Posted 97 days ago
Mustard Seed vs. Mega-church
By Eileen Hansen, Trinity Lutheran Church
In a religious landscape that celebrates the “mega,” Trinity Lutheran Church conceived and freed a simple vision of smallness through its Mustard Seed ministry. We found we have a number of Christian creatives who are not a part of the core leadership and like emerging leaders want to create imaginative new missional expressions. We started this ministry because we wanted to help them unleash their imaginations to create new ways to make a difference. We also want to help other traditional churches enable their creative members to create new forms of innovative mission like some of the younger churches are doing. In fact, that will be the focus of my workshop at The New Conspirators gathering.
The mission of the Mustard Seed ministry is to plant hope in our neighborhoods through one-on-one relationships and small missional groups that translate and live out the life and message of Jesus in suburban and institutionally suspicious settings. Trinity is a mainline Protestant church that has defied the general trend of decline because of its commitment to taking risks in response to its perceived call as a faith community. The Mustard Seed ministry was a risk that evolved in October 2006 and was supported by a generous one-year grant from the Northwest Washington Synod of the ELCA. Essentially, the ministry seeks to free people to live out their passions and interests through small group life and to engage others into the life of the groups. The groups are balanced to nurture deeper relationships with the Triune God, caring relationships with one another, and inviting and serving relationships with their neighbors near and far. The interpretation and expression of this balance is left to the participants since the goal is to make the”* LifeGroups*”:http://www.trinitymustardseed.com/lifegroups relevant to their unique contexts.
As of January 2008, there are 14 LifeGroups, a few of which I mention here:
1.Journey: an intergenerational group of women who gather to share their spiritual journey through life in words and expressions both spoken and written;
2.Sowing Seeds of Hope: a group wanting to make a difference in the lives of children and women in Nicaragua by funding and organizing a women’s sewing cooperative in Nicaragua and establishing a distribution network in the U.S.;
3.Play and Pray: a co-ed softball team playing in the Lynnwood softball league;
4.Christian Drama Studio: a group of middle school students who gather for friendship, practice Christian-themed dramas, and perform the dramas to assisted living centers and area churches.
Again, all of these groups are intentionally “balanced” between their upward spiritual life, inward fellowship life, and outward mission and service life, which has planted hope and belonging in the lives of many neighbors who have been injured by the institutional church or who would never walk through the doors of a church building.
The entrepreneurial spirit of this basic ministry of small missional groups has translated to other new ministries at Trinity. As an example, Neighbors in Need has emerged from a grass-roots call to respond to the increasing homeless population in Lynnwood, not only to dispense “charity goods,” but more importantly to establish relationships that encourage, inspire and hopefully one day equip people with skills to move out of the quagmire of poverty.
The goals of the Mustard Seed ministry are not only to continue to grow the groups in the next few years, but more importantly to deepen the spiritual, communal, and mission/service lives of all the participants so that they become incarnational examples of faith to others in their lives—without labels and without walls. Call it “paying it forward” or “rippling beyond,” but that is the basic flow and dynamic of LifeGroups. Another important goal for the next year is to establish larger gatherings of LifeGroups in regional geographic areas. A typical LifeGroup has approximately 6-15 people, and in the next year we will be establishing “hubs” or “satellite” communities that share the same balance and entrepreneurial spirit as the LifeGroups. These groups, however, will introduce more traditional elements of the sacraments for an average gathering of 70-100 people. These Hub Communities will be indigenous reflections of the people who create them, and just as there is a creative variety of LifeGroups, there will also be a creative variety of Hubs as well.
Trinity continues to invite members to experiment, to risk, to learn, and to make mistakes, as we respond to our call to Share the Word of God, Grow the People of God, and Live the Love of God. We do not have the answers, but we invite partners who are interested in walking with us in asking the questions and in imagining and living into new expressions of the traditional church.
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