The Relational Mission

Word and action. Promises and promises kept. Proclamation and fulfillment. If you want to understand who God is you must view how God both states and acts. He makes promises and he comes through on what he has promised. Many toxic images of God result from the fact that we don’t hold these two in collaborative tension. If we lean toward a God who speaks but his actions are not expected, then we create an image of a god who has a lot to say to us but for the most part it’s up to us to get it right. His talk, our action. Sadly, I see this happening in the "missional" movement today. We think that since God told us to go and "make disciples" then we must go. We act as if God has said all he is going to say and we don't trust that God is actually going ahead of us and with us. But Jesus's final words to the Great Commission are "Look, I myself will be with you every day until the end of this present age." (CEB) If we have an image of ...

Train People in Relational Intelligence My friend Kevin Calligan is a licensed Christian counselor. Through the years, he has worked with people ranging from the chronically ill to those who just need an emotional tune-up. And of course, there have been numerous couples who have come to him for counseling. In his work with couples, he realized that the skills they did not possess were the same basic skills needed to make any relationship healthy. Gary Smalley came to the same conclusion in his book, The DNA of Relationships. He writes, “The exciting concepts and methods hammered out in our marriage intensives aply to all relationships, not merely to marriage. I made this discovery for myself as I saw major improvements taking place in my home and with friends." The difference is that it’s socially acceptable to seek out and receive relational training for the sake of our marriages. We just don’t think about a need to be trained to relate to one another in our friendships. And w...

“There is a way that appears to be right, but in the end it leads to death.” —Proverbs 16:25 What way “appears to be right?” If we are going to understand what this means and how to avoid it then we had better avoid the temptation to jump to conclusions about this. On the surface, the meaning seems obvious. The patterns of sin lead to death. But the Proverbs were not written to pagans who were steeped in sin. The Israelites knew about sin and how sin leads to death. God spoke through the laws and the prophets to make sure that his people understood this. They knew the difference between right and wrong. Breaking the law does not appear to be right. So what might this mean? Let me suggest that it means something like this: Doing what is right because it is right leads to death. It’s a masked death, one that looks good on the outside, but it eats us up from the inside out. God is seeking covenant partners who will enter into loving relationship with him, not roboti...

Create Environments Where People Ask the Questions of Life The common approach to directing small group systems is to prescribe a small group methodology and help people conform to that methodology. In reaction to this approach, other churches have taken a free-for all approach that basically allows people to lead almost any kind of group they want. I think that a much wiser approach is to facilitate the creation of natural environments where people can answer the questions that they are already asking. This is not about giving people the answers. Nor is it about letting them do whatever they want in order to get them in groups. It's about guiding people into honest self-discovery. The power behind self-discovery is that it frees us to create environments based on powerful questions instead of prescribed, top-down patterns developed by leadership. If we work within the big questions about life and personal significance people are already asking, we will encounter less resistan...