Forge KC Cohort

Last week I joined a "cohort." Forge KC and KCSentral have combined efforts to create a cohort for pastors and other church leaders in the KC Metro area to collaborate on the twin tasks of learning and doing, specifically for the goal of leading our churches to live life "on mission." The leaders of the cohort, Brad Brisco and Lance Ford, are also the authors of the workbook a few groups at Grace have been studying, Missional Essentials.

The cohort will read a stack of books and articles together, wrestle with the ideas, work on implementation personally and in our churches, and participate in one-on-one mentoring. We will meet as a group once a month for nine months, but I'm sure friendships and working relationships will last for years to come.

The first meeting was simply introductions - we each had a turn at telling a bit of our stories, especially as they relate to how we got to the point of joining the cohort and what we hoped to gain from it. The stories were rich and the night went quite a bit longer than we had scheduled, just because we didn't want to miss anything about anyone's story.

We also had an assignment that night - to bring some artifacts that represent our contexts. Since we're coming from different parts of the area, from outlying to the 'burbs to the city, we will have different challenges, opportunities, and approaches. I brought two items, which I also used in last Sunday's message. Our context is primarily the 'burbs (although we do have some closer in toward the city and some further out in the open spaces), and the 'burb life provides unique challenges to living missionally. I brought a garage door opener (because we drive into our garages, close the garage, and never have to interact with our neighbors), and a slat from a wooden privacy fence (a guardian of privacy, creator of personal space, and barrier to casual interaction with our neighbors). I didn't have to say what I said - they all knew what I was going to say as soon as I showed those two artifacts.

Most of the members of the cohort had the same kind of story. They had been in church ministry for a while, and by the church culture metrics, they were "successful." But they looked at the New Testament and what was happening in those churches, and then looked at their own "successful" churches, and realized that they weren't making disciples like they read about in Scripture. They were doing good things, but they weren't truly making disciples, and they weren't seeing God move in the lives of their people like we should expect.

And so, one by one, they began a journey that had lead them eventually to this cohort, where we are all asking the question, "How do we best make disciples? And how do we build our churches around this idea?" Some are church planters who want to craft their churches as disciplemakers from the ground up, and others are in present church contexts trying to figure out how to guide a living, moving organism with its own strong momentum more and more towards disciplemaking.

And every single one said something like, "Once I latched onto the idea that our churches should major in disciplemaking, I can never go back."

I don't know where our journey will take us. But I'm excited and enthused, perhaps like never before. I pray that little by little, our focus on disciplemaking will grow in intensity and clarity. No one is going to flip a switch and suddenly change everything we know. But we pray that everything we do will orient with ever-growing fidelity toward making disciples who make disciples.