Missional Communities – Quick-Start Guide

Missional Communities are how we obey the command to “meet together to encourage one another to love and good deeds” (Hebrews 10:24-25).

So once you have established some Growth Groups the next step is to make each member of the group the centre of a Missional Community. This is really easy!

1. Visit your immediate neighbors and explain that you would like to gather a few neighbors together to share a meal and get to know them better and talk about how they can improve things for the community. If one of the neighbors offers to host the meal, accept the offer, otherwise host the meal yourself (they don’t have to be believers.)
2. When you gather for the meal, ask them if you can give thanks to God for the food. Give thanks for Jesus giving His life for us by allowing Himself to be unjustly killed and then rising from the dead to be the King over all things.
3. Explain that you want to give each person a portion of food and a drink of water and that it represents Jesus' body and blood that He gave so we can have Life.
4. Then enjoy your meal together and talk about your community. Encourage people to be thankful for the good things and to think about what they can do to help where there are bad things.
5. After the meal, encourage people (including unbelievers) to talk about how they think God may be working in their own lives. Ask them what they can do to cooperate with God.
6. Tell them about Growth Groups and share a gospel story and discuss it together. Afterwards offer to help them start a GG in their own home.
7. Discuss and plan any specific action you can take together to help your community.
8. Plan your next meal together.

Missional Communities should be for all Christians and their neighbors, regardless of what church they go to, or if they don’t go to church at all. You should especially try to include any troublesome families, because the Gospel message is for the broken, the sick, the captives and those who are lost.

If you have Growth Groups and Missional Communities, you have the keys to reaching whole communities with the Gospel and reaching out into the communities all around.

Remember that Missional Communities work best when there are less than 40 people involved, so create lots of small Missional Communities (the average size across the world is about 10). If more people want to join in, then simply start a new one. The whole point is to reach out, rather than gather in.

The mentality of traditional church is to gather, gather, gather. They think that the more you gather the more successful you are. Our mentality is to go, go, go. Reach out. Create new Growth Groups, new Missional Communities, go to new villages. If people want to gather from other communities, we MUST RESIST! Instead encourage them to gather in their own community and start their own GG’s and Missional Communities.