Mission Vision: The Secret Sauce of All Effective Missional Endeavors (part 1)
A 2-part special on how to set the mission vision for your missional community
“If we restrict our discipleship to specific religious times, the majority of our waking hours will be isolated from the manifest presence of the Kingdom.” (Dallas Willard)
We have been launching and growing missional communities for over 2 decades, both in England and the States. Yet in those early years, we had no idea how important it would be for a missional community to have crystal clear clarity on its mission vision.
However, as we look back, what we have seen is that knowing precisely who you are trying to reach is the #1 step that a leader can take to shape the future growth of a missional community.
(A note on labels: missional communities are known by a variety of names, such as micro churches, house churches, go communities, villages, and so on. The key uniting factor is that these are groups centered around living internationally on mission in a specific context. For the purposes of this article, I’ll use the generic label of missional communities.)
Mission Vision Summary
This ‘mission vision’ is a WHO rather than a WHAT. You need to focus on who you are trying to reach, over what you will be doing.
And since people matter to Jesus, the leader’s #1 task is to gain great clarity on who your missional community is most called to reach and disciple at this time.
Generally, a mission vision will lean more either towards a ‘neighborhood’ (a specific geographic focus) or a ‘network’ (a set of relationships you have access to). However, every group in reality is shaped by a mix of both (e.g. ‘other young families in our subdivision’, or ‘students in this specific hall of residence’).
The secret sauce for missional communities is a specific mission vision. In the hundreds of groups that we have helped start and coach, we have unfailingly found that the more specific and focused your mission vision, the better your chance of success as a group on mission.
Mission Vision in More Depth
Missional communities give a framework to go and reach those far outside the four walls of the church. MCs can go into a crack or crevice of society where the hope of Jesus has faded or maybe never previously existed.
There are people who will never darken the doorway of a church, no matter how many times you invite them, and they - every man, woman, and child - need to hear and experience the good news of Jesus!
The purpose of a mission vision is that it helps define the WHO that your missional community will be focusing its proactive missionary efforts on.
Too often churches grasp the concept of mission (“go wide with the Gospel!”) but miss the incarnational aspect of this commission (“go deep with a few!”). Mission vision enables us to focus both the breadth and depth of our missionary mandate into a specific group of people.
This means that your mission vision is not a ‘what’ but a ‘who’!
Here’s the central question: Who is God calling you to reach at this time?
One of the beautiful things about this question is that there’s no wrong answer! It can be as unique and specific as you wish, so long as you have the connections, opportunities, and prayerful passion to reach those people.
From that clarity of focus, you are far better able to work out what an authentic and effective expression of a Jesus community should look like to reach these friends of yours. You start looking at the world through their eyes. You imagine walking in their shoes. You begin to incarnate the unchanging message of Jesus into that specific cultural context.
This clarity on the ‘Out’ dimension (your mission vision) enables you to better answer all the varied questions around ‘In’ and ‘Up’. By way of example, when you know who you are trying to reach, that will define when and where you gather, the type of food you share, the sort of music on the sound system, how you will worship, how people celebrate, what kind of societal needs they want to tackle, and so on.
In summary: The more specific your mission vision, the easier it will be to develop your missional community!
Examples of Mission Vision in Missional Communities
Practically speaking, here are three examples to help you see the importance of a Mission Vision.
Example #1: People living in a nursing home
Let’s say your Mission Vision is to make disciples in a nursing home where the majority of people were elderly and can’t leave the facility. While they may have biological families, their day-to-day relational network consists of residents, staff, and regular visitors in the home.
If you would like to gather people together for community worship, and because your Mission Vision is clear, it probably makes a lot more sense to:
Meet early-ish in the day.
Worship around a piano in the dining hall singing old hymns.
You intersperse that with some readings from the Bible - and you mix in a generous dose of King James Version for the ‘famous’ texts that you share (since those might connect with something in their long-term memories).
Invite them to serve the wider world through activities that don’t require physical exertion (e.g. knitting gloves for the homeless, praying for the local elementary school, being adopted grandparents to local teens, etc). Why? Because that would have resonance with the people you are trying to reach.
Your hope through it all is to create a community that still feels valued and useful, both to Jesus and to others.
Example #2: Middle schoolers in a low-income neighborhood
Perhaps you are trying to reach middle school teenagers in an under-resourced and low-income neighborhood.
After praying and spending some time there, you notice there’s an opening around basketball. You recognize that through this sport you have an opportunity to build community and extended family. So:
Rather than driving the kids somewhere else, you bring good basketballs and offer pick-up games on their home basketball courts, thus building relationships in their context.
The timing might be after school, or on weekend evenings.
Music might be hip-hop or hit pop songs.
Worship could include graffiti art, writing modern-day psalms, and learning to sit in quiet to listen to God.
You are hoping that these early teens begin to experience the hope for a better future that Jesus brings, and consequently make better decisions that lead them down a path of life, in every sense of that term.
Example #3: Four streets
Maybe your Mission Vision is to reach a specific four streets in a middle-class neighborhood.
Living on these streets are a group of people who, by and large, are incredibly cynical about the church. What they long for, however, is to have a deeper sense of community with those who live close by. So rather than inviting them to a church service, you invite them to a weekly cookout and block party that’s open to everyone in those four streets.
The kids go door-to-door each week inviting people to the Friday night cookout.
The core of the missional community gathers to pray for the evening before people arrive.
The doorway into worship might be inviting people to share one thing from the past week for which they are thankful to God, or using creation as a platform for considering the nature of God.
Neighbors could be invited to join you in serving vulnerable downtown communities through clothing drives, fund-raising, or once a month together serving a meal at a homeless shelter.
You are aiming to demonstrate that, even in the midst of relative affluence and success, Jesus can offer a deeper and more satisfying sense of purpose and significance.
Reflect and Plan
As you think about who you would love to see come to Jesus, begin to ask these sorts of questions:
WRITE DOWN YOUR RESPONSES!
What does an expression of spiritual family need to look like to reach them?
What is Good News for them? (It will look different for each ‘who’)
What does fullness of life look like for these people?
Who is my Person of Peace there?
How do we become ‘One Of ’ this group of people? (if we aren’t already)
If the Kingdom was more fully present in this place, with this group of people, what would be different? How can we be present in the gap between what is and what could be?
NEXT TIME in the second half of Setting Mission Vision:
Discover the Principle of the White Field, 5 words to exegete your culture, and go through a clear process to nail down your mission vision!
CLICK HERE to jump to Part 2
Want some custom help?
There is no need to reinvent the wheel! You can learn from our several decades of experience, as we have personally planted and run half a dozen missional communities, and overseen the launch and support of over 130 groups.
We offer a limited amount of paid personal coaching, including in this area of developing your missional culture.
To find out more, please follow this link to let us know more about your specific context and how you think we might be able to help you!
