missional communities

Interview with Jeff Vanderstelt on Missional Practices

January 10, 2017 By Daniel Im

Recently, my friend Jeff Vanderstelt shared his heart on the Saturate Field Guide that he developed with Ben Connelly, another one of my friends and one of our regular authors at NewChurches.com. Here is the interview.

Q. How can an attractional church move towards being more missional using this book?

A. The book guides believers through a study whereby they will come to understand the gospel and its implications for discipleship and mission. As participants work through the daily study and exercises, they will learn to embrace their identity as God’s family, sent as servants and missionaries to the world. The guidebook is most effective when a small group of believers commit to go through it together. As they travel together through the study, not only will they be led to personally grow as God’s missionary people, but collectively they will learn to realign their lives together around God’s purposes and mission. The guide was designed to move people from being Sunday only believers to everyday disciples who make disciples together in community while on mission.

Q. How do we normalize mission in the life of my church?

A. First of all, we need to preach the gospel indicatives – What is true about 1) who God is as revealed by 2) what God has done (especially in and through the person and work of Jesus Christ) leading to understanding 3) who we are in Christ. Then, we need to help people see how believing the gospel leads to new behaviors. The indicatives of the gospel lead to the imperatives of obedience.

The outcome of the gospel is mission

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The reason this is key to normalizing mission in the church is because the church needs to understand that the outcome of the gospel is mission. God is a missionary God who sent his only son to rescue and redeem a people for his mission on the earth. God is missionary, and we are his missionary people. It begins with us understanding our true identity as God’s people. Charles Spurgeon was famous for saying: “Every Christian is either a missionary or an imposter.” There is not a category for non-missionary Christian. If you are a Christian, you are a missionary.

Book Review: Saturate by Jeff Vanderstelt

June 17, 2015 By Daniel Im

*My post here was originally published on June 15, 2015 in Christianity Today.

When I first stepped into my role as a small-group pastor, I was at a loss as to how to help my church get on mission. I knew what it meant to be missional and intentional with my relationships. I knew how to share my faith. I even knew how to motivate my leaders to get on mission with God. However, the one thing that I didn’t know was how to make mission normal in our church—I didn’t know how to help the congregation get on mission with God in everyday life.

As a result, much like Jeff Vanderstelt explains in Saturate: Being Disciples of Jesus in the Everyday Stuff of Life, I loaded my leaders and groups with a task list of missional activities. There was only one problem: I was teaching and expecting my congregation to be Jesus—when only Jesus can truly be Jesus. As a result, I was expecting my group leaders to do more than Jesus every asked of them. In reality, as Vanderstelt puts it, “we are not meant to carry the weight of the world or the mission of Jesus on our shoulders. Jesus came to seek and save. He doesn’t expect us to become the saviors.”

So when I first encountered Vanderstelt’s ministry, Soma, I was impressed with the way they were able to normalize mission and make it easy for their church members to get on mission with God in everyday life. That’s what led me on my journey to digest everything I could get my hands on from Vanderstelt and Soma—articles, seminars, audio files, and the like. But now you can simply read Saturate, a book with all of their wisdom in one place.

As I was preparing to develop a discipleship pathway for my multi-site church, I was inspired by the ministry philosophy, identities, and rhythms of Soma because they have the clearest missional paradigm of discipleship. Soma’s focus, and subsequently, the focus of Saturate, is to provide a vision for complete and utter Jesus saturation rooted in who you are in Christ, rather than in what you do.

Developing a System for Leadership Development – MSC Leadership Training

March 31, 2015 By Daniel Im

Is your leadership development haphazard?

Do you have a system for developing leaders or do you just pick the low hanging fruit? Are you being intentional in your church’s leadership development process? In other words, do you have a leadership pipeline to move someone from the pew into a high level leadership position?

When talking about leadership development within the church, we need to have the big vision in mind. We cannot just narrowly focus on developing leaders for our own ministry areas, Our goal and vision needs to be bigger than that – it needs to be about creating kingdom workers for the harvest.

When I developed this Mid-Size Community (MSC) leadership training program (which became a farm system to develop future church planters), I was not going off of nouveau leadership sayings and tacky workshop techniques. Rather, I created this system intentionally around a multi-dimensional adult-education oriented model for leadership development.

As a result, this program takes into account a variety of learning methods, such as, personal growth, conceptual understanding, feedback, and skill building. This program is also focused on developing leadership competencies, in addition to role based skills.

It is important to note that this program is merely the primary/initial training for MSC leaders and leadership team members. Successful ongoing leadership requires secondary/subsequent training, which will be the topic for another post/workbook.

The diagram here outlines how the leadership training is laid out. Each session can be accomplished in a two-hour time frame. Furthermore, the all-day retreat setting gives you the opportunity to observe the personality of these future leaders in a relaxed environment.

How to Develop a Church Planting Farm System

March 10, 2015 By Daniel Im

spruce grove community garden — My kids and an MSC harvesting their community garden

How do you feel about these statements?

Being excited about becoming a church that plants churches is not the same thing as doing it.
Picking the low hanging fruit (the already developed seminary student) and sending them out to plant is not the same thing as having a process to develop a new believer into a church planter.
Setting aside a percentage of your budget for church planting is not the same thing as developing future planters.

What would it look like if God answered Matthew 9:37-38 through your church? How would you feel if God raised up harvest workers and church planters through your church?

Now I know many of you might be thinking, “Yeah, yeah, I get it. I need to start a residency program or an internship program.” But that’s not what I’m talking about here.

This post is about developing a church planting farm system that starts before any type of internship or residency program. This is ultimately about developing the type of leader that you would want to accept into an internship or residency program.

Every church planting farm system requires three things.

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–> Enter: Mid-Size Communities (MSC)

When I started the mid-size community movement at my previous church (you can watch the MSC intro movie here), I said that it was going to be a way to get more people connected into community (which it totally did – 700 more people into community in three years at three campuses). However, the underlying reason I was so passionate about MSCs was because I saw them as a farm system to raise up future church planters. This pervaded the way that I developed the MSC leadership development curriculum, training strategy, roll-out plan, and everything else that accompanied it.

In fact, when you consider what makes up a healthy farm system, there seems to be three common factors:

My Hope for Beulah, the Local Church and Edmonton

November 24, 2014 By Daniel Im

Whenever I pray, “God may your kingdom come and your will be done,” I’m not just going through the motions and praying some sort of ritualistic prayer. Nor am I praying it and hoping that God would do that through someone else in some other place. Since this is a part of the prayer that Jesus taught us to pray, I have confidence that he is doing “something” when we have the audacity to pray that prayer with sincerity and faith. And I’m convinced that God chooses to do that “something” through you and I – through the church.

Let’s face it. The local church can be dysfunctional because we are the local church and we can all be dysfunctional. Regardless, I have full faith in God’s redemptive power and his desire to usher in his kingdom through the local church.

God wants to usher in his kingdom through the local church.

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When I came to Edmonton, Alberta, Canada to serve at Beulah Alliance Church in 2010, I wasn’t just coming for some job. I came because I was convinced that Beulah was all about God’s kingdom and his mission. After all, since its birth in 1921, over 60 churches have been planted out of Beulah.

And now that God is leading us into a new season of ministry, I’ve been spending a lot of time reflecting on this question,

“What gives me hope that Beulah will continue on this trajectory and be a transformational kingdom agent in Edmonton and beyond?”

Here are some of my thoughts:

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