What are Missional Communities [excerpt]

Brad House, Mars Hill Church (Seattle); Shawn Wood (Seacoast Church, SC)

Brad House, Community Pastor from Mars Hill Church, and Shawn Wood, Experiences Pastor from Seacoast, share how they define and strive to get people involved with missional communities at their churches.

“The mission has to be owned by everyone in the church and knowing that God is using us individuals and he’s using everyone from the janitor to the preacher to the person who just attends to advance the Gospel in the city.” ~ Brad House, Community Pastor, Mars Hill Church

Conversation Transcript:

Eric:  One of the things that kept coming up today is this concept of missional communities and what does that even mean? So if you guys want to start and jump in and tell us a little bit about how is that impacting what you guys are doing in your churches.

Shawn:  Since Brad is the community guy and I know you were talking a little bit about how you guys have been on that trajectory for a while. What is happening at Mars Hill right now to get people engaged in the whole missional communities idea.

Brad:  I think as we’ve been talking one of the big deals we’re trying to do with community is make sure we’re developing well rounded disciples, we’re trying to disciple people in community and one of those aspects of a disciple is that they are loving God, they are in community loving the church and they are also on mission.

So the idea of missional community is if we’re going to have disciples that are making disciples in their own life, we can’t leave it just to the professionals or to the pastors to own the mission of the church. The mission has to be owned by everyone in the church and knowing that God is using us individuals and he’s using everyone from the janitor to the preacher to the person who just attends to advance the Gospel in the city.

So missional community to me means that we’re all on mission, we’re all accepting; we’re all owning that mission that God has put us on.

Shawn:  For us, we’ve really been thinking about missional communities a lot recently. We have small groups now that we call Life Groups and what we’ve seen is the small group gets passionate about something and wants to serve somewhere, I know it is like this in our group we have a lot of kids in our group, so we plan to go serve somewhere or go do something we’re really passionate about, 1 or 2 kids are going to be sick and someone else is going to have a ballgame they had to go to.

So you had this group of 15 people that are going to go serve and try to impact the world and all of a sudden it’s 3 people that show up and they’re supposed to do something. So that is one of the reasons that Mike Breen calls it, he says being small enough to care but large enough to dare.

So we’re really talking about these missional groups that will come together and they are doing the end part of the discipleship and they are growing and loving one another and they’re doing the “up” part in worship and then together they come together in a group of 40 to 50 people to really be able to do something in the missional part and the shared mission of what they can do.

We’re not there yet and we’re trying to figure it out. Someone asked us the other day when we’re going to launch missional communities and I don’t know if you launch missional communities. I think they are birthed and so right now we’re trying to get that going and get some momentum going in that direction. But definitely the out piece of the large group is the harder piece to find where people can really plug into that I think.

Brad:  One of the things you mentioned is the passion. What I find a lot of times in churches is that they try to do things missionally disconnected from community rather than taking their passion and tying it into community. So what they might have is, “I participate in this organization for mission” and “I participate with my small group for community.” But why not marry those 2 passions and do mission together and be on a mission together. We find when we do that then we get better of both, we get better community and we actually get fruitful missions.

Shawn:  Yeah Pastor Mark talks about the weird teams, then you get some cross-pollenization of different people. In the old model of the small group you tended to get the same demographic, living in the same community and everybody looks the same. All of a sudden, when it’s passion based you kind of meet some people and get to rub shoulders with some people who can stretch and grow you in different ways because they are different with that shared passion.