LTM Report 3/4/08

Man, last night's LTM was exciting!!! We had some great discussion. Here's a recap that I posted over at Hub City's blog:

Last night we spent time discussing this question: How can we be a missionary church that develops missionaries? Everyone had something great to add to our discussion. Here’s an overview:

- Hub City Church is going to be a missional church. That means that everything we do, the money we spend, the groups we partner with, the music we use, the programs we do, and the topics we tackle will all be run through the missional filter: Is this connecting with people, specifically 20-30 somethings, who are not yet Christian?

- We don’t want Hub City Church to be a church that has a “club member” mentality where it’s all about us and where everything we do is about meeting the needs of club members. We are going to do whatever we can to guard against that.

- Just like missionaries in foreign countries contextualize the gospel and the methods to the culture they are trying to reach, so we will contextualize what we do to connect with 20 and 30 somethings in such a way that they want to be a part. This includes using secular songs, media, speaking to real needs, having music that sounds like what people are listening to, hanging out where not yet Christians hang out (as opposed to always wanting them to come to us).

- We talked about a scorecard so that we can measure whether or not we are actually developing missionaries and being missional. Instead of how many people attend or how much money are people giving we want to measure things like: Number of conversations with people who aren’t yet Christians, are our people actively inviting their not yet Christian friends, and the number of people who are participating in local and foreign mission projects.

- Action Steps: One thing we’ll be doing each week is coming up with an action step for people to do in response to what we’ve talked about. This week people signed up to help out with Shamrock’s on the Square on March 15. This is Spartanburg’s annual St. Patrick’s day celebration. We get to volunteer and be missionaries in our community. Don’t you want to be a part? Contact me and I’ll get you signed up to help.

One REALLY cool thing is that we had almost everyone sign up to help with Shamrock's on the Square. I'm really proud of our Launch Team. They stepped up to be missionaries. I can't wait to see how God is going to use us! I heard of definition of serving that I really like: Leveraging your abilities for the good of someone else. That's what we get to do on March 15th. Anybody else out there want to help us out?