How this Arkansas church Is thinking differently and re-creating Itself to make disciples

Dru Dodson’s ‘Epic Failure’

How this Arkansas church Is thinking differently and re-creating Itself to make disciples

Lindy Lowry

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Transformative Stories From Exponential Learning Communities

Over the last several years, church leaders around the nation have journeyed together, in an attempt to hear and understand what God is saying to them about the next years of their lives and ministries. Specifically, what they will focus on–building their church or building the Kingdom? Guided by missional thought leaders Alan Hirsch and Rob Wegner, this inaugural group, eventually called Future Travelers, met several times to learn together and wrestle with the implications of this question.
 As a result of this journey, these churches and others have initiated transformative changes and practices. Below in this Q & A, Dru Dodson, teaching pastor at Lake Valley Church in Hot Springs, Arkansas, shares about the transformative impact Lake Valley has seen as a result of his involvement in Exponential Learning Communities. The Dodsons are one of the 13 original families that started Lake Valley. Here, he talks about his experiences in Future Travelers—one of two Exponential Learning Communities starting this fall—and why this “epic failure” + the extended six-month gathering have proved to be such a catalyst of change for him, Lake Valley and many other churches in the region. 
Dru, when you think back to the three actual gatherings you participated in as part of Future Travelers, what struck you most about the overall “learning together” experience?
The peer environment. It was refreshingly free of comparison and competition. I loved the humility of the participants—and speakers—who are all “successful,” yet are asking the deeper, thoughtful questions about actual disciple making, not just best practices for running the machine. Because several of us from the same informal regional network were there together—Chip Jackson, Wade Burnett, Ben Parkinson—there was a lot of learning and fun thinking together about our corner of the world: the American South.
Looking back, what are the most noticeable ways your thinking has changed? 
The experience galvanized my own thinking and action about convening regional leaders in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and the South to begin praying for and imagining what Alan Hirsch called a “movement flotilla” (not simply conceiving of churches as independent “battleships,” but imagining a flotilla of large and small communities in movement together). We now have a meeting on the calendar in September for the Future Travelers churches in our area, as well as a few other apostolic leaders, to begin learning together how to encourage Kingdom movement in our part of the world. In essence, Future Travelers got me off the dime!
What are the most tangible ways Lake Valley has changed? 
We are 20 years old and just emerging from a multi-year season of evaluating and repurposing ourselves. So much of the DNA that God wired into Lake Valley as a church plant and pioneer church in our area was missional to the core, but has been diffused or layered over in recent years. We found ourselves with many church members who loved Lake Valley, but were not so fired up about loving and following Jesus! We had made a major attempt to install—top down—a renewed missional emphasis among ourselves. It was my single biggest “Epic Failure” at Lake Valley!
Future Travelers, along with Alan’s background work in his books, has equipped us to analyze and learn from the Epic Failure, and work on implementing proven organic strategies for creating (re-creating) the disciple-making church we’re called to become. Both our conversations and our decisions this year are much more informed and sharper than in recent years as a result of the Future Traveler’s conversations. One of our senior leaders remarked just today that these conversations now are like “water in a desert!”
What conversations or conversational threads at Future Travelers have been put into action at Lake Valley and as a result have resulted in the most transformational impact? 
It’s too early to tell what will have the “most” impact, but a leading candidate may be the thread around “bounded sets” versus “centered sets” thinking for a missional culture and ethos. Alan Hirsch and Michael Frost wrote about these concepts in their book, The Shaping of Things to Come, so it was surreal to be listening to Alan.
Alan explained that an attractional church is a bounded set—a set of people clearly marked off from those who do not belong to it. The missional-incarnational church is a centered set. Rather than drawing a border to determine who belongs and who doesn’t, a centered set is defined by its core values, and people are not seen as “in” or “out,” but as closer or farther away from the center. Alan defined the core of the centered set as Jesus, so that means we should be concerned with fostering increased closeness to Jesus in the lives of all those involved. The growth toward the center of the set is the same as the process of discipleship.
One of our leaders was tasked this year with assessing and where necessary re-designing our assimilation and new members process. We realized pretty quickly that while we have a centered-set heart and attitude toward our unbelieving community, we actually have a bounded set process and programs to enter into the life and influence of Lake Valley. Wow! No wonder we’ve been dissatisfied with our own stuff! Like pulling the loose thread on a sweater, we’re now pretty deep into unraveling our entire membership process and covenant. Very exciting stuff!
Dru, how have you seen what you’ve learned and implemented played out in the transformation of people’s lives?
Just recently, one of our teaching pastors was tackling sex and sexuality from the pulpit, including the controversy around gay marriage. The conversation around centered sets, including the appropriate concerns about doctrine and discipline boundaries, enabled him to teach with great clarity AND with great grace on same-sex marriages as well as heterosexual sin, without in any way diluting the Lord’s high view of sex and therefore the high sexual ethic to which we’re called. In fact, the main takeaway from the sermon was not about “them” out there (bounded set), but was a call to us to repent of our own unbiblical ideas about sex, and together—along with everyone in our reach—move closer to God’s truth (centered set).
A missional, centered-set mentality is enabling us to be welcoming, accepting and graceful toward those on any kind of ethical journey without in any way compromising clear biblical teaching and standards. I believe this will ripple through our membership process, our preaching and our discipling …  in short, it has the potential to finally match up our hearts and missional instincts with our processes and practices.
In addition to his teaching pastor role at Lake Valley Church, Dru Dodson has recently been commissioned by church elders to devote about half of his time to Kingdom efforts outside of Hot Springs. He is involved with Go2 Ministries, helping to get churches involved in international relief and development projects. This experience has birthed Dodson’s recent book, Kingdom Outposts: A Fresh Theology of Relief and Development. Download the FREE eBook here.