Missional Church

Missional Church Learning Experience

The Missional Church Learning Experience is designed to help churches effectively do mission in their own community and context. With a commitment to four intensive training sessions scheduled over the course of a year, along with a team-designed local outreach project, each church will discover how to use their gifts and resources to meet local needs.

Missional Church Learning Experience (MCLE) is a cluster of churches that form a Learning Community to explore what God is saying to the church today. Each church forms a Mission Team that receives training in basic missional church principles, and practices those principles by designing and implementing a small community project. The Learning Community will meet during the process to share what they are learning and receive further training.

2011 Sessions:

March 6

June 5

September 18

November 6

For more details about the workshop and the entire Missional Church Learning Experience, download the brochure

Your participation in MCLE is confirmed once you recruit your MCLE mission team and submit the application with $100 fee. Space is limited. Still have questions? Please call or e-mail the ABCGI office.

Confused about what it means to be a missional church? Spend two minutes at youtube watching this simple video.

Reflections on the Mission Church Learning Experience workshop, by Lori Chapman (Emerson Avenue Baptist Church

The MCLE workshop was an amazing experience. The very next day we shared what we had discussed and learned in the workshop with two adult Sunday school classes. Since the workshop, our group has met every week and discussed and planned our next step in this process.

Step 1: We talked with people outside our church! We went to a local McDonald's to talk to our neighbors, and we talked with clients of our church food pantry. This was a humbling experience. We offered to go to their homes and sit with them and their neighbors and talk, and one person said yes. We had four questions: 1.) What are some of the missing resources you see a need for in the community; 2.) If you could fix one problem in our city, what one do you think would make the biggest difference; 3.) How can the church help the community; and 4.) What "needs" (development, growth, justice) do you see the church meeting and what role do you see the church playing in the community now.

It was interesting to hear all the responses. Most folks were telling us the same thing: get drugs out of the neighborhoods; need for more medical services in the community; something to bring different classes of people together; more openness into the community and making all feel welcomed; enlightening people about truth, trust, and faith in our Lord and Savior; need for safe places in the neighborhoods for the children to play; and lastly, they want people from the local churches visible in the neighborhoods.

We are walking our neighborhood the second Saturday of June and asking the same set of questions. We are attending our neighborhood association meeting and meeting with our local elementary and high school leaders. At our recent Congregational Gathering, we shared with the congregation what we were doing and invited them to join us.

Our group is focusing on and looking at how Jesus told us to go into all the world and be his ambassadors. We are seeing firsthand what happens when we replace the "come to us invitations" with a "go to them" life. We are beginning to focus more on who our neighbors are outside of our own four walls. We are working on adopting a more missionary-minded attitude in relation to our community/culture.

Emerson Avenue Baptist Church MCLE Team: Lori Chapman, Louise Cole, Leader, Lynette Felder, Beckie Knight, and Rev. Janet Hoover, Pastor