Tolstoy wrote, Everybody wants to change the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. Maybe we’re a little over ambitious, but we want it all. We want to change our world and become a changed people.
Our hope and our calling is to shape and send out missional people as we follow in the footsteps of Jesus together. Jesus lingered long with God, and so we carve out time in each of our communities to do the same. We call this communion.
Jesus did life day-in and day-out with a small band of sojourners, so we choose to live near and share our lives with each other. We call this community.
Jesus lived with an unwavering purpose as he moved into people’s worlds and created a spiritual home for them right where they lived, so we move into the neighborhood, open our homes and our hearts and seek to be a redemptive presence wherever we find ourselves in the world. We call this engaging our context.
Communion, Community, and Context are the three indispensable arenas of engagement in our formational experience. Each of our communities sets out every year to pursue God relentlessly, to allow our faith and character to be transformed in the crucible of community, and to submerge into the cultures around us, helping shape people to become uncommon followers of Jesus.
Our journey into communion, community, and context unfolds as we step across in six natural stepping stones, steps we call missional postures. These are the postures that missional leaders need to learn, maybe even master, to engage communion, community, and culture well. So we focus our conversations and our experiences on these postures in our journey together:
Listening: Learning to listen to God, to our hearts, to each other, and to the culture around us.
Submerging: Being present and being the hands and feet of Jesus in the neighborhoods we live in.
Inviting: Becoming fragrant followers of Jesus who gather people around a compelling story.
Contending: Fighting well for the lives and faith of those God has brought into our lives.
Imagining: Seeing and embracing what God has created for us and preparing to engage the next leg of our mission.
Entrusting: Preparing those we have served to go on with God and encouraging them to pass on what they’ve received.
These are natural and essential phases we experience in life as we set out to explore what it takes to be good news, to navigate life, and to create communities of faith where they didn’t exist before. It’s our hope and expectation that those who come to be formed in our community would be able to go anywhere in the world and fruitfully and take others through a similar journey into communion, community, and context.
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