Mission Driver

What is the role?

The role of the Mission Driver is to drive mission at your congregation. But what on earth does that mean? Let’s break it down.

The word mission means the purpose for which one is sent out. Jesus sends his disciples for a purpose: to share the love of Christ and the message about Christ with others. When we talk about mission, we’re talking about Christians sharing and non-believers responding to Jesus. This happens locally as we help people explore the gospel in our suburb, and it happens further afield as we partner with organisations and individuals doing mission work around Australia and overseas.

We use the word driver because we want you to accelerate it forward and steer it in the right direction. It means taking initiative and responsibility in making mission happen in your congregation.

What is the goal?

We want to see as many people as possible explore the gospel, and we want to see more people go from death to life through faith in Jesus.

What are my responsibilities?

The role involves collaborating with the Mission Pastor who will help you decide what to spend your time on, but it also involves a good deal of freedom to try things you think will help achieve your goals. With this in mind, there are some things that have proven useful for mission drivers in the past, such as:

• Checking connect cards each week to see who might be likely to want to explore Christianity, and inviting them to Christianity Explored.

• Attending Christianity Explored each term to get alongside explorers from your congregation as well as the Christian friends who brought them along.

• Capturing and sharing the stories of explorers or new Christians within your congregation to encourage others to explore or invite.

• Thinking about church from the perspective of an outsider and feeding back to pastors ways to make church more outsider-friendly.

The way you do your role may look different depending on whether you have a team working with you, and how big that team is. Sometimes drivers don’t have a team, sometimes they have a small team, sometimes they have a big team. Part of the role is working with what you’ve got, and requesting extra people/resources if you need them.

The Mission Pastor may occasionally invite you to be part of other activities, such as baptising people, making announcements at church, and so on.

What’s the time commitment?

At a minimum the role involves two hours of your time per month: one hour to meet with other drivers in your congregation, and another hour to meet with the other Mission drivers across the other congregations. This is a two-hour block at church, normally on the first Sunday of each month from 1–3pm.

But part of the role is figuring out how much time you want to give to the things you’re trying to do in your role. For example, if you decide that checking and responding to mission-related connect cards is something you’ll do, this may take a half hour each week. Attending Christianity Explored and/or Bible Explorers group could take a few hours per week. You might decide to put your time into something else that will better achieve your goal. There is freedom here, and it’s a good idea to begin by discussing what your priorities should be with your Mission pastor.

We ask you commit to doing this role for one year, before reviewing whether to continue the role or not.