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.

“They sold me a dream of Christmas, They sold me a silent night, They told me a fairy story, Till I believed in the Israelite.” Becomes; “But I believed in the Israelite.”

About this cover, @U2.com writes:

Like pretty much all of their other Christmas references, this is not a happy song. It’s about how our modern world has corrupted the simple beauty that a Christmas tree can offer. Edge’s chiming guitars sound completely in their element as a delicate, Christmassy effect. Lake used part of the Prokofiev composition “Troika” in between the verses, and Edge’s guitar version of it is utterly amazing. Adam and Larry chose to go with simple, sparse, deep rhythms that help drive home the gravity of the song. When I’m watching the video they made, with the cold-looking steam and the blinking, flickering lights all over the floor, and Bono shoots up an octave to cry out, “I wish you a hopeful Christmas. I wish you a brave new year. All anguish, pain, and sadness leave your heart. Let your road be clear,” it gives me goose bumps.

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

~ A Light to the Nations: A Study of the Old Testament Conception of Israel’s Mission to the World
by Robert Martin-Achard

As a cultural story, consumerism exerts a shaping influence on virtually every aspect of life. Philip Sampson observes that “once established, such a culture of consumption is quite undiscriminating and everything becomes a consumer item.” Similarly, Don Slater notes, “If there is no principle restricting who can consume what, there is also no principled constraint on what can be consumed: all social relations, activities and objects can in principle be exchanged as commodities.” Even the gospel and the church can be overtaken by the consumerist spirit. When the church takes up the role assigned it within a consumer culture and allows itself to be shaped by that story, it becomes merely a vendor of religious goods and services. Clearly, the church must not accept this role in society; as Sampson argues, the “challenge for the church here is to take up its task in the reformation and renewal of all life, rather than becoming another isolated customer center.”

- A Light to the Nations: The Missional Church and the Biblical Story by Michael W. Goheen