Tolstoy wrote, "Everybody wants to change the world, but no one thinks of changing himself."
Maybe we’re a little over ambitious, but we want it all. We want to change our world and become a changed people. In NieuCommunities, we are a collection of mentoring and sending communities, exclusively focused on the development of younger missional leaders and communities. Our hope and our calling is to shape and send out missional people as we follow in the footsteps of Jesus together.
Our communities are made up of at least three kinds of people: our staff who are called to mentor people to live missional lives, apprentices who are being shaped to live missional lives, and a handful of others from within our context who are becoming followers of Jesus.
Our hope and our calling is to shape and send out missional people as we follow in the footsteps of Jesus together. Jesus lingered long with God, and so we carve out time in each of our communities to do the same. We call this communion.
Jesus did life day-in and day-out with a small band of sojourners, so we choose to live near and share our lives with each other. We call this community.
Jesus lived with an unwavering purpose as he moved into people’s worlds and created a spiritual home for them right where they lived, so we move into the neighborhood, open our homes and our hearts and seek to be a redemptive presence wherever we find ourselves in the world. We call this engaging our context.
Communion, Community, and Context are the three indispensable arenas of engagement in our formational experience. Each of our communities sets out every year to pursue God relentlessly, to allow our faith and character to be transformed in the crucible of community, and to submerge into the cultures around us, helping shape people to become uncommon followers of Jesus.
Postures
Our journey into communion, community, and context unfolds as we step across in six natural stepping stones, steps we call missional postures. These are the postures that missional leaders need to learn, maybe even master, to engage communion, community, and culture well. So we focus our conversations and our experiences on these postures in our journey together:
Listening: Learning to listen to God, to our hearts, to each other, and to the culture around us.
Submerging: Being present and being the hands and feet of Jesus in the neighborhoods we live in.
Inviting: Becoming fragrant followers of Jesus who gather people around a compelling story.
Contending: Fighting well for the lives and faith of those God has brought into our lives.
Imagining: Seeing and embracing what God has created for us and preparing to engage the next leg of our mission.
Entrusting: Preparing those we have served to go on with God and encouraging them to pass on what they’ve received.
These are natural and essential phases we experience in life as we set out to explore what it takes to be good news, to navigate life, and to create communities of faith where they didn’t exist before. It’s our hope and expectation that those who come to be formed in our community would be able to go anywhere in the world and fruitfully and take others through a similar journey into communion, community, and context.
Values
These are some of the values which guide each of our NieuCommunities sites:
Discovering Together…
We’ll explore and learn together, in big groups and in small groups, one-on-one and with our neighbors. Our learning style will be interactive, varied, and experiential.
Experiential Faith…
We’ll steer our learning beyond intellectual understanding towards an experiential awareness of God’s presence as we do life and ministry. We will attempt to live what we learn.
Transformational Relationships…
We go all-out to form communities where honesty and love prevails; to be a place where people can live unrehearsed, but not necessarily unchallenged lives.
Incarnational Mentoring…
We will open up our homes and our hearts to each other. We’ll share our stories with you as you write the next chapter in yours.
Missional Communities…
Missions is about creating a spiritual home for people. It’s about creating space for people to connect with each other and with God. Our calling compels us to shape leaders who will create and multiply new communities of faith everywhere they go.
Teams
NieuCommunities currently has teams living and serving in South Africa and San Diego.
To learn more about NieuCommunities, visit our website at www.nieucommunities.org.
