Creating Community and exploring Mission initiatives in the C21st:
things we learnt
- Praying for what you are doing is essential – with prayer things happen, without it they don’t!
- Listening to God also crucial – his plans may be different from ours…
- Pioneering new relationships, initiatives or projects is a long term thing – nothing happens overnight
- It also takes time, commitment and sacrifice – like anything in life, if you want to see results, you have to put in hard work
- Small results are not to be disregarded – Jesus often worked one person or one small group at a time
- ‘Ordinary’ results are not to be disregarded either – just because you have known a person a long time, it is no different when they come to church or come to faith than if it was someone off the streets…
- Trying something means taking risks, possibly looking stupid, going out of your comfort zone…
- Don’t worry about what other people are doing – what is God calling you to do in your context
- Language and presentation can be really important – a churchy feel can put people off who don’t want to be churchy… but this may mean working hard at escaping our in-built church way of thinking
- Social media is great for bringing things to the community’s attention – don’t ignore it; if you can’t use it – find someone who can do it for you
- Just be yourself, be ordinary, be part of the community, be one of them…
- Helping people explore nowadays is best done from within – explore with them, don’t teach from the outside
- Constantly be aware of the balance between recognising that something doesn’t work (and therefore switching to something else) and persevering (just because it doesn’t work on the first occasion doesn’t mean giving up)
Jacqui Horton October 2017