Missional Church in Practice - PMC Process Reveals Adaptive Challenges at Oxford Circle Mennonite Church
By Tim Leaman

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At Oxford Circle Mennonite Church (OCMC), a diverse multi-ethnic congregation in Philadelphia, we are over two years into the Partnership for Missional Church (PMC) journey, in which we are participating with six other churches in our conference.

The recent Missional Engagement Team (MET) phase of the process has created opportunities for two teams of lay leaders from our congregation to dig into some of the most pressing challenges our congregation faces. As a congregation that has grown rapidly in size and diversity over the last five years, we have become accustomed to seeing new faces, all representing a range of life experiences, worshipping with us on Sundays. However, after the initial Discovery phase of the PMC process, our Church Council and PMC steering committee identified two major adaptive challenges to be addressed if we were to grow into the fullness of God’s purposes for us.

These challenges were:

1. How do we invite/engage people on the edge of our church, and new people coming to our church, into deep relationships with Jesus and with others in our church family?
2. As a church, how can we cultivate an individual and corporate excitement and desire to pray, as a result of an increased dependence on and hunger for God, in a way that allows us as a church to be co-workers with God in His activity rather than our own?

The individuals comprising the METs reflected the breadth of our congregation’s diversity, including many individuals who had begun attending our congregation within the last two to three years.

The MET working on welcoming and including people arrived at several key observations in their process of re-framing the assigned challenge. It noted that “the original wording seemed to divide the church into US (established attenders) and THEM (new faces). We felt that the challenge truly involves ALL OF US working together. The key to growing relationships is being OPEN and HONEST with one another about our struggles. We feel there is a need for forums and opportunities for people to move toward doing this.” Out of these observations, the team re-stated the challenge as:

“How do we as a church family, create an environment where all people can be themselves—honest and open—and in this way, deepen our relationship with Jesus in our growing community of believers?”

Noting that OCMC does have a growing network of small groups and discipleship classes in place, this team designed most of its action steps around creating forums to encourage deeper interaction with those who have not yet had the opportunity to connect with others beyond Sunday morning attendance. The action steps involve:

1. “Coffee connection” time after morning worship
2. “Wake-up reminders”—periodic skits/announcements/congregational exercises within our worship services that remind us of our calling to reach beyond our comfort zones to vulnerably share ourselves with others
3. “Mystery-guest dinners”—opportunities to invite others into our homes for deeper hospitality.

The “prayer” MET also re-framed its challenge. Noting that the recognized need to foster “prayer,” really speaks to a need to foster “relationship with God,” the re-stated vision is:

“We want to become a church that supports people in deepening their relationship with God by creating motivation and desire for a deeper relationship with God, and providing opportunities for people to try different forms and methods of prayer.”

The prayer MET identified that as OCMC grows, all members need to have an active voice in shaping the church’s direction, not just relying on a few leaders to do so. For this to happen, the church as a whole needs to be in prayer. This MET’s action steps include:

1. Incorporating prayer into our worship service in a way that teaches and models different forms of prayer and helps us break down the barriers we feel toward prayer, and toward God;
2. Including time for prayer and retreats into the job description of our pastoral staff, to help foster its relationship with God and to model the importance of this to our congregation; and
3. To create accountability to sustain these commitments through a “prayer ministry” team which would have representation in the church leadership structure.

We are excited to see where these action plans take us as we continue to grow in our missional journey. We sense that the PMC process has arrived at an important time in OCMC’s story. Its action-reflection structure has disciplined us to take time to pause from the urgency of the needs we see around us and from our activities of outreach, in order to discern and reflect together. In doing so, we have seen God speaking through new voices and raising up new leaders. As these new leaders dream together and listen to God together for the future of our congregation, we have seen the fruit of increased prayer and increased vulnerability and openness bubbling into the life of the church, even before the action plans were unveiled. We have seen the entire church body capturing a deeper ownership of how God is calling us to be “His sent people” in the Oxford Circle community.

Tim Leaman is the Council Chairperson at Oxford Circle Mennonite Church.