Daxological Diagram and Diatribe of Missiology

You can click on the image for a bigger view of it. I have in mind the tabernacle that increases in holiness as one approached the presence of God. I realize that this is now in the hearts of all believers, but I believe there is an aspect of this that is pictured with how the church relates to the community as well.

Here's the thing. I think I am being called to church planting, yet I don't have a clear vision on the church plant, or on the culture to target. When I pray to God and meditate on a vision for my church plant, the vision is HUGE, it is scary because it is way beyond anything I could manage, i can't even fully imagine what it all entails. I know I am being called now to prepare through study, prayer, and at some point soon I will begin some planning.

The vision I have included bits and pieces of many things, including a network of Christian Schools, integration of those schools with the church and the teachers in the church (teachers meaning experienced and Godly people). It also includes integration of Home Schooling families so that they are not so separated from the culture but through the schools and the churches, the weaknesses they (home schoolers) may have in education their children in certain areas (examples could include calculus and chemistry) could be supplemented by these Christian schools, the schools could also serve as a "co-op" of sorts to enable greater activities and opportunities for everyone involved.

I see that we currently in our culture are operating under certain paradigms that do not work. For instance public schools, the way we do "church" (mainly in terms of how the church interacts with and engages the culture), the way our culture deals with the elderly, and the way we are parenting our children and caring for the orphans and widows of our society. It seems to me that solving some of these problems will mean we will have to make some new (or more precisely, rediscover some old) ideas about education, worship, evangelism, and community.

I think these schools may be funded by many churches and private individuals with full time staffs and teachers, and offer the education to anyone in the community for free (like the community schools of old), however with a major difference in that through the use of technology, the availability and quality of the curriculum, access to high quality and dynamic teachers, and access to a larger market place of potential students would be greatly expanded. The vision I have here parallels and mixes in what I read in the bible where people would gather at the temple, or how the Greeks would gather at Mars Hill in order to learn and debate things. I see these schools as being able to offer all kinds of educational services to the community as a whole and offer a "temple" or "market" of sorts for people to come together.

Another part of my vision is building these schools within entire communities that include orphans, families, and retired people who are willing to live in an "apartment" style communities that creates opportunities for generational knowledge to be transferred to the people being taught in the schools, I'm still pretty unclear on this idea, and it seems really big and scary too. however I think I would want to be careful not to build these communities in such a way that they seemed "cultish" or "communish". I can imagine some apartment complexes open to anyone in the public to live in, surrounding a school, orphanage and nursing home, and designed in such a way that the community of the apartment complex centers around the activities at the school, orphanage, and nursing home, and all of this managed with an evangelical purpose. Now this is the vision I have, but it may be symbolic in many ways as to how God wants to implement it, and it may also be virtual in many ways (meaning that some of these places may not be physical but virtual in nature, and some may only be philosophical in nature in regards to the world view of the organization that is attempting to achieve the ends that the vision implies).

What do you think? I don't think this will be possible except through the work of God, it is much bigger than a church plant, but I think that a church plant may be where God wants me to start.