America is no longer the nation many of us once knew. People have changed their base way of thinking and now look differently at the world around them. The influence on the people, who make up the general populace of this country, has little to do with the Church, its leaders, doctrines, or systems. In short, the church simply doesn’t hold the privileged position it once held among Americans. This is the Post-Christian world we live in.

So after reading a five part series here is the question we want to answer in this issue…

What does all this have to do with what we (Bennetts) do as U.S. missionaries?

For us (Kandy and David) it is about what the Holy Spirit referred to as the “University District Village” and our pursuit of it has changed the course of our lives since 2011. It’s a people group who God cares about and called us to figure out how to bring the Good News to their lives. God still speaks and is calling others to join us in this pursuit.

It is about reactivating the church as we mobilize a missionary movement to go places the organized church could never go. As we said earlier, the people group we are talking about are our neighbors, co-workers, families, and sometimes even a part of our faith community. Pause for a moment and let that thought sink in.

More specifically, what we do is help the ministers we work with to experience the transformation of discipleship as we mobilize a missionary movement. They experience something that has eluded them and will make the work they strive to do far more fruitful going forward. In other words, we help the ministers we work with to be more effective in discipling the people they work with in the local church itself.

It is something we believe will make the church far more effective in our Post-Christian world than what we have been focused on in the past. The more people see themselves as a missionary where God has placed them the greater the impact we can experience as we disciple leaders who influence other influencers around them.

Our hope is to turn our local churches into sending centers, who send missionaries out into the neighborhoods and marketplace around them to share Good News as they practice the habits of good neighboring.

We help ministers who help the people they serve to recalibrate with greater Gospel Intentionality (the ability to live out the missional-incarnational impulse of sharing the Good News of Jesus Christ and using the natural rhythms of daily life in discipling others). It is moving beyond a simple confession of consumerism and genuinely living our faith in everyday ways.

We work with people to increase their Gospel Fluency (the ability to share the Good News of Jesus Christ with the people of peace in your life through natural and normal daily conversations). It is an effort to remove the fear of sharing our faith as we discover how to talk about our faith without having to preach a sermon or use some plastic evangelism tactic.

Our efforts each day are to influence other influencers as we disciple ministers in a missionary approach with a missional philosophy to life and ministry. We give them something they can give to the people they serve. We believe it will lead to a more fruitful and effective way to live the lives God has given us in our Post-Christian world.

The results are transformed people who live differently than they did before. People who have been discipled are now doing the hard work of discipling others. Some have become influencers who are willing to influence others so that more missionaries are released to go into every sector of the cities and communities we live in. It is people who come to know Jesus Christ, are discipled, and sent out to disciple and send others into the harvest.

When we set out in May of 2012, we had no idea what this would look like. People asked us questions and wanted us to describe it for them, and our best efforts came up short. We did our best with what we had available to us. Our understanding has grown and the fruit of all this can be seen in the people we disciple. We disciple and release ministers to do likewise as we mobilize a missionary movement. Join us!

God Still Speaks (Part 6)