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Monday, January 31, 2000

About Me

My name is Bret Wells. My wife, Rachel and our three sons, Conner, Micah and Josiah and I live in Burleson, Texas. Since 2008 we've been working locally with Christ Journey Church in the ministry of planting new churches. We are happy to announce that we have now been sent out by Christ Journey to begin a new church planting work in the northern part of Burleson.

Prior to this I served as the Preaching Minister for the Tammany Oaks Church of Christ in Mandeville, which is on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain outside of New Orleans. Before that I worked in youth ministry for about 7 years in Madisonville, Corpus Christi and Dallas, TX.

Rachel and I met and were married as undergraduates at Abilene Christian University, where we both graduated in 2001 -  her degree was in Speech Pathology and mine was in Psychology and Ministry. I then began plinking away at grad school while working full time in ministry. I eventually earned an MA in Christian Ministry from ACU in 2005.

Most recently, I've been working on a Doctor of Ministry in Missional Church Studies from Southern Methodist University...if all goes according to plan I should graduate in May 2012.

I'm also in the process of starting a non-profit ministry called Intentional People which focuses on inviting people into the missional and incarnational life of faith. We are developing videos, podcasts, articles, discussion forums, and other media through a collaborative website. Through my work as a church planter and my studies at SMU, I've also developed a 6 month experience for groups called Communitas (a Latin word meaning community that is formed through a shared struggle or mission). This process serves as the first step in our attempt to not only shared conversation about missional life, but also provide guidance in cultivating it in the participants' real world local context.

I also serve as the part-time director of IT for The Academy of Missional Wisdom, which is a 2 year process for individuals focused on training for the development of missional and monastic micro-communities.

To be missional means that we are seeking to be a people who are both the called out and the sent out - we are called out of a life of despair and sent out to proclaim freedom for the captives. As Church Planters we're also referred to by some as "domestic missionaries" - meaning we function more like a missionary than a preacher in an established, settled congregation, we're just doing it domestically (here) versus in a foreign (overseas) context. What we are seeking to form and cultivate are churches and missional communities that form and cultivate new churches and missional communities.

bret@missionalmonks.com