The Vision of the MRC: An Interview with Travis Bodden

by Jacob Clagg with Travis Bodden

What is the Midwest Regional Conference's vision and strategy?

The three strategy areas that we feel we need to make headway in are:

First, Developing Reproducible Disciples. We’ve often tried to do discipleship. We’ve had many things that we’ve called it. So, we keep pushing on that, and it’s a long trajectory of change.

Second, Connecting with Cross-Cultural Ministries. Recognizing the many cultures and subcultures within our given community, the hope is that we’ll begin to look more and more like our communities.

Third, Empowering Leaders who Impact their Communities. We’re trying to represent [that Kingdom of Heaven] here on Earth. How can we develop leaders so they can really make an impact within their community? These are the three areas we’ve been working on for about 10 years.

Why these three visions?

For discipleship, we recognize we have not been teaching people to teach people. Our discipleship is all one generation deep. We have the same Sunday school teacher who has taught the same class for 40 years. She has had the same students for 40 years. I think we’ve also realized that if we dropped someone into their lap, and said, “We need you to develop this person,” they would say, “We don’t know how.” For most of us, that hasn’t been something we’ve done for the last 40 years, 50 years, or 80 years. We’ve done a good job of grabbing people who are already good at teaching.

For cross-cultural, we are a culturally homogenous group. Often, we do not have a good representation of our community. But for us, we recognize that we can learn from some of the other cultures that are within us. Whether that’s rich/poor, black/white/Hispanic, democrat/republican, Harley rider/construction guy, blue collar worker/white collar, you pick. If they are all created in God’s image, we can learn from one another. I think we miss the completeness of God when we only have a small section.

For empowering leaders, we’ve found that we had a tendency to do almost anything we do inside of our four walls, and we recognize that the church needs to be outside of the building. If we were taken off the map, our communities should miss us. That they might go, “Oh man, we hate to know that they closed. That’s awful.” So, how do we leverage relationships and people so that we really impact our community for the kingdom of heaven? If we were gone, [the community] should notice. I want to know that we are making that kind of an impact.

How did this vision come about?

This started at a retreat we had, where, you know, we brought out the white paper, and we started asking questions. “Where are the areas that if we don’t change, that will not be good for our trajectory?” These were the three things that, for the group at the time, rose to the surface. These things, we think, are going to outlast us. Even in a year, two years, or ten years, we still need to focus on this, versus some latest fad that we need to jump on the bandwagon of.

Who were the people that helped to inspire this vision?

I remember Brian Miller (Interim Pastor at Crossroad Community Church, Sullivan, IL) was helping us do the whiteboard, and coaching us through that. He asked all of the questions and helped those things bubble to the surface. Brandon Kelly (Pastor at College First, Findlay, OH) was influential about how we do this directionally. Lance Finley (Executive Director at CGGC Office, Findlay OH) was a part of those conversations. Those would have been the three.

What are some of the changes you are seeing in the MRC?

I’ve watched a lot of churches try to pick a partner in their local community. I think it’s slow going. They say, “We are going to provide backpacks.” And eventually it moves to, “We are going to help with tutoring.” New Beginnings did their VBS at Durfee school in Decatur, Illinois, only because they were partnering with the school for six years before that. That finally led to the schools saying, “We don’t mind you doing VBS here.” That’s a big school district. That’s huge for us.

I probably hear more pastors saying, “Yes, yes, yes, but how do they get my congregation in on that?” More pastors are convinced, but they just have to figure out how to bring their leaders in.

Jacob, this is probably a 30-year trajectory change. The fact is, we’re only 10 years in. This is going to outlast me, if we’re talking about how long it takes to turn some of this.

What does this vision look like in practice? How do you measure your success?

For discipleship, a goal for me is every member of a congregation could clearly identify who’s discipling them, and who they are discipling. That would be a success.

Cross-culturally, there is some awareness that the things we post online are speaking poorly of the people we need to reach. We often speak poorly and then we wonder why they don’t want to come to our church. What we are posting, and what we are sharing, other people are seeing and they are going to have a pretty good idea of whether you love them long before they come through your door.

In the area of empowering leaders who impact their communities, my longing is that every church has one partnership organization within their local community and one partnership in the global community.

Often, I think churches do too many [partnerships]. If you’re a church of 40 people, you can’t make 12 partnerships. You just don’t have enough people for that. Let’s just do one and let’s do it really well.

What about when the event/partnership doesn’t make more people come to our church?

The recognition that we are going to invest in a lot of people that aren’t going to come to our church is really hard to hear. I still believe it to be true. The way our current gatherings are, I don’t think most of the people we are trying to reach are going to come on Sunday morning at 9 a.m. I don’t think that’s their next step with Jesus.

Our first conversations about Jesus aren’t going to happen in the church. And that’s where churches are pretty disheartened. They are really hoping people will just start coming to their churches. They are going to want some pretty immediate results.

You’ve mentioned that this is a slow process. How do you feel about that?

I’m not depressed about the local church. It still has a valuable purpose. But here is my disheartened part. When I go to the churches that are locked in, they dismiss the people that won’t come. “Well people just aren’t spiritual. It’s a sign of the times. Jesus is coming back, and we just have to hang on until he comes back.” Instead of saying, “We have got to reach the 50s, 40s, 30s, and 20s.” That’s not on their radar. They’ve bought into the idea that “this is the sign of the times. There’s nothing we can do.”

Maybe Jesus is coming back soon, but I also know that 2,000 years ago, as Paul was writing, people were quitting their jobs because they thought Jesus was coming back that soon. He might still be gone for another thousands of years. Even if he’s coming back in two years, our mission has not changed. We still have to connect with a generation that does not know the hope of Jesus and we’ve got to do whatever we’ve got to do to make that connection.