How to Create a Missional Culture at Your Church (BLESS Pocket Guide)

How can you create a missional culture at your church?

The big challenge and task for churches that are serious about creating a missional culture and participating in the mission of God, is how to normalize mission and missional engagement in the lives of her congregants.

Do you inspire your church to action with a sermon? Do you equip your church with skills and knowledge with a seminar? Or do you employ an apprenticeship model? How is it that you can best call your church to significant city-impacting, gospel-driven and spirit-empowered missional engagement?

The answer?

You need to normalize it.

You need to make missional engagement as normal as motherhood and apple pie. Don’t make missional engagement sound like something that only missionaries are called to do. Make it natural and an assumption for every disciple. In other words, if you’re a disciple of Jesus, then missional engagement is just a part of it.

I want to commend Community Christian Church for producing a fantastic acronym to normalize mission – it’s BLESS. You can find Dave Ferguson’s article and video on it here from Verge. You can also watch Jon Ferguson explaining it here.

Part of my role at Beulah Alliance Church was to lead the church and all the campuses in their missional engagement. And in order to raise the missional culture at Beulah, I needed to give the congregation a tool to normalize mission. Out of all the tools out there, we decided on BLESS because of its simplicity and its ability to make mission seem easy.

So here are a few things that we did to create a missional culture:

• We created a BLESS Pocket Guide for our congregation – you can download it below in English and Spanish (We adapted it with permission from John Wentz’s Missional Pocket Guide)
• We introduced it via a 3 week sermon series. You can listen to all the messages at www.beulah.ca or click below for one the one that I preached on the last S of the acronym
• We incorporated the BLESS language into our community engagement strategy for city impact
• We made weekend life stories BLESS oriented
• We created vehicles for our congregation to live out BLESS in community – they’re called mid-size communities

How are you creating a missional culture at your church? How do you normalize mission?

If you would like to learn how to use this tool to shift your church to becoming more missional, check out chapter 5 in my book, No Silver Bullets. In this chapter, I unpack how you can use this in partnership with the spiritual disciplines, in your spiritual formation classes, and broadly across the different ministries in your church.