Spent part of this afternoon with Mark and Jess, colleagues in the Seeds of Hope network in the Uniting Church in Australia, Queensland Synod. The movement started back in 2002 when a few of us started dreaming about developing a culture of church planting in the Uniting Church.
Back in 2002 we linked up with Church Resource Ministries for a two year process called “Matrix”. We put together the elements of strategic prayer, identifying, recruiting, assessing and placing church planters, coaching planters, building ‘multiplying churches’, and development of emerging leaders. With help from Ken Morgan of CRM we developed our own versions of D:Frag (called Reframe by us) and Launchpad – training sessions on missional church in a postmodern postchristendom environment.
So now we have some shared language, shared strategy and a denomination starting to place priority on developing fresh missional initiatives. We’re forging links with Forge Mission Training Network. And we’re developing ‘leadership farms’ for young leaders who are keen to try out short-term (2 year) team projects. We’re negotiating funding and strategic support from the Synod.
There’s a web site (Seeds of Hope), and a couple of email groups (Hopeseeds & Prayerseeds) No blog at this point!
We have something like 15 new missional initiatives that have started up in the last two years, that we know about.
Now’s the time to change gears.