Before diving into the specific directions for part two, here is a reminder of the basic instructions that will apply to every paper:
Submit as a Microsoft Word or compatible document.
Write using your own words.
Double-space.
Times New Roman, 12-pt. font.
One-inch margins.
Proofread your work carefully to be sure you use proper grammar, spelling, punctuation, and capitalization.
Part Two: Storying the Adventure
The second part of your final project is a story of God’s love and grace coming to life in your chosen people group! It begins with the formation of your cross-cultural ministry team, and ends with a thriving city-church among your chosen people, working to transform its culture through goodness, love, beauty, and truth. This paper should be eight to ten pages, Times New Roman, standard margins, double-spaced.
This story has five acts:
1
Team Formation
2
Incarnation
3
Proclamation
4
Maturation
5
Transformation
Structure the paper accordingly, with an intro paragraph and five distinct sections, each titled as I did above. To help you flesh each section out, make sure your story answers all of the following questions:
1. Team Formation
Who is on your team? Describe them, how old they each are, and how old you are in this story. Are you single? Married? Kids?
How do you meet? In your church? Through a sending organization?
How do you prepare together to go?
What practices do you, as individuals and as a team, espouse in order to help you live into the gospel? How do you pursue Christification?
How do you as a team cultivate Christ-centering community? What practices and commitments do you keep in order to help one another grow in Jesus?
2. Incarnation
You’re there! You’ve arrived! How are you going to go about learning this new culture?
What will your observation practices be?
What kinds of decisions will you make to keep you close to the people you came to serve?
What do you think is most likely to bother you about your host culture? How will you and your team manage culture stress?
How might you get deeply involved in local community?
How will you subject yourself to the forces that they are subject to? How will you avoid a spacesuit, insulated kind of experience? How will you, as much as possible, become one of them?
What aspects of their culture will you intentionally NOT acquire?
What CQ Strategies do you anticipate employing, based on what you’ve learned about your host people?
3. Proclamation
What needs does your target culture present, that the gospel speaks to?
How will you present the gospel in a way that is uniquely suited to your chosen people, without truncating or damaging the essential message? [This is big.] [Review my Gospel of Harmony video here for an example.]
How will you bring the gospel into households? How will you get household-on-household contact when possible? How will you deliver the Jesus Way to whole houses? How will your households work while you live there?
4. Maturation
Some people have believed!
How will you help them learn to hear the voice of Jesus?
How will you teach them to engage Scripture?
How will you encourage them to gather in Christ-centering community?
How will you actually disciple these new disciples, and how will you do it with a focus on households?
How might these household churches provide powerful contrast communities? How will they show a new way to be family?
As some people grow faster than others, how will you cultivate new local leaders?
How will you help these leaders see where leading like Jesus and leading like their culture of origin might not be the same? How will you teach them to lead like Jesus?
How will you encourage the development of a network of household-churches, and an identity as one, unified city church?
5. Transformation
How will you help the growing church identify where following Jesus necessarily means a break with their cultural norms? How will you help them identify the beautiful and good aspects of their culture?
How will you encourage unity in the city church?
What are the major social problems in your host culture? Poverty? Human trafficking? Hunger? Affluent loneliness? How might the approach the city church takes to social problems in the city provide a powerful contrast community for the lost to see?
How will you encourage the growing church to look beyond its borders and send their own teams to unreached, unengaged people?
Part Two of the final project should be approximately 8-10 pages, Times New Roman, standard margins, double spaced. Every single question above has related content in writing or in the videos, so you really shouldn’t get stuck anywhere. The research is done. Now, you just need to story the adventure. You can do it in the past tense, like it’s already happened. Or you can write it like a plan. It’s up to you.
