Small Groups leading to BIG change
When we move past the theory, what does it look like to live out the great commission wherever we are?
Nic writes on the Great Commission website about growing a city-reaching movement.
When we move past the theory, what does it look like to live out the great commission wherever we are?
Nic writes on the Great Commission website about growing a city-reaching movement.
Part of our vision as Kx is to see 1 missional expression of church planted for every 1000 people in England and Wales. That’s over 56,000 missional households, communities or churches in every neighbourhood across our villages, towns and cities. Now, we’re not going to be able to do this on our own – God is doing exciting things across our nation with lots of different churches, networks and organisations. But we want to plant our flag in the ground to say this is one of the key things we are focusing on over the next few years and hope you will join us in praying for and seek to plant #1in1000 in your area.
Here is a #1in1000 story from one of HBC Chester’s Missional Communities, called “Welcome” Missional Community.
‘As part of our missional community, we have operated a group called ‘International Forum, Chester’ for about a year. This group aims to welcome and engage with internationals in the Chester area. The IF group meets monthly in a neutral hired venue and has a talk for 20-30 minutes on a topic of international interest. Our numbers of attendees vary between a handful and 20. We have several Muslims from different countries who really enjoy the group and have become good friends.
In the summer we put on an additional event in conjunction with our broader Missional Community and wider people of peace. We had a BBQ in the local park and played ‘croccer’, a camp game based on cricket using a football. Our Muslim friends loved this event, and one of our Ugandan friends went to town bringing his BBQ and lots of food to share. Meanwhile friendships deepened and conversations went to a new level.
Our friends are asking questions about Christian faith and we have been able to share discussions in a natural and respectful way.’
We love Form! An intense year of discipleship, rooted in a culture of leadership and mission running in several Kx family churches. Last week we shared some stories from Form USA, here is a video of similar stories from Form UK trainees.
There are three ways you can get involved in form.
To find out more about each of these head to www.form-uk.org.
FORM is an intensive year-long discipleship internship for young adults, currently running in 4 locations in the UK and also in the USA. Here are a few stories from this years trainees at Form Fort Wayne, Indiana about what God has done with them over the past year.
At the last Launch Learning Community we asked Kx family members Rupert and Sally Martin to tell us what they had gained from joining Kx. You can find out more about becoming a member church here.
Our Missional Community’s vision is to reach our neighbours around the area we live in Liverpool.
We started with 2 other families, so 6 adults and 6 kids in total. We wanted our MC to be an extended family on mission, so it was important from the start to build it around stuff that works for the kids and with people that were willing to share their lives with us.
So every Friday, 5pm we gather together for food. We rotate between our houses (all spitting distance from each other), and we do it ‘bring and share’ style. Easy – no fuss. So 5pm till 6pm we eat, chat, catch up. We draw the kids into a bit of prayer. Occasionally we’ve had a kids bible story. We regularly have neighbours join us. Then 6pm till 7pm we alternate between dads and mums accountability. So one week the dads take the kids back home and the mums meet together, then the following week the dads meet.
We try and focus this around the learning circle and 2 discipleship questions (What is God saying & what are you going to do about it?) We pray together. We find that because we’re sharing what’s going on in our lives through our Facebook, when we do meet, we can pray for one another with greater understanding. More recently another family have joined us that we led to faith a while back, but have been on the fringes for some time. It’s been a real joy to see them get committed and grow in their faith.
Once a month we do something more outwardly focused, so we tend to invite neighbours over for a drink, or extended one of our birthday parties out to the MC and neighbours so we can connect with them. We have a cycle of bigger outreach events for our housing estate, summer BBQ, bonfire night, Christmas carols and christingles, Easter egg hunt etc. Loads of people turn up to these and we’re building relationships with our neighbours.
Here is a great bit of story from a church which has been involved in Learning Communities and how they’ve seen growth in their church and development of new missional communities.
“I had in mind to thank you properly for all the support you give to the wider church and particularly the help to us as a church. It has been invaluable and we see the kingdom advancing through your endeavours – Thank you so much; we see you as a real gift from God to the church.
This term our sermon series has been based in the book of Romans. As we have done this we looked at the ‘one another’ verses that can be found in the Bible (did you know there are over 50 of them?), so we called the series ‘Love One Another-Living as Family’. This is how we introduced the series to the church:
“We are looking forward to exploring what these different ‘One Another’ passages mean. One of the ways we are going to do this, that we’d love you to start thinking about will be to encourage everyone to get to know one another better by eating together in each other’s houses; a sort of ‘Come dine with me’ but without the rating system! The value behind this is to enable us to get to know each other better and give attention to who we are called to be as the people of God.
The series is going to start on 29th January and will last for 9 weeks, so get the dates in your diary and perhaps put up 1 Peter 4:8-9 on your fridge. ‘Above everything, love one another earnestly, because love covers over many sins. Open your homes to each other without complaining.’
And if you really want to go deep, the greek word for ‘One another’ is ἀλλήλων, pronounced ‘ah-LAY-loan’. Try and drop it into conversation during coffee time….people are certain to be impressed.”
We’ve had a number in the church talking about how they have loved getting to know different people through this series. They’ve been invited to houses and then on the back of that have been inspired to invite people to their houses in return. These people then themselves go on to invite people and so on.
One of the great things about it is that it’s encouraged people from across the ages and different groups in the church to meet together and find out about each other which is helping to give a greater sense of family. We used the twitter hashtag #tweetyoureat to share the fun!
Mike Rutter – Network Church Sheffield
Today we want to share an opportunity for mission in one of our Kx family churches which is very exciting!
Hello friends,
I hope this finds you well. Our dream of opening a cafe is finally becoming reality.
My team and I are currently running a crowdfunding project to help see our coffee-shop project, www.fltrcoffee.co.uk completed. We’re hoping to impact our neighbourhood by becoming a community hub as well as re-investing our profits back into local people and projects. We’re hoping to reverse the recent statistic that called Britain, “The loneliness capital of the world” as well as continue to impact young people and their dreams.
The crowdfunder is open! Will you consider becoming one of our financial founders? We’re offering some great gifts like stickers, t-shirts, mug, coffee events, opening parties, and more as perks for giving.
Click below to watch our video and consider giving!