Launching Missional Labs
A ministry design group built on the Missio Dei
Hey - if you’re new, welcome!
You might be interested in some recent articles, like Design Thinking and Mission, or Digital Transformation and the Church, or Mission in the Modern World.
I’m excited to announce the launch of MISSIONAL LABS - a design and innovation group for churches and ministries, built on the Missio Dei.
Here’s the website. More below. Enjoy, and send to a friend!
Disruption and Opportunity
It’s late October 2020, and I’m going on a lot of walks around Sheep’s Meadow in Central Park these days. I live on the Upper West Side, and even though I’m digitally in touch with most of my friends and network from church, I haven’t seen most of them in person in months.
It’s the longest I’ve ever gone without live Sunday services, and so the contrast as to what they bring - connection, community, shared hearing of the Word, experiential worship, etc - has never been sharper.
Everything is different - evangelism, discipleship, teaching, relationship, prayer, worship - all of it.
I know I’m not the only one. I’ve spent quite a bit of time in 2020 thinking about disruption, innovation, and the church, given the circumstances.
It’s safe to say 2020 is one of the largest immediate disruptions churches have ever faced. Overnight, 330,000 congregations in the United States alone lost their essential organizing principle: gathering together a physical community of people.
We’ve had to start thinking about live-streaming and digital transformation and online evangelism and marketing and media production, on top of how to care for and form people in a world being consumed by the roller-coasters of politics, media, race, technology, and power.
Much could be said about this (and I’ll keep exploring it), but churches and ministries today are facing big cultural and technological disruptions, and we all know it, see it, and feel it.
The Shape of Things to Come?
As a church leader in the middle of New York City working on this stuff, I’m deeply interested in the shaping of things to come (to borrow my friend Alan Hirsch’s phrase). Much change will be permanent after 2020, even if many churches revert back to “normal.”
In disruption, leaders need agility and creativity, undergirded by deep biblical imagination. We need to learn mission-oriented “design thinking,” to imagine, design, and craft new ways of communicating and embodying the Gospel for new hearers, in new places, through new mediums, technologies, and channels.
Contextualization matters. It resists passive withdrawal and results-driven pragmatism. Can we re-contextualize the Gospel into our moment, in partnership with what the Spirit is doing in the world?
The invitation will always be to step into the disruption to shape the future.
My hope is to see more pastors, church planters, staff leaders, funders, and nonprofit execs develop apostolic imagination, and use creative tools to translate the Gospel into new shapes, forms, and mediums in the world.
We have a chance to design “missionary encounters” in cultural frontiers like New York City, and create compelling cultural apologetics for the future.
Launching MISSIONAL LABS
With this in mind, we’re launching MISSIONAL LABS, an innovation group built on the Missio Dei.
To be “missional,” in essence, means to adopt the creative mindset of missionaries: sent, courageous, curious, flexible, and committed to partnering with God to redeem and renew all things.
We help leaders develop missional imagination, and build capacity for theologically-rooted, Spirit-empowered innovation and design.
MISSIONAL LABS will do a few different things:
Consulting Practice: We’re building a consulting group, with a network of mission-minded strategists and creatives, to work closely with leaders on vision, strategy, digital ministry, content, marketing, and more.
Digital Courses: We’re building digital products on missional discipleship, missional leadership, and missional innovation. Take a look at our first course built with Church of the City, with more in development.
Content: We’re creating content from the frontiers of our cultural moment. We’ll look at evangelism, church planting, technology, cities, and more, using case-studies to help advance best practices from the innovative edges. Take a look at some of our articles in this newsletter.
Ventures: We’ll help take on special projects we believe in, and give you that marketing team, creative team, and operations team you don’t have on board. We want to see new tools and initiatives for evangelism and discipleship find their audiences and grow.
I’m also teaming up with my friend Stephen Mulder - he’s been the Associate National Director at Alpha Canada since 2012, and is stepping in to work as the Chief of Staff at Bridgetown Church in Portland, Oregon. He’s from South Africa, worked in Dubai in consulting, and has an MA in Theology from Regent College. He’s got a big heart for leadership, evangelism, and the Gospel. We’re excited to team up.
Get Involved
If you’re reading this, there are a few ways to get involved.
We’re just getting started, so much could change as we grow, develop, and fine-tune our story and our core resources. But, start here:
Subscribe and Share. This newsletter is the first step toward everything we’re doing and the audience we’re building.
Set up a call - If you’re a ministry leader, we would love to talk all things mission and innovation. We want to learn from you. Set up a call here.
Slack channel - If you’re a strategist, creative, technologist, producer, etc., with a vision of missional innovation, let us know! We’re building a small slack channel to get started.
Stay tuned - More to come! Email me with any thoughts, ideas, and recommendations.
Some Personal Background
You might wonder where this is all coming from, so I thought some quick personal narrative would be helpful.
Growing up in the midwest, I spent a lot of time with missionaries. My dad was a pastor, and we had missionaries coming through the church all the time, including my extended family living in Congo, India, Pakistan, and more. I was always fascinated by their inventiveness and courage.
In college, I moved to Los Angeles, and spent a lot of time exploring the various churches in the region reaching the city. I studied economics and the humanities, trying to understand our cultural narratives and how it all works. I spent time around the world with mission-driven organizations, went to Urbana, and even got to go to the Lausanne Congress in Cape Town in 2010, which helped me map the major themes and networks happening at a global level.
I spent the next five years traveling the world for OneHope. It was there that I got innovation into my DNA. Everything was a design challenge - how do you create a book, a video, a movie, and app, and program, or an experience for people in a small part of Nigeria, or Thailand, or Lebanon? How can it be a resource for churches and communities on the ground? This set the framework for me, and I loved it.
I did some grad work on this topic, in seminary, and moved up to New York City. I spent a season learning from the great folks at Praxis, and then wanted to put this into practice in a local church context, and found the perfect friend and partner with Jon Tyson at Church of the City. It’s in this context that we worked together to build a creative and missional church, with prayer and discipleship as the beating heart, in the middle of New York City. We’ve worked on a bunch of fun side projects, including the Missional Life Course and the Church Accelerator, among others.
During COVID-19, I’ve watched as cultural disruption and technological acceleration have made the world go crazy, scattered our congregation, closed our venues, and put pastors and leaders on their back foot all over the city. I’ve seen us all try to respond to online church, race and justice, national politics, and technology and algorithms, all while trying to care for hurting congregations.
So, I felt like it was time to do more to help beyond my own context, and create resources to try to help us all in this cultural moment.
This is where I’m coming from. Hope you’ll join.