The Relational Mission

Like many who grew up in the church, Sunday school small group Bible studies shaped my life. Then I added home Bible studies. Then I got involved in the early days of the cell church movement in the 1990s. Sermons, Bible studies, Bible teaching sessions, conferences—how could I ever count the hours of information that I've poured into my brain about the Bible. My situation is not that uncommon. Many in the church know a lot about the Bible. I've even heard it say that we know more Bible than we can obey. As an alternative, many propose a focus on Bible application. So the point of a sermon or a Bible discussion time in a small group is to get people to the question of How can I apply this to my life? Or What am I called to obey as a result of this study? Or How is God calling me to respond to this passage? I don't think that the problem in the church is having too much Bible information. Nor is it about having the right information. And I don't think the solution is...

"A new beginning! We must learn to live each day, each hour, yes, each minute as a new beginning, as a unique opportunity to make everything new. Imagine that we could live each moment as a moment pregnant with new life. Imagine that we could live each day as a day full of promises. Imagine that we could walk through the new year always listening to a voice saying to us, "I have a gift for you and can't wait for you to see it! Imagine!" Henri Nouwen, Here and Now , 16 For years, I would read a Henri Nouwen book about once every 12-18 months. I would mark it up, take notes, and copy quotes like this in my journal. Then I would put the book aside and think, "Well, I'm just not there yet." Upon reading his stuff, I would get what he is saying conceptually, but my soul didn't get what he was really saying. I felt like a little league baseball player watching the high school team practice. Then I realized that I had never been through the period...

In yesterday's post , I asked the question related to why it is so hard for people to enter into community. Most of the time, we look for ways to fix this problem.  They usually come in the form of "6 Ideas for Taking Your Group to the Next Level" or "3 Sure-Fire Ways to Turn Your Group Around." Posts like that are needed. But this is not one of those. Sometimes I think we try to fix the problems in our groups without going deeply enough to identify the real issues. So we medicate the lack of community, while we become numb to what the Spirit of God really wants to do. The problem though is that the Spirit of God usually does not work as fast as we want him to. We want to "get over" the problem of the lack of community. While God wants to lead us into the painful reality that we are not very good at living in community. He wants to reveal show us that we don't know how to love others very well. That "considering others as more important th...

 In a previous post , I wrote about how we our core being is defined relationally. We are socially formed. At the same time, this formation has shaped our personal identity in such a way that we set the self over against others. We are taught to look for our core identity apart from others, as if there is some kind of essential identity that is pure and untainted that can only be found in the individual, isolated soul.   This sets up a problem that often goes unnoticed when we try to establish small groups. We tell people that they need community, that we are created as social beings in the triune image of God, and that the Bible tells us that we are called to love one another. Then we organize people into groups and give them curriculum to talk about each week. Thus far things are heading on a good track. But something happens. The group doesn't move beyond the Bible study experience into community. People say that they want to love one another, but the group struggles t...

I'm reading a mind-blowing book entitled Relational Being by the psychologist Kenneth Gergen. He is confronting the paradigm through which we understanding ourselves, which he calls "bounded" identity. That is, we have grown up in a world where we view ourselves as individuals first, as if there is a core identity that we possess that is independent and distinct from our relationships to other people or to our world. In other words, we tend to think about self in one category and our community in another. He lays out the falsehood of this view of the self by demonstrating how we cannot even understand our identity apart from our relationships. The most basic illustration of this is found in the way we are born into a family. We learn how to talk, how to think, and even how to reflect about our own identity from those who care for us as children. Our identity is wrapped up in social interaction. This takes us beyond typical ways of talking about individualism and ...