About Estuary

Inspired by a metaphor introduced to Joey Tomassoni by his mentor Makoto Fujimura, an image emerged that describes our volatile cultural moment filled with fruitful possibilities: an estuary.  An estuary is a body of water where fresh inland rivers collide with the salted sea.  Estuaries are volatile but rich with nutrients that give rise to new life and ecological flourishing.  A cultural estuary describes the volatile places outside the walls of the church, where Jesus establishes His followers to be salt and light through the beauty, goodness, and truth of the gospel.  In our Western cultural estuaries, 80% of our friends, neighbors and coworkers have become religiously disenchanted, not perceiving the Church as a place to discover answers to the deepest longings and questions of the human condition. If you have this booklet you are being invited into the Estuary Collective, a community of Jesus followers who have been inspired by the Holy Spirit to have intentional impact beyond our church walls–to seek the flourishing of the people who inhabit the cultural estuaries of our lives, walking with them to discover Jesus through the beauty, goodness and truth of his gospel.

In this way Estuary functions as a discipleship ecosystem that awakens the missional imagination, equips and sends small bands/teams of disciples to enter into the fragmented realities of our broken world.  These teams embody and share the gospel of Jesus Christ in the formation of new disciples who join in seeking the flourishing of a place or people.  Estuary follows this model as a para-church organization that is connected seamlessly in partnership with local churches.  This is modeled after the apostle Paul and his team who always came back to the local church.

Estuary practically helps local churches to empower the people of Jesus to be faithful to what He has called them to do in the world. An important part of empowering local churches involves considering the collection of churches in a given geography that proclaim Jesus as Lord and fall in line with a historic/orthodox faith.  Estuary helps to unite churches together in unity through prayer to cultivate interchurch collaboration of theological, pastoral, and missional equipping towards the formation of new disciples among the people and places untouched by local churches. Each quarter, disciples who are being equipped through Go! come together across churches and denominations in the name of Jesus for deeper formation in community, prayer, worship and to break bread together.