Phase 1 is a process of discovery. It’s the phase that is more about you as a catalyst than any of the other phases. It’s about understanding where God is and is about to be. It’s understanding the community, people and affinity groups and contexts you are engaging. It’s about finding and discerning the movement leaders out of all the possible indigenous leaders you will encounter.
Discovering God:
The most important part of this phase is understanding what God is up to. It calls to mind the beginning of Luke 10 where Jesus sends out His disciples to all of the places He was about to be. It’s the also the vision core of movement: aligning what the Holy Spirit is up to with what we are being called into. Our energy here should be focused on discerning this first and foremost so that we can then discern the places and people to actively engage. It is here that catalysts lay the ground work for all that will follow.
There are a couple of specific topics I hope to dive deeper into at some time. One is just the importance of discovering and understanding “Kairos” moments. In essence these are moments in time where the work of God seems to be particularly accessible, available and open for engagement. Another topic worth diving into is the need for healthy vision and the importance of develop and staying true to vision statements.
Discovering the Context:
The next part of the Discover phase is all about the place you are called to engage as a catalyst. You have to be able to understand the places and people and affinity groups that inhabit it in order to fully discover what God is up to. There are many ways to do this but ultimately it boils down to the need to read and analyze the city and it’s cultural contexts.
As a brief aside here, I’d suggest that prayer walking is an important early discovery discipline to develop as it directly seeks to connect your heart to the heart of God in the midst of a particular context (a neighborhood or city or block or street).
Discovering the Movement Leader:
The final key part in the discover phase is centered on finding indigenous movement leaders specifically. I use the word indigenous here as I think it’s an important qualifier: catalysts are catalysts because of their external-to-the-context nature and the seek to find people from the context they are engaging to be leaders in that context. Local leaders will always be the best leaders. I will likely write much more on this so will leave it at that for now.
To successfully discover movement leaders, you have to understand the people you encounter and their place in the work. You have to be able to both assume the best about people while simulataneously looking for the exceptional leaders. In brief, this involves focusing on where God’s vision, the context and actual work align in the life of an indigenous leader.
I have a proposed tool to consider when engaging in this way. It specifically looks at the types of leaders catalysts will encounter and seeks to build a paradigm through which they can easily filter the work they are engaged with. Look for it in a newsletter soon.
Wrapping Up Phase 1
Each part of this discovery process is important in its own right. There aren’t any hard and fast rules for doing this that apply to every single context. For example, as a catalyst you might be called in to work with existing movement leaders and the discovery process is focused primarily on learning from the movement leader directly. At other points, as a catalyst, you might be required to pioneer in a given context making the discovery process focused and long as you learn and discern to the best of your ability as an outsider to that context.
I believe my time in East Africa illustrates some of this diversity of process. I entered Kenya specifically with a lot of hope for working with one particular movement leader that we had previously identified. Unfortunately this relationship turned out to be not quite what we had hoped. In that discovery process though, I came into contact with another potential movement leader who turned out to be an amazing leader. I then came into contact with another significant movement leader from a neighboring country through my sending organization and was asked by them to start engaging him as a catalyst. Discovery in this case involved actively working with him as he processed what God was up to and what was going on in his context (as it was external to my day to day context in Kenya). And throughout all of this, I carried on a continual discover process in a local community I engaged in an attempt to (a) understand what God was up to, (b) understand the people and places important in it and (c) find potential movement leaders.