In the last years of his life, John, the last of the twelve disciples left alive, contemplated the most important truths he wished to pass on from their personal experience with Jesus. He wrote:
“What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the Word of Life…” (I John 1:1)
The Apostle John’s model is important to us on the Horizons Team. As we seek to steward our experience walking with Jesus in starting new teams and new initiatives, we humbly offer to you what we have learned, especially what we have seen, heard, and touched. The Exodus Walking Guide is one of several sets of Horizons’ action/reflection modules using audio, video, and written text in order to share key insights, encouragements, and challenges from InnerCHANGE pioneers with years of experience. It is meant to be a guide for starting new teams, not a roadmap and certainly not a formula. We hope that the Exodus Walking Guide will cultivate intimacy with Christ and heighten awareness of how God’s Spirit directs pioneer efforts.
Who is the Exodus Walking Guide For?
This guide is designed to develop the character and spirituality of apostolic leaders in InnerCHANGE who are starting new teams. As a new team leader, we encourage you to experience these modules personally with mentoring from a Horizons coach. This can happen in one of two ways. First, this material can be presented in person, interactively, by Horizons coaches in a week-long intensive formation retreat. Second, learning can be stretched out over time by covering one or two modules a week in Learning Community. In this second way, new team leaders can reflect on the formation modules directly off the Horizons website and then discuss them with a Horizons coach in person or on Skype, Zoom or What’s Ap. Second, the formation material in the Exodus Walking Guide is designed for members of a pioneering team. After processing and “owning” this material in advance, some pioneer leaders may choose to go through this set of modules a second time with their team or with key community leaders. Other team leaders may choose to adapt and rework some or all of the formation material for their teams. Either way, this material is designed first for new team leaders, and second for new team members. Generally, Horizons coaches will expect that both team leaders and team members will have interacted with this formation in some form. Occasionally, new team leaders and their Horizons coaches may choose a third way to use this material—as new team leaders and members together at one time. This can be an especially good, time-saving option for veteran leaders in InnerCHANGE who are starting a new team in a new site and want to create a mutual learning environment in which the formation content, itself, is the primary mentor. While this Guide is designed for Horizons teams, in truth, there are many ways this formation material can be used. The Exodus Walking Guide can be a “script” to help existing InnerCHANGE teams that wish to refresh their vision, confirm their foundations, or are experiencing new beginnings with new team leaders and/or team members. This material can be a supplement to the normal apprenticeship and novitiate material for new team members on teams that are especially dynamic in creating new expressions of ministry.
How Should I Use This?
The Exodus Walking Guide is as “finished” and comprehensive as we can make it. These formation modules are also sequenced developmentally to biblical story, especially the Exodus narrative, as well as the history of our experience. We have tried to go deep in order to communicate what is core, but have also gone wide in order to anticipate the broad number of questions and challenges that emerge in a dynamic new site. We have been thorough in this guide so that new team leaders can concentrate their creativity on the day-to-day actions and reflections of ministry. In the past, without this content, Horizons coaches and new team leaders have been forced to spend a lot of energy creating their own formation content and this can slow down the pioneering journey. As much as possible, the Exodus Walking Guide is designed to prevent new teams from needing to “recreate the wheel.” We believe new teams will journey farther in the privilege of making disciples and transforming their communities if they begin with a foundation of formation content. However, some new team leaders or members may find that this material is too finished, or too culturally defined, or simply too wide for their specific context. We want to emphasize again, that this is a guide, not a roadmap, and we invite you to adapt this content as you discern the leading of the Spirit. One way to adapt this material would be to focus more on the biblical passages than the personal InnerCHANGE stories and form the pioneering team through a series of Bible studies creating new sets of questions. For new team leaders that have experienced the content of these modules in a week-long intensive and found it very helpful, they will be able to fall back on the Exodus Walking Guide as a means of reviewing or refining learning. In fact, we believe you can expect to use much of this material more than once. Many of the most important lessons in life and ministry are repeated in order for learning to go from the head to the heart and practically to the hands.
When Should I Use This Guide?
This guide is an important foundation for forming ministry perspective so new team leaders should expect to use it in the first year of the journey, generally in the second of five seasons, called “Sending out Laborers.” Depending on time and travel constraints and the availability of new team leaders and Horizons coaches, these modules can also be started in the first season, called, “Preparing the Laborers.” However, this guide can also be used as a resource throughout the first two to three years of ministry to build capacity in new team members as well as local leaders and volunteers as God brings new laborers. A Journey of Great Meaning
“Listen, my beloved brothers, has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the Kingdom, which he has promised to those who love him?” (James 2:5)
It is hard to imagine a journey in ministry more meaningful than co-laboring with God as he brings new life among the “rich in faith.” Yet sometimes, in ministering incarnationally in under-resourced communities and contending daily with tangible and often desperate limits, our perspective can become more shaped by deficits and shortcomings than assets. When we lose touch with God’s vision of the rich in faith, we risk losing sight of a God who is rich in everything and desires to bless us abundantly. Jenny Bacon has been an important voice in reminding us that our God is very rich and for him all things are possible. Thus, maintaining an accurate biblical perspective in mission among the marginalized is essential in every way. For this reason, the primary force for formation in the Exodus Walking Guide is the Word of God. We believe that the closer we stay to the Word of God in the Bible and in the person of Christ, the more relevant we will be to the world. The Exodus Walking Guide is paced to our great Exodus “Walking God,” who travels the liberating journey on foot with us every step of the way, as the cloud by day and the fire by night.
