Tonight we meet to begin framing up our core practices as a missionary team. We are seeing ‘core practices’ as the things we will agree to do together as a team to keep ourselves focused on the task we came to Brighton for and growing in the faith we want to communicate.
In thinking of ourselves as a low level mission order, we believe its important to set higher requirements for team members in terms of both relational committment and a performative ethic.
Its about shaping up a sodality (to use a technical term) as we will have a ‘modality’ meeting every second Sunday AM.
Its also about doing these things as a covenant – not as a legalistic rule.
A few reasonably obvious ‘practices’ or requirements for team membership would be:
- Living in the suburb of Brighton.
- Long term commitment – 3 years?
- Attend and participate in all team & community meetings
- A personal spiritual formation plan that wil enable you to train yourself to be godly
- A description of how local mission will occur for you that you will be accountable for
- A description of your gifts and how you see these functioning in team/community/neighbourhood that you will be accountable for.
I have others that come to mind but that’ll do for now!
At times it feels quite anal, yet history shows that without some bars to jump people tend towards laziness – I know I do.
The question will likely be whether we can come up with practices that stretch us but aren’t beyond us practically. And then of course we will need to support, encourage and challenge one another in the implementation of these practices.
Anybody else experimenting with ‘core pracs’?