MCs are primarily led by laity and are "lightweight and low maintenance"[3] and most often meet 3–4 times a month in their missional context.
Missional Communities place a strong value on life together, with the expressed intention of seeing those they impact choose to start following Jesus.
An MC has leaders who, through a process of discernment, decide their mission vision and then invite people to join them in reaching that particular context.
"Low control, high accountability" is one way to describe relationships between the Missional Community and the church body and leadership.
The small groups work as places of support, challenge and closeness, as the wider MC gathering is too large for general sharing of prayer requests and the like.
Although they were first experimented with in inner city London in the late 1980s, they became more fully formed when Mike Breen became the senior pastor of St Thomas' Sheffield in 1994.
Leaders were encouraged to seek God for a vision for a new expression of church and, with training and support, they could be released to gather a team and pursue that dream.
The church met for Sunday celebrations in a variety of large rented facilities, ending up in a huge disused nightclub, the Roxy, where the Rolling Stones had once played.
In 1998, however, with only a couple of weeks notice, the building was closed down for breaking fire code, and the church was forced to scatter into their various MC gatherings for Sunday worship.
Mike Breen, the former senior pastor of St. Thomas' Sheffield who originated Missional Communities, moved to Pawleys Island, South Carolina and in 2008 began 3DM, a coaching entity that comes alongside churches of varying sizes to help them transition to this missional/discipleship model.
[9] More broadly speaking, even the term Missional Community is seeping into the consciousness of the evangelical world of the United States as the first large-scale conference was held about MCs.
[10] In 2011, Verge united with Exponential, the largest conference for church planters, where the theme was, "Missional Communities: Discovering Old Truths in New Paradigms.".
Most often this is the language of LifeShapes, a set of 8 Shapes that distill the teachings and principles of the Bible and Jesus, that were fashioned by Mike Breen as Missional Communities first developed and captured in his book "Building a Discipling Culture".
In practice MCs do tend to certain things pretty regularly, albeit in slightly different ways according to their context, including: In addition to providing this list, Alex Absalom comments, "We would summarize this as a 1 Corinthians 11-14 model, which seems the fullest unpacking of how a church oikos [extended household] would meet and express its life together.
From what Paul writes, it is also clear that those gatherings were led in such a way that people who weren't yet Christians could come in and be welcomed, without it throwing all the plans into confusion.