Missional

Living as a Missional Community

June 14, 2016 By Daniel Im

One of the things that fascinates me about Jesus was that he was a masterful communicator. One of the ways that he loved to communicate was via word pictures.

Jesus loved to paint word pictures.

He did this because he knew that, through word pictures, we would be able to intrinsically understand and connect the truths that he was teaching us with our real lives today.

Two of the most powerful word pictures that he used to describe you and I were salt and light:

Matt 5:13 “You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled by men.

Matt 5:14 “You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. 15 Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. 16 In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.

When we read these verses, we, in our western individualistic world views, think that he’s talking about you and I individually–that we are individually the salt of the earth and the light of the world. However, when you look at the original language, the word “you” is actually plural.

You (the community together) are the salt of the earth.

You (the community together) are the light of the world – a city on a hill.

You (the community together) are the body of Christ, and each of us is a part of it (1 Cor 12:27).

Jesus never intended any of us to journey through life alone. Faith is not a private thing, it’s a community thing. We each have our own relationship with God, but it is in the context of community that we live it out and grow.

Cultivating Missional Community in the Summer

June 7, 2016 By Daniel Im

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Back when I lived in Edmonton, Canada, it was literally winter six months out of the year. We used to say that there were only two seasons in Edmonton: winter and construction. So you could guess my excitement for those blissful summer months where it didn’t take a century to get in and out of the house with all of our winter gear, and I could just walk out with flip-flops! For some, summer is about jumping into a pool, with no worries, timelines, or meetings. For others, summer is about hiking, biking, being outside, and enjoying God’s creation. And still for others, summer is about getting those honey-do lists done. In any case, as adults, summer vacation is usually a couple weeks long, and then we have to get back at it and put our noses to the grindstone.

Although we all love taking a break in the summer, and the natural rhythms of life dictate our need for one, the one thing that doesn’t stop over the summer is our need for community.

So here is that infamous question that every small group or missional community needs to ask over the summer, “To continue, or not?”

Here are a few of my suggestions:

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.

What Church Leaders Can Learn From Uber and Lyft

March 24, 2015 By Daniel Im

How long have you been driving for?

Anytime I’m in a Taxi, this is typically one of my go-to questions. It also inevitably turns into an opportunity for the cab driver to share their personal story with me (this is one of the 5 BLESS steps in missional living). Last time I asked this question, the driver opened up the internal world of the taxi industry, and gave me insight into how and why companies like Uber and Lyft are gaining so much ground.

It costs $300,000 to buy a permit to drive a cab in this city…

I couldn’t believe my ears when the cab driver told me how it cost to drive a cab in Edmonton (Canada). As I continued to pry into the industry, he continued…

A limited number of permits are issued once every few years, and when they are, it’s a complete lottery. Here’s the catch though, in order to enter that lottery, you need to have already been driving a cab for a couple of years, which is why I’m leasing this cab from someone else. If you’re lucky enough to have your name drawn, then it’ll cost you less than a $1000 to buy the license through the city. Once you get that license, you can either use it yourself, lease it out to someone else, or you can sell it for $300,000 – that’s the going rate these days.

If I was talking to a lawyer, doctor or a dentist and they told me that it was going to cost them $300,000 to buy someone else’s practice, I wouldn’t even blink. All you would have to do is crunch the numbers and it would make sense. However, how does it make sense for a cab driver to dish out $300,000 to buy a permit, when they might only make a couple hundred dollars a day, plus the cost of maintenance and fuel?

I was beginning to understand why companies like Uber and Lyft were gaining so much ground in the transportation industry and why taxi drivers and unions were trying so hard to prevent them from coming into their cities.

Missional

Jesus loved to paint word pictures.

Although we all love taking a break in the summer, and the natural rhythms of life dictate our need for one, the one thing that doesn’t stop over the summer is our need for community.

Here are a few of my suggestions:

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