pat loughery

This is another part in the Strategic Planning for Missional Churches series. You can find the whole series by viewing this tag.

Part of the strategic planning process, and the one which allows you to scope and scale your effort, is the identification of the “sandbox” you want to play in. The goal in a profit-driven environment is to choose a sandbox (a target market) which is big enough to allow for profitable growth and yet not so large that you get lost in the crowd of competitors. Microsoft, early in its lifespan, chose the personal computer as its sandbox, and then expanded from the desktop to add portable devices when they needed a new challenge.

A missional church identifies the sandbox as the mission field. That’s a nice simple starting point, isn’t it? But here’s where things get a bit more difficult. A friend of mine who is a missionary in the classical sense is working in central Asia teaching in a local university while he also seeks to grow God’s kingdom. But he has to focus beyond that, and he is in a particular country (which I can’t name here because of political concerns). In that country, he works with a specific people group so that he can learn their language, culture and customs – and so that he can, over the long term, build friendship with people of peace among them, and let them see the Jesus in his life.

As our church goes through another iteration (reboot, reformat), we considered the idea of sandbox. We saw sandbox both as having a geographic and a social aspect. Here is what we see as our initial sandbox.

The areas and peoples we feel sent to are:
· North Bend, Snoqualmie and the surrounding semi-rural areas (specifically, not targeting Issaquah). Not people who would commute out, but people who live here.
· People in their 20s to 40s [central target; not inclusive, but implies worldview and stylistic choices] without a strong preconceived notion about what church “ought to be”
· Unchurched and churched people without structural and ecclesiological baggage
· People who want a faith that makes a difference in their world
· People with a sense of flexibility and experimentation (entrepreneurial, willing to go on an adventure)
· People who are seeking deep faith and realize that it may not always include simple answers.
· People who are willing to embrace mystery as part of God’s nature, realizing that God cannot be fully captured or described by our thoughts and words

This is partly a description of those who we are seeking to join us to grow the core portion of the church, and we will see a different skew in the fall as we focus our efforts reaching out to those with no grid of faith.

Where is God specifically sending you? Where is God sending your community? How do these areas overlap? Is it OK if the first isn’t a pure subset of the second?