Keeping MCs Organic

Each week I’m going to try to answer a practical question about Missional Community life.  If you have one that you would like me to witter on about, then please post or email me!

“If I understand things correctly, Missional Communities are supposed to be organic and built around reaching out where we live.  How can we recruit a bunch of people from our big church gatherings (eg at a Launch Weekend, or by advertising there), have them just show up and yet expect the MC to still be organic?”

You are right to describe Missional Communities as being organic in nature.  By this we mean that the nature of the group is not structured around some rigid detailed masterplan everyone has to be molded to fit, but rather it develops out of the journey of doing life together in a specific context.

Clearly in the first instance this is about a group being glued together by the presence of God.  Everything hangs on people (whether they are Christians or not) encountering Jesus.  That is the most organic relationship of all – our story fitting into the Big Story of God.

Out of this flows the MC’s internal relationships, as we walk together towards Jesus and experience the ups-and-downs of working out what that looks like in the everyday.  Clearly this is strongly organic in nature.

Then comes our organic interactions with the wider people context we are seeking to impact, through witness and service.  Basically we are seeing where there is grace and favor – put another way, we are looking for our People of Peace and intentionally investing in those relationships.

In turn, it is our mission context that defines how we express our relationship with God and with one another, and thus the cycle continues.

Within this framework, to advertise MCs in the wider church gatherings (eg at weekends or on a website) does not need to undermine this organic lifecycle in the slightest.  We are inviting people – whether they are already part of the church or not – into relationship and life together, built around a common mission vision that draws us closer to God and to one another.

A few years ago we developed a practical communication tool to help people in the church work out which group to be part of.  Often they can feel a little overwhelmed by the choice or the missional focus, but this seems to helpfully simplify things.

What we have seen is that they will pick groups based on one of the following criteria:

1.  They Share the Vision – this means that the mission vision of the MC strongly reflect their own passions and life context, so even if the language to describe it is new to them, the underlying calling from God for the group matches closely their own calling.

2.  They Serve the Vision – here people hear a vision and perhaps it is a new one for them.  Nevertheless, it is clearly something from God and so they can gladly come behind it and commit to supporting it for the next season of their life (ie the next few years).  It isn’t necessarily their life calling, but it is something they can happily invest in for a time.

3.  They Serve the Leaders – in this scenario, the MC vision is not the catalyst, but the quality of the leaders is what draws commitment.  Often this is built upon existing relationships, and allows that organic pathway of current friendship to help build and grow a Missional Community.