1. Nic Writes: #1in1000

    Reaching a whole town or city with the gospel. Saturating a place with good news. Completing the great commission where I live. If any of these thoughts excite you then you’ll be pleased to know that a number of places are beginning to ask the questions ‘what might that look like round here?’

    As I’ve had the opportunity to explore and experiment with some of these ideas in the Liverpool city region in recent years, I’ve been asked to input to a number of other places – specifically Chester, Ipswich, Newcastle and Basingstoke this term.

    What would it look like if in 10 years in your place everyone knew someone whose life had been transformed by Jesus? What if every neighbourhood had a small group of Christians living out life together, praying for their streets, practically blessing their neighbours, finding the people of peace, creating pathways to faith, and producing disciple-makers?

    What if we did this so that everyone knew where to get spiritual bread, to get practical help, and to find Jesus? What if we multiplied these groups so that there was one missional expression of church (an MC in our language) for every 1000 people (#1in1000)?

    This is our dream for seeing people and places transformed by the gospel.

    Here’s a bunch of 15+ of those kind of Christians in Liverpool who are praying and plotting to do just that for their neighbourhood. Current plans for the next couple of months include:

    • helping a neighbour with an overgrown garden.
    • continuing to befriend the night-time security guard who watches a particular footballer’s mum’s house in our street.
    • serving and blessing the local catholic primary school in our street (flapjacks for the receptionist so far).
    • taking round bunches of daffodils for the women in our street over the mother’s day weekend and inviting their families to the Easter service.

    What could it look like round your way? 

  3. A warm welcome in Chester!

    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.’

     

     

  4. NW Hub Missional Communities Conference

    Saturday 18th November 9am-3pm, Frontline Church Liverpool.

    Join us as leaders across North West England gather for a time to reflect, dream and discuss all things related to missional communities. We are excited to welcome Keld Dahlmann from Denmark who is coming to speak. He leads a church as well as being senior leader of TOM (The Order of Mission). If you are interested in building communities centered around the gospel then this will be a fantastic day for you.

    Book on here or email Kate Eaglestone on [email protected] The day will include free childcare and food, as well as teaching, training, discussion, worship, planning and eating. It is open to anyone in the North West region.

    We look forward to seeing you then!

  5. Kx Story: Reaching neighbours in Liverpool

    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.

  6. Kx Story: Growth through involvement in Learning Communities

    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.


    Despite not attending the latest round of learning communities we are making steady progress with our missional communities. As you know, we decided not to go for the big bang and started with two pilots. We now have 3 MC’s and plans for a 4th and maybe a 5th. The pleasing thing is that each one has started ‘bottom up’ with people approaching the leadership. Inspiring stories are starting to come and it is exciting:     

    – We have one group for the ‘more mature’ and have an event this Friday to which we expect about 20 ‘not yet believers’ from nearby sheltered accommodation where we have been given an open door to go in and out.

    – We run a group for families with children with disabilities and special needs. This is proving a real blessing for families and we are even getting people referred to this group from outside – amazing.

    – We have started a third called ‘Cafe of Hope’ for all the contacts and friends we make through the cafe.

    – For our next one, which is in embryo,  we have a vision statement and  leader for ‘Life cycle’, based upon the men’s cycling group but with a wider remit.

    Thank you, once again, for your help.”

  7. Kx Story: Building family in Sheffield

    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

     

  8. Kx Story: Coffee in Bicester


    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!

     

  9. Discipleship & Missional Community Taster Day – OXFORD // CANCELLED

     

    PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS EVENT IS NOW CANCELLED

    However please check out our other upcoming events for 2017!

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    June 2017 Oxford Workshop

     

    This event is designed for Church leaders and their teams, church members, missional community leaders, ministry leaders, elders and others who simply want to think through what discipleship and mission could look like in the 21st Century Church.

    It will be a day of worship, teaching, interactive seminars, networking, and a chance to hear how God is bringing transformation through missional communities of ordinary disciples.

    You will hear stories of what God is doing through the local church, and the principles we have learned along the way. There will also be experienced missional community leaders sharing their stories and plenty of time to ask questions.

    This event is hosted by Oxford Community Church and Highway Christian Church in partnership with Kairos Connexion.

    Click here for more information and to book

  10. Kx Story – New Beginnings for Blacon Central

    Here’s an update by Ed Green from HBC Chester on their new Missional Community.

    “Last year in April 2015 my wife and I moved into a house next door to our friends because we wanted to do Missional Community/family on mission together.  We had already experimented with an MC called Blacon Central (we live in Blacon and the houses back onto an old train line) and wanted to really go for it.  At the same time our Church, HBC Chester, was launching MC’s.  In September 2015 we really went for it by starting a new church rhythm of 2 in 2 out.  So for 2 Sundays a month we met as Blacon Central.  Over this last year our MC has grown from 3 core families who lead it and a few on the edge to a group of about 7/8 families regularly engaged and belonging to our community with more on the edge.  We have baptised 3 people in the back garden and grown too big for our houses so we have just started meeting in a building with a hall.  A number of our MC have started coming to church on Sundays and we are loving it!

    ed

    In amongst all of the good there have been moments where we have got it wrong and tried to do too much and not taken on the ‘light weight’ aspect which at times has caused stress (surprise surprise).  We have also, and this is more my fault, not always been as planned and organised as we could be.  This year has helped us a s core team to really be a family and not a team.  We haven’t spent enough time on us as a core (3 couples) but we are correcting that.

    What we did do well was go slow and try to keep it secret!  This goes against my nature!  As a church we have tried to go slowly and as such in our MC we did the same.  We didn’t advertise or invite many people for ages!  We just invested in a few people/families.  Now we feel that we can grow it and invite a few more and what’s great is that the people we have invested in and discipled are doing the same with people close to them, their own people of peace.    We are looking forward to the year ahead.

    Also it’s worth noting that some of the people in our MC, we have known and been building relationships for a number of years, so this isn’t just an overnight thing.  What’s great is that we now have space, time and a vehicle in which to disciple them.  However, others we haven’t known for long but they were definite people of peace so they came and loved it!”

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