Connecting Mercy Hill on The City

In a day and age when connecting is harder than ever, ironically, it has become more important than ever.

Over the past few months, Mercy Hill's community has been slowly implementing tools to make connecting easier through an online connection space called The City.

What is The City?  The City is the online community we're implementing for Mercy Hill. It is an excellent tool for church plants designed by some people who are part of our church planting network, Acts 29, and sold to Zondervan (the Bible people).  

Click here to visit The City's public "plaza" for Mercy Hill. (You can also find a link to this in the nav bar to the right.) From this page, you can open a page with a form that enables you to join The City.

Before you join--or if you're reluctant to do so, I want to explain some of the benefits that The City provides to our church plant.

So, below, I'm going to talk about (1) easier communication connections; (2) an online church membership directory; and (3) serving one another. 

Click to read more ...

Growing in the Gospel as Missionaries

Scott Leary has uncovered a helpful worksheet that takes various measures of a person's Christian maturity as held up against his or her "gospel fluency" and "missional orientation."

Check out this handout from the Edge Network here; it is a PDF under the title, "empirical indicators." Use it as a self-assessment or as an assessment tool for someone you're considering to be ready for leadership.

Incubation: a New Stage of Church Planting

Updated on by Phil Henry

We have completed our preview stage as a church. This means we've met four times as a gathered community and enjoyed the public worship of God.

We think it went pretty well!

We averaged sixty people per service; had a variety of musical expressions, all along the lines of ancient and Christ-centered hymns set to modern music; heard God's Word preached from the Gospels, the Psalms, the Pentateuch, and the Epistles; and saw a few dozen people visit a "church" who don't typically do so, or haven't done so before.

But there's a lot of work still ahead. In that light, we're excited as we move into this summer and see what God is doing in our growing community.

We're calling this summer's stage our "incubation" stage.

Our goals in this stage include meeting for worship in homes, launching several small groups (called crowded houses) and showing mercy to our community through various ministry and outreach efforts.

Some of these may be as simple as showing up and "being there" for a community event.

Click to read more ...