Our Journey with Interface
May 2025
Interface is our SM program on missional church. It encourages a local church to embrace its missional discipleship journey, leading to all God’s people living a life on mission with God and the local church facilitating that missional journey.
Our goal since Simply Mobilizing’s launch at the International Conference in Chiang Mai, Thailand, in 2015 has been to achieve church-centered mobilization, essential for a missional church. The Interface Program is where God has guided us to fulfil this vision.
In addition, Interface paves the way for all our SM courses to gain acceptance in local churches and even in entire denominations, thereby enabling the full potential of our prophetic (level-one) mobilization ministry to be realized.
Background
The Interface seminar was first launched in 2018. Five videos were produced as tutorials to help our SM Mobilizers conduct the seminar live with pastors and church leaders. Showing the video tutorial directly to pastors, however, proved to be most effective, so in 2020, the second edition videos of the seminar were produced with live showings in mind. This approach has been well received by both SM Mobilizers and pastors. To date, the Interface seminar is in 34 countries and has been translated into 12 languages. However, the implementation of the concepts taught and discussed at the seminar has not been forthcoming, highlighting the need for practical workshops to help facilitate implementation.
Towards the end of 2023, a connection was made in New Zealand (NZ) with Caleb Leadership Ministries through Andrew Moore, our SM NC for NZ. Caleb Leadership Ministries is a Christian leadership organization that specializes in assisting pastors with implementing vision within their local church.
Progress
With the help of Caleb Leadership Ministries, we have been developing workshops to assist churches in transitioning from the ideas and concepts of a missional church to practical and meaningful implementation.
Three workshops have been identified, and two have been developed and trialed. The ‘events’ of the workshops and the seminar are complemented by the all-important ‘process’ that produces the change necessary for missional church to become a reality. This is where the SM Mobilizer functions not just as a facilitator of a course, but as one who guides the program, journeying with a church and its leadership to experience the realities of missional church thinking and practice.
The seminar now includes Session 6, which provides a lead-in to the workshop phase by introducing the workshops and outlining the next steps for pastors should they wish to proceed beyond the seminar.
Where Are We Now?
Here in NZ, at Dorothy’s and my home church, we are halfway through the implementation process made possible by very good buy-in from the church leadership. Other churches are also beginning to express interest.
We are ‘making haste slowly.’ We are very concerned that we provide a program capable of succeeding, regardless of the local church’s current culture, size, spiritual condition or even their theology. I believe we are well on track to accomplish just that!
The Roll-Out
I would prefer to continue this development phase in NZ for the rest of the year before rolling it out internationally; however, due to high interest from our SM leaders, we will roll out the first two workshops in June and July this year for trials in other countries, along with session six for the seminar that leads into the workshop phase. We have been communicating with NCs and others about this and the accompanying training and will continue to do so with additional information.
In Conclusion
The potential of Interface to SM, and to mobilization in general, is enormous. Until now, mission mobilization has generally focused on recruitment, resulting in a somewhat passive involvement of local churches in mission, thereby utilizing only a small percentage of available Christian resources for mission, both human and otherwise. In contrast, the church-centered mobilization that Interface promotes and SM champions has the potential to enable local churches and entire denominations to engage actively in mission both locally and globally and cooperate meaningfully with Khevra/Sodalities that specialize in reaching the world’s remaining unreached.
Biblically, missional church is not just one option of church among many. It is the only option.
Just imagine for a moment the five million local churches in our world today being truly missional churches, guiding the 700 million believers in their congregations in missional discipleship. The problem for world Christian mission is never the ‘harvest’. The problem is always the ‘harvesters’ – they are far too few (Mt 9:37).
Is the Lord leading us to help change this? I truly believe He is!