Epic Bay Area Project 2006 - Part 5

June 27 - Organic Training Day

Okay, Organic Training Day. Really important day for us, as we are taking the whole day to talk about what it means to be an organic movement, what does it look like, how do you do it, why should we try things this way. Keoke did a great job with the presentation. I won't try and summarize things here, but if you're interested, you can find more information at SF Metro's website.

But I will highlight one of our ministry goals for the summer. Our hope is to be able to start several G3s (Groups of Three) and to gather good, solid leads for more of them for the coming school year. A G3 is comprised of a small group of students (3-5) and has 3 main components: (check out SF Metro's page for more details)

1) Giving: looking outside the group with evangelism
2) Growing: looking inside at our personal walks with Christ
3) Praying: asking God for what's on our hearts

This will be a primary component of "launching" new movements on the campuses. Rather than trying to get the beginnings of a larger movement of, say, 50+ people, an organic approach that is reproduceable would mean that we try and start smaller G3s that emphasize immediate involvement. If a student comes to faith, rather than extracting him from his natural social network/community, why don't we plant a G3 on his turf, with his friends? Also, rather than treating that as secondary to the primary of being involved in a large 50+ movement, we make that the primary and release him to impact his friends.

Of course, all of this may sound logical and reflect what we, as a ministry, have always done. But the fact is that we often maintain a structure that features the "flagship" of a big meeting with everything else being merely forays into unknown, "enemy" territory. We don't often de-centralize and make the missional aspect (the "being sent" aspect) our primary focus. However we feel about the "correctness" of this approach, history has shown that "big movement" approach doesn't work in the Bay Area. Students are too busy, too jaded, too hostile, whatever. So, this summer, we're asking Project students to share their faith and ask God to lead us to other students (Christian or non-Christian) who can lead us to their social networks where we can plant G3s. We move forward with our little experiement.