The Relational Mission

When I was writing my book Difference Makers , my oldest son (age 9) asked me about the title. When I told him, he responded, "Is this like The Avengers "? This got me thinking. Difference Makers are God's heroes who are putting the world to right. After I explained this to him, his face lit up. Maybe I became a little "cooler" in his eyes. But there is one huge difference. The Avengers have an end goal in mind, that is goodness, justice and wholeness. God's Difference Makers have a similar goal. They are sent by God to participate in God's redemption of all things. But the means by which The Avengers try to get to that end involves a lot of violence. The means and the ends do not line up. They want justice and peace, but their process of attaining it involves meeting the enemy on their terms. The meet violence with violence. God's difference-making heroes are on a journey of learning how to align the means with the end. In other words, the way w...

ASK QUESTIONS Asking good questions as a small group point person is more important than finding the right answers. In my experience, there many "right" answers when it comes to how we develop small groups. But if we are asking the wrong questions then we can very easily be led down a fruitless path. In his book, Community , Peter Block writes about the kind of life that brings transformation to neighborhoods. He writes, “The small group is the unit of transformation and the container for the experience of belonging.” This transformation is both personal and societal. Throughout his book, he consistently makes a strong argument proving “authentic transformation does not occur by focusing on changing individuals” but by creating environments where small groups of people can generate an alternative future for the social fabric of a neighborhood. To put it in the language of Jesus, the Kingdom of God comes through a group of people who are willing to embody the good news ...

While almost all of my church experience falls within the Evangelical category, I hold Orthodox theology in high esteem, especially that of John Zizioulas. I was first exposed to his thinking through Alan Torrance while I was studying at Regent College. As I have read and reread his books, I’ve found his perspective provides a prophetic challenge to insulated thinking and opens doors to seeing God, church and life in new ways. Recently, I was rereading his book Communion and Otherness . I found his opening words to be incredibly helpful: “Communion and otherness: how can these be reconciled? Are they not mutually exclusive and incompatible with each other? Is it not true that, by definition, the other is my enemy and my ‘original sin’, to recall the words of the French philosopher, J. P. Sartre? Our Western culture seems to subscribe to this view in many ways. Individualism is present in the very foundation of this culture. Ever since Boethius in the fifth century identified the ...

Dietrich Bonhoeffer observes in the opening paragraph of his book Ethics that those seeking a Christian ethic "must give up, as inappropriate to this topic, the two very questions that led them to deal with the ethical problem: 'How can I be good?' and 'How can I do something good?'" His words challenge the notion that the goal of Christian ethics is to find out how an individual can become good or how an individual can change the world for the good by his or her actions. He wrote, "Of ultimate importance, then, is not that I become good, or that the condition of the world be improved by my efforts, but that the reality of God show itself everywhere to be the ultimate reality." (See the translation on pages 46-7 pg Vol 6 in the Dietrich Bonhoffer Works series.) Practically speaking this means that Christian ethics is a focus on the ultimate reality that "God be known as good, even at the risk that I and the world are revealed as not good....

Jesus said, "Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy." The reality is that all of us find ourselves in situations where we need mercy. We all enter into places where we find that we have very little to nothing to offer those around us. But for some reason we have been taught that we need to outgrow the need for mercy. There is the myth that circulates around Christian teaching that trains us to think that Christians should grow up to a level where they can always benefit others. The assumption is that we need to grow out of the need for mercy. It's based on a triumphalistic perspective where we think that somehow we can always rise up and that the Spirit will empower us at any and every time to be strong for someone else who needs mercy. But this is a myth. We are all wounded. We are all in need of mercy. In my experience, those who don't think they need mercy are not very good at offering it. They are professionals at telling people how to bec...

So you have a good small group. The members like attending every week. They enjoy the conversations about the Bible and the ministry to one another is encouraging. But have you ever wondered if there might be more that God wants to do? Is a weekly or bi-weekly group meeting the extent of what God has in mind for you group? Don't get me wrong. Group meetings are a good thing. However, I'm not sure that God is sitting with a checklist to see who shows up at small group meetings and who does not. I think he is much more concerned about things like whether we love one another, how we are sacrificing for each other, if we are forgiving each other, and the like. I think he is looking at how we live our lives and whether our interaction with one another is distinctive from the way typical relationships occur in our world. Is our relational pattern marked by self-sacrificial love? When this occurs our small groups move beyond just connecting in meeting and into an experience of com...

What do effective small group pastors do versus small group pastors that fall short of expectations? Before talking about a list of activities, let's first begin with perspective. Perspective will help you ask the right questions. And if you are not asking the right questions, then it won't matter what kind of list you work from. In the book, Good to Great , Jim Collins writes about companies that stand out and what they do that is different than those who are average. He and his team of researches discovered that great companies practice patterns that result in the “flywheel effect.” Imagine a huge flywheel, one three stories high and weighing over 5000 pounds. The goal is to push the flywheel so that it rotates by simply leveraging your strength against it. By pushing once, it moves slightly. You realize that it will require multiple, consistent pushes to get it moving. After some pushing, it turns once. Then you keep pushing, and it turns again and again and again. Collins...

What does a small group do? What is the work of a small group? How does a group do outreach? What is the mission of a small group? Honestly, for years I've struggled with these questions. As soon as the word "work" or "witness" or "service" was used, there was a part of me that resisted it. For some reason these words triggered within me ideas of what I "should" do, what I "needed" to do as a good Christian, and what we "ought" to do to be a good small group. In other words, encountering God within a group is an act of God's grace. Loving one another in community is likewise a free gift of God. But working, witnessing and serving others is primarily about my efforts, my willingness and my work. Of course, no one actually said it this bluntly, but as I've interacted with groups, the work of the small group that pertains to how the group relates to the world is the most difficult to develop. For years, I've b...

I'm a fan of the Impressionists. Prints of Monet, Renoir and others bring life to a room. However, when I saw one of Monet's famous paintings in person, I viewed what no print can capture. The light bounced off the brush strokes. The characters sitting around the tables popped looked like I could sit with them. I stood in front of it mesmerized. I didn't just view it. I did not see it. It saw me. It engaged me. It's beauty moved me. Life together is like a work of art. Each one is a masterpiece, but none are the same. They cannot be copied, replicated or mimicked. Every life together experience is unique, a one of kind expression of God's love. Life together is the life of God put on display in such a way that it engages the world around us. It is lived in the midst of life, revealing God's beauty in a world that lacks it. Dietrich Bonhoeffer opened his book Life Together with these words: "Jesus Christ lived in the midst of his enemies. In the ...

Paul wrote in Colossians 3, "Therefore as God's chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds the all together in perfect unity." The call to community. This is more than a just a call to participate in a group. Every small group book I have on my shelf speaks of this experience. In addition, it has become quite popular to talk about how God is community. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit share life in eternal perfect community. Father, Son and Spirit are one and the call of the church is to be in unity just as Jesus prayed in John 17. The vision for community has been put out in the church. It has been announced repeatedly over the last 25 years but while the call to community is great, vision alone will not p...

Life together is more than just getting together as a small group. It's more than a meeting. It's about the way we relate to one another in community. It's about the way we belong to each other.  People long to belong somewhere. All of us have an inner sense that we are wired to relate. It’s part of the DNA of being human. However, many relate through clinging to each other because they are driven out of a condition of loneliness. They are compelled to interact with others in a way that pulls us in directly to one another. In other words, we relate in a way that puts pressure on others to fill our emptiness, to be for us what we have not been able to be in and of ourselves. Henri Nouwen puts it this way: “Friendship and love cannot develop in the form of anxious clinging to each other. … As long as our loneliness brings us together with the hope that together we no longer will be alone, we castigate each other with our unfulfilled and unrealistic desires for oneness, in...

Connecting happens in all kinds of shapes and sizes. And we call connecting by all kinds of names. We connect as families, at school, in the workplace and at church. We connect with neighbors, with friends and with those who share the same hobby. And almost always, these points of connecting happen in some form of small group. In the church, we have all kinds of ways to connect with others: Home Groups Task Groups Mission Groups Cell Groups Choir Groups Bible Study Groups Worship Groups Fellowship Groups Care Groups Recovery Groups Service Project Groups Outreach Groups Leadership Development Groups Church Leadership Groups Committee Groups Short-term Sermon Study Groups Sports Groups Sunday School Groups I remember one time in my journey when I connected in seven different church small groups at the same time. I was what you might call a Christian Go-Getter. I was serious about my faith and the way to follow through with that seriousness was to get involved in g...