At the beginning of this year, our Associate Pastor, Bob England, and myself, participated in the initial cohort of Forge Motown. Our church, Warren Road Church, is in the midst of a turnaround and we are entering the building culture phase of that. At the end of 2018, our Lead Team was in the process of discerning some longer-term vision, and it was around that time that I received an invitation to be a part of Forge Motown.
I resonated with the language of that invitation, as well as what I initially saw on the Forge America website. Pastor Bob and I signed up for the cohort. We joined the cohort with the intent to bring back some quality content to our church that would help us move forward on mission with Jesus. While that did happen, we both were personally challenged to live a missional lifestyle in our own lives. It was a wakeup call for both of us.
It didn’t take long to realize that Forge really resonated with our hearts and the vision that the Lord was making clearer to us for Warren Road Church. We were then approached about the idea of WRC partnering with Forge. It almost seemed like a no-brainer.
Warren Road Church, like many churches, has relied on the attractional model of church throughout our history. Our church averages 75 people in Sunday worship—1/4 of the people we did 20 years ago, and yet we were still trying to be attractional. This often led to frustration and a feeling of defeat.
Pastor Bob, myself, and our Lead Team began to sense that something needed to change. And the paradigm shift of moving from an attractional model to a missional model began to make sense, as Pastor Bob and I were able to bring back what we were learning to our Lead Team.
So this summer, we officially became a partner church with Forge. Since then, we have been receiving coaching from Mark VanValin. Together we brainstormed how to incorporate the Forge curriculum into the life of our church to help us begin to make this massive paradigm shift from attractional to missional.
We decided to start big rather than small, and invited our entire church to be a part of Forge in our initial cohort (Fall 2019-Spring 2020). Our format involved using our existing Life Group structure, paired with some churchwide teaching. We tried to model our structure based off of our Cohort, which involved larger group sessions, and smaller group coaching sessions.
So once a month, we gather all of our life groups together on a Sunday night, to go through a Forge session collectively. After some teaching we break off into our Life Groups for discussion, support and prayer. Our Life Groups then meet one other time a month to go through a session together.
We have several Life Group leaders who are super excited to be leading their groups through Forge. A few of them have been living out some of the Forge concepts even before they knew that what they were doing is missional living. They are excited to receive the training, and to help others discover the joy of a missional lifestyle.
We are now almost 2 months into Forge at WRC. We have at least 30 people participating in our Forge Life Groups. We are praying for the Holy Spirit to do a deep heart work within our church. We know that the paradigm shift from attractional to missional is not an easy jump for many people. But we believe that the Holy Spirit will awaken us to our contexts as individuals and as a church.
We are now beginning to brainstorm and plan for what years 2 and 3 of our partnership may look like for us, which is leading us to pray about a bigger vision for our church to become a hub for micro-churches that are birthed as individuals and/or Life Groups engage their contexts. We have a long way to go, a lot of planning, a lot of conversations, a lot of prayer, and a huge reliance on the Spirit. But we are excited to see what the Lord will do in the years ahead, and even in this first year of WRC’s partnership with Forge.
- Andy Bentz, Warren Road Church, Westland, MI