Missional Pathway

The Missional Pathway provides a church with four experiences over the course of 18 months:

1. Assess - Assess how your church’s history, strengths, make up, and passions have prepared it to minister influentially in the community. Understand the community around you and the opportunities God has provided for your congregation’s engagement.

2. Advance – Discover who God wants your church to serve in your local area and the God-honoring difference God intends to make in their lives through your ministry, love, and service. Discern the values that will underscore all you do within and outside the congregation as you move into mission.

3. Discover A(D) – God has been at work preparing every Christian for the unique impact each was made to bring to the world around them. [Ephesians 2:10] Discover, a nine-hour workshop, helps reveal who God made each participant to be and what God wants each to do so that new disciples are made in the community outside.

4. A(D) Team Series – This is a ten-week community where teams of church members discover, embrace, and apply Gospel insights and practice Bible discovery tools, a bit at a time. The Team Series is an indispensable support so believers incorporate the postures and practices that produce new disciples in their way of living.

1. Christians—even those who want to see new disciples made through their influence—often feel unsure how to accomplish this noble outcome, particularly in a culture that has become increasingly hostile to the Church. The Pathway provides a well-traveled route to personal and whole-congregation engagement with those God is preparing to be open to the Gospel.

2. Missional engagement is not a matter of simply being told we must evangelize. The missing key is motivation. We take ten weekly sessions to unpack and process the implications of what Jesus has done for us as the foundation for reaching out to our neighbors. We call this gospel-motivation.

3. Every Christian was meant to influence others to ultimately discover and live God’s calling for them. To live what the Bible calls “the life that is truly life.” [1 Timothy 6:19]. In Discover A(D) we review our life experiences and highlight what motivated us toward Jesus as a way to seek and support those with a similar “God-shaped hole.”[Pascal’s Pensées] We take nine hours to consider how Ephesians 2:10 applies to each of our lives.

4. Teams of similarly-visioned, like-minded believers who are mobilized to impact the lost have been most effective in evangelizing whole networks of relationships. The Missional Pathway assembles and guides teams in each congregation who individually and collectively foster relationship with un-churched people slowly, over time. Activated teams are the building blocks for effective community engagement.

5. God has placed community leaders within reach of your congregation who will welcome your ministry in the city. Some will come to be indispensable partners as you move into neighborhoods, bringing Christ’s light into the darkness. The Missional Pathway helps you identify these “persons of peace” and guides your connection with them, each step of the way.

6. You will need a comprehensive plan that is, above all brief, practical, and actionable. Integral to the Missional Pathway is the guidance to develop your own “mission plan.”

7. Churches are famous for launching well-intentioned endeavors in their communities—only to exit when difficulties arise. Not so with the Missional Pathway. Our focus is long-term engagement, and you will be coached for years while the mission plan becomes reality.

Your church will…

1. Increase in motivation to make new disciples.

2. Form effective teams of disciple-makers.

3. Impact the local community with the good news of Christ in tangible, relatable ways.

4. Experience its members’ excitement as they are being used by God in life-giving, biblically-consistent ways.

5. Enjoy encouragement as people in the community respond to the love and generosity that your church members embody with gratitude, then openness.

6. Become a church that is influential in the community because of the authenticity of its members as they minister to those outside the Church regularly, personally, and unconditionally.

Because our staff are supported by financial donors, churches pay only for ACTIVATE(D) staff travel and congregation members’ materials.

The church (or participants) cover:

1. Assess workbook: $15/participant

2. Advance workbook: $15/participant

3. A(D) Team Series Journal: $30/participant

4. Miscellaneous workshop supplies: $250/church