Partnership for Missional Church - United Kingdom
By Pat Taylor Ellison

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Church Innovations Institute’s mission is innovating your church’s capacities to be renewed in God’s mission. The Institute and its partners have worked at that mission for over 20 years through research and consulting. And the central, most basic, and yet most effective way we combine research and consulting to work toward this mission is the Partnership for Missional Church.

For decades we have grown Partnership clusters in North America, and for the last six years also in southern Africa. Each cluster has between eight and 16 congregations who covenant to partner for three-five years on a journey of spiritual discernment , grounded in their communities and listening for God’s call for them within the mission of God. Last year after much preparation, a multi-denominational cluster formed in the United Kingdom, with a brave and creative leadership team to guide them. I was privileged to meet with them at their 3rd Cluster Event in June 2010, in Locking Castle in West Somerset.

Pastors and lay leaders came from each participating church to take part in the event. As in all PMC events, Friday was devoted to helping the spiritual leaders of each church clarify their emerging leadership role and imagine the changes in their work that a new sense of the local church’s missional vocation can bring. Friday evening was devoted to hearing the stories of each local church and what they had done since the previous meeting, whom they had involved in discerning their direction, and what challenges had arisen in each location. Saturday was the day for training in next steps, asking one another’s advice, and launching one another forward into the next phase of the journey.

Although there were many moments I will never forget, two stand out to me:

• On Friday evening, one congregation reported on their spiritual discernment conversations, which use a triangle pyramid as part of the conversation process. They described meeting with their youth on a beach and constructing a triangle pyramid out of at-hand materials, driftwood they had found on the beach. Their report projected a photograph of that pyramid, their young people, and the sunset on the English shore. That triangle pyramid we had designed on a piece of paper in our office so many years ago had been actually erected thousands of miles away, and young people were listening through its corners for God’s preferred and promised future for their church. They couldn’t have known how moving that story and photograph was to me – they didn’t even know me! Yet I was forever connected to them, through driftwood on the sand and the act of listening for God’s promises.
• On Saturday afternoon, at the end of a long day of work and prayer toward the goal of being something special for the communities in which each local church sits, Alisdair, our closing worship leader, was about to give a benediction. We were ready for it. Then he told us to turn around and walk to the rear of the sanctuary, the room in which we’d worked so hard, and face the back wall, a wall entirely made of glass. We did it, watching the traffic pass on the busy street, people walking to and fro, bicyclists swishing past. Then Alisdair blessed us and our churches’ missions, facing the world God so loves, and sending us out into it.

What a gift it was for me to be there, to experience a PMC UK event with those good people! What friendships and partnership have been formed there! May God bless their continuing journey.

Pat Taylor Ellison, Ph.D., is the managing director of research for Church Innovations.