A Missional Community is a group of people who orient their lives around being on mission together to make the Gospel known among a target group of people (a shared network of relationships, neighborhood, or need in their city). A Missional Community is a team of Missionaries working together for the glory of God in their local context. There are three reasons why I believe Missional Communities are the best way for a local church to live out the gospel in community on mission.
Today at 1PM EST, I’ll be interviewed by the team at Innovate For Jesus on the role of the Executive Pastor. Tim Stevens will also be on the show with me. Tim used to be the XP at Granger Community Church and now works for Vanderbloemen Search Group.
Email is like a visit to the dentist. You don’t really want to go. You’re a little nervous about what you might find, but at some point, it just has to be done. It’s painful to open your inbox after only a couple hours of meetings to find dozens of new emails dying for a response. It doesn’t have to be this bad. But here’s the deal – to quote Smokey The Bear, “only you can prevent forest fires”. With each new crop of interns that come through our church, I share some simple tips for making e-mail less painful for those around you. These are rules I try to live by. I thought I’d share them with you in hopes that together, we can reduce the volume in our inbox, and the length of the emails in it. (Plus I wanted to link to this article in my own e-mail footer, maybe you should too!)
We all know that our churches need to serve our communities, but let’s be honest, that can often degenerate into offering things at your buildings, and hoping that people will show up and “be served”. A few years ago, we took this to a whole new level with Mission Serve:Local. It has grown each year and last Saturday, over 600 people who call Mosaic Church home fanned out into the community to serve in over 50 projects, then returned for lunch together. Here is a full post about it. Having promoted this event for several weeks, we wanted to celebrate it right away, the very next day at all of our services with a video. That meant having one of our video people do a super fast turnaround on a video by editing all of the content in just a few hours. It also meant sending our story team around to multiple projects to capture video and pictures. I think it turned out well. Check it out.
I’ve been writing about the Generosity Initiative at Mosaic. It’s been going really well in the pre-launch and private phase. In just a couple weeks, we’ll start the public phase. We had this super short preview video, almost like a commercial, created to promote things and get people excited. Check it out! It’s really fun to see this stuff coming to life on the screen after so many months of work.
Earlier this year, I had the chance to teach twice at the first ever Acts 29 Conference in Guatemala. My friends at Casa De Libertad hosted the event. The Holy Spirit’s presence was palpable. We all had the overwhelming feeling that God was in the process of doing something unique at this event, and in Guatemala . . . all of Latin America really. Yancey Arrington was one of my fellow conference speakers. He writes about this sense of God’s timing on HIS BLOG. Acts 29 was in the process of making a new website, so they took awhile to get around to posting the video. Disclaimer: this was my first time teaching through an interpreter! I co-taught this session with Jay Bauman who leads Acts 29 Brazil. I got to visit Jay’s church in Rio De Janiero last fall while teaching at another Acts 29 Conference there. My church also has the privilege of supporting financially all that Jay is leading in Brazil.
I’ve been writing about the generosity initiative that Mosaic Church is launching later this year. I’ve shared the process we went through in deciding to get some outside help. Then I shared the four basic stages of the plan. And lastly, I shared the way we came to choose the name and subtitle. We landed on calling our generosity initiative GET LOUD-Let’s Actually Change Our World. With the language decided on, we needed to figure out the look of it all.
Earlier this year, I had the chance to teach twice at the first ever Acts 29 Conference in Guatemala. My friends at Casa De Libertad hosted the event. The Holy Spirit’s presence was palpable. We all had the overwhelming feeling that God was in the process of doing something unique at this event, and in Guatemala . . . all of Latin America really. Yancey Arrington was one of my fellow conference speakers. He writes about this sense of God’s timing on HIS BLOG. Acts 29 was in the process of making a new website, so they took awhile to get around to posting the video. Disclaimer: this was my first time teaching through an interpreter!
What’s in a name? Can’t we just go before the people, tell them the needs and leave it at that? Do we really need to come up with a name and a logo? I asked myself these questions earlier this year as Mosaic church began planning it’s generosity initiative with the help of Generis and ultimately I realized that your people need an identity to attach to vision. It’s the way our minds have been trained to work in our culture, and to be honest it’s just good shepherding to communicate clearly. We spent a couple months working on the look and language of our generosity initiative. Here is how that went.
Each summer, our Lead Pastor goes away on vacation for three weeks in a row. I love knowing that he does not worry about the church while he’s away because he knows that there is a great team in place back home. I usually cover the pulpit at least once while he’s gone. We are in the book of Acts, so I picked it up at Acts 19:21-41 teaching on how the Gospel Confronts Idolatry. You can catch the audio, or the video below.
Last week I had the opportunity to spend the week with 175 middle and high school students from Mosaic Church. It’s not something I would usually do. Was it worth my time? I don’t have a particular calling to students and I have no unique gifting with teenagers. But when our student ministry pastor asked me to consider going, I prayed about it, and decided that it was in fact, a good use of my time even though I’m in one of the busiest seasons of my working life.
Earlier this year I wrote about our churches decision to hire a company that specializes in Generosity Initiatives. We are now well into the planning on this process and I’d have to say that it has gone extremely well. Our tasks are on track. The project is moving forward and we have greater clarity overall. Generis and our rep, Chris Willard have done a great job.
I’m kind of an organized guy. I might be a little obsessed. I don’t have a problem though. I can stop anytime I want to. Really. To me, knowing what you need to get done in a day, or a week, or a month, is really important. So I use a list app called Wunderlist. Let me tell you what I’ve found works for me.
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Phil Taylor
My name is Phil. I spent 20 years pastoring (mostly executive pastoring) and now I serve churches all over through consulting on buildings and brands at Plain Joe Studios and coaching Executive Pastors. My wife and I have three kids and one grandchild. I’m into running and kayaking.