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WHDL - 00014254

Missional Communities and Training Leaders to Plant Missional, Faith-Based Communities in the Mission Valley of Northwest Montana

Matthew W. Connally

William Broadhurst Library at Nazarene Theological Seminary

Resource Types

Academic (Thesis, Dissertation, Etc.)

Resource Languages

English

Institutional Repository

Description / Abstract

The Mission Valley of northwest Montana is a diverse place of Native and Anglo Cultures. There are numerous churches that exist in the valley; however, very few have found a way to balance the cultural diversities and their mission to the community. The model of mission consists of build bigger and inviting more, but the mission of reaching into the various communities and forgotten neighborhoods of the valley have been forgotten. There seems to be a struggle as to what constitutes the “Missio Dei” and what it means for churches to participate in said “Missio Dei.” To solve this problem, this project discusses the often-forgotten contextual element of Native American culture. Then the project provides a guiding “Missional Ecclesiology” where it challenges the idea of “Kingdom” that often pervades the concepts and understanding people have of the Church. After this the project discusses foundational practices for missional engagement. Those strategies are intentional intimacy, leadership by the Holy Spirit with a focus on shared leadership of the people, seeking to reproduce more missional communities, serving the community, and evangelization. The artifact provided is a curriculum designed to train lay people to display those practices in forming missional communities in their neighborhood. The curriculum focuses on the Biblical principles for incarnational, missional engagement, discerning the context of missional engagement, building relationships within the context of missional engagement, engaging in mission within that context, and the challenge to meet regularly for worship within the context of missional engagement.