Category: missional community

Categories
austin stone leadership megachurch missional community

Creating a Sense of Urgency

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!

—–

Creating a Sense of Urgency

For change to happen, it helps if the whole church really wants it, and a sense of unction or urgency is crucial to driving a transition.  Cultivating this sense of need can come in many different ways – identifying opportunities in your city, pointing out weaknesses of the current model, showing statistics of lostness, and a variety of other methods.  We have used these tools and more.

At The Austin Stone, we have found that for the believer, a sense of urgency must first and foremost be grounded in conviction from God’s Word.  We can certainly have a sense of necessity of change in our minds, but deeply-rooted conviction begins with the heart.  Specifically, a heart that desires to be conformed to the image of Christ through obedience to the Word of God.

This isn’t simply a matter of showing people statistics about lostness or talking about a stagnant church, although those tactics can be helpful.  Urgency born of conviction from God’s Word will lead to repentance, which is the single most necessary step in transition.

What Convictions Do I Need?

Practically speaking, if you are considering a transition to missional communities, you need to be convinced and convince others from the Scripture that:

I’m sure there are more convictions, but those above will impel you to consider why you must transition your church.  Perhaps even more critical is showing how your current model of ministry is not fulfilling these beliefs. What is most important is open, honest and convincing dialogue about what is true from the Scriptures and where your church simply doesn’t match up.

The single largest challenge we faced in the transition was helping our leadership and people see how our actions as communities did not actually match our beliefs.  Very few people were coming to faith, very few of our old groups could state a sense of purpose beyond themselves, very few were intentionally seeking to invite neighbors, and most of our people were content to simply gather at our functions.

Surely there had to be more to church than that! Missional community became rooted in conviction, but also practically applied into action.

What Can I Do?

In order to help foster these convictions in your leadership and your wider community, you can:

  • Tell stories of other communities who are living a different way
  • Provide a case for why this strategy is more fully biblical than the previous one
  • Start honest discussions about the health of disciples in your church relative to God’s word, specifically in Acts

The Importance of Leadership

Finally, urgency must exist primarily in your leadership.  In order for wholesale change to be successful, I think you’ll need ~75% of your leadership team to buy into the change. If you want to transition your church and be effective in the long haul, spend a considerable amount of time and energy building urgency and conviction in your core leadership before moving onto the next steps. Without this sense of conviction from your leadership, a transition to missional communities is doomed to be simply another program in the church.

Categories
austin stone church leadership missional community

Mobilizing Your Community to Sunday Service Teams

Over the next few weeks, I’ve asked several members of our team at The Austin Stone to write on different aspects of missional community in different contexts and ministries.

Today, Brendan Thompson is going to share some learning points from practicing missional community in conjunction with service teams, specifically in our Children’s Ministry.  Brendan serves as our Children’s Director at the West Campus, and originally posted this blog here.

—–

Mobilizing Your Community to Sunday Service Teams

At The Austin Stone, there is an abundance of ways to get plugged in and involved.  And it seems that as our church grows, our people find themselves being continually stretched between seemingly competing church events and ministries.

You may be one of those people.  I know I am.  You walk in on a Sunday morning, hear the announcements, “Join this Ministry!”  with the followup being “Join our Service Teams”.  Later that week, you receive an email imploring you to help with some men’s event or women’s event.  And all along, you already feel stretched as you lead your own small group (or missional community as we affectionately call them).

Honestly, as a pastor, I wrestle with this very issue almost daily.   How can I do all that God has called me to do vocationally as a pastor and and personally as a disciple?  How can I faithfully serve in the areas of my church that need it while still being obedient as a disciple of Christ at home?

I think the answer is in overlapping your ministry with your community.  

Think about it; the resource you find yourself needing in this hard place is time.  If only you had time to raise your children, be devoted to a small group of Christians who live faithfully and obediently on mission for God, and be leading and serving on a Sunday at your local church. If only.  Time just so happens to be the only commodity you can’t “get more of”.  

We are all given 24 hour days and for the average person, 9 hours of that will be at work and about 5-8 of them sleeping.  That leaves you with a good 10 hours or so to do this.

This post will detail the benefits of overlapping your community into your Sunday service and I will end with a story of how my own community has done this and what it has meant for us.

The Benefits

Obedience to Christ

Often, people feel as though their attendance and participation in a community IS their service to the church.  I would contend that Christ has more for you than just one or the other.  Firstly, Christ came and gave himself up for his bride, the church, and calls us to the same radical sacrifice.  If we are to model God’s love for his bride, naturally, this means that we will want to serve her and love her with abandon in any way that we can.  Even more, in 1 Timothy 3, Paul outlines the qualifications of the office of overseer or deacon, and explicitly states that deacons will “care for God’s church”.  

Now I know that not everyone reading this is a deacon, but the aim of this passage is that Christian’s aspire to this kind of leadership, that we long for this kind of character.  This isn’t an “if you’re not a deacon you’re off the hook” kind of passage, it is a calling to every christ-follower to take up their cross and follow Him, and lay down their lives for the bride of Christ.  To die to ourselves because Christ gave himself for us that He would remove all our blemishes.  Let’s follow after Christ and love his bride.

More time with Community

Another great benefit to this is the time spent with your community together.  In my own community, I feel closer to these people than I ever had, because I am not only seeing them midweek for a bible study, meeting with men for accountability, sharing the gospel at our 3rd Place or attending Sunday service, but I am in the trenches leading a ministry team with them.  Our labor together for the gospel produces closeness in our community.  We have taken the opportunity to grow closer in the areas we already know we will intersect.

Opportunities for Giftings to Show

Another side benefit that I recognized when my community came alongside me was that I began to see the gifts of many of our members. Previous to this, I would have never known that Sarah was great with the teaching preschoolers, or that Stefan could lead so well in our grade school kids worship time or that Tim could do such a great Scottish accent! (for our kid skits of course!)  This is one of those opportunities where people get the chance to serve and grow, and use their gifts for the “building up of the body” as Ephesians 4 says.

A Model for Encouragement

One of the greatest benefits has been to see how my communities service on Sunday together has both provided a model and a resource for other people in our body serving.  My volunteers have an opportunity to be encouraged by the maturity of relationships that some of our couples who serve together have, and can ask questions about how our community is able to love each other so well.  Ultimately, I am convinced that any success that we have seen in our ministry team on Sunday has been only because I have had some faithful men and women come alongside me and say, “we are with you, we care about God’s church, and we will serve wherever is needed to see the body grow properly”.  This has fundamentally changed the attitude and direction of our kids programming.

And we have seen amazing things happen in our ministry.   I often tell my volunteers I feel like I am turning around a large ship with our children’s ministry, and I can say with confidence that my missional community’s investment in me and the ministry have made this directional change not only a joy, but an opportunity to show others what biblical community looks like

How do you do this?

Often, our most gifted leaders are both serving and leading communities, but rarely are these two spheres overlapping.  So, as a community member or leader how do you get there?  How do you lead your missional community to this?

  • First off, change is not easy.  You will encounter resistance, even from friends in your community!  But the benefits so far outweigh the hardships that it is worth enduring any amount of resistance, even from your group.
  • Cast Vision to your group.  The first step is to clearly and compelling lay out your vision for your group to serve.  Our change required that my entire community of 20 people move to a different campus of our church.  That was a large ask.  But again, the benefits (not to mention the needs) were so great, that asking them to serve was a delight.  I told them exactly what was happening;  ”I am going to another campus to lead the children’s ministry”, and I wanted them to come serve with me.  It would be a great experience to grow together, to serve together, to grow closer towards one another as we make disciples.
  • Remind them of who you are as a community. It was good for our people to remember that we loved each other and fought for each other.  I asked them also to examine their hearts before the Lord and work through prayerfully why they would or wouldn’t want to come.  I reminded them that I love each of them, and if they felt called a different direction that was ok.
  • Meet with them personally.  Take the time to have conversations personally with people.  Some of your folks will jump on the opportunity and others will need some processing time.  Give them the space, but give them the courtesy of asking.  I had one individual actually even press back on the whole transition. I was truly thankful for the conversation because he forced me to think and articulate the benefits themselves, and forced me to grow in my grace as a leader.
  • Continue to invest in them.  It is really easy for me to stop investing my time and energy into folks who I spend so much time with and as your community joins you, it will be a temptation to lessen the amount of energy you put into that relationship.  Fight against this.  They are not just “co-laborers” with you in the gospel, but you are also brothers and sisters in Christ.  Make time for each other outside the ministry.

Did this transition go perfectly for me?  No, not by any means.  But this was a great place to start for our community, and I can say now that my entire community is now serving our church in some way with one another.  I praise God for this opportunity and may He use it for his glory!

Categories
austin stone leadership missional community

Two Ways to Transition Your Church

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!

—–

Two Ways to Transition

Generally speaking, if you are considering a transition to missional communities in an existing church, there are two routes you can go – top down or bottom up.  Each has their own pros and cons, which I will unpack here.

The Austin Stone opted to go with the first – top down leadership.  Although we utilized a lot of the principles of bottom up change, we went very quickly to reorienting our entire church around a new paradigm for ministry.  Let’s start with top  down driven transition.

Changing from the Top Down

Typically, most churches are structured with some amount of hierarchy.  Depending on your size, you’ll have different layers represented, but generally the structure is similar.  For the record, I’m not advocating right or wrong, I’m just describing what is most often the case in church organizations.  Churches generally look something like the chart below:

Top Down

On the left side, you see the way leadership most often works, while on the right side you see how information typically flows.  Transitioning with a top down strategy means that the people at the top of the organization see a preferred future, and then begin to architect a transition for the entire structure.

Keys to Success

In order for this kind of strategy to be effective in a transition, the senior leadership must have buy in for the change.  Also, a top down strategy will be very ineffective without a vision and commitment to the transition for the long haul.

Pros/Cons

The pros of transitioning this way are a larger impact on the organization, and a greater percentage of innovators inside the church being released into ministry.  Quite simply, if you communicate a vision to more people, generally speaking, you’ll have more people adopt it more quickly.

The cons of transitioning this way, however, are that you will often lose people who are committed to your previous vision for ministry.  Also, you may have a high number of people buy into the vision, but often their commitment is shallow and understanding of the vision is limited.  Generally, when situational challenges to implementing the vision  come up, many people will revert back to patterns and practices they previously used.

Changing from the Bottom Up

Transitioning from the bottom up is an alternate strategy.  Generally speaking, you’re starting a new initiative at the ground level with a small number of people.  Words like “pilot” and “experiment” are thrown around, and ultimately you’re hoping that the new initiative will be wildly successful and influence the ascending layers of an organization.  It generally looks something like the chart below:

Bottom Up

In the bottom up transition, you’re starting in the crowd and community, and filtering stories and vision up the communication chain.

Keys to Success

Keys to making this kind of transition work are piloting new initiatives slowly over time and keeping track of your learning along the way. If you have ambitions to influence an entire organization, it is critical to try the new strategy yourself so you have first-hand experience and can answer questions and provide stories to inspire people.

Pros/Cons

The pros of transitioning a church like this is that there is less risk of alienating people, and you have a lot of time to learn what challenges lie ahead for others who will attempt to change.

The cons of this kind of transition are that it is very slow, and often won’t change the entire organization.  Because of the deliberate under-the-radar approach, it often is difficult to convince a senior leadership team of an organization of the effectiveness of the particular strategy.

What Did The Austin Stone Do?

In our transition, we spent one year in the piloting stage, but planned all along to make a major top down transition because our senior leadership was well bought in and ready for change.  We certainly saw the benefits of making a major transition (lots of people tried missional communities, and great stories came from the transition), but also experienced several of the drawbacks to this approach (unnecessarily offending some people, frustrating people because we didn’t have all the answers, failing to keep pace with necessary support structures, etc)

What Should You Do?

I don’t know each of your circumstances, but in general, I would say you ought to consider the top down approach if:

  • Your senior leadership team is already onboard for a transition
  • The people in your church are generally flexible and willing to change
  • You are convinced that missional communities are the best way to make disciples in your city

I would strongly urge you to consider a bottom up approach if:

  • A senior leader is reticent or not fully vested in the change
  • Your people are very committed to another model of ministry
  • You are looking for a “best-practice” or a new method

The following posts will unpack our strategy for undergoing a top down transition from small groups to missional communities.  What strategies have you employed to architect change?

Categories
austin stone leadership megachurch missional community

Transitioning Your Church to 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:

  • Transitioning Your Church to Missional Communities
  • Two Ways to Transition
  • Creating a Sense of Urgency
  • Forming a Strategic Team
  • Crafting a Vision
  • Communicating the Vision
  • Empowering Others to Act
  • Celebrating Wins
  • Building on the Change
  • Institutionalizing the Change

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!

—–

Transitioning Your Church to Missional Communities

The vision of The Austin Stone has always been “to be a New Testament Church, existing for the supremacy of the name and purpose of Jesus Christ.”  Early on as a church, we were committed to the authority of the Bible and the supremacy of Christ.  Additionally, one of the things that made us unique as a church was a willingness to try new things and a strong commitment to necessary change.

At the outset of the church, preaching and worship were definitively our core competencies – it’s hard not to be when you’ve got a guy like Matt Carter filling the pulpit and Chris Tomlin leading worship!  We continue to pursue excellence in these areas as a church, but also early on began to feel a sense of dissatisfaction with simply doing church on Sundays.

Several different things over time led us to consider missional communities.  From the outset, we had a desire to be a church that led people to Jesus and changed our city, but we began to analyze our strategy and structure in light of that desire.

Asking Tough Questions

In 2006, our lead team was reading through Transformation by Bob Roberts, and the book posed the question “What if the church was the missionary?” and that’s when some light bulbs started going off.  Rather than simply operate as usual, we began to examine everything we did in light of adopting the posture of a missionary.  As we processed that question, we realized that when we aimed at community, we got neither community nor mission.  But when we aimed at mission, community almost always resulted.

Also, we started surveying church planting movements around the world and there were some very clear patterns that emerged. We realized that very few of them were characteristic of our existing communities.  

Finally, we began to see mission as central to the new testament church as we studied Acts together. In many ways the mission to make disciples was the organizing principle of every facet of that church. We just couldn’t keep doing church the way we have been doing it after we considered all these things.

A Learning Journey

Those early years were filled with many questions, several challenges, and a lot of learning along the way.  One of the things I continue to be grateful for is the leadership of Matt Carter and Kevin Peck, as they are men who embrace change and are willing to lead through it.  Convinced that we HAD to change, our church began the process of transition to missional communities late in 2006.

We made several mistakes in our transition, adopting more of a “Ready, Fire, Aim” approach, but God was faithful and our people were forgiving.  We learned how powerful stories are in shaping vision, and how necessary structure and practices are in persevering in mission.

Although the process has been long and difficult, it has brought more joy in Christ, obedience to the Spirit and God’s Word, and greater fruitfulness in disciple making in our city.  We have learned a ton about leading people through change, about leading a rapidly growing church, and about leading people into everyday rhythms of community and mission.

Take Your Time

Perhaps the single greatest lesson we have learned in the process is that it takes time for churches, communities, and individuals to change.  In fact, a transition from start to finish takes the better part of a decade!  The process is long, but in my opinion, the outcome is worth it.  We see more and more people pursuing God’s mission to glorify Himself through making disciples in a community on mission.  Austin may not look extremely different now, but in the years ahead, by the grace of God, this city will change.

What has led you to consider a transition in strategy?

Categories
discipleship evangelism missional community

Parenting, Education and Mission

Recently, I was chatting with a member of our church who has been intentionally living on mission for several years amongst unreached people groups in Austin.  He has children that are similar in age to mine, so we struck up a conversation about school.  In that conversation, I was incredibly challenged by his faithfulness to consider the schooling choices of their children in light of the mission, and I asked him to write his thoughts for me.

We have deliberately kept his identity anonymous because of the sensitive context of his ministry, but I pray that his story encourages and challenges you to live all of life in light of the gospel!

—–

Parenting and Missional Communities

Am I a good parent?

When we began to consider where to put our son into school, we were sobered by the many options and opportunities.  What would a good parent do?

Our life in Austin had placed us among a diverse group of friends and we saw many positive routes to go whether it was public or private schooling or homeschooling.  We saw great parents in all those options.

So the question came, “what does God want for us – for our son?”

Initially in preschool, we used some Christian schooling options.  These were positive experiences and quite honestly, there was a number of non-believing families that chose to place their kids there.

I had heard some sermons on the internet by a pastor I had great respect for.  He teaches his congregation that parents must choose a specific schooling option in order to faithfully steward their children.  But do we place this same expectation on “goers”?  Do you expect the missionary to keep his children out of the culture he is seeking to reach?

As we approached the decision about entering Kindergarten, we began to ask many other folks to pray with us about this decision.  We desired to make a decision that was not based on the advice of others, or the desires of our heart – but rather the priority of The Gospel.  God has demonstrated so much  kindness and forgiveness to us.  We believe that the worship of His name among all peoples should take priority before any other.  He is worth that.

I have experience with many believers serving overseas and have seen many of them rely on either ex-patriot private schools or homeschooling.  However, I also met some who were sending their children to secular school.  They believed that this would better prepare their children to be witnesses for Christ, both learning culture and language.

In the end, we decided to send our son to a school that is run by people with an entirely different worldview than our own so our entire family can continue to live and minister amongst those whom God has called us to. Practically speaking, it’s been hard!  We have to invest more time in discipling our son, and also are having some conversations that are difficult for a first-grader to grasp.  But we know we’ve been obedient.

Our heart really wrestled and prayed over the decision we made.  Honestly even as my son approached his first grade year, we continue to ask ourselves if we’re doing the right thing.  But the answer always brings us back to The Gospel.  We could make a decision based on what is in our children’s best academic interest alone.  We could not make a decision that gives us the most comfort.  The Gospel called for us to follow Jesus no matter where He led.

Choose Against Comfort 

Jesus gave up His royal status in heaven – a place of privilege and everything due Him.  But he chose against comfort.  He chose to love those who were different from him – sinners.  He chose to love people outside his own culture.

In our experience with the Gospel, we have found that we must bring every decision to the light of the Gospel.  Decisions on how to discipline.  Decisions on how to instill character and cultural manners.  And yes, even decisions on how to educate academically .

Should our son be protected and kept apart from the secular world?  Should he not learn discipleship and evangelism from a young age?

And as a parent, do I compartmentalize the decisions for my children?  Those decisions which are only for me and not for them? We asked ourselves, “Can we separate our lives and decisions from the truth of Revelation 5:9-10 and God’s plan for Jesus’ return contingent on the preaching of His Gospel to every people group on earth?”

Recently we planned for my son’s birthday party.  We realized many of my son’s friends have lots of vowels in their names and they look nothing like him.  He shared with us recently about one of his best friends who doesn’t like it when he talks about Jesus, but he shared a Bible story and his friend really liked it.

So are we good parents?

The Gospel reminds us that we are not good people or parents.  In fact we are sinful parents who desperately need the Gospel to guide us in all matters.  So our hope is not in making the most shrewd academic or social decision for our son – our hope is that he will be a part of God’s worship party when every tribe and tongue are present.   That he will be used in greater ways than we can imagine to bring God more worship.