Mutual learning

Fellow storytellers,

The comment below from Chadd Schroeder in Mexico strikes me as a great example of a "community of practice" at work. That is, a context where all of us, as church planters, are learning from each other. (Chadd has always impressed me as both a great learner and a great teacher!)

In a sense, there several lessons in Chadd's comment. First, that videos are a great way to tell stories. Second, stories are a great way to change the culture. Third, that videos are amazingly easy to make these days. Fourth, that our MRT Community is a great place to share useful videos (either ones that we make or ones that we find).

Right now in the "Tags" section of our MRT site there are two videos listed. (And, I, the least techie of all of you, made them both.) I'm looking forward to story telling videos about vibrant families of Jesus from you all! (Under 5 minutes please.)

John


From Chadd...


One of the things that keeps coming to my mind as I watch the videos is that video interviews seem to communicate so effectively, contagiously and in multifaceted ways that written material is not able to do. I'm thinking of Mexicans and the obstacles to the viral spread of the kingdom here. I sense God wants me to experiment more in this area. Hmm...

MRT Modeled in Scripture

Here's a great insight from Peg Batcheller in Albuquerque...

"Here's what I saw this morning in Colossians 4:7-9.

What a great example of an MRT, that even then, in the first century, men traveled in 2s, sent messages around the territories to share what was happening in their cities and to encourage the brothers and sisters in other cities. They sent messengers, whereas we just get online for a few minutes and tell our stories across the world. But the message is the same: communicate with each other how we are doing, and encourage the hearts of the others.

Tychicus will tell you all the news about me. He is a dear brother, a faithful minister and fellow servant in the Lord. I am sending him to you for the express purpose that you may know about our circumstances and that he may encourage your hearts. He is coming with Onesimus, our faithful and dear brother, who is one of you. They will tell you everything that is happening here.

You are right on, brother, in the MRTs working together to encourage the believers, and to share our stories. Thanks for the invitation to be here with you."

Your thoughts?

John

MRT Introduction: Guadalajara, Central Mexico

Hola! (That's about the extent of my Spanish.)

All kinds of interesting insights into MRTs from Chadd's introduction to us below. I think I'll reframe from my comments for now and ask you - what do you see in what he has written that seems important as we think about how MRTs function?

John



Intro to Guadalajara MRT

My name is Chadd Schroeder. My wife Nancy and our three daughters, Morgan, Natali and Ceci have lived in Central Mexico and have understood ourselves as missionaries to the people here since 1991. For the last 12+ years, we’ve lived in Guadalajara—a large Mexican city of about 7 million people.

Over the years, we have always worked with a team of other U.S. missionaries and Mexican leaders. But especially for the past 5 years we have understood ourselves more as an MRT instead of a traditional missionary team. Instead of all working on one church or one project, we have transitioned to see ourselves as a grouping of trans-local workers with a common vision to see healthy incarnations of Christ throughout our region even as each of us is involved in different local ministries or projects and with different communities of Christ. For the past few years, we have typically met together every two weeks to connect with one another and to listen to God together. The relationship and practice has been very helpful.

Our MRT for now is made up of four families: Cory and Toni Burns, Tim and Kim Rush, Gerardo and Carola Garcia, and my family. The ladies are encouraged to connect with us fellows when possible—but family duties sometimes make this difficult. It seems that we are in a strange and new time for us. The Rush family is on furlough in Tulsa, Oklahoma. They hope to move back to GDL in summer 2010. The Burns family is planning to go on a one year furlough this summer—and then return to GDL in 2011 for a new mission assignment. The Garcia family is Mexican. They are very involved in local and trans-local ministry in Guadalajara and envision themselves likely in GDL for many years to come. Gerardo is limited in his understanding of English—but a gifted and proven Mexican leader. Finally, my family is planning to transition to Texas in July 2010. However, after so many years of life and ministry here in Mexico, we are stretching ourselves to envision an ongoing ministry of some kind to Mexico—perhaps as “Non-Resident Missionaries”—even as we also feel God’s call to flesh out Jesus with others in Texas.

I think this MRT experiment with you is timely. Because of so many transitions with missionary families, we had stopped our intentional practice of gathering as an MRT (though we remained connected through phone calls, CO2 relationships, etc.). But through this experiment with you all, God seems to be urging us to begin anew the practice—perhaps as a way to remain intentionally connected and strategically praying for our region even as we move into a new chapter of our lives as apostolic workers. Because of our geographical challenges now and in the near future, we have decided to meet every 2 weeks for our gathering on Skype. For the moment we are using the name Equipos de Misioneros Translocales (EMT) to articulate the idea in Spanish. We translated Kent’s document in Spanish using that name.

I wonder what God will teach us and do among us in the next few months.

MRT Introduction: Cambridgeshire, England

Dear Simple Friends,

It was about 9-10 years ago that we came up with the term "simple church". Neil Cole had coined"organic church" as an alternative to house church because "not all churches meet in houses". I liked that a lot! Then, one day this thought wandered into my mind: "Simple church - a way of doing church that is so simple that any believer could say, "I could do that!" ".

In that one phrase, we took a quantum leap towards the priesthood of all believers.

MRTs are much the same... a way of doing (being) regional leadership that is so simple that any two apostolic people could say, "We could do that!"

Sean and Chris, in their story below, are a wonderful example of this principle. I love this phrase: "We held our first meeting before we really understood what the MRT process was." The fact that the MRT idea is so simple tells me that there is great potential for it to also be viral. It will be fun to see if that is indeed the case.

One other thing to point out. Once they had read the Invitation, they "began to explore the MRT blog". In other words, they began to read your stories and comments. Keep this in mind when you find others you want to invite into the MRT Experiment. Encourage them to explore this blog and see if it's the kind of community they would want to be a part of.

In the comments section, I hope you will welcome our two friends from England and share with us all your observations about their story.

Simply,

John

Hi everybody, we are Sean (Diviney) and Chris (Jefferies) in the western part of Cambridgeshire in England. We joined the MRT experiment a little late and are not very far along with it yet. However, the way we got started will make a good story so we'll tell that for now, we can share other information later as we learn more about Father's purpose for us.

We have been doing CO2 together since the first week of December and it was a blog post about CO2 that encouraged John to contact us with an MRT experiment invitation. We held our first meeting before we really understood what the MRT process was. Chris had watched John's interview with Kent before we met and we talked about that, we discussed three connections we felt drawn to make with local people, and we prayed together.

Afterwards, as we began to explore the MRT blog and understand it more thoroughly we realised that we had already held our first session. What a revelation!Everything we have seen and heard so far resonates with what we've been seeing and feeling for some time as a result of spending time in CO2. We think CO2 leads naturally to mission. Both of us had already felt driven towards some form of outreach and we thought the Luke 10:2 approach would be the way to go.

In particular we already felt that mission would come through listening, that what we do would be driven and guided by what we heard. Now we had been invited to join a considerable number of people who felt the same way. This was awesome!So here we are.

So far we have three possible 'leads', one new and two older ones that we want to try to 'refresh'. The new lead is a Muslim couple who live about a mile from Chris, they published an article on a Muslim website and we spotted it and feel we should follow up on it. We will try to make contact with them.And finally there's a good chance we'll repeat a kid's camp that we were involved with last summer. This may give us links to parents as well as the children.Meanwhile we plan to meet weekly to chat and pray. We'll keep you posted on developments.

MRT Introduction: Hawai'i

Fellow Incarnational Workers,

See below for the introduction from our friends who, in order to function subversively, need to be called simply "two workers in Hawaii". (BTW have you seen Eugene Peterson's chapter on "The Subversive Pastor" in The Contemplative Pastor? He makes the powerful point that "Jesus was a master at subversion".)

Two comments come to my mind about this report. The first is that it reminds us that each of our "mission fields" have a different level of receptivity. As a result, the strategies that He gives us will vary. There's no "one size fits all" here. I see our MRT Community as a place where we can reflect on these differences with safe people who understand the uniqueness of each calling.

Second, I love the fact that this MRT is consist of just two people - in this case a husband and wife. ("... and He sent them out two by two" -Lk 10:1) The simplicity of this has huge implications for multiplication. Neil Cole: "Only that which is simple can multiply rapidly."

Your comments/observations?

John


We are two workers following God into mission in the beautiful Hawaiian Islands. We believe God has called us to be vocational apostolic workers here for the rest of our lives. This place is our home and these people are our people. We aim to take on the "flesh" of our fellow citizens as a way for them to see the Kingdom revealed among them. That means, we're doing everything we can to blend in and incarnate Christ here in a local manner. Hence, we've taken regular, ordinary, everyday jobs as a vehicle for building continuity with our fellow locals and opening up venues for ministry and evangelism. For far too long, Christianity has been brought here with a foreign fist ready to strike at anything non-Western. We feel it is now time for the Kingdom of God in Hawai'i to be revealed with love and aloha - allowing ordinary people here to see that they can join up with God without having to "leave home" in the process.

For the now, it is just us as a couple who are part of the MRT for this region - at least, we're the only two that know we're part of it. There are others we live among and connect with on a frequent basis that hold to CO2/MRTish practices and have missional hearts for this place. So, while we don't have any official MRT-mates (as of yet), we are definitely not without believing company. We're actually just getting started (within our first year in our current location) but we do have a church of believers (6 adults, 3 kids) that shares life together within our neighborhood. We have also found many people of peace in this place (some followers of JC, some not) that we are nurturing relationships with and seeing where God leads. Even though we may not live to see it, we look forward to the day when every person in this region is within close-reach, both geographically and culturally, to a local family of Jesus.

The "First Five"

MRT Community,

Many of you are responding to my request last week of investing the first five minutes of your email time each day to the MRT Experiment. To reading the post of the day (I'll work on keeping them short) and responding with a comment. Thank you!

Perhaps you may feel that you need to say something profound in every comment. I want to assure you that this is not the case! A key part of the MRT Experiment is about building encouraging webs of relationships - even with people we've never seen face to face. It's about knowing that we're not alone. Knowing that there are others on the same journey who we can talk to and who will pray for us.

This is the kind of community where mutual learning can thrive.

So, today, I just going to post below some of the responses to the Chicago MRT Introduction from yesterday by Mark and Katrina Willis. Read them over and see if any comments come to mind about the value of a community of friendship and mutual learning like this.

John


From Chris in England...

Mark and Katrina, thanks for this introduction. You have encouraged me and confirmed what is happening where I live as being part of the same pattern. It's the way the Almighty does things.I'm impressed that on the one hand you see the loud work of the world but intermingled with it Papa's work of love and peace through his special people. What a contrast!'People from the harvest who can be leaders in their context.'Yes! That is the key to how the Kingdom will continue to come. The sown seed growing and sowing seed of its own. Read Revelation 3:7-8. The key of David is the Key to the Kingdom, the key that was promised in Matthew 16:19.


From Hobby in Brighton, CO...

Wow, you are quite articulate! I love the description.I appreciate the image of you pouring yourselves out/emptying yourselves. Philippians 3 has been on my mind lately.Father, I pray that you be WITH Mark and Katrina. Make your presence known as you rejoice and suffer with them. Accept their offering and fill them up again and again.


From Noah soon to be in Christchurch, NZ

Praying for you guys in Chicago - that's a tough city if I've ever seen one!For the Kingdom!!


From Chadd in Guadalajara, MX...

Mark and Katrina-great description of the vision that God is placing on your heart. I really appreciate your desire to interact with the people in your city--to notice and look for ways to describe what you see through your Father's eyes. I'm praying with you today.

MRT Introduction: Chicago

Fellow church planters,

See below for a great description of the harvest field called "Chicago". Mark and Katrina Willis, part of the Abilene/Antioch diaspora, have been assigned by the Lord of the harvest to that huge city. Add your voice to theirs today in beseeching the Lord to thrust out (exballo) an army of harvest workers there.

John

My wife Katrina and I are living and working here in urban Chicago - we moved here in June 2008. It's been a fast-paced lifestyle that has asked a lot of us emotionally, financially, and spiritually. Living in the urban matrix of Chicago, we've seen elements of Babel and whispers of the New Jerusalem -- plenty of "making a name for ourselves" through skyscrapers, gang graffiti, and workaholics; but also plenty of peace-making, reconciliation, and redistribution of God's people throughout the "empire" to serve the poor and lost among us.

We are connected to several other couples in the city who have the goal of planting house churches and participating in mission with God. This has been a great source of encouragement for us, and at the same time, we're still listening to God as to how he is calling us together. Our dream is to see a "vibrant family of Jesus" in close reach of every person in Chicago. We are desperately praying that God show us people from the harvest who can be leaders in their context. We have seen several vibrant families gather in the last year, and are praying for the holistic salvation of Chicago, the "city of neighborhoods."