Mission Alive

Last month many of us in Mission Alive spent dozens of hours redesigning our Strategy Lab to more significantly reflect missional theologies and values.

We constructed the lab around what we consider to be six primary ministry tasks of church planting. A focused question(s) defines each task.

• Discovering and equipping a ministry team: How does the church planter discover and equip co-workers to partner with God in His mission?
• Learning the culture: How do Christians discern both the working of God and Satan within human culture to understand impediments and readiness of people to hear and participant in kingdom activities? Six cultural learning tools were provided.
• Connecting with community: How do people of God incarnationally live in a community discovering "people of peace" (Luke 10:1-6), sponsors of good will who experience God's transformation and call other searchers to learn and hear God's Good News.
• Guiding searchers to come to the Lord: How do people of God help searchers journey to Jesus and become participants in the kingdom of God?
• Helping new believers grow up in their salvation (1 Peter 2:1-2): How do new Christians mature as disciples of Jesus so that they grow inwardly, outwardly, and upwardly?
• Equipping God’s people for works of ministry (Eph. 4:12): How are leaders trained to help others journey to Jesus, grow up in their salvation, and become leaders themselves? How are specific types of ministers (home fellowship leaders, children and youth ministers, and shepherds) nurtured and equipped?

After equipping in each module church planters constructed a ministry flow chart, a practical paradigm visualizing a process of ministry for their chosen context. The lab culminated with the sharing of these paradigms and group analysis of them.

During the lab, we worked closely with seven church planting families as they developed ministry patterns for their church plantings. Michael and JoEtta Deaton are just beginning the process of church planting in the campus context of James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia; Ryan and Claudia Porche are working with Charles and Julie Kiser in Uptown Dallas, and Brent and Rachel Wells with Chris and Heidi Chappotin in Burleson, Texas. Albert and Trisha Acosta will either be planting with us or taking take a preaching job in California.

Latino leaders and their families from Genesis Alliance, our Latino counterpart, joined us. These included Carlos and Glenda Lopez of Highland Oaks Church of Christ (Plano), Carlos and Gisela Acosta of the Pleasant Ridge Church of Christ in Arlington, and Sixto Rivera. These leaders, along with Albert Acosta, are being trained to facilitate a contextual Strategy Lab in Spanish.

Church planting coach Steven Shaeffer of Carbondale, Illinois, also worked closely with us during the lab.

We were awed by how God worked through our church planters and staff to develop this new paradigm for strategy formation. It was developed synergistically, from the bottom up, based upon developing on-the-field models of doing missional ministry. Chris Chappotin, for example, presented a catechesis, called "Foundations," for searchers coming to the Lord, and Charles Kiser, as a new church planter, modeled contextual tools for cultural learning. Tod Vogt, Director of Planter Equipping in Mission Alive, helped develop the process for constructing the ministry flow chart and prototyped the new Mission Alive model for coaching and spiritual direction within a Partnering Team.

The ability to think in these missional categories was stimulated by the teachings and reflections of our Theology Lab. During this lab I nurture church planters to think and interpret the Bible narratively. The biblical story line becomes like the rudder of a ship guiding the stories and practices of church planters. The biblical narratives include the story of the kingdom of God, missio dei, and incarnation (and crucifixion, resurrection, and inspiration; if time permits). In the second half of the lab Randy Harris, who has a unique ability to help Christian leaders apply theology to practice, begins with "humanity" and takes church planters through the major tenets of the Christian faith, concluding with a theology of "church" and the nature of spiritual formation. These activities equip church planters to form a theology for their own church planting. The final presentation by church planters gives . . .

• Basic Beliefs: What basic beliefs form the identity of the church that God is leading you to plant?
• Beliefs Shaping Ministry: What missional practices are inferred from these basic beliefs? How do these basic beliefs shape ministry?
• A Brief Description of the Church: Based upon these beliefs, describe the identity and focus of the church that God is leading you to plant?
• Entering into God's Story: Which biblical story best describes your identity?
• Core Values: Based upon these theologies, what core values shape your identity?

I praise God to see biblical theologies, rather than popular culture, begin to the shape the identity of our church planters and the resulting churches. The end result is churches focused on spiritually forming people to walk with God.

Our overarching questions have become . . .

• How is God's eternal gospel lived out within ever-changing cultures?
• How does God work through communities of faith to enable searchers "to open their eyes and turn . . . from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me" (Acts 26:17-18)?

We conduct the Theology Labs each March and October and the Strategy Labs each June and December with six Discovery (assessment) Labs interspersed throughout the year.

Mike Deaton aptly describes the nature of the Strategy Lab and how all three labs fit together to form Mission Alive's process of training.

Jo and I certainly reaped huge benefits from the Strategy Lab. As we look back on our journey so far, all three labs seemed to build on each other in powerful ways. The Discovery lab continues to teach us a great deal about ourselves and how God is working and inviting us to join Him on this great mission. The Theology lab expanded our thinking (maybe "blew our minds" is a better description!) by leading us into God's story and how that story is so relevant and powerful today. The Strategy Lab pulled it all together by helping us connect God’s story with our own calling and giftedness and to connect that story with today's culture. It was really helpful for us in the Strategy Lab when we began thinking about how to build our ministry around the spiritual formation of ourselves and those who respond to His invitation. This will all have a profound impact on how we pursue the church plant in Harrisonburg and on the JMU (James Madison University) campus.