Our hope and calling is to shape uncommon followers of God as we follow in the footsteps of Jesus together. Jesus lingered long with God, and so we carve out time to do the same. We call this communion. He did life day-in and day-out with a small band of sojourners, so we choose to share our lives with each other. We call this community. He lived with an unwavering purpose as he created spiritual home for others, so we open our hearts to be taught how to live on purpose wherever we find ourselves in the world. We call this mission. Communion, Community, and Mission are the three beats that run through everything we do in NieuCommunities. Each of our communities sets out every year to pursue God relentlessly, to allow our faith and character to be transformed in the crucible of community, and to submerge into the cultures around us and make a difference in peoples' lives. 

Our journey into communion, community, and mission unfolds in six natural phases, which we call missional postures. These are the postures that missional leaders need to learn, maybe even master, to engage culture well. So we focus our conversations and our experiences on these postures in our journey together:

Listening: Learning to listen to God, to our hearts, and to the culture around us.

Submerging: Being the hands and feet of Jesus in the neighborhoods we live in.

Inviting: Becoming fragrant followers of Jesus who gather people around a compelling story.

Contending: Fighting well for the lives and faith of those God has brought into our lives.

Imagining: Seeing and embracing what God has created for us and preparing to engage the next leg of our mission.

Entrusting: Preparing those we have served to go on with God and encouraging them to pass on what they've received.

These are natural and essential phases we experience in life as we set out to explore what it takes to be good news, to navigate life, and to create communities of faith where they didn't exist before. It's our hope and expectation that those who sojourn with us for a year would be able to go anywhere in the world and journey fruitfully down this path again.