I stumbled across a post from missional blogger David Fitch’s website today, which describes almost to a t the sort of process we are following to start a missional community in southeast Portland.
In the article, Fitch identifies 5 issues that any group looking to start a missional community must deal with. I’d like to highlight his number 5 especially:
5. PREPARE FOR A SUSTAINABLE WAY OF LIFE OVER A LONG PERIOD OF TIME. (as opposed to projected growth and financial sustainability after three years). EXPECT GROWTH TO BE SLOW, BUT OF MIRACULOUS VARIETY. YOU MAY START WITH 10-20 PEOPLE, EXPECT NO SIGNIFICANT NUMBERS FOR THE FIRST FIVE YEARS. IT TAKES FIVE YEARS TO BUILD A MISSIONAL PRESENCE. BY THE FIFTH TO EIGHT YEAR, GROWTH WILL HAPPEN.
This is by far the hardest to understand and to expect. That is, it takes a lot of time for relationships to develop, for the living out of faith and so on. It seems counter productive, because most of us to are trying to cultivate missional expressions of community are confident folks. We believe that we can parachute in and immediately, people will be impressed by us and want to know what it is we’re doing. But this is not realistic. As my mentor and president of Christian Associates (the missions organization I work with), Rob Fairbanks, says about the church plant he led, “it was a ten year overnight success.”
The reality that this sort of project takes time is a big reason we need to learn to “think decadely” (an expression coined by Rob). That is, instead of thinking what we’ll see a year or 2 years down the road we need to be thinking that it will take us about ten years.
What I find myself struggling with on this is that it’s one thing to recognize this as true, but it’s another to beat it into my brain. How do we work against the expectation that our communities will take off immediately? That’s the question I think missional leaders need to be wrestling with.
What do you think, how should leaders work to keep the expectations for a group at a sane level?
It’s been interesting to observe the weather in Portland this February. We had a warm spell for quite a while that had been really looking like we were going to have an early spring but alas, it was not to be.
February has been an interesting month. I’ve been out of Portland as much as I’ve been in and I’ve been out of town for at least part of every weekend this month. I’m looking forward to getting back into a normal swing of things and thinking about the future of this blog and what I’ll write about. I’m sure you’ve probably seen that in the last little while I’ve started expanding my range beyond theology. It’s not really that I’m losing interest in theology, it’s just I start to reach a point where I start to g insane if all I’m doing is writing about church stuff and theology but not being active in it. That sort of writing just isn’t appealing to me.
I haven’t really wrote much about what I’m doing now. I’ve been pretty hesitant to write about what I’m doing with my ministry vocation since seeing the Anchor die as a dream. I’ve been moved a lot lately, reflecting on John 12:24
I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat is planted in the soil and dies, it remains alone. But its death will produce many new kernels—a plentiful harvest of new lives. (NLT)
With that said, I’m starting to be okay with it and a little less hesitant to talk about what we’re doing now. A year ago, after we decided it would be good to put the Anchor to rest, a couple experienced ministry friends and myself put our heads together and started dreaming about a new missional community for Southeast Portland. It was a welcome thing and one which I’ve been excited to be a part of planning. We spent a few months praying and planning and making sure it was something that we should be pursuing and have found ourselves really feeling like it was what we were to be a part of.
So last fall we started meeting with a small group and discussing the sort of stance that it takes to be the sort of community we hope to be. Out of that group we’ve got about 12 folks who are continuing to pursue what that sort of missional community looks like. I guess I share this because I’d love to have people praying for our thing. Having already tried to lead one group and seen it fail, I know how tenuous these things are. So please pray for us. Pray that God would build us up and that He would be making us aware of where He is already at work in our neighborhoods.
And if you know people who are wanting to be a part of a non-traditional, missional community in Portland, put them in contact with me. I’d love to invite them into what we’re doing, or at least tell them about it so they can dream their own dreams.
It’s a Monday morning, and I’m having a tough time getting my brain into work mode. I’m getting there, but it just doesn’t want to focus. I am on the other hand really digging a band called Mumford & Sons (inadvertently introduced to them by blog friend Jason Coker. Here’s a video of their song Sigh No More (lyrics underneath).
Serve God love me and men
This is not the end
Lived unbruised we are friends
And I'm sorry
I'm sorry
Sigh no more, no more
One foot in sea, one on shore
My heart was never pure
And you know me
And you know me
And man is a giddy thing
Oh man is a giddy thing
Oh man is a giddy thing
Oh man is a giddy thing
Love that will not betray you, dismay or enslave you,
It will set you free
Be more like the man you were made to be.
There is a design,
An alignment to cry,
At my heart you see,
The beauty of love as it was made to be .
This is the second in a series of posts looking at some quotes from Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage. Previous Post: As We Begin So Shall We Go
This post will be broken into looking at three smaller quotes from The Medium is the Massage. All three quotes center around aspects of how technology has effected the way we perceive the world.
The goose quill put an end to talk. It abolished mystery; it gave architecture and towns; it brought roads and armies, bureaucracy. It was the basic metaphor with which the cycle of civilization began, the step from the dark into the light of the mind. The hand that filled the parchment page built a city.
In this example, we see how the idea of writing lead to applying an organized stance to many other parts of civilization. I think this example and the second serve a double purpose, while showing how technology has reshaped the way we perceive the world, it could also be argued that the way we view the world has shaped our technology. In this case, consider the current trend of social media – has/is social media changing the way we view the world? or has/is the way we view the world shaped our idea of including social media? The truth probably lies somewhere in between, but also explains why stories revolving around technology getting out of hand is horrifying: our technology shapes us. (consider for instance The Matrix, the storyline of Battlestar Galactica or Dollhouse as some easy examples of our wariness towards technology) This next example as well could be interpreted in this double nature of us shaping technology and technology shaping us.
Like easel painting, the printed book added much to the new cult of individualism. The private, fixed point of view became possible and literacy conferred the power of detachment, non-involvement.
Once again we see how technology, in this case easel painting and the printed book, have the power to reshape how we view the world. This once again brings forth the question though about whether we shape our technology or our technology shapes us. The third example is the strongest in terms of Marshall McLuhan’s stance that our technology has the power to change us.
The railway radically altered the personal outlooks and patterns of social interdependence. It bred and nurtured the American Dream. It created totally new urban, social and family worlds. New ways of work. New ways of management. New legislation.
This is perhaps the most well documented of McLuhan’s observations which I have quoted here. When the railway was established (and later the invention of the automobile, and the telephone) it reshaped the way we consider the family and how we are related, because for the first time we could have more distance from each other while still having the possibility of connectedness. It has led to the ability of families to be more distanced from each other while still being connected, but has invariably reshaped the way we think about where we live and the sort of considerations that would go forth in such a decision.
In all three of these examples though, we can see an illustration of one of McLuhan’s classic statements “we become that which we behold.”
