Life in a vibrant gospel-centered community –a missional community– is an amazing thing to experience. It’s something I believe we were all created to enjoy. But what does this really look like? How is it different than your current church or small group situation? Let me tell you a true story that will help illustrate the beauty of this.
A Broken Family
Good friends of mine, Greg and Mary, came to faith and become part of our community a few years back. They pretty immediately began to loop others into this life with us as they learned to live as full-time missionaries. One of the very first families that Greg and his wife Mary began to invite into their lives was a 16-year-old girl named Kirstan and her widowed mother, Julianna. They had a pretty rough story. (more…)
Many of us find our parenting style too often mirrors the ways we were raised by our own parents. And this is not always a good thing.
My wife, Tina, and I were raised in pretty similar ways. If we had to name the style of parenting our parents often used we would call it “transactional”. Every desire or action–even our emotions–was connected to a certain requirement or response based on the “value” of what it was we desired. Or avoided. (more…)
As a leader, your time spent developing and equipping the right people can have immediate and expansive results.
Leadership development is really just apprenticeship or discipleship further along the path of faith, knowledge, and skills. Discipleship further up the slope. If you have trained people in such a way that they can now reproduce and train others, in turn producing future leaders, you have the makings of a true movement.
I’m often asked what the rhythm of life in our family or missional community looks like; is it a series of planned out activities or just hanging around? Well…both, I guess.
I have found it helpful to think about life in a MC through two filters: organized and organic. My buddy Mike Breen turned me on to this way of looking at it and it has been very helpful.
In the same way that natural, healthy family life contains both of these elements, some aspects of life together are “organized” and structured and some aspects are more “organic” or natural.
Think for a moment about your immediate family or a group of friends. You probably don’t think about that time you spend with them as a succession of events you need to attend (or worse, something you might skip if you’re too busy). We don’t generally tell our friends, “We already met once this week; why do we need to get together again?” They are our friends. We enjoy getting together.
One More Night Together?
We don’t think of our time together as one more night out or as some kind of obligation we need to fulfill. And when we think about our families, we don’t count up the number of events per week that we attend with them. We live with them! There is a fabric to our life together that cannot be reduced to a series of “events.” This doesn’t mean that events and planned activities aren’t good or necessary.
A healthy family life includes planned-out events and reoccurring activity, but we don’t see these as something separate and distinct, because it’s all mixed into the normal rhythm and flow of our life together.
Things like bedtimes, meals, homework, and chores often do take place in an organized way. These are important, and they need to get done, so we put them on a calendar of some sort, and they come around time and again. But we don’t see these things as the sum total of our life together as a family.
Recently my family was together celebrating Thanksgiving. There are definitely parts of this holiday that we plan out. In fact, we almost follow a script in preparing our favorite Polish foods cooked “just like Grandma used to make,” or in using the old pink platters made out of indestructible Melamine that we must use as plates for the meal, or watching a favorite holiday movie and several football games on television. You probably have similar organized aspects, traditions, and reoccurring things you do during the holidays as well.
Life In The Cracks
These activities provide continuity and they hold great value for us. But those organized things we do together are accentuated and enlivened by the myriad of spontaneous interactions and stuff we do in between—the jokes told and conversations had while cooking together or watching the game, while on a walk to the neighborhood store, a trip in the evening to a favorite pub, or a last stroll in the park to look at the lights. Often, just the hours spent on the couch under blankets watching nothing in particular on TV become cherished and important aspects of our time together.
Life happens in these unplanned, ordinary moments. Ideas and dreams are shared, correction and forgiveness are extended, and our bonds as a family are renewed and strengthened.
Think of it as being like a piece of cross-stitch artwork. The initial fabric with the pattern on it provides the framework and structure; the colorful stitches and needlework that you add to that bring the whole thing to life. Without the regularity of the pattern, you would have nothing, and the stitch work would be random and meaningless. On the other hand, no one hangs up a white canvas cross-stitch pattern with a black-and-white outline on it. The true beauty comes when the different colors and textures are added in.
If you’ve been struggling with life in community–either too structured or too loose with no real intention, the next best time to focus on organized and organic rhythms is now.
Question: So which do you most naturally lean towards– organized activities or organic interaction–when it comes to disciple-making?
Gossip is poison! And I’ve noticed gossip is one of those things these days that is so common in relationships, in our conversations and in our cultural experience, that we hardly even notice it anymore. Let me show you how to stop gossip.
I was thinking about how us humans have a predisposition to earn our worth by doing—do to be– to work hard for status, love, acceptance, and value.
I once heard it said that we always want to work FOR love instead of work FROM love. I want to remind you that in the beginning of the Story, God created humans in his own image on the sixth day, to be like him. And then on the next day—the very first full twenty-four hours of life for Adam and Eve—was a day off. A day of rest.
In the book of Exodus found in the Old Testament of the Bible, these ancient Hebrew writings show us that when God gives the fourth of what we commonly call the Ten Commandments, he says, “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.” He’s not talking about Ozzie Osbourne and his band… but he gives us a whole paragraph of instructions on this command while the other of the 10 Commandments are just mentioned briefly, such as, “You shall not steal or lie.”
It seems that God knew that we were going to want to work hard at earning and providing for ourselves, and that we would need a rhythm of reminders to help us restore balance and trust in him each week.God created everything, including us, pronounced it awesome, and then took a break to enjoy it all. That is his desire for us too—to live in a rhythm of resting in his finished work. So why do we so often treat this command of God’s as a suggestion? “Oh, um, yeah…I really need to do that more.” Or… “In the New Year, I am going to rest and take some time off. At least I hope to.”
But we would never say that about any of the other commands: “Next month I am going to cut my stealing and telling lies in half. I really need to.” Or, “I should definitely stop murdering people. I really gotta cut back.”
What?!
Why is it when it comes to the command to rest and then work, we so easily blow this one off? Maybe we get so busy we forget. We lose track of God’s ongoing goodness and provision, and begin thinking that we’re our own source of talent, energy, skills, and…well, everything.
God desires our lives to be a perpetual state of Sabbath, a non-stop resting in his completed work. On the cross, Jesus secured for us what we never could earn for ourselves, the forgiveness of sins and the restoration of our relationship with his Father. We can do nothing to add to this any more than we can cause plants to grow, control the weather, or cause God to love us any more than he already does.
Because of Jesus we can rest. Today. Every day. At a soul level.
So if you’ve been working hard and then resting… the next best time to start working from rest is now.
Let me know what keeps you from truly resting in a regular rhythm in the comments below.
