We are excited to announce dates for the next gathering for The Sending Church Roundtable. For those who attended the 2011 Roundtable, be looking for a letter for follow-up that will help in our 2012 planning. We are excited to receive your ideas and suggestions as we design what we believe will be another amazing time to dream, strategize and learn how the church and send the church. If you attended last year, we hope you will begin calendaring and planning to come along with other key leaders from your church. If you did not attend last year and would like to be included in the invitation process, please sent us a message. So, here are the details:

• Date: September 10-11, 2012
• Location: LifePoint Church, Smyrna, TN
• Contact Info

If you would like to catch-up on the details or conversations from the 2011 Sending Church Roundtable, you can:

1. Read Summaries of the conversations and topics
2. Review the Info and Details

This post continues our description of what the sending church looks like today. Of course we have the best picture of sending church from the New Testament. We must continually ask ourselves, “How do we apply biblical patterns to whatever context we find ourselves in today?” This is a continuation of two previous posts:“sending church is…” and “sending church: more missional groups… less individual missions”. We are using contrasts to help define the sending church.

Dream with me for a moment. What if our tribe (churches we associate with) would shift from sending individuals to sending churches to carry out God’s mission among the nations? What if our denominational mission agency helped to facilitate the sending of churches rather than the sending of individual/professional missionaries? What would happen if our mission agency commissioned churches for making disciples among a people group, instead of individual/professional missionaries?

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God sends His people in community to accomplish His mission, not as individuals on a personal mission. This post continues with one of the contrasts that we use to help define the sending church: more missional groups… less individual missions.

When my wife and I first surrendered to God’s mission for us overseas, we were part of a traditional institutional church. Our default response was to contact the denominational agency responsible for our international missions program. We did not really look to our local church for approval or help, other than a letter of recommendation from the pastor. The church did give us a commissioning service, confirmed our calling, prayed for us and supported us through the denomination. However, it did not go beyond that… the church was not intimately involved with or directly participating in the mission we were called to do. This was not completely their fault or our bad, this is just how our system worked… it was all we knew. Later in our time on the field, our church along with several others from our association of churches sent a team of people to help with a project, but it did not go beyond that one visit.

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I am asked often, “So, what did you do to prepare for moving to another country?”  That’s an incredible question and I have an incredible answer for those who are asking.  A word of caution though, what my family did is not the only way to prepare for a huge move across the ocean. It worked for us and I definitely think there are some points of wisdom in this list. While we were accomplishing these processes during our wait to move, we had the feeling of forward motion. We weren’t just sitting and waiting. We were actually accomplishing things and thus getting closer to what we saw as the coming new reality.

I want to remind you that I am writing from a personal perspective. There isn’t a doctoral research project attached with these thoughts and family practices.  What we walked through in our preparation we viewed as training for the “field” even before we reached our official training for departure. By keeping a “training”  mindset, it helped us to try new things in preparation for the transition we were embarking on as a family. We laughed a lot at our failures and bungles. We told ourselves that as difficult as challenges are in the United States, it is better to try and experience them first in a familiar culture than to have them forced on us in a foreign cross-culture. So, with that in mind, I encourage you to launch out in a “training mindset” before you actually move to another culture.

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This the the third in what I didn’t realize was going to become a series on the relationship between missiology and ecclesiology. I believe this is an extremely helpful conversation. One that needs to happen more and more.

Missiologically-driven folks need to hear more about the centrality of the church in the Great Commission. Many of my missionary friends seem to be a bit, er, underdeveloped in their ecclesiology. They operate as though the local expression of the church is but one of several valid mechanisms for mission. As if things like pastoral care, personal accountability, and spiritual gift-based ministry were optional. But as I’ve written before, I believe that the Commission was given to the church, and that it is God’s structure for obeying that Commission. I believe that churches, not individuals, should be planting churches. I believe that church doesn’t just happen by accident, but that people must be discipled into becoming a healthy body of Christ.

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What is the difference between a “sending church” and a church that is in “partnership” with a missionary or cross cultural church planting team? Do you believe there is a difference?

I truly believe that every cross cultural worker needs to be “sent” from a church. I believe one’s calling into cross cultural missions needs to be in community and not simply an individual’s calling. I believe often the calling starts in a person’s heart but it needs to be shared, prayed through and confirmed within a community of believers.

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In many ways our end game at Upstream is to help the church think and act as a missionary. Though we are finished with this trip the conversation continues with these churches. Many of them have us back to their places where we can start engaging in a conversation with their church.

Our next trip is to London and Paris in May of 2010. Check out our site atwww.theupstreamcollective.org for the dates and the initial application.

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It was the summer of 2007 and Belgium kept coming across his radar. In the news, on TV, on the Internet–the small country in Western Europe seemed to be everywhere. Kyle Goen, associate pastor at LifePoint Church in Smyrna, Tenn., wasn’t sure what this meant.

“I really didn’t know much about Belgium … waffles, chocolate, capital of the European Union, and N.A.T.O. headquarters were located (there). But as to its actual location, I had to find a map and get my bearings straight,” he says in his blog.

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