Missio Dei Church began with a general dissatisfaction with the many and varied forms by which church was being done. It seemed as though the grand story of God’s Gospel and Kingdom were at best forgotten and at worst, being ignored, minimized or changed.
While it’s very easy to deconstruct church paradigms, it takes heavy reliance on the Spirit through prayer and Scriptural study to “reconstruct” what the church should be. Many are asking good questions, but not digging into the Bible and thus are coming up with creative and new ways of being disobedient to God and the Gospel.
The dream at Missio Dei was that we would not come up with new ways of doing church. Our intention has been to always “contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3), so that things such as virgin birth of Messiah, inspiration, infallibility, inerrancy, authority of Scripture, necessity of faith in Christ alone, etc. were not up for debate. Missio Dei, to be a faithful, Christ honoring church would have to remain committed to an unchanging Gospel, contextualized to a changing culture. The Gospel would be the foundation of our community.
With the Gospel as the foundation, Kurt Hannah moved his family from a small town outside of Greenville, SC to Asheville in the fall of 2006 and began forming gospel-centered friendships with neighbors and organizations. Along the way, Bryan Robbins, developing the same vision and already living in Asheville, jumped ship from an established ministry to participate in the development of our gospel-centered community working for the heart of our city. Our small group became a regularly occuring worship gathering in Sept. 2007 and we’ve grown into a thriving congregation that meets regularly under the authority of God’s word every Sunday at our location downtown.
The journey continues as Missio Dei will plant it’s first daughter church in 2011. Kurt Hannah will be moving to Cincinnati, Ohio in August, 2010 to begin gathering a core group for Missio Dei Cincy, with hopes of launching in the Spring of ’11. You can find out more about MDCincy at Kurt’s blog HERE.
