Why a Mission Society, and Why Now?
Learning to See What God Is Doing in Greater Austin
Howdy!
My name is Todd Engstrom, and this is the first letter from the Greater Austin Mission Society. Thank you for being here! Before I tell you what we are building and what you can expect to find in your inbox, let me tell you how we got here.
How We Got Here
For nearly twenty years, I had the privilege of serving Jesus and His Church through The Austin Stone Community Church, most recently as Executive Pastor of Ministry Strategies.
In 2024, after a long season of both fruitful ministry and real personal suffering, the Lord led our family into a year of transition and trust. It was a wilderness, and it did what wildernesses tend to do. It exposed my self-reliance and reminded me that “the steps of a man are established by the Lord, and He upholds his hand” (Psalm 37:23-24).
Out of that season came a clearer calling. Rather than leaving Austin, Olivia and I sensed the Spirit asking us to stay rooted here and make ourselves available to the wider body of Christ, to help strengthen what God is already doing across our city and to build bridges of trust among churches, ministries, and leaders who too often work alone. That calling now has a name:
What is a Mission Society?
For centuries, followers of Jesus have joined hands across traditions and boundaries to carry the gospel further than any one congregation could alone. The Moravians, the London Missionary Society, the China Inland Mission, these were mission societies, bound not by a single denomination but by prayer, conviction, and the urgency of the Great Commission.
A church shepherds its members. A denomination provides shared governance. A nonprofit usually serves one cause. A mission society exists to equip and send God’s people into new frontiers, whether across the world or across the street, and seeks to sustain that work for the long haul.
We believe Austin needs that kind of effort. Our city has changed faster than almost any other in the country, and not only in size. By the most recent measures, fewer than one in six adults in our metro identifies as an evangelical Protestant, and more than a third claim no religious affiliation at all.
On the spiritual map, Austin now looks less like its Bible Belt neighbors and more like Denver or Portland. This is not cause for despair. It is a call to think and act like missionaries again, in the place we already call home.
What You Can Expect
This newsletter is where we will do that thinking out loud and invite you to join us. We are committed to being Spirit-led and data-informed, so we want to understand what is before we set out by faith to build what may be.
Our first series walks through our State of the City research: the demographic, church, and spiritual data we gathered to understand God’s activity across Greater Austin over time.
After that, we will publish prayer guides for each of our region’s Census County Divisions, the distinct communities that make up Greater Austin, so we can pray for this city region by region and neighborhood by neighborhood. Along the way, you will hear directly from cross-cultural workers sent out from Austin, who see our city with missionary eyes after years on the field abroad. And we will share longer essays on the questions we keep wrestling with: how the institutions that support the church are changing, what leadership development should look like in a harder cultural moment, and how generosity and trust actually move through a city.
I expect to write once every other week or so. Some pieces will be short. Some will be longer than they should be. All of them are an attempt to listen, gather, and serve, so that together we might see what God is doing here and join Him.
Will You Join Us?
There are three simple ways to walk with us:
Subscribe to receive updates in your inbox. We will have freely distributed content sometimes; however, to fund this work, we’d love for you to consider becoming a paid subscriber:
Share this with one person who loves Austin and longs to see it reached. A movement of prayer and partnership grows one relationship at a time:
Pray for our churches, our leaders, and the millions of neighbors God has gathered in this city.