missio

In a brief follow up post to the last post on being a localized missional church, I’d like to talk about the pond, that is, your area of ministry. Have you really sat down and defined your pond? You and your staff need to discuss where it is you are to be reaching. Someone famous (can’t remember who) said that if you aim for nothing, you’ll hit it everytime. Ministry is no different. Jesus taught that we are to be a city on a hill. You have to know where your hill sits in order to be city on it. What could you define? In defining our pond, we’re using zip codes. We have a target area made up of four zip codes, within a 3-mile radius of one another. I’ve mapped out and noted the population, demographics, perceived needs, and churches within the ‘pond’.  I’m going to post some research tools that make defining your pond relatively easy, once you decide on who you’re going to reach. If you’re an existing ministry, I would suggest (maybe implore) that you not define who you’re trying to reach by who you are reaching. This may seem counter-intuitive, but just going along with who you’re reaching is not Scriptural. Just take a look at the Jew-Gentile division between Paul and Peter at first. They had separate ponds, but were making waves in one another’s. This was the foundational conflict of the whole Jerusalem council in Acts 15. Avoid a conflict by determining who you are to reach, and what exact pond you are to make waves in.

Another concrete example of this is a college ministry here where I am. They’ve reached off-campus and churched students for two years now, but it’s no good because the pond around them (the college itself) is still stagnant; algae is growing. The pond needs to be defined (the campus), and then ripples can start to be made. It’s possible to be a city on the wrong hill.