Compassion By Design

According to the research completed by Ed Stetzer about what makes church plants most sustainable, new churches that include outreaches like block parties fare better than those that use door to door evangelism strategies. These outreaches serve several important purposes: 1) they help build team cohesion; 2) they stretch team members outside their comfort zone; 3) they provide another marketing opportunity; and 3) may help us connect with potential visitors to our launch.

Many of our outreaches however, are more marketing than missional. Being missional has to do with organizing our church life AND the personal discipleship of our team around relational connections with people. Being in the community is an important step toward growing a real missional DNA, but the postman is in the community too, and he/she is not necessarily missional. Being “sent” means not only “showing up” in the community, but actually connecting with people in a caring way. Missional DNA shows up as our people become more committed and comfortable in reaching out to new people on their turf.

The number of people in your team that actually make a personal connection with someone new during the outreach is often very limited. Our people get busy during these outreaches, but they don’t always talk to anyone. Could we use our planned outreaches to build a greater relational and incarnational DNA in our plant team? We know that the more that the entire team becomes connectors, the healthier and larger the church launch.

Here are some suggestions about making our outreaches missional growth opportunities.

Structure outreaches relationally. Don’t do ring and run outreach. Plan the outreach to require some kind of conversation—make it comfortable and non-invasive, but conversational. This is the difference between just washing windows for free, or taking a brief survey while you wash windows. Surveys, like those in a needs assessment help those who are not highly skilled talkers to learn to start conversations.

Model relationship building. Talk about this in advance and tell success stories when you are done that amplify the importance and ease of talking with people. Share skills in conversation starting. Don’t only tell the most exciting stories, tell the simple ones where a quiet team member had a positive conversation.

Pair people to stretch their networking skills. Place those who are not easy talkers, with those who make this look easy. Teach the strong relational leaders, to take turns talking with others and to encourage those who are being stretched.

Do Needs Assessment survey work during the outreach, so that lots of conversations are started. By simply adding needs assessment to your existing outreach calendar, you ensure that in every contact a conversation is started. To learn more about needs assessment, join a free conference call, or attend the February 5,6 Needs Assessment Training in the national capital area of Virginia.

We have several upcoming trainings that you should be aware of. They all provide cutting edge instruction that will help your church plant, compassion ministry or church committed to community engagement move forward. This is training that is designed for faith based community service that is both sustainable and high impact.

Free Conference Calls about Needs Assessment– Join David Mills for an overview of how needs assessment can help you plant a healthier new church, build new credibility and missional heart with a church in revitalization or move your church into strong community connection. These calls include a detailed overview document and are available monthly. click here

Needs Assessment Intensive– February 5th and 6th in Historic Northern VA, get intensive training, additional needs assessment tools and get prepared to lead or train others in needs assessment. This training is for those who want hands on training to lead their new church or church committed to community, or faith based non profit into greater community impact. The fellowship and shared learning make this intensive an important opportunity for those who want to increase community impact. The venue is located just 7 miles from the Historic Mannassas Battlefield, 30 miles from Mt. Vernon, and just minutes from the new Air and Space Smithsonian as well as other DC locations. The venue is located so that you can add some tourism to your trip without the expense of staying inside the beltway.

Quick Start Ready to Serve is a one day training on January 15th in Greensboro, NC that will lead you through the right steps to start and grow a community based ministry. Appropriate for churches and faith based ministries, the training is based on the best available approaches to starting strong and sustaining high impact, mission oriented community service. The Trainer is David Mills. click here to learn more.

Design for Service . This teleconference training will take you through the Design for Funding workbook form the comfort of your own phone– allowing you to describe your services in a way that funders and donors can support. During this series of calls, you will learn to describe your services in the standard formats that funders want to see, and also create communication and critical thinking tools that will improve your services and help you to recruit more volunteers and effective board members. This is a series of calls that begin January 14th. click here

Join us!

It was such a hopeless start. Baby born to a yet unmarried couple in a stable, giving birth while traveling to satisfy bureaucratic requirements for residence, and then having to flee to another country to avoid a government sanctioned death squad. From the outside, a morally challenged refugee family with a newborn. But to those in the know, a King whose birth drew angelic visitation, personal visits and treasures from the east and the prophetic whispers of relatives and shepherds alike.

I am awed by the incarnation—what we celebrate at Christmas. The entrance of God into human form, born into the lowest of circumstances—son of a woman who became pregnant outside of marriage, living in a dirt poor town, in a country under the iron thumb of a dictator.

What moves me so much is the willingness of God to be “with” us, to join us in our pitiful condition, to take our very form. Then to live among us, work a job, pay taxes, deal with parents, customers and co-workers on a daily basis.

It was,
Omnipotence that became vulnerable
Omniscience that had to learn math and human language,
Omnipresence that had to walk in sandals along sewage strewn roads.
The prime mover pounding nails with a hammer, smoothing wood with a chisel.
All this to be with us.

While a holiday has many expressions, my heart is humbled by this knowledge, how about you?

Many of those who visit this blog, have experienced this reality personally, and we should take time during this season to remember. Some have not, and I encourage you to invite him to join you this Christmas. You can do that with a simple request.

Many who do know him, live out the incarnation everyday. You are a model of this deep spiritual truth, when you move your family to grow a new community of faith in a strange city, when you patiently tutor a child in reading, when you chop potatoes and carrots and then dip soup, when you help neighbors every month to get their Angel Food, when you take time to share encouragement with a homeless family, or whatever selfless acts of service you do somewhere where the public lights do not shine.

If you are one of those who work tirelessly to meet the needs of others, setting aside your own plans and interests to feed, clothe, care and encourage others, you are living out this miracle of Christmas. You are that hidden faithfulness being born in a converted cave—holy character wrapped in shredded cloth. You are being him to others, because he was not only born in a middle eastern city on a historical date, but because he has also been born in you.

May your service deepen your knowledge of him and may others come to know him who moves you to serve.

Merry Christmas.

One of our biggest challenges in moving toward a missional and incarnational expression of church life is proximity. Most Christian activity (it is unfortunate that we can segment our lives this way), occurs only within the confines of our religious establishments. While we all understand that every moment of life is sacred, and that every encounter and relationship is a place that God wants to visit, we have established a sub-culture approach to church life. This “attractional” model, suggests that all life transformation and God-encounter occurs when people “come to our meeting.” We don’t really trust the average Joe and Josephine in the pew to do the job of evangelism and discipleship, and the statistics bear out our fears–for a church of one hundreds that is more than 5 years old, less than 3 people will come to Christ in a given year. So we encapsulate all Christian life expression inside of our buildings and church activities. And as the American Church, we are stuck in this mode. We disciple people in this manner, they don’t see or experience the New Testament alternative, and the process goes on. And many leaders are both frustrated and saddened by this reality. The problem is we cannot show the love of Christ, model the Christian experience if it never occurs IN PROXIMITY to those who are on the outside.

“In proximity” means that we have to live it out in front of them. The early Christians didn’t really have a choice, they only had public forums and small homes to meet in. Their preaching and singing and fellowship were always public. The Apostle Paul did his church business right in the marketplace–sell a tent, write an epistle, repair a tent, counsel a pastor, etc.

We are making good progress by placing new churches in proximity to the people groups that need a new expression of Christian life. The work of Externally Focussed churches takes this to a new level– churches that serve and interact in the community as lifestyle.

What if we combine the two? New churches, placed in proximity to the people that need them, who have a lifestyle of community engagement and service. What if we start these new churches with an intentional DNA of mission, they start with a needs assessment– lots of listening and connecting with people (the whole church plant team, not just the planter), and then we spend the pre-launch period serving in the areas that we discover. This path will lead us to plant churches that have a real DNA of Proximity, and who live out their Christian life in a transparent public way.

Proximity doesn’t resolve all the challenges; we still have to disciple and re-disciple those that we lead into a missional lifestyle, and break down the barriers of fear and habit. But getting ourselves in the right places is a very good start.

Check out the new needs assessment kit http://www.compassionbydesign.org/church-planting.html