no matter what they might be.

I’ll unpack our strategy in the next post, but how do you think through environments, especially on Sunday?

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Forming a Strategic Team to Lead Transition

The Austin Stone didn’t begin as a church committed to missional communities.  Through several years, we have transitioned our church from a traditional community/small group model to our current model of missional communities.  This series of posts will help you understand how we made that transition over time:

Much of this framework is adapted from John Kotter’s model for leading organizational change.  I pray this series will help many of you that are leading churches through a season of transition!

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Form a Strategic Team to Lead Through Transition

After you have created a sense of urgency and convinced people that change is necessary, the next step is to cultivate a team to guide the transition. This often takes strong leadership and visible support from key people within your organization. Managing change isn’t enough – you have to lead it!

To lead change, you need to bring together a coalition of influential people whose influence comes from a variety of sources, not just those with formally recognized roles.  These kinds of people can be found from your pulpit to the children’s ministry to a greeter who knows everyone’s name.

Particularly, I would focus on a few groups of people:

  • The primary communicators in your church
  • The leaders who allocate resources for the church
  • Point leaders for existing ministries
  • Individuals who seem adaptable, entrepreneurial, or generally attracted to change

Often times it can be relatively easy to get a visionary or preacher excited about change, but the real hard work often comes with those tasked with the implementation of the existing vision.  You will want to involve these kinds of people in your guiding coalition or task force, allowing them buy in to the process of change, not jus the vision.  The Austin Stone spent a good solid year in vision-casting, strategic planning, and piloting with this particular team.  It was critical that our stakeholders didn’t just hear a vision, but contributed to the development of the process of change.

This often will be the best way to turn those who are reluctant at first into the most committed to the change.  Once formed, your “change coalition” needs to work as a team building momentum and strategy for a wider-scale launch of this new vision and practice.

In this stage, it is important that you:

  • Identify the true leaders and stakeholders in your church
  • Obtain conviction about the transition from these key leaders
  • Create collaborative environments where leaders can contribute to the vision and strategy
  • Identify weakness in your team, or expertise you may be lacking

Transition at The Austin Stone didn’t happen overnight, but rather over the course of years.  Honestly, we expected it to go much faster than it did!  If we had built our team for the transition solely based on execution, not conviction, I am certain that we would not be pursuing missional communities today.  This team you build needs to be more captivated that your church would become something, rather than simply excited about implementing a new strategy!