The Relational Mission

So today I turn 42. Wow! That's weird to write. I don't feel that old. Maybe it's because my wife still looks 26. She says it's love that makes me think this, but it's true. Anyway, I thought I'd share what I want for my birthday. Instead of asking for something like Amazon gift cards (how's that for a subtle hint?), I decided to give something away today. I asked my publisher if we could give away a chapter in my book MissioRelate , and he agreed. So here you go. Click here and you can download it for free. If you want to know more about the book, click here . And here it is on Amazon . Now what you can give me on my birthday. If you know a pastor, a small group leader or a church leader, would you let him or her know about this free chapter download? This would be better than eating cake ... well I'm on diet and cake isn't an option anyway. Have a great day! I'm gong to. We get a date night tonight. That's rare with four kids.

I wish every small group leader and every leader of a missional community would watch this short video and listen--really listen--to these words. Jean Vanier understands community, leadership and ministry at a depth that challenges us to slow down and reflect on the way we minister to others. His perspective has been shaped through the school of ministry . This is not theory. It's a lived experience. It's deep wisdom, not just another trick or strategy for growing your group. If you listen to these words, they will penetrate your heart. You will have to sit with them because you will not immediately know what to do with them, but you will sense the Spirit speaking with deep wisdom. If we want our small groups (or whatever you call your community gatherings) to go beyond being a Bible study and enter into a shared life that demonstrates and experiences the character and compassion of Jesus, we need to be shaped by this kind of wisdom.

Over the last few days, Shawna and I have been having to discipline two of our kids more than usual. Because of the repetition of the disobedience, we've had to be very strict and stern in our response. This morning I had to be stern again. While in worship today, my heart was breaking for our children. My heart breaks because we are having to be so strong in our discipline. I hate this. I want to embrace, bless and communicate how much they mean to me. My heart delights in them. They bring me great joy. I want to express this and bless them. However, right now if I do that, they will assume that their actions are ok. If I forego the discipline because I don't want them to experience any distance or unhappiness, I'm being less than loving. I so desire them to express my heart but they cannot know the love we have for them as parents if we turn love into "nice." I've heard the verse about God the Father disciplining those he loves hundreds of times. But t...

What kind of group leader are you? Some leaders are quite passive and let the group meander wherever it wants. Some leaders take the opposite approach. They control everything that goes on in the small group, much like that found in this little clip from The Office: What are the results of controlling leadership in a small group? Why do leaders feel the need to be controlling? How does controlling leadership hinder God's mission through the group?

"We have never seen anything like this." —Mark 2:12 This was the response of the people after Jesus healed the paralyzed man in Capernaum. You know the one where the four men lowered down the man through the hole they made in the roof.   I wonder to what degree authentic encounters with Jesus are marked by "our not having seen anything like it." I wonder if knowing God is really about encountering the unexpected. I wonder this because so little that we do in the church seems to be marked by this. How rarely do we respond with "We have never seen anything like this." We all have our ways of doing things, our patterns that are established. I'm not knocking traditions or even liturgies and promoting some kind of free-flowing anti-structure approach. (That argument does not hold water because even those who embrace some kind of "anti-structure" approach to church life actually develop a tradition. They just refuse to see that.) No I'm...

I grew up on Country and Western music. There was one that I remember quit well that had a catchy phrase, "If loving you is wrong, I don't wanna be right." As I read Out of Babylon by Walter Brueggeman, new words for that tune came to mind, "If heeding this book is right, would we prefer to be wrong?" Do we want to hear the prophetic voice so clearly articulated on these pages. Using the words of the Old Testament prophets, Brueggemann proclaims a prophetic challenge indirectly. He teaches us and then he challenges. He invites us to consider whether or not the dominant culture of the American empire and the way of life found therein shares patterns found with the empire of Babylon. And just as Israel lived in exile under Babylonian captivity and had to carve out a way of life that was faithful to its calling, so too the church today. He writes, “The experience of Israel in empire was a ready venue for the continuation of prophetic rhetoric that admitted no ...

What does God challenge in the American church? What we do we need to have reshaped in our lives so that we can display God's cruciformed love and join him on mission? What follows will not read like nice, American Christianity. This is not "how to have a better life 101" or "how to be happy small groups 201." There is a place for that, but there is also a place for challenge. Western culture, and specifically American culture is addicted to three things that drive daily life: Prestige Power Possessions I wish I had come up with this on my own, but alas there is nothing new under the sun. I've been wrestling with these ideas with the likes of Walter Brueggemann, Richard Rohr and Jacques Ellul. My concern is that the church has gotten so used to these cultural patterns that we don't even see them for what they are. Right now, think about a few ways that social media in being used by Christian leaders to elevate these three things. It seems that we...

We settle for works of mission instead of God's mission. We replace doing things that look like mission for participating in the deep things that God is doing in our world. We are a people of action. We want to become "externally-focused." We want to see "movement" growth happen. We want "exponential." Don't get me wrong. I think our intentions are good. We want to see people get saved, the church grow and the world changed. We want to see love shared. We believe that God's mission expands as we do "small things with great love." And I agree with all of this. But we overlook at deeper truth. Too often the church is trying to share love that it has not it's encountered and experienced. I'd like to draw from the words of Kierkegaard in his great book Works of Love : "Love's hidden life is in the innermost being, unfathomable, and then in turn is in an unfathomable connectedness with all existence. Just as the quiet la...

Small groups are a great strategy for closing the back door. If people don't get connected within two months of visiting to your church, they are highly likely to move on. They might visit a church initially because they like the weekend services, but if they don't get connected to four to six other people, they will eventually move on. There are a ton ways small groups can be used to connect these people, including: Church-wide campaigns (See Small Groups with Purpose by Steve Gladden) Semester groups with a big push to join groups at the beginning of each semester (See Activate by Nelson Searcy). On-going open groups with on-line sign ups that talk about the Sunday sermon (See Sticky Church by Larry Osborne). Recovery groups that focus on specific needs Task groups that make it easy for people to commit without deep relational risk We need these options. I applaud them all. In churches that have lots of visitors and new members I say use these strategies. They hel...

You and I don’t need a position or an official responsibility to change the world. We don’t need someone else to offer us to a reason to make a difference. In a world where official recognition, credentials and positions of authority we often co-opt our “difference-making” ability to the need for a position that gives us the right to actually do something.But the reality is that there are NO positions on God’s mission to change the world. It’s not that all of the positions are filled. There are no openings for you and me because there are no openings to begin with. Contrary to the modern phenomenon where we often elevate certain Christian leader to the status of the fourth member of the Trinity because we assume that people of status and position make the real differences, I’d like to propose that real difference flows our of what we do outside of the public eye. God’s mission is one of self-sacrificial love, one that leads us to pick up a cross (See Luke 9:23). There’s not much glor...

Jesus tells us "Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me" (John 14:1). This is a great verse of comfort and encouragement. It makes for great material for a refrigerator magnet and bumper stickers. That is until you read the verse that comes before it and see the context of Jesus' words. We don't often do this because we separate the content of chapters. But the original books of the Bible were not divided into chapters and verses. So when John penned chapter 14, it was meant to be connected the end of chapter 13, which reads: Simon Peter said to him, "Lord, where are you going?" Jesus answered, "Where I am going, you cannot follow me now; but you will follow afterward." Peter said to him, "Lord, why can I not follow you now? I will lay down my life for you." Jesus answered, "Will you lay down your life for me? Very truly, I tell you, before the cock crows, you will have denied me three times" (Jo...

"For God so loved..." (John 3:16). These are popular words right now. In the simple rawness of Tim Tebow, people are wanting to find out about his favorite verse of scripture. But what exactly is going on in this verse? It's packed with meaning on so many levels. What does "God" mean? What does love mean according to God's way of loving, not ours? What is the "world?" What does "gave" mean when you consider that the Son died on a cross? And what does "eternal life" mean, especially when the modern mindset of the good life is so focused on the "my" well-being? It's so easy to read John 3:16 through our own understanding of these words and miss a deeper reality of the life that God wants to give us.  I read this quote this morning by the theologian Miroslav Volf in his award-winning book Exclusion and Embrace : "When the Trinity turns toward the world, the Son and the Spirit, in Irenaeus's beautiful im...

After washing the feet of the disciples, Jesus instructed them to do likewise. Then he said, “servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greter than the one who sent them” (John 13:16). With his action of washing feet and his instructions about discipleship, he clarifies what it means to be the church throughout the ages. It means that we receive his power that comes to us through the resurrected life and the filling of the Holy Spirit. Then we choose to use that power by stooping down to serve others. If there is something I’ve learned about being a leader or husband or a parent or having any role of authority, it takes a lot more power to stoop down and serve than it does to “get big” and demand that others give me the respect that I’m due because of my position. Jesus displayed the power of God by stooping to our level. But too often we try to get around actually following Jesus in a likewise manner. We try to live out triumphal discipleship that does not cos...

"Putting Beauty where Beauty is Not." St. John of the Cross described mission as putting love where love is not. (I write about this in Missional Small Groups .) He said, "Where there is no love, put love -- and you will find love." I believe that he hit the nail on the head, but he had an understanding of love that most of us can't even fathom. His wrote of encounters with the God of love that is quite frankly humbling to say the least. To give love we must realize the hidden dimension of encountering the God of love. And besides, we use the word "love" to mean so many different things in the English language ( see my post of the different meanings of the word ). I don't think Aerosmith's "Love in an Elevator" fits what St. John meant.  You might say that the kind of love that he was talking about was self-giving and other oriented. Granted. I agree with this. But in our culture, this kind of language usually is associated w...

Tim Tebow cannot save the world, although it appears that he has saved the Denver Broncos from obscurity. And he has made the NFL playoffs interesting. He has brought in a level of unpredictability and creativity that makes his games fun to watch, even if you don't like him as a player. But Tebow cannot save the world. No individual can. I know. The proper answer would be to say that Jesus Christ is THE individual who saved the world. Yes of course. But I want to make a different point. No individual can embody God's dream of salvation for the world. Salvation comes through a community, a people, not through individuals. Of course the way we idolize individuals in our culture makes this hard to see. But this is not new in the church. We have a long tradition of setting church leaders on a pedestal. In church history books, we talk about great leaders like Luther, Calvin and Wesley. In modern-day church expressions, we have our favorite speakers who get elevated to a level...

In Matthew 11:28 and following we hear Jesus calling us to rest, to join him by taking on his easy yoke, to walk with him. There is something about those words. I imagine myself in the crowd that day and see a ordinary man, without any religious credentials or anything about him that would give him any status, standing up and proclaiming rest, peace or as the Old Testament puts it "shalom." He was offering something other than normal life. Something wildly different from the religious demands of the temple system. He was offering relationship with The Beautiful. And he is inviting us to join him in this beautiful restful dance with THE Beautiful. It's both safe and wild. It's restful and moving. It's like dancing with fire, but all the while it energizes without igniting. Sadly too much of Christianity fails to emphasize this. It seems that we emphasize one of two ditches. Either we focus on our justified status before God and tell people there's nothing...

"The way we treat one another changes the world!" This one statement is so simple that we should not need to say it. But the reality is that we miss this point in the churches, families and workplaces more than any of us would like to admit. There are a few reasons why we miss this: We don't commonly connect daily personal choices that we make to love or not to love with world history. But my choices today about how I will love those around me have a direct impact upon history. If I choose to act in hateful ways, that impacts others. If I choose to love in self-sacrificial ways, even when they go unnoticed, history shifts a bit toward God's Kingdom. Most of us think about following God in individualistic terms. We measure our followership of Jesus according to things like spending private time with God, moral choices and volunteering for "Christian" things. These things are important, but Jesus told the disciples that they way they loved one another was t...

How do you know if you are really following of Jesus? How do you know if you are in God's will? Or maybe we could put the question this way: How do we make the Christian faith legit? It seems to me that many people, both inside and outside the church would respond with one word: "Success." Another way to put this would be to say that following Jesus brings us personal satisfaction. Just look at how we talk about following Jesus. It is said by some of the most prominent representatives of the church that following Jesus will give you the "best life." We lift up Christians who are successful in the public arena and applaud them because they have triumphed in their particular field. We turn winning in a particular profession into a way to legitimize Christ. When we think about churches that are really doing what God wants, we point to the mega churches assuming that the success of the multi-site movement is marked by God's blessings. As they say on ESPN when ...

“And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.” (1 Corinthians 13:13) The experience of love in this world will always be tainted with perceptions of it that are less than loving. We are surrounded by distorted, weak, and even perverted ways of love. God’s kind of love is not simply a concept that we analyze, define, and then simply live. Love is a way of life on which we discover how to relate  to God and others. In some ways it is like a good story, a love story, that we listen to, ponder, talk about and even participate in. It is the one story that “remains” and is the greatest story of all. But it is God’s story and to hear this love story, we have to let God tell it his way. I grew up on a family farm. In theory someone could learn how to run a farm by reading books, listening to experienced farmers or maybe even getting a degree in agriculture. But the farming life is played out, not as a set of theories or concepts that one learns, ...

I grew up on a farm and if you know anything about farms, there is never NOT work to do. But every Sunday, my father would take a day of rest. We did not do farm work on Sundays. Now I assumed that this was about reverence and worship of God, but when you read the Exodus account of the Ten Commandments, the Sabbath is about work stoppage, not about worship. Walter Brueggemann states: "It is about withdrawal from the anxiety system of Pharaoh, the refusal to let one's life be defined by production and consumption and the endless pursuit of private well-being" ( Journey to the Common Good , 26). The Israelites had been schooled in the way of anxiety. The Sabbath was God's strategy to break what they learned and teach them a new way. As I think about life today, the word "anxious" seems appropriate. And I'm not sure that being a Christian diminishes the effects of the anxiety of our world. Too often the patterns of anxiety shape and mold us and then we...

Just then a woman who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak. She said to herself, “If I only touch his cloak, I will be healed.” Jesus turned and saw her. “Take heart, daughter,” he said, “your faith has healed you.” And the woman was healed at that moment. —Matt. 9:20-22 Most often when we talk about this passage we focus on the words of Jesus to the woman about her faith. We then discuss our need to have faith like hers. I wholeheartedly agree, but I'd like to step back and experience this story a different way. The precondition to this woman reaching out to touch his cloak is that fact that Jesus was present that day. In fact, it could be argued that these stories in chapter 9 of Matthew are not really about the responses of the various individuals but about the one to whom they are responding. We so often turn stories like that of the woman with the "issue of blood" into mini-moral lessons th...

I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 3:14) Whenever we use the word "training" in the church world, we think about conferences, seminars, classes, webinars and written resources. All of these depend upon an expert giving us information, as if information should be classified as "training." Contrast that with training in the sport's world. Athletic training does not require athletes to sit and listen to experts. In fact it can be done with very little input or direction. When my 7th grade football coach gave us instructions about how to prepare over the summer for 8th grade football, he handed out one piece of paper and told us to go do it. Now if you walk into a bookstore, you will find hundreds of magical plans for getting in shape, but the biggest part of the training is just doing it. I wonder if we have made Christian training as difficult and complex as it seems like physical training has become. ...

So much of the ministry of Jesus happened in the ordinary stuff of life, eating, walking, sharing life with friends. In Matthew's Gospel, he records his own initiation to life with Jesus: As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him. While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew’s house, many tax collectors and sinners came and ate with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” On hearing this, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” —Matthew 9:9-13 I wonder what Jesus saw in Matthew that would make him a good choice to be a part of the twelve. I wonder if Matthew wondered the same thing. After all, he was at his place of work,...

When we talk about being missional, at the same time we need to talk about being relational. If we don't we turn God's mission into an act of violence where we try to accomplish something for God. People, usually called unbelievers or the lost, become objects of our monologue. We turn ourselves into Gospel agents of aggression, trying to get something done for God. I've been down that road far too many times—although we didn't use the word "misssional"—and I've no desire to go back. The Apostle Paul wrote: "make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others." (Philippians 2:2-3) The way we love one another determines how we will be on mission. In our modernistic mindset we tend to divide outreach from community....

Today, I picked up The Sky is Falling by Alan Roxburgh and reread the introduction. There you will find two paragraphs that summarize the call to be missional as well as any I've read. I quote them here because they help us think about what it means to live in missional community. "Throughout Western societies, especially in North America, there has occurred a fundamental shift in the understanding and practice of the Christian story. It is no longer about God and what God is about in the world; it is about how God serves and meets human needs and desires. It is about how the individual self can find its own purposes and fulfillment. More specifically, our churches have become spiritual food courts for the personal, private, inner needs of expressive individuals. The result is a debased, compromised, derivative form of Christianity that is not the gospel of the Bible at all. The biblical narrative is about God's mission in, through, and for the sake of the world and how...

To be "missional" is to be sent. The church is sent. The people of God are sent to be a sign, witness and foretaste of God's coming Kingdom in the midst of the world. We are sent to put on display God's beauty in the midst of violence. If we are going to do this God's way, then we must actually understand how God sends. Philippians 2 reveals some insight into this. Jesus Christ:     6 Who, being in very nature God,        did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;     7 rather, he made himself nothing       by taking the very nature of a servant,       being made in human likeness.    8 And being found in appearance as a man,       he humbled himself       by becoming obedient to death—          even death on a cross! God reveals God's missional nature in the sending of Jesus Christ. God'...

"My judgment is that the cultural temptation to triumphalism that has beset the church was powerfully reinforced by the scholastic catechism tradition that took God as 'omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent.' Thus, self-sufficient selves in communion with an all-managing God has no room for lament, and that theological premise is now powerfully replicated in so-called praise hymns, in which 'never is heard a discouraging word." (Walter Brueggemann, Disruptive Grace , 180). I quote this with some trepidation, knowing that I risk being misunderstood. But I'll risk it anyway. The point is that we have a limited ability to practice "lament" according the biblical tradition because we believe in an all-controlling, triumphalistic God. And because he is managing everything from on high, any attempt to cry out to God in lament does no good. In other words, God intended for human trafficking to happen. Or he intended for people in our neighborhoods to be...