[0:00]
well welcome to the learning lab mission and the ecosystem i've got graham fuller here the mission and maturity pastor at ev church on the central coast just a little bit north of sydney welcome graeme thank you graeme i want to find out how did how did you become a christian uh yeah so i grew up in uh not a christian home although we would have thought we were christians we call ourselves church of england so tick that on all the forms and that sort of thing but never really went to church maybe once or twice am i growing up um

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but i always thought there was a god always so he's important always listened in scripture at school learned a little bit in primary scripture but then had a mate in year nine who grew up in a christian home but started to take it seriously around that time and uh he just kept bugging me inviting me along to stuff that i didn't want to go to and i resisted resisted resisted until i came to understand that um if i wanted to be a christian jesus had to be the boss of my life and i suddenly realized

[1:02]
i wasn't a christian and i thought i could never be one and then six months later i heard the gospel again and gave my life to jesus as lord that's great and you've been working at ev for the last 20 20 years now no 16 no 13. 13. okay 13 years uh and before that on the on the northern beaches in uh in sydney now today's lab is is going to be all about mission in our first section of teaching uh we want to talk about building mission heat and talk about some of the key uh principles that come out of the

[1:33]
mission funnel then we'll have an opportunity for questions and then we'll break and we'll push in our second bit of teaching into the mission calendar and some key aspects of uh of actually uh planning out your mission for the year fantastic uh first things first though we talked to the conference last week about the ecosystem so tom's going to put up a slide just with the ecosystem i thought we'd start there graham just to sort of uh speak about the place of mission uh in the ecosystem so you'll see there

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that the whole ecosystem needs to be fueled uh by by the word of god you know it's the engine room it's the fountain it's uh it's which sort of drives everything uh but we actually want to see each of these purpose areas each of these outcomes being seen in the life of the disciple the individual christian but also in the life of the church as well so mission how critical is it what place does it um sit you can give us an unbiased approach because you're a mission and a maturity

[2:36]
pastor at ev uh yeah each of the pieces is absolutely key um obviously deep in the word is the um the primary means of grace the the fountainhead of everything else which which fuels uh growth in christ but um each of these pieces are really critical so you really want a church where people are engaged in god's mission and where we're actually seeing people become christians just a critical thing that churches are to be on about and if mission is a really key thing the great thing about an ecosystem is that um you can make sure

[3:08]
mission is represented everywhere throughout everything it's not just you'd run a couple of mission events or do a couple of mission things you actually think i want to infuse mission through the whole through everything we do so for those who are uh perhaps on staff team and have you know sort of a mission you know role or perhaps they're part of a church plant and they're not a staff member but they've been given the task of sort of driving mission your your role is to sort of infect mission throughout the whole

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ecosystem as well as actually be responsible for some of the key champion structures that actually make machine as well yeah that's exactly right and you do want to make sure that the um the senior ministry if you're not that person is also really on board and um just driving harder about seeing people converted yeah so often in a small church really the mission past is going to be the senior minister yeah that's exactly right okay so in this first section we want to talk about some of the key uh sort of building blocks for building mission heat and then we want to press into that uh mission funnel

[4:09]
yeah fantastic um key key building blocks for building mission heat because that's the starting place is um you want a growing conviction and passion in all of your people that this is what we're on about we've got to see disciples made you know there's a real heaven there's a real hell life is very short eternity is very long we need to see people saved it's god's great passion for the world and so um you want to be slowly building that heat so that as a church that's your culture the whole culture of churches we've got

[4:39]
to be on about making disciples and then growing them as deep disciples so the slide on the screen here just to give you a bit of context is to say that you don't build mission heat with one event no you don't build a mission you know i you know just one yeah with one thing it's actually going to take a few years and so this slide here kind of pulls off a bit of cotter's change management uh uh stuff but the the idea of in year one you're going to want to build a guiding coalition you want to build a group of people who are actually identifying this problem

[5:10]
and seeing it they're doing the hard work of actually analyzing reality and really pressing into what's actually going on we haven't seen a convert for a number of years there's there's there's really not a lot of people who are actually passionate about evangelism mission and and really doing that hard work so you can actually go here here's our sort of base point then in year two as you build some of these systems and processes you want to celebrate those wins you want to work out what's working what's not working you want to do things well and keep adding it and then finally do that uh pipeline in that review

[5:40]
so yeah so i'm just going to say some of the pieces though in terms of building that mission heat it really is key to have the top guy the senior minister um passionate about speaking about it but but all of staff so particularly getting staff on board um but it has to bleed from you in everything you do so preaching is is key the the way we preach um preaching with an urgency and a passion and a desire for disciples to be made for people to be saved is is critical um the sort of things that we celebrate in church so interviews or videos or people we get

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upfront or the stories that we tell if we're still telling stories of people becoming christians people having a shot at inviting someone along to stuff even if it didn't work um people who just your average bloke invite so long they become a christian at the at the christian explained or life course whatever you run um all those things do heaps in terms of saying man people really do become christians uh we really care about that and any old mug can have a shot at it and and that person got saved in our course

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isn't that fantastic i could have a go so it really builds confidence it builds builds passion around these things and it builds heat what about the prayers how do you get infected mission into the prayer life of church well i think it's exactly the same principle but often you'll be quite intentional working with whoever's going to be doing the praying to make sure that as they pray they're the sort of things they're praying they're praying for the nations they're praying for people to be saved they're praying for missionaries they're praying for local evangelism they're praying for any sort of evangelistic event or course that you're

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running and along with a number of other things you're praying about in church life um but it's trying to get that fundamental piece into everything that you do stories your job the illustrations that you use can really give a sense of how urgent and critical our mission is so the the mission pastor the mission you know leader in in church they're really responsible for sort of uh seeing these things happen which doesn't necessarily mean they have to do all the videos do all the prayers no uh

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do all the preaching uh what is it what does it actually look like to encourage the whole church or encourage the team to be doing this what does it look like sort of day to day um i i think if you're the mission person and you might be the senior person at the same time but if you're a mission person it's having the eye to this everywhere and then speaking into each of those other areas of church life so if someone's in charge of services and the prayers that go on and those sort of things it's it's chatting to those people and giving feedback to those people in a

[8:15]
in a helpful warm partnership way to try to help them to think about how how do we think um from that mission framework in terms of building uh mission heat in the serving area of church as ministry teams start to be built and are doing their activity you want to try to train the leaders in such a way where whatever they're doing put you know setting up tea and coffee or whatever they're doing um every time that team gets together they're reminded of why are we doing this what's the bigger thing we're trying to do

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we're trying to see disciples made and disciples grown and that's that's how this activity actually fits into that so you can actually every piece of church life can be just drip drip dripping this this bigger vision and bigger passion because it leaks vision vision leaks all the time so you just got to keep dripping in um yeah vision and mission vision particularly because mission vision leaks um more because it's it's other person centered it's much easier to do things in church life that serve us much harder to do things that are uh are

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costly to us to serve and love others so um yeah you've got to overdo it so let's uh let's press into the funnel uh i want to think about it as a whole and then want to look into the parts and then want to think about it as a planning tool as well how you can use it as a planning tool so tom if you can put up the big sort of picture view of the funnel for us uh let's understand it you talk about contact connection events you talk about a conversion engine and you talk about the importance of the life of the church so yeah so um it's it's just a way of trying to

[9:49]
break up what's what what's going on for non-christians um they're at different places and we have different um engagements with them in different places and so it's working out that this um there's some people who are contacts like they're not connected with us at all they're out there in the community they're but we want to contact them how do we contact these people how do we make um start to build a relationship um often it's through our people uh someone they meet in the local sporting club someone they meet their kids school that sort of thing sometimes it's

[10:20]
through advertising marketing social media it's and and we want to generate as many contacts as we as we can as many people who uh we can then pursue the things of jesus with um but then and there's a number of ways to do that you can think of it so it's kind of at the top of the funnel at top of the funnel that some people actually might know of you they might have heard of you just because of a food bank or uh because you're that church that's on the main road you've got a sign on the street you've got a yeah a big carroll's event whatever it is but it's doing all those things intentionally to work

[10:51]
to actually try to develop as many contacts as possible uh warm contacts um positive content so sort of making making noise yeah okay so you want to move people from contact though to actually connecting with christianity with christians yeah so that so then it's how do you then get them into the next step because what you find is the more christians someone needs the more powerful that is because you actually start started thinking it's not just that weirdo there's a bunch of weirdos um and actually they're not as weird as i thought and actually they're quite quite lovely and they seem to have hope

[11:21]
and their world seems to make sense and the things they talk about and seems to drop into conversations quite naturally actually means i see that their life their spiritual life actually integrates into their real life all those things start start going on so connecting to more christians is quite profound for a non-christian and starting to connect to christian truths a christian worldview bits and pieces that come together even if it's not a full gospel presentation all that's very powerful

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and it often takes people quite a long time when we get to the final tour quite a long time before they're actually ready to accept an invitation to something more um let's come to hear the full gospel explained and so connect type events that are that are just designed to do those two things um connect non-christians to christians getting non-christians to christian truths and teaching in some small way is quite powerful and each event will be slightly different so we've all been to the

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christian event where you know you've brought your christian friend a non-christian friend along and there's just been a real you know clunky hard gospel presentation they've had to do the old call and you're thinking i wasn't expecting that uh that wasn't going to happen this sort of aspect of the funnel is really helpful just in helping uh you think into what are you actually trying to achieve in this event is it gonna have uh heavy evangelistic content uh so you know are they actually gonna be asked to make it make a decision which you know often might happen at uh you know the at a at a um at a service uh or a gathering

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uh or is it just gonna be really light we're just gonna talk about church on sunday uh we're just actually just gonna catch up and hang out and and share something to the relational side of things as well you know thinking about walk up high high strong evangelistic content potentially but but low relational connection so actually using this framework to sort of think about what are we actually trying to achieve and you might have different events for trying to achieve different things and you're not trying to do all one type or all of what another type um and it is and it is the social contract thing like

[13:26]
if you design an event a certain way you want to advertise and market it and get the communication to your people so they know what they're inviting their mate to and their mate knows what they're coming along to and they haven't been yet been switched yeah there's no smuggle okay moving down the funnel into the conversion engine um because ultimately you want to see people saved converted so you've contacted people you want to then try to connect them to christian things christian people but ultimately you want to come them to come to somewhere where they can explore the gospel thoroughly and what the gospel will actually mean

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for their life and in today's society that seems to take actually quite a long time um you know in a christianized past where people have lots of pieces in place shorter i think today it takes a lot longer we we call it a conversion engine that says integration engineer conversion engine um just it can sound mechanistic but the idea of an engine is it it um it generates a lot of power it punches above its weight if you built it well and you fuel it

[14:28]
it really does a lot of your hard work your heavy lifting and so we actually um have two parts i think two parts are helpful to a conversion engine one is a really clear gospeling part so some sort of evangelistic course or evangelistic program and people set it up for different links and that sort of thing but something that's that's really easy for non-christian to come to it's engaging it's warm but it's clear you know you're clearly explaining the things of jesus the

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gospel and to the point where someone can actually make a commitment a decision to follow jesus and opportunity for asking questions and having those questions and those sort of things often people become christians in that sort of four five six week course but actually often they don't because it's not long enough but they're keen they're interested they're eager and they're really warming to the things of christ and so the second component i think to a good conversion engine uh is a longer

[15:31]
follow-up course which is a continuing gospeling of people and bringing them into assurance of salvation establishing them in the faith ready to then integrate them into church life so the follow-up part it's doing multiple things simultaneously we actually find lots of non-christians get converted in the follow-up piece rather than the evangelistic course just because it takes a long time but some who've become christians then are more established in the faith

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and um and it it provides a context where those people can really be nurtured where they're at before they move into like a small group bible study um which otherwise would be very difficult for them to land in and stick in so i'm in a small church and i'm thinking man it's just going to be a lot of effort just to get you know a simple christianity course or a life course up and running and you're saying have a five course as well and and have a mission team that wants to do you know five weeks and five nights out and then another five to seven weeks for

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a follow-up course why would you encourage someone you know just again remind us why would you encourage someone to have that in place as a system and not just maybe just the life course by itself yeah right a super christianity course by itself yeah i think there's ways to um pull things off as well isn't it so yeah your evangelistic course that can take many different shapes um and it doesn't have to be of course it could be dialogue dinners it could be you know people have done all sorts of things throughout sorry history but what's going to be most effective do you think can actually evangelize and explain the gospel clearly to people

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um but then also you follow up um it can be one to ones like you've got three people who are interested or two people are you meet one on two it's not a massive i have to run a big program and food and it's just meeting up with them once a week doing that sort of thing or a small group there's lots of great video courses as well so so i know a number of people would do a live you know life explored they use ev's resource um and bespoke it for their their context but then they'd use a video resource uh christianity explored uh and so they'd

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they'd just spend seven weeks digging into mark's gospel um so there are lots of good video resources out there which means yeah you can do design development yeah that's exactly right and then you scale it adjust it for your context i think having the two pieces yeah having two pieces i think is really important so i just chatted to a past the other day they had uh they had 20 people complete their life course uh praise god five people you know became christians at the end of that but there were 10 people out of the 15 that didn't who still wanted to keep meeting

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meeting up and gathering and and so they have the next thing that they can invite them to uh with those five people have already made those decisions is really helpful and and as graeme said hopefully the ten non-christians will you know half of them will make a decision so that you actually see uh you know c grade three we actually find it it's interesting the um the number of from a certain number of people who actually start uh evangelistic course um a certain proportion tend to get converted and god can do anything um certain proportions that end

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the evangelistic course get converted which is much more than those who start and those who enter into the follow-up a lot more of them get converted so it's actually quite a powerful thing and you know people are warmer and warmer and more and coming closer as they move through so be ashamed at that point to stop doing it yep so if we if we move the from the conversion engine now to the integration engine thomas is going to put up that final uh final piece of the funnel which is to say that people then need to be moved into the life of church so you know often that might be a member moment a

[19:08]
member course we want to see people actually established in the faith and often you know the best way for that is in small groups we want to see people serving and being discipled and in ministry teams as well and then obviously giving and regularly attending church so you'll see a dotted line into that black line there the the church gathering um as you know small groups but being intentional about actually moving people out of uh the conversion engine into that integration engine is really important

[19:38]
as part of thinking about church as a pathway yeah absolutely absolutely um because you you you don't want a non-christian to sit distant from the gathering or distant from the rest of church life or come become dependent upon that small group that they've been part of you actually want them to integrate fully and it's critical for them it's really important for the church so thinking about how you do that so we talked a bit about reach conference about the importance of the gathering can can you speak about the importance of the gathering in the context of mission um well there's there's

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two parts uh we've already spoken a bit about one one is you're actually trying to set a whole culture and tone of um the urgency and importance of seeing people saved so you're creating ukrainian mission heat the other side though is it's your primary front door you're going to get so many people come to church either just totally randomly because they saw the street sign they had some sort of background of god they crisis in life they looked on the web whatever they

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just come along or more often invited by a friend and they're going to come along to church and it's going to be your front door so thinking about how do we intentionally design and shape church in a way that it's accessible to outsiders so accessible what do you mean accessible yeah because theologically we hold the conviction that um churches for the edification of believers primarily but with an eye to the outside one corinthians 14 um we want to make sure we always have an eye to the outsider we want to design things in a way that doesn't put

[21:12]
any unnecessary cultural stumbling block in the way of people now there will be things we do which are odd and weird but necessary for the edification of believers so we don't want to lose those but no unnecessary thing and so thinking about you know the language we use the dress style that we have the sort of things that we say in announcements that creates insider outsider mentality the way we pray do we speak expecting there to be

[21:44]
non-christians in the congregation in in the way yeah preach etc and preaching in a way where we are regularly um as part of our preaching calling people to repentance and faith even in the midst of sermons that are designed to edify and encourage because we're always gospeling both christians and non-christians but also we find that it can be very helpful to have certain services in the year which are particularly mission services so

[22:16]
we particularly well christmas and easter are interesting because again they're primarily for believers and they're real moments of celebration high points of the christian life and we want to have that for believers but you get religious-y people come come and friends family often come at those times a year so we we dial things up a bit towards the let's have clear gospel explanation type end of things there are other services where we do that too um so mother's day and father's

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day we really quite dial it up towards an evangelistic sermon and then we do a big thing we do it in january you could do it any time of the year but where we do four weeks in a row of really gospel weeks of church invitational weeks of church uh where we're doing sermons that um are really hitting where people are at and really explain the gospel and so you're communicating that to the to church uh they're clear that hey this is this is what we're on about this week but really you're communicating every week should really be uh

[23:18]
an invitation to the outsider the outsider should be welcome to come every week you're doing that by paying attention to these things totally how your building looks how it feels is it hot is it cold what sort of seats are people sitting on yeah all those things um which i come from a tradition previously which who cares about buildings just get on with preaching the word and yes the word is the power to save but um all those things can be barriers that are unnecessarily unhelpful yep to someone coming out so

[23:49]
so again if you're in a small church team how might you go about actually uh equipping the mission person to be you know speaking into each of the other uh purpose pastors or actually to be speaking to you as a senior pastor to say hey your preaching is not preaching to two audiences or when we did this in the service flow this was really clunky are you aware of this how do you how do you sort of equip and train people on your team to be able to have those uh fierce conversations with you

[24:19]
where you go hey you just really missed the mark this week that's good that's good it's always hard isn't it to receive um feedback particularly critical feedback it is but i think one of the key things is it it's awesome ideally if the senior guy can be pulling together a team a high level team who represents the different key different areas of church life and that team actually functions as a team so we're actually discussing how is church going how can we make things better

[24:50]
ideas problems and we actually make decisions together because in that context you're actually growing trust you go in the ability to highlight issues in each other's work without going into your fault we all own everything but you can actually point out those issues and we can work on them together and usually every issue is not just there's one issue and it's your fault usually every problem there's three solutions that actually takes three different areas of church life to solve so we've got to work as

[25:20]
teams and even if you're the senior guy and you actually have two of the other hats as well he still functions that team you