Resilient Communities: Transforming the World Step-by-Step

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Resilient Community

Resilient Communities: Transforming the World Step-by-Step

By Justin Long ⋅ December 18, 2009 ⋅

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Resilient Communities are one of the goals of mission. No, you won’t find the phrase “resilient community” in the Bible – but we know that God cares about communities, cities, and peoples just as much as he cares about individuals. So we know that Jesus came to forgive, rescue and heal the lost as well as to destroy the works of the devil: He does this both for individuals and for groups of individuals. A standard part of missiology is: the world was broken into nations at Babel, and now God has been penetrating each individual nation with the Good News until all the nations are drawn into salvation.

Swarming is important to me because it is a key part of a broader process. It is an organizational structure which leaders can use to transform a community into resilience. The process is simple:

Mobilizing: we recruit missionary candidates …
Training: who are discipled, trained, prepared and equipped as …
Leaders: who operate not by ranks & rights but by responsibility & stewardship & influence …
Swarms: through visionary, community-oriented, decentralized self-organized, culturally influential, adaptive, open, multiplying groups…
Multiplying: raising up multiple generations of leaders in a multigenerational pass-on-the-baton model…
Resilience: who achieve specific goals within communities that increase their resilience and sustainability.

Note: Resilience isn’t about salvation. There are numerous spiritual worldviews and paradigms out there, of which for example Buddhism, Christianity and Islam are only three. These worldviews fight for the allegiance of communities (for a case study, see this article about how the Taliban takes over villages using a model reminiscent of the Luke 10 “Person of Peace”). More than that, communities often have a certain element of brokenness: for example, rampant disease, lack of resources, or lack of water. Salvation, from the world’s perspective, is generally just the transition of a community from a not-Christian perspective to a Christian one: this is not always viewed in a positive light by non-Christians. On the other hand, salvation from a Christian perspective is the rescue of a community, healing of its brokenness, and return of its allegiance to God. The beginning of salvation and the process of discipleship increases resilience, which is a measure of a community’s resistance to attacks which would take it away from following Christ. The process, put simply:

Evangelization: is about the proclamation and spread of the Good News so that people can understand it
Making Disciples: is enabling people to respond to the Good News, grow in their faith, and share it with others
Church Planting: is helping disciples to create locally, contextualized structures for worship and mutual encouragement & support
Church Planting Movements: are helping churches to reproduce themselves rapidly and spread into other contexts
Resilience: shoring up the community around the church, increasing its ability to sustain itself, and protecting it from attack

Resilience is a measure of the ability of a community to withstand attack and to sustain itself over time. ”Protection from attack” does not imply militancy, at least not in how I am using it (although I am sure it does take that form from time to time, but I do not want to here debate the right-ness or wrong-ness of that). However, it does mean standing up for justice, communicating news about oppression, as well as providing apologetics for communities where Christianity is being attacked, debated, slandered, etc. in the public square. “Raising sustainability” means in all spheres: food, water, business, philosophy, education, theology, government, etc. If Christianity is firm in one area but is weak in others, it can be open to attack.

Missionaries, therefore, must contribute to the Resilience of a Community. Stopping only at the salvation of a few individuals – or even the salvation or Christward movement of a community of a whole – will endanger the long-term stability of a community. A community where we are unconcerned about the long-term resilience is like the rocky soil in the parable of the Sower and the Seeds (Luke 8): when trials and tribulations come, the community will be lost.