Our Presbytery Mission Pilot Project kicked off last weekend with a training intensive weekend led by Phil McCredden, Duncan Macleod and myself with teams from the two participating churches plus others in our presbytery team. We had a stimulating weekend of getting to know one another, exploring changes in church and society, and reflecting on discernment in mission.
So what is the Mission Pilot? It is a twelve month partnership where the presbytery helps congregations to do two things:
1. Discern and take up a new Mission Experiment
This is about learning mission by doing it.
– seeing their local community with fresh eyes
– building new or deeper relationships with people
– seeking the hospitality of strangers
– discerning where the Spirit is at work and seeking to join in
– partnering or collaborating in creating a missional initiative
2. Help their congregation develop a Mission Posture
– sharing learnings from the mission experiment with the congregation
– seek to reshape the culture of the congregation and its leaders towards mission
The elements of the weekend included the following:
* Exploring Acts 2 and Luke 10 as early church narratives about Christian community and being sent in mission. We discussed the early church as being both a spiritual and a social transformation.
* Looking at changes in church attendance and participation in recent decades and reflecting on the challenges and opportunities for the church in a post-Christendom era.
* Phil introduced the Three Zone model by Alan Roxburgh and Fred Romanuk as described in The Missional Leader. I’ve since discovered videos of Mark Lau Branson describing the zones in a series of short videos starting here.
* Reflecting on the breadth of mission and gospel and the multiple dimensions of these.
* Examining change processes and how to lead change.
* Exploring the nature of discernment and how we being to look and listen both to our communities and the Holy Spirit.
