What is Mission Guiding?

Mission guiding immerses a bishop, priest, or lay leader and their team in the 3 Essential Principles (which we helped develop during our time on mission with ACTS XXIX) to bring transformation to the Church. The narrative below explains in greater detail what we mean by this.

We minister to the leader and their team through prayer, conversation, and the renewal of their minds for this apostolic moment in which we live. The work is analogous to discipleship, executive coaching, and leadership team strategic planning.

Practically, we do this through phone calls, remote sessions, retreats, and frequent visits onsite with the leadership team for strategic 2-day sessions. Some of the means we use to accomplish this work include: organizational development approaches, tools in executive and team coaching, reading assignments with discussion, and a tremendous dependency on God, asking Him to reveal His plan in every area of work. The goal, approach, tools, and mission itself are aimed at the deeper conversion and transformation of each individual person, from which comes the opportunity for renewal and reform in the Church.

To be clear, we are not creating plans for the leader and their team; rather, we participate in their discernment process for discovering areas in need of renewal and God’s plan. The unique identity and circumstances of each local church require our approach to be completely holistic and non-programmatic.  We do, however, encourage the 3 EPs to be applied systemically, with the hope that all leaders in the organization will experience a deeper apostolic way of life. This includes everything from the way they strategize and run meetings to the way they interact with one another and minister to society at large. When this way of living permeates the why, what, and how of ministry, we see what John Paul the Great spoke of when he called us to “Look to the future with commitment to a New Evangelization, one that is new in its ardor, new in its methods, and new in its expression.”

 A quick summary of mission guiding includes, but is not limited to:

  • Facilitating leadership team strategy sessions

  • Regular 2 on 1 video calls with select leaders

  • Video calls into team meetings

  • Retreats (i.e., chancery, school leadership)

  • The Institute for Apostolic Leadership