The Relational Mission

For almost 25 year, I've been meditating on a passage found in in Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer: "Spiritual love will prove successful insofar as it commends Christ to the other in all that is says and does. It will not seek to agitate another by exerting all to personal, direct influence or by crudely interfering in one's life. It will not take pleasure in pious, emotional fervor and excitement. Rather, it will encounter the other with the clear word of God and be prepared to leave the other alone with this word for a long time. It will be willing to release others again so that Christ may deal with them. It will respect the other as the boundary that Christ establishes between us; and it will find full community with the other in the Christ who alone binds us together. This spiritual love will thus speak to Christ about the other Christian more than to the other Christian about Christ. It knows that the most direct way to others is always through prayer to Chr...

Here’s a sure thing for any small group: You will have problems. There will be at least one person in every season of group life that creates, well let’s call them challenges. Groups are full of people. All people are hurting and need healing in some way. And when people start revealing themselves to one another, their hurts will hurt others. Hurting people hurt people, as the old saying goes. These hurts manifest in as many different ways as there are people in groups. However, there are some consistent patterns that I’ve observed over the years. It could be illustrated by this picture: A fun activity is the name each of the people represented in this picture. For instance, the owl at the top could be called Mr. I-Know-the-Answer-but-I’m-Not-Telling. Or Mr. I’ve-Done-This-Before-So-I-Can’t-Be-Bothered. Of course this illustration is all men. Women don’t display disfunctions like these in groups. Right? Well, since I’m a man I won’t respond. Of course, most of the time, people’s...

Do we do small groups for community? For the fellowship? To close the "back door?" To get 100% of our people involved? For evangelistic growth? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. And Yes. But might there be a deeper motivation? In her book Community is Messy , Heather Zempel challenges us to go deeper than all of these. She wants us to grow up. She calls us to allow community to shape our lives. She invites us into a life of discipleship that deals with reality. She writes, "Community is messy because it always involves people, and people are mess. It's about people hauling their brokenness and baggage into your house and dumping it in your living room" (24). We offer our messes to one another not to wallow in them , but to grow as disciples together. This is made especially clear in her chapter entitled "Discipleship is Not Linear." She challenges us to think about how people really grow instead of trying to fit people into a one-size-fits-all process. She wri...