A Cosmopolitan Theology for Creating an Urban Missional Small Group to Reach Postmodern Generations in the City of Lacombe, Alberta
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Problem Many youths within the Canadian city of Lacombe, Alberta, are having difficulty finding traditional church attractive, engaging, relevant, and meaningful. Because of the prevalent postmodern mindset of youth in the community, thoughts toward church, religious gatherings, and organized religion are pessimistic and skeptical. Research has pointed out that faith-based community initiatives have been either lacking or ineffective in addressing the disengagement and disillusionment being demonstrated by postmodern millennials. Method The purpose of this study was to see if an urban missional small group made up of 10 to 15 youth would have a positive social spiritual impact on their personal lives. The focus was to bring postmodern youth together for a period of 12 weeks to create an urban missional small group intended to foster a sense of community and belonging. It was to employ open dialogue but also allow for discourse and debate, and it was to facilitate individual and collective spiritual development and growth. The dialogue would center on studying and reflecting on the life of Christ; however, the dialogue would also remain open to natural discussion points and personal sharing as raised by the participants. Results The results were reviewed and evaluated by conducting entry and exit surveys. The results of the survey evidenced that implementing a 12-week urban missional small group in an urban city had a substantial spiritual impact on the group participants. The key six areas evaluated were (a) personal life, (b) community life, (c) spiritual life, (d) urban life, (e) church life, (f) church experience/small-group experience. Each of these six categories included a series of questions. The study showed, overall, that 64% participants’ responses indicated positive and constructive improvement since before the participants had joined the small group. This ultimately revealed that urban missional small groups can have a positive, meaningful, constructive, and measurable impact on young urban churched and unchurched postmodern millennials. Hence, a new urban missional church plant is scheduled to be planted September 2019. Conclusions In business, the term disruptive innovation means an idea that disturbs the status quo and changes the nature of the previous model or version that came before it. One may consider urban missional small groups as a type of disruptive innovation because they have the unique power to reach postmodern millennials. Small groups are a new and different way for young unchurched urban youth to meet spiritually, they focus specifically on mission in the city, and they foster a sense of diversity inclusivity, and they are, above all, user friendly. As a result of this small group endeavor is that there is currently a core group of new urban missional leaders who are empowered and equipped to (a) share the gospel with others, (b) disciple new believers, and (c) successfully lead other small groups that will ultimately attract this niche demographic and impact it spiritually for Christ.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".