Kx Story – North West Leaders Day
On the 16th Novemeber Kx hosted a Northwest Leaders day at Frontline. Here are some reflections on the day from Andy Glover: Team Leader at HBC Chester.
We’ve been on the journey of missional discipleship and missional communities here at HBC Chester for the past 4 years and during this time we have been developing our vision of missional living: of being both a gathered and scattered community as we launched a number of missional communities in October 2015. During this time we have appreciated the opportunity to connect and learn from other churches who are on the same journey especially those within the Kairos Connexion Network. Here is the North West of England there are 6 churches that are developing a closer working relationship with a shared vision for our region. As the Team leader of HBC Chester I am in a huddle with the other 5 church leaders led by Nic Harding this has been very helpful and beneficial to me personally so when the opportunity to gather together across the 6 churches with our leadership teams presented itself in Liverpool I was keen to get 3 other leader to go with me.
The morning was divided into 3 main sections – time to share some stories and reflections from each church, to hear from Nic on the vision for the NW of England focused on Reforming the Church and Transforming the Region and time to pray together. It was encouraging and inspiring to hear from each church and to capture some key learning from experiences of success and failure in each church as the vision for missional living has been pursued. In particular the importance of keeping discipleship at the heart of what we were doing missional was highlighted a number of times and to not to get discouraged when “we have a go but made a mess”. Learning from our mistakes is so important and enables everyone not be paralysed by the fear of failure!
Hearing from Nic is always encouraging and challenging and his 20 minutes of input on this day was no different, Nic highlighted the challenge of the ‘internal work in the church’ needs to lead to another reformation – this time its about putting discipleship back into the hands of ordinary believers! From this will flow an external work in society – transformation across the spheres of society by Christians living as disciples of Jesus 24/7. A Demonstration + A Declaration of the Gospel + A Saturation of Christian presence will = Transformation!!
Finally we prayed together using the 6 phrases of the Lord’s Prayer to provide a focus and enabling us to take time to seek God together and to pray for one another and the region. It was good to worship and pray together!
