Yesterday, I had the opportunity to share my passion and our vision for community in our new church plant with our core launch team.  It was awesome to be able to share!  Here is the outline of our vision and strategy for groups, as we are calling them, X Groups, at Connexion:

We want our groups to be a part of four things:

1. Build Community – Love each other like is described in those “one another” passages in the NT. Live life together.

2. Struggle with God’s Word together.  Study together.  Grow together.

3. Use your community to bring heaven to earth by serving the church and community together.  Find a way to leverage your community to serve others.

4. Use your community to bring heaven to earth by becoming an on-ramp for unreached and unconnected that we already have relationships with.  What I mean by that is, be willing to invite these people you know into your world of community to expose them to Jesus Christ through your love for each other.

That is who we want to be and this is how we plan to accomplish it:

We will be kicking off our groups this coming week.  We are using a model called Turbo Groups to train potential leaders and begin to build a culture of community with our launch team.  Turbo Groups focus for a short period of time to give the folks involved a quick but strong experience in group life.  We will meet for three weeks and then break one week to meet with the potential future leaders to go over leadership issues and debrief on the previous three week’s experience. Then, we will meet three more weeks in November and end with a final debriefing meeting with leaders.  That meeting will include a leadership covenant and the opprtunity to sign on to lead their own groups in the winter as we lead into the launch on March 1st.

We are using this method because it is quick, we don’t have any time to waste. And because we are going to be drawing out of this pool and experience to provide leaders for adult X Groups and for teen student Contact Groups this winter and spring.

Our first X Groups will mimick our plan for future groups.  Because we are going to be a multi-site church, we are structuring ourselves geographically.  We are dividing our launch team right down the middle in order to form two groups.  One will meet at a home on the North side of the city and the other will meet on the South side of the city.  In the future we will be advertising groups not by leader, but by location so that people can choose to be connected with folks that live in close proximity with them.

I am excited to really get to know our launch team over these next 8 weeks as I lead both of these groups!

Connexion launch team…get ready for community!  It is coming to your side of the city!