missio Dei Group

I recently met a new friend Dan Steigerwald who with his wife Ann and their two daughters moved to Portland a year ago from the Netherlands. His heart is to network and develop partnerships that will send healthy Christ-centered leaders and teams who will start missional initiatives and churches in the urban centers of the Pacific Northwest.

To start he has invited several individuals from the Portland/Vancouver area who have a similar passion to join a Missio Group. Linda and I have been invited to join Missio. As Dan describes it, Missio will be a face to face learning community that gathers regularly to stimulate each participant’s natural missional engagement with their neighborhood, workplace(s) and social network. The format envisaged is a weekly small group experience over three or four months involving conversations about how we might join Jesus in the missio Dei (mission of God) within our contexts. This includes discussions about how to apprentice disciples in their “missional formation.” Attention is also given to thoughtful interaction over how we might help seed a misional DNA within existing and new churches. It is hoped that Missio might become a proto-type for a group learning experience that is reproducible within local churches and other expressions of Christ-centered community around Portland.

The following are some of the questions we will be discussing.

What does it mean to be “missional” and why it matters?
How might we “live prophetically” in our context?
What does it take to make friends with those who’ve yet to know Christ?
What does incarnational living look like in practice?
What does evangelism look like and what is the message we speak/live?
Why Christianize everything when there’s already great waves to catch?
What is “time-banking” and how does it foster community?
How does spiritual formation relate to missional church?
What does it look like to be creatively missional?
How do we form and link local communities for maximum missional impact?
What have we learned and how can we pass it on?

To say I'm excited is somewhat of an understatement. These are questions that not only need to be asked, but also wrestled with, and than applied for the sake of the missio Dei.