One of the questions I'm asked most is: "How do you keep missional communities healthy?" "How do you help them grow?" At Austin City Life, we've learned this one the hard way. Some of the mistakes we've made include:

• Installing (unqualified) leaders too fast
• Multiplying without vision or a clear process
• Making mission a project and unclear in focus

We've rectified these failures through listening to our leaders, developing several tools, and then training them accordingly. Before pointing to the tools we've found helpful in nurturing healthy missional communities, I'd like to mention an important point. One of the healthiest things a missional community can do is talk about missional community.

Missional Communities Talk About Missional Community

When I say, missional communities should talk about missional community, I don't mean they need to study it, discuss its theoretical fine points, or theologize about it (though all of those can be good). What I mean is communities on mission should talk about what their community is like and how their mission is going, regularly. 

If a missional community is a network of brothers and sisters in Christ, a family, then they should act like a family. In family, there's no taboo topic. Healthy families hash out problems, confront challenges, resolve conflict, reflect on their relationships, and plan to be better families. They have fights, offer discipline and correction, talk about their expectations of one another, and plan to spend weekends, vacations, and regular time together. Similarly, healthy missional communities should do the same. See and treat one another as a family.

My missional community has celebrated births and new careers, encouraged one another in deep doubt and skepticism, affirmed spiritual growth, and talked about our areas of weakness. We talked about our "event" mindset when it comes to community, or unmet expectations in our mission among the poor, our desire to grow beyond offering moralisms into wise, biblical counsel. This is especially important given our common nature to compare, judge, and compete.

Regular conversations help keep missional legalism (measuring one another's worth on missional performance) from creeping in, or help us ferret it out. There can be a tendency to judge one another based on our missional community performance. If we're not careful, we'll compare without conversing, silently keeping score on who shows up in the projects more, who is more active in community, who is more active in sharing their faith? Having these conversations creates space for repentance over selfishness or legalism, making it an opporunity to grow through adversity as a community. Truth be told, we're all going to fail at missional community, so we might as well be honest about it, and in our honesty, look to Jesus for forgiveness and renewed zeal for his fame.

3 Tools God Can Work Through

Talking like family as a missional community takes time, trust, and patience. Focus in mission requires a lot of the same. Therefore, its important to implement things that will make it easier. Here are three tools for the three issues I listed up top on: Leadership, Multiplication, and Health Evaluation. The Monthly Missional Community Check-in helps coaches, leaders, and even the MCs themselves, know where they need to grow in Gospel, Community, and Mission. The diagnostic questions promote healthy reflection so that you can focus on an area of growth. Feel free to take these tools and tweak them for your church and context. They are imperfect but God has a history of working through imperfect people, especially when they bank on his grace.

• Missional Community Leader Application
• Multiplying a Missional Community
• Monthly Missional Community Check-in