Contagion

One of the first things a house needs is a foundation. This part of the process will determine what the finished process of the house will look like. It will determine if this house will be solid, weak, straight or crooked. If precision isn’t used and wisdom isn’t valued, this house will not last long. This is where we are at as a launch team.

We have been meeting for about a month now and things have been going really well. As we’ve been discussing how this church will look, we’ve determined 2 things: This church will be completely about the lost and it will primarily focus on the community in which it is a part of (which most churches do). Accompanying these two factors are a few challenges that we have addressed.

If this church is going to be primarily about the lost, how are we going to reach them? Up until this point, our approach has been to put together a very well designed and run Sunday morning for the lost to come to. As we reassessed this approach, we decided that it was a little niave to think that people who haven’t gone to church a day in their life would just decide to come once they heard about our “cool, hip and trendy church meeting in a movie theater.” We still want to do our best to make Sunday’s as good as we possibly can so people aren’t falling asleep in the theater chairs . However, there has to be a more strategic approach to reaching mission than to just put on a show and expect the lost to come running, which leads to the second challenge.

Everyone currently on our launch team lives in Abbotsford and because we have determined that this is a church that will focus primarily on mission, we find ourselves in a bit of a pickle. How do we reach a community that we aren’t even a part of? This has been more of a challenging obstacle to get over but we have come up with a few solutions.

First off, Bek and I feel that as the primary leaders of this church, our family needs to relocate to mission. So we are actively pursuing the possibilities of how this can happen sooner rather than later. Second, as a launch team, we have GOT to be actively involved in the life of the community. This doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone needs to move but it DOES mean that we each have to commit to being a part of the community every chance we get. What this looks like will be different for each of us individually, but as a group we are committing to do a few things like being in the Canada Day Parade, Volunteering for and putting a soap box in the Annual Soap Box Derby, Passing out water bottles at the Mission Speedway and being involved in the Christmas light parade. The possibilities are endless and these are just a few of things we can do to live incarnationally in the city. This will be a stretch for all of us but it is necessary if we are going to become a part of this community and fully understand who it is we are trying to reach.

Out of these oppurtunities our main purpose will be to serve as well as broaden our sphere of influence with those we are serving. Through these relationships that are formed we hope our church will gain profile in the community and the people will see that we care about the community and want to come alongside those already doing so and make it a better place. We feel that this time of integrating into the community is crucial and will be one of the things that will determine whether we are a church for the lost or not.

Our goal is to still launch the church in September, but will not go “fully public” with our gatherings until January. From September until January we want to take a very strategic approach to what we do. Our intention is to have monthly preview gatherings that will have a dual purpose of giving the community of mission the opportunity to get a taste of what our church will look and feel like as well as giving us the chance to figure out what we do well and correct the things we don’t do well. During the week after each gathering we will have a casual social event where people can come and hear a more detailed version of what our church will be about. Our hope is that we will have people who don’t know Jesus come to these events as well as Christians who aren’t currently connected to a church and are looking for a place to serve and reach the lost. On top of these events, we will have Undercurrents (incarnational small groups) where people can get plugged into. We are also currently in discussion about starting weekly worship gatherings that would be relaxed and informal in nature as a means of expanding our foundation of who will form the church.