DNA.jpg

Core DNA

The following principles are central to Forge:

  • Helping birth and nurture the missional church
  • Equipping leaders and churches to multiply, and to transform their context
  • Provide in-context training and action-learning systems (through active experience by engagement in mission)
  • Centered on innovative entrepreneurship in relation to mission and church
  • Fivefold ministry and leadership affirmed and developed
  • Mission informs everything

Educational Philosophy

We believe that in the end, the medium is the message.  The means of developing leaders must be consistent with what we believe these leaders must look like. We believe the educational philosophy that will birth a missional church must contain the following elements:

  • Missional context is primary
  • Required liminal context
  • Action-reflection learning model
  • Relational empowerment
  • Practitioner-teachers
  • Inspiration, then information
  • We value imagination as a resource for leadership
  • Leadership development, not just skill development
  • Multi-dimensional leadership systems
  • Rigorous intellectual engagement

Ethos

We hold high value to certain practices that embody the Forge DNA and Educational Philosophy:

  • As followers and lovers of Jesus Christ, who  we are and what we do is shaped by the person of Jesus both individually and corporately; we hope to inspire and lead others to fall more in love with Him.
  • We are not a church planting organization, rather we seek to train people to live as missionaries in the places they are sent and as the gospel is planted, church communities will birth as a natural byproduct.
  • We champion, support, encourage, and give voice to the ordinary people on the ground joining God in mission in their context.
  • We aim to model training in a different manor than the prevailing Western Church without detaching ourselves from the local church.
  • Those who lead and train through Forge should be practitioners who can communicate and inspire others to be innovative in their missional incarnational contexts.
  • Because we embrace an action-reflection training model we believe that learning should be a whole life encounter, if we teach theory it is to aid in important paradigm shifts and is relevant to a person's experience on mission.
  • We value all forms of leadership and work to equip and release all functions of APEST (Eph. 4: Apostle, Prophet, Evangelist, Shepherd, and Teacher) for the maturing of the church
  • We seek to give a voice to those in the margins of society
  • We want to be an organization that is always learning, while keeping the important things always before us.
  • We hold high the power of a story and continually tell an alternative story
  • We seek to help every person be released to engage in incarnational mission and serve established churches by equipping individuals to live incarnationally.
overhead-grape-vine-trellising_9131_600x450.jpg

We believe the image of a trellis best illustrates what Forge is attempting to do.  Most Christians in the West are either bored or feel inadequate for kingdom impact in their world.  Forge builds the necessary framework for these men and women to be elevated (through inspiration, encouragement, and permission) and connected with others, forming a network of missional practitioners that can cross-pollinate ideas, tell stories, and share lives - inspiring much fruit for the kingdom.  We believe that if fruit is produced that in turn does NOT produce exponentially more fruit, then we have failed to be missional movement.  

"Where there is life, there will always be multiplication; where there is no multiplication, there ceases to be life."