What are Missional MOBS?
Missional MOBS are formal or informal groups of people from a missional community who choose to respond to an opportunity to provide needed services to a missions project, a new congregational expression, or an existing congregation to expand and extend their capacity for ministry.
Often they are a missions organization, team, or network within a congregation, or a missional community beyond a congregation who choose to accept a Great Commission and Great Commandment service challenge as representatives of the Church scattered rather than just gathered.
Their breakthrough service can be many things for various durations. They can be a one day, one weekend, or one or two weeks missional engagement with a specific project or congregation. They can also be a commitment of six months, a year, or two years or longer to a specific missions project or congregation.
Short-Term Commitments: When the commitment is for one day to a couple of weeks, the Missional MOBS role is typically to complete an identified project – are part of a project – with a beginning and an end. They do their part, then withdraw, although they may continue prayerful support of the larger effort for which they provided a defined service.
Long-Term Commitments: When the commitment is for six months or more, participants in Missional MOBS bring their whole life as a Christian to the effort. As an example, if Missional MOBS are part of a new congregational expression or an existing congregation seeking to increase vitality and vibrancy, they bring their prayerful support, their spiritual gifts, their skills, their tithes and offerings, their leadership capacities, and other qualities to the effort.
They do not seek to reimage the new congregational expression or existing congregation in their image, but to help empower the vision of the congregation they are serving.
- They provide support for the strategies to fulfill the vision of God by which the congregation is captured.
- They seek to work themselves out of their ministry role in the congregation by helping to raise up, train, and deploy people who will be leaders of the congregation for many years to come.
- When possible they work seek to nudge into public service the leaders they are raising up and begin to move themselves into the background.
Where Did the Idea of Missional MOBS Originate? During the past two decades, the idea of “Flash Mobs,” who would show up in public places and engage in some type of performance art, has emerged and reached some level of popularity. Some church groups began to think about this concept in innovative ways. In the Catholic Church in North America, the concept of “Mass Mobs” emerged as a group of people swarming to a local parish who was struggling and helping them for the short-term or long-term. This is an application of this concept in CMBA for new congregational expressions, existing congregations seeking to ReThrive, and other types of short-term or long-term missions projects.
George Bullard, October 22, 2020, www.BullardJournal.org