Project: KC Underground
Leader: Rob Wegner
Website: www.kcunderground.org
Project: KC Underground
Leader: Rob Wegner
Website: www.kcunderground.org
A missionary on every street and a microchurch in every network of relationships for the purpose of filling Kansas City with the beauty, justice and good news of Jesus.
A missionary on every street and a microchurch in every network of relationships will fill the city with a Gospel Presence, a Gospel Demonstration, and Gospel Proclamation that is relational enough, adaptable enough, and proximate enough to change an entire city, with all its diversity.
Our 40 Year Dream is this: 21,000 microchurches that have emerged from the work of 42,000 missionaries. The KC Underground has a Two Entity Structure. We are a Mission Agency and a Decentralized Network of Microchurches. The Mission Agency helps people discover their Ephesians 2:10 Masterpiece Mission and equip them as missionaries through seven equipping teams to walk with them through a training process we call the Missionary Pathway. We plant missionaries who plant the Gospel, make new disciples from unreached people, and a microchurch emerges.
Our mission agency sets up Hubs, a shared space for our equipping teams, and a co-working space for our missionaries. 20 Hubs in our city would make it so that every missionary in the city would have a hub that is proximate to them and contextualized for their part of the city. Hubs are not churches. They do not offer weekend services. They focus exclusively on training, leadership development, coaching, and the equipping of missionaries and microchurch leaders.
We launched our first Hub in 2019. Our second Hub launched in January of 2021, and we have three more in development for the launch in the next 12-18 months. We are also a Decentralized Network of Microchurches. We have microchurches in the burbs, in jails and prisons, among travel baseball leagues and the Kansas Rodeo Circuit, among the LGBTQ community and Algerian immigrants, and the list goes on. We’ve seen a 1000% increase in microchurches (from 3 to 32) in 24 months, and it’s accelerated during COVID. We organize the microchurches into networks of 4-8 microchurches, known as a Collective. Governing Elders are identified and equipped for each Collective, which provides hyper-local, indigenous, scalable leadership for this bi-vocational movement. Currently, we have seven Collectives. We’re humbled and amazed at the Kingdom advance that the Spirit has birthed in the first two years of the KC Underground.
As mentioned, our mission agency equips normal folks to be loving missionaries and effective disciple-makers in new contexts. As new disciples are made in a new context, a microchurch emerges. When we have 4-8 microchurches in a geographic region or affinity group, we network them together in what we call Collectives. Collectives have shared elders, mission, and resources.
Our Hub’s primary customer is the potential missionary, who is waiting to be equipped and activated. The Mission Agency and its Hubs focus relentlessly on the goal of Gospel Saturation in Kansas City.
Each missionary then has their own mission field and unreached pocket of people (primary customer) they have been sent to. The digital age, the fragmentation of the family, and the mobility of our society has tribalized our culture, creating hundreds of very distinct tribes (pockets of people) in every community. This diversity of contexts requires a unique missionary who can live and plant the Gospel incarnationally. The result is a contextualized embodiment of church for every unreached pocket of people. The microchurch provides the laboratory for this missionary work.
The activation of a new Hub in north Kansas City Kansas that is focused on gospel saturation among all the ethnic groups in our city (90+). This particular part of the city has great diversity in ethnicity in a relatively small geographic region of the city. A Kingdom breakthrough here would be a microcosm of the coming Kingdom, where every tribe, tongue and nation is gathered into the global family of God.
The activation of a new Hub in the heart of Kansas City Missouri, a few blocks from Troost Avenue. Historically, Troost Avenue has been a racial dividing line in Kansas City. A Kingdom breakthrough here would speak a story of Hope to our whole city.
The activation of new missionaries, new Discovery Bible Studies, new disciples, and new microchurches in those two regions of the city.
We are intentionally pursuing a full embodiment of all of Expo’s key frameworks. The Kansas City Underground is pioneering a sustainable and multiplicative approach to Gospel Saturation in a city via mobilizing all
of God’s people God’s way as missionary disciple-makers in every sector of society who are living out their Masterpiece Mission. Therefore, we are likely a particularly interesting case study for the Expo community, as we are boots on the ground.
The activation of 110 new missionaries, who have signed the Missionary Commitment, with another 300 + in training who have not yet signed the commitment.
The activation of 120+ new Discovery Bible Studies in new contexts, with multiple generations on multiple strands.
The emergence of 32 new microchurches in 7 collectives in the city made up of new disciples in new contexts.
The emergence of 2 Hubs made up of apostolic equipping teams who equip and empower movements of missionaries and microchurches. We have three more Hubs/apostolic equipping teams in process.
We have formalized our Hub Launch training in a partnership with Stadia. Our first batch trained leaders from six cities and two of those cities now have functional Hubs with similar results. Our current batch has a leadership team from 9 cities and this batch is stronger than the first. We are not only pioneering a new way, but are already scaling and reproducing it nationally.
