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5 Essential Ingredients of a Missional Community

By Mike Breen

We’ve been doing Missional Communities for years and years, and in that time, we’ve always tried to boil it down to the most essential ingredients to help pass it on to others.

In the last year, I believe we’ve most simply honed it down to these 5 essential ingredients of a Missional Community:

1. Size of an extended family. A missional family is best understood in the range of 20-50 people, as it is small enough to care but large enough to dare. From much experience, I’d say it can be difficult to sustain long-term missional activity for a group smaller than this.

2. UP/IN/OUT. Intentionally lives out the three dimensions of Jesus’ life. UPward dimension of life with the Father, INward dimension of life with the Body of Christ together, OUTward dimension of fully stepping into a broken world.

3. Clear mission vision. Who is this Missional Community trying to bring the Kingdom of God to? The most successful MC’s have a very clear answer that could only be true of their group.

4. Lighweight/Low maintenance. If the Missional Community can’t be led by people with normal 9-5 jobs who aren’t paid to do it, it’s not lightweight and low maintenance enough. It’s got to be simple and reproducible.

5. Accountable leaders. The person(s) leading the Missional Community need to be accountable to others so there exists a dynamic of low control and high accountability. It’s one thing to say you hold people accountable, it’s another thing to do this well.

If done well, these can lead to the incredible phenomenon of a scattered and gathered church where it is the lay leaders of the church being released to the edges of the missional frontier, seeing extraordinary Kingdom breakthrough.

This blog post is reposted with permission of 3DM and Mike Breen.

[author image=”https://vergenetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Mike-Breen.jpg” ]Mike Breen has been an innovator in leading missional churches throughout Europe and the United States for more than 25 years, and leads 3DM, a movement/organization that is helping hundreds of established churches and church planters move into this discipling and missional way of being the church.  Twitter: @mike_breen[/author]