Come spend time with and learn from Alan and Deb Hirsch, Michael Frost, Neil Cole, Hugh Halter, Dan Kimball, Darryl Gardiner, Scot McKnight, David Fitch, Sherry and Geoff Maddock, Lance Ford, Jo Saxton, Mike Breen, Kim Hammond, Brian Sanders, Steve Lutz, Mindy Caliguire, Paul Aung, Yemi Mobilade, and Guy Pfanz.

We will be offering multiple main sessions, over 30 breakout sessions, and significant “living room” times to network and connect with all the presenters. All the details will be available on the new Sentralized website in just a couple of weeks, but in the meantime mark your calendar and plan on joining us in KC this September!

When considering what it will take for an existing congregation to move in a missional direction, I believe one of the key starting points is to begin with discipleship, or spiritual formation. Now having said that, I also believe we have to be careful not to think it is a purely linear process.

In other words we need to realize that we can’t, or shouldn’t, see discipleship as something that has to be “complete” before we engage in God’s mission. I would much rather view the process as a cycle of discipleship and mission, where intentional apprenticeship to Jesus (discipleship) leads to mission and mission compels us to intentional apprenticeship (discipleship).

The main point that I want to make here, however, is that we cannot neglect the formation to Christlikeness if we are to be a sent, missionary people.

I was humbled to discover recently that Len Hjalmarson quoted from one of my blog posts on this topic in his and Roger Holland’s excellent new book titled Missional Spirituality:

God calls the church to be a sent community of people who no longer live for themselves but instead live to participate with Him in His redemptive purposes. However, people will have neither the passion nor the strength to live as a counter cultural society for the sake of others if they are not transformed by the way of Jesus. If the church is to “go and be” then we must make certain that we are a Spirit formed community that has the spiritual capacity to impact the lives of others.

How do you understand the interplay between discipleship and missional living? What do you do to ensure that you have the passion and the strength to live for the sake of others?

We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws, because noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. Throw us in jail, and we shall still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall win freedom, but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory. . . .

Now there is a final reason I think that Jesus says, “Love your enemies.” It is this: that love has within it a redemptive power. And there is a power there that eventually transforms individuals. That’s why Jesus says, “Love your enemies.” Because if you hate your enemies, you have no way to redeem and to transform your enemies. But if you love your enemies, you will discover that at the very root of love is the power of redemption.

– Martin Luther King, Jr., “Loving Your Enemies”, 17 November 1957, Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery Alabama

The seminar will be held on Tuesday, February 7th from 9:00am to 3:00pm. The cost of the one day is $29, which will include lunch. We will be meeting at Westside Family Church, at 8500 Woodsonia Drive, Lenexa, KS. You can register at Eventbrite here.

Churches — thinking now of local assemblies of such people — would naturally be the result. Churches are not the kingdom of God, but are primary and inevitable expressions, outposts, and instrumentalities of the presence of the kingdom among us. They are “societies” of Jesus, springing up in Jerusalem, in Judea, in Samaria, and to the furthest points on earth (Acts 1:8), as the reality of Christ is brought to bear on ordinary human life.

~ Dallas Willard in Renovation of the Heart

Here is one recent quote I found helpful on the topic of the need for hospitality to be natural, or casual.

Jesus’ hospitality to the displaced and distressed was not calculated but casual. It is as though Jesus lived his life as a type of present participle: as he was going. Jesus saw. It is this casualness that undercuts much of what goes by the name of Christian hospitality today. The churches of the country continue to promote program after program, and call committee after committee, to care for the poor, the naked, and the hungry. There is merit, of course, in organization. There is something good to be done by working together. But these efforts, as noble as they are, begin in process of institutionalizing care. When that happens, our ability to see the stranger “as we are going,” is eroded. Clothing and feeding, welcoming and visiting, become agendas. By adopting the vision of Jesus, by seeing as and how Jesus sees, our inclination toward hospitality will become natural and unforced. Hospitality ought to be ad hoc and personal.

~ I Was a Stranger: A Christian Theology of Hospitality  by Arthur Sutherland

by Samuel F. Pugh

“For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me… – Matt. 25:35

A few years ago our family moved to a new part of town to plant a church. We were convinced that God placed us in our new home, on our new street, in our new neighborhood, for the purpose of meeting and getting to know our new neighbors. But how do you begin to build relationships with those whom you have never met? The primary key is that you must be intentional. New relationships seldom happen by chance. Instead you must find ways to “rub shoulders” with your neighbors. While your neighborhood situation may be quite different from the one we experienced here are some simple ways we began building relationships with our neighbors.

1. Pray for Your Neighbors.
Someone has said, “We need to talk to God about people, then talk to people about God.” If you have a neighborhood directory use it to identify the names of each family member in your building, on your street or cul-de-sac. Make a list that will help you pray for each family that you seek to build a relationship with. This list will help you move from simply hoping to connect with some nameless neighbor in the future, to specific action aimed at building a new relationship.

2. Be Outside.
After dinner take a walk in your neighborhood with an eye for meeting people. Play with your kids in the front yard instead of the backyard. Some of the best opportunities for our family to meet our neighbors came from playing baseball and Frisbee in our cul-de-sac. Playing ball in the front yard many times acted as a magnate for kids in the neighborhood and inevitably parents would follow.

3. Organize a Garage Sale.
Have a garage sale at your house and ask your neighbors if they have anything they would like to sell. We found in many cases neighbors not only brought over items to sell, but they would spend time “working” the sale and creating the opportunity to begin some brand new relationships and deepen existing ones.

4. Invite People for Dessert.
One of the best ways to get to know your neighbors is to have them over for dinner. However, we have found that inviting people over for dessert is less work and many times less threatening from their perspective. Dessert is less formal and requires a much smaller time commitment.

5. Have a Cookout.
Everybody loves to eat, and few people will turn down the chance to cookout on the grill and sample others people’s favorite dishes. Some of the best-attended get-togethers that we have hosted have been backyard (or front yard) cookouts. On one occasion we had the chance to have one of the local TV stations do their weather from our backyard. We used the opportunity to have a neighborhood cookout and everyone came to meet the weatherman and to be on TV.

6. Ask for Advice.
Everyone has differing talents and areas of expertise. One way of getting to know our neighbors better is to ask for advice in a person’s area of expertise. Having moved from a condominium where the grounds were always cared for, I had many opportunities to ask the more handy men in our neighborhood for advice. Advice on how to operate the sprinkler system, to over-seeding the lawn, to fixing a frozen air conditioning unit.

7. Join a Community Cause.
Find out if your neighborhood has a Home Owners Association. If so, join in on neighborhood workdays, or find an associational committee on which you can be a part. Find out if there is a neighborhood directory, if not, offer to put one together for those on your street.

8. Have an Open House.
One of our first connecting efforts after moving into our new house was to host a “dessert party.” We hand delivered special invitations to more than 180 homes in our housing addition. We simply invited people to a “come and go” dessert party where we had a dozen different kinds of desserts for people to sample. We also found that most people are very open to attending a party around the Christmas season. Take advantage of special times in the year to invite the neighborhood over for food and fun.

9. Watch for Special Needs.
Be on the lookout for special needs. Offer to baby sit or perhaps pet sit. Help to maintain yard work while neighbors are on vacation. Not long after moving in we noticed one of our neighbors preparing to paint their house. We spent part of the day helping them paint and that evening they had us over for pizza and we had the opportunity to discuss spiritual issues.

10. Start a Home Bible Study/Discussion Group.
The most significant and rewarding step to getting to know your neighbors is to discuss spiritual issues with them. After spending several months taking every opportunity to build relationships with those around us we invited our neighborhood to a new “Home Fellowship” that we started in our home one night a week.

Jesus explicitly told us to love our neighbors and that begins by getting to know them. Recognize that there is a cost to building relationships with people around you. It will complicate your life, it will cost you money, and it will certainly cost you your most valuable resource, time. But I hope we will also recognize that the benefits of investing in the lives of others and of being a part of what God is doing in the world, and your neighborhood, far exceeds any personal inconvenience we might experience in the process.

– Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556)