The Relational Mission

I'm reading this incredible book by Christine Pohl entitled Living into Community: Cultivating the Practices that Sustain Us. In it, she identifies four key practices for community life. These practices can be applied to small groups, committees, a local church body as a whole, work teams and family life. This is not a book about structures and programs for community. It's a book that deals with the hidden issues that make community community. This is a book that invites us to think, reflect and pray about the kind of life God is creating in our churches and in our small groups. The four practices she identifies are: • Gratitude—without it we turn the the practice of grumbling. • Making and Keeping Promises—without it we turn to the consumption of relationships as long as they are personally convenient. • Living Truthfully—without it we hide from others, thereby deceiving ourselves and others. • Hospitality—without it we live in fear and horde the good that we have to o...

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...

In August of 2012, Shawna and I resigned our pastoral positions in Saint Paul, MN and return to Houston, TX. She was offered a pastoral role in a church here and I started working on developing my training and consulting ministry. When we made the decision to move a few months earlier, I immediately started blogging, tweeting and doing other stuff to increase my social presence so that I could let people know what I was doing. For quite a while, I was blogging almost every day and tweeting a ton. I began to follow my stats and to look at my RT rate on twitter. I even got some social media coaching from a friend and my number of Twitter followers soared. The hits of www.mscottboren.com took off. I became "socially significant." Then in March of this year, something happened. Due to a wild set of circumstances, I entered into what could be called a "dark night of the soul" experience. I began to evaluate everything I was writing. I relooked at old stuff to see if it...