As Austin Mustard Seed prepares to move into our first gatherings, we have been asking friends and supporters to join together in 24 hours of prayer over on our support team blog. This will take place next Saturday through Sunday evening, and we’ve filled about 70% of the half hour slots. If you’d like to help us make it 24 consecutive hours, please take a look at the schedule to see what time slots are still open, and then let us know.

Below is my first go at writing some values that will help shape a new church community in Austin. I think they still need some molding, but I’m excited about the potential of these, and have a number of ideas about how we can shape the life of the community around them:

Story
At the heart of our faith is a story. It is the story of how God’s kingdom has unfolded through history. But each of us has a story as well. Just as we look to see how God has been at work through history, we also reflect on how God has been at work in our life. Faith happens when we see the intersection of God’s story with our own. Our community longs to join God in the writing of how this story will continue to unfold.

Wholeness
While we see the work of God in this world, we also hold a deep understanding that not everything is as it should be. God is not finished with the story. In the structures of our world and in our own lives, we see brokenness. But we hope. We long for the final redemption when God will join a new heaven and a new earth together in the ultimate act of restoration. Until then, we choose to live in the Way of Jesus because we believe that is how we will see life flourish in our souls, our homes, our community, our world and in creation.

Presence
As a church community, we are the presence of God in the world today. God is continually moving into the brokenness of this created world, and so do we. Compelled by God’s love, we partner with the resurrected Christ to recover the beauty, renewal, and justice that our broken world longs to see. We pray that we will be able to help God’s will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.

A few months ago, I blogged about mustard plants. (Never mind that that post was supposed to be the intro to a series. The ideas have continued to flow, they just never made it to the blog!)

Some of that thinking has really helped form some ideas about the initial stages of what our church community might look like. I was able to develop the ideas in a paper for a class. While at a church planting boot camp a few weeks ago, I reworked that paper to form a general strategy for developing a multiplying church model. It is linked below for those who are willing to take the time to read it. I’d be thankful and honored if you would share the thoughts and questions that it stirs for you.

A Mustard Seed Church (pdf)

In addition to the bits I posted here last week, I have posted some more indepth reflection on our time in Austin on the Hodos Project blog.

A few have wondered aloud why I am maintaining a separate blog for the Hodos Project. The Hodos Project blog is streamlined and focuses on updates for those praying for and supporting us the church plant in Austin. This blog, on the other hand, might be considered superfluous with more of my personal ramblings and theological reflections.

If you are interested in reading both, let me just once more point out the super combo feed which includes updates from here, HodosProject, Creatvityist, and my fledgling tumblog.