Mike Breen and Alex Absalom, seasoned practitioners with experience navigating the changing tides of culture in the increasingly post-Christian West, recently published Launching Missional Communities: A Field Guide, which addresses the structure or vehicle of mid-sized groups or missional communities.  A missional community, in their words, is “a group of anything from twenty to more than fifty people who are united, through Christian community, around a common service and witness to a particular neighborhood or network of relationships” (19).

At just over 200 pages, Launching Missional Communities is part-guidebook and part-workbook, offering reflection questions, case studies, charts, graphs, and lists of ideas.  The book is divided into three main areas: (1) developing the concept of missional communities, (2) outlining the actual process of launching a community (nitty gritty details like budgets, pilot programs, launch Sundays, etc.), and (3) describing the life of a missional community (leadership, spirituality, discipleship, families and children, missions, etc.).

Rather than offer a traditional review, I invited Mike Breen to respond to a few of the questions and reflections that arose as I read through the book.

1) Launching Missional Communities joins a crowded field of books, many which promise the latest and greatest (and most missional!) answers to your church’s problems, whatever they may be.  You reference a lot of recent missional literature, but your book felt more practical than most other books on this topic.  Can you talk a bit about your hopes for the book? Who did you write for and what kind of results are you seeing?

In many ways your preface of the question answers why we felt the need to write this kind of book. You see, we’d been doing these mid-sized missional groups of 20-50 for more than 20 years, so when various people like Alan Hirsch or Hugh Halter or Darrel Guder write about the missional church, we’re like, “Well yeah, of course that’s the way it’s supposed to be!”
But what really gave us the impetus for writing this book was seeing the panic on so many church leaders’ faces. They recognize there’s been a dramatic shift as we move away from Christendom and they realize that all of their experience and all of their training is for a world that, by and large, doesn’t exist anymore.

This book was written for them. For the people who have bought into the fact that the world has dramatically changed and want to do the hard work of putting discipleship and mission at the center of everything they do. Our hope was to write a practical resource that will help people do it.  Plenty has been written on theory and theology; we wanted to show what that would look like with skin and bones on it. And you’ve read the book, you know that it’s not a “you must do it this way” kind of thing. I mean, just the insights on how to deal with kids in Missional Communities offer three alternative solutions ways with none being perfect. It’s just what twenty years of doing it has taught us.

As for results, we’ll say what we said in the book: Books are a starting place. The most successful churches doing this are doing this in community with other churches attempting the same shift. It can’t be done alone. For the churches that have done that, the results have been nothing short of stunning.

(2) Small groups are just starting to catch on with many churches and now you’re telling pastors that what they really need are mid-sized missional communities!  What are the key differences between small groups and missional communities?  If a church has small groups but not mid-sized communities, what will be missing?

I feel small groups are quite the conundrum for North American churches. Most churches would say that small groups exist either to disciple people or for evangelization purposes. The problem is that small groups don’t tend to do either of those well! We see people often becoming nicer in small groups or perhaps knowing the Bible better, but you don’t often see people whose lives and spirits look more like Jesus, which is what discipleship should do. Furthermore, with groups of 6-12, it’s really hard to multiply them because these people have become some of your closest friends. So research is saying that the strongest small groups will only multiply 3 times and then they’re done. Not to mention that most small groups patently look inward and do very little evangelizing.

What we say with mid-sized Missional Communities is that they are small enough to care but large enough to dare. You can do substantive missional activities with a mid-sized group that you simply can’t with a small group. But it’s small enough that people will know when you’re missing.

This isn’t to say there isn’t value within breaking down into smaller groups within the whole of the Missional Community regularly, but it’s done within the context of a larger missional impulse.

(3) I don’t think I’ve read any book on the missional church that spends as much time discussing how to create space for families and children. What are the primary difficulties you’ve seen incorporating children and families into these types of communities?  Why is it worth the effort to do this?

Well like I said above, I think there are different ways of incorporating kids into Missional Community life. There isn’t one way we’ve found best to do it; it generally depends on the mission context, age of the kids, temperament and work situation of the parents, size of the meeting spot, etc. But at a bare minimum, we would say that kids need to be seeing their parents involved in mission and discipleship and participating with them. We’ve done a fair amount of research on this and what came to light is that kids who have atheist or agnostic  parents have a better chance of having a strong faith than kids who have parents that go to church, but don’t ever disciple their kids themselves. There’s simply too much dissonance there. Parents must be the primary disciplers of their kids and Missional Communities let this happen.

The reason it’s worth it is because this allows our kids to journey into a story bigger and far more important than the consumeristic narcissism they are sold everywhere else. And parents and spiritual aunts and uncles have to show them how to live this kind of life if it’s going to stick.

(4) I’m a pastor at a small church plant and even though we don’t have a lot of programs running throughout the week, the thought of adding another layer to an already over-scheduled community can be a bit intimidating.  What should churches stop in order start missional communities?

I’ll give an answer that will probably come off as ambiguous or skirting the question, but hopefully it’ll make sense.
Having an over-scheduled community is a discipleship problem. There’s really no other way of putting it. What I’ve come to see is that we don’t have a leadership or missional problem in the United States. We have a discipleship problem. What we have to understand is that if we make disciples the way that Jesus made disciples, we’ll get all of the missional leaders we can handle. More than we can handle.

The Western church just isn’t good at making disciples. And if any church is hoping to start Missional Communities, they should stop immediately if they don’t have a solid discipleship foundation and structure. Otherwise, everything will implode. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen that.

So what should you stop and what should you start?

It would be different for every church, but I’d look at stopping everything (over a period of time) that isn’t actively discipling people to be more like the people we see in scripture. Let’s make sure we’re not making our criteria for good discipleship “they look nicer and sometimes feed poor people” kind of thing. What do the disciples in scripture look like? What are they doing?

As for starting, I’d go with what Dallas Willard says. Every church needs to be able to answer two questions. 1) What is our plan for making disciples? 2) Does our plan work?

So whatever your plan is that works…start that. Or start finding a plan that works. In the churches that I’ve led, we’ve started things we developed years ago in the UK called Huddles, which you can read about in Building a Discipling Culture.

(5) Scot McKnight suggested Launching Missional Communities could be a “powerful textbook and template for seminaries” as they train pastors and leaders.  As your organization invests a lot of time and energy into the lives of pastors, what do you see seminaries doing well?  How could seminaries better prepare and equip pastors for missional discipleship and leadership?

I think seminaries like Fuller or Northern Seminary in Chicago are doing their best to make theological education much more accessible to people, whether that’s financially or through distance learning programs. I’ve really liked the change into cohorts so that you’re journeying with a group of people. Also, there seems to be a real shift into not only Kingdom theology but missional theology, which I think is crucial. The Missio Dei needs to be reclaimed.

That being said, I still think there is a ways to go. As I mentioned in one of the earlier answers, I still think seminaries, by and large, are training pastors for a world that no longer exists. Christendom has all but crumbled, save a few places like the Bible belt. What seminaries did for so long is teach pastors to run the organization of the church and to build the church. So we have all of these well-run, shrinking churches because most church leaders have never been trained to think, act or behave like a missionary and they certainly don’t know how to disciple people to do the same.

And to do that, I think we must move beyond thinking at just 100,000 feet. We need to actually train our pastors in the nitty-gritty, dirty 5 feet spaces where they actually have to be missionaries and disciple people. We’ve actually been talking with Northern Seminary about developing this kind of track…almost a re-imagination of theological education. Probably just a pilot program to see how it goes.

You see, it’s great to theorize about being missional, it’s another thing to do it. So theological education should have much of what it does now, but it should be combined with people actually doing the work of the Kingdom. Sometimes I wonder if we’re afraid to teach our students best practices because we perceive so many churches are selling formulas we’ve jumped from ditch to ditch. With best practices, it isn’t that there is ONE WAY to do something; it’s that you have to start there and innovation can spring from that once you’ve learned it and done it well.

If we want missional innovation, we must understand the track goes like this:
Teaching (Information) —–> Training (Imitation) —–> Innovation

In Western education we’ve wrongly assumed that the right information would simply lead to innovation. There is a desperate need for seminaries to embrace the active, down-and-dirty training of missional leaders who go out to start movements of discipleship and mission; not people trained to build the organization of the church.

Dave Kludt is a pastor/equipper at Kairos Hollwood and works for the Fuller Doctor of Ministry program. When not doing one of these two things, he hangs out with his wife in East Hollywood reading books, laughing with friends, biking around the neighborhood, and eating ethnic food.