Catalysts

Originally published at LINC North Texas:

It’s in vogue these days for mission developers to call themselves “catalysts.”  Church planters are catalyzing a new mission, organizations are catalysts in their communities, and so forth.  Catalysts tend to enthusiastically gather people and make things happen.  They are action-oriented people, often daring, and excitedly creating the future of the church day by day.  I have fond memories of science classes in school, so I recently gave myself a refresher on the roots of the term “catalyst.”  Catalysts, in science, are substances that either speed up or slow down reactions and processes.  The catalytic converter in your car has a precious metal in it (platinum, palladium, or rhodium) that speeds up the breakdown of noxious exhaust.   The two key features of catalysts are that they are only needed in very small amounts, and that they are never used up in the reaction.  Not part of the actual reaction, they go on to help over and over again.

This got me to thinking about our use of the term for mission developers, and for LINC North Texas.  Is there something we could learn from science’s original definition of the term?  When thinking about a catalyst in mission developing, I’m now more likely to think of a facilitator, a networker, or a collaborator.  I think of someone who brings together diverse people and then releases them.  They would make things move more rapidly with only very slight nudges of their own action.  Their passion, energy, and resources would not be used up, but after launching something, they would move on to the next mission.  I am reminded of Paul, spending just enough time in many cities to launch churches and then move on.  A catalyst’s focus would be on people, not programs, organizations, or structures.  Then they would have to leave.  It’s a special calling – different from a pastoral calling, a teacher calling, and many of the other ministries that Scripture speaks of.

This sounds very different than what some of today’s mission developing catalysts are doing.  Launching new missions is exhausting work.  Their leaders work 100-hour weeks building things from the ground up.  They are the clear leaders of the processes, and without them things can quickly fall apart.  These leaders deserve a great deal of respect for the challenge they take on and I wouldn’t take a thing away from what they do.  But I wonder if there’s a way to be a catalyst for mission development in the way that science speaks of catalysts.  Could a catalyst launch self-propagating missional cells and release the process from his control and begin a movement?  Here at LINC NT we are trying to see if this is possible in North Texas.  In the process, there’s a lot of 100-hour weeks.  But, Lord willing, can we not be used up by our efforts, but remain ready to launch over and over again?  Join us in prayer as we try to discover what the role of a catalyst would look like in our communities!