In our last big conversation on this blog, “Shooting for what’s real”, we talked and debated a bit about how the Christians can keep from being isolated from non-Christians, and live in closer proximity to them.  Some of us suggested new ideas, others struggled with those.  As I continue to ponder the state of the faith in western culture, I’m more and more convinced that it won’t look just one way.  Our greatest challenge may simply be that a lot of people’s perception of “Christians” and the church is very negative, or simply that the church is irrelevant.  And yet look how people in our culture are scrambling for connections and reality… facebook, myspace, etc.  They are hungry for what is real.  Do we have it?  Do we know how to live it?  Do we know how to give it?  It seems to me that some basics of living the Kingdom of God as we go forward, as we try to sniff out the trail of being like the Jesus of the Gospels in our culture, would be:

–We must understand that to become like Jesus is to  become human and real… too much of modern Christianity puts a religious shmeer over the way people talk and act that makes them less real, less acceptable, and frankly, strange. 

–We must run like hell from all attempts to reach out that will feel canned, contrived, or manipulative.  This was Judy’s concern in the last discussion when we talked about small Christian communities mixing with people’s non-Christian friends, neighbors, etc.  And I get that.  Proximity matters, it just can’t be contrived.  We just need to offer friendship that’s sincere and warm.  Sometimes if it happens in some group church setting, people will fear we are trying to “suck them in”– we can’t control people’s perceptions, but we CAN guard our own motives and love people just to love them!  What will help with this is caring less about whether we get people “into the church” and caring more about knowing them and how we can love them redemptively.

–We must care about what Jesus cares about, one of the results of which will be that people will be surprised to discover Christians who are really trying to be like the Jesus of the Gospels.  At our Summer Picnic last weekend, in my conversations with some of the not-yet-Christians who were there (and there were quite a few), I could tell that they didn’t know quite what to make of a bunch of white suburbanites having a party with a bunch of Hispanics, half of whom didn’t even speak English– and their perception was that this was a good thing, just not “normal”.  We might have a hard time sometimes convincing “Christians” to care about the poor, but I find that many not-yet-Christians are pleasantly surprised to find a group of Christians caring about real problems in the world.  In one place Paul says, “They will see your deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.”  We do these things not for those who are watching, but to love and serve.  But people are watching.

I am becoming more and more convinced that if we can follow the Jesus of the Gospels, the church will increasingly look less and less like the Christendom church we have known in the modern era (Catholic, evangelical, or whatever). 

Thought I’d start a new post on a topic that I often think long and hard about - as the title suggests, how do I discover God’s will for my life?

Let me start by saying that I know there’s a TON of material out there on the subject, and I’ve read or listened to a lot of it, but I’m much more interested in personal thoughts and experiences than (as Fran would say) ”tips and tricks”, or long essays on the subject.

God’s will in my life has always been an elusive thing for me.  I can look back over the years and see some of the many ways God has molded me and guided my path, but I always have this nagging feeling that I’m missing something really significant.  I find myself asking all the time - “God, what am I not getting?  Where is it that you really want me to be heading?”

Sometimes I think it could be just my nature - I’m the type of person that wants a clear answer and explanation for everything.  I start thinking, “OK, God, I want You to use me however You want, so why don’t you just spell it out for me?”  Of course I know it’s not that simple - what fun would it be if we were simply following a predefined recipe through life?  Not much.  I’m pretty convinced that part of God’s plan is that we are always on a journey of discovery to some extent.  (But even knowing that much, the “unknown” still constantly frustrates the heck out of me…)

Interested to hear your thoughts and especially experiences you’re willing to share on this topic.  Thanks - GS

Hi everybody,

Forgive the intrusion of this administrative note, but I figured it would be better to place it here for archiving purposes.

There have been a couple of questions about how to change your password for this blog. It’s a fairly simple process, but finding the right link to start with can be kind of tricky. Basically, once you log in, you’ll see a screen that looks something like this:

Near the top right, you should see a ‘Profile’ link (circled in the above screenshot). If you click this link, you will be taken to your profile page, where you can change your preferences and account information, to include your password. You’ll have to scroll all the way down to see the password fields. This is what it looks like:

Once you’re done changing your password, click ‘Update Profile’ to save it. From this point on, you’ll be using your new password.

If you have any questions about this, please reply to this post. In the meantime, happy blogging!

Brian Z

I’m going to try to get a fresh chew on our last conversation about community and mission.  What we all seem to know is this: There’s something missing in the small group paradigm we have known. I think at the heart of what’s missing is the fact that we see the flow this way: You come to church (the weekend worship gathering) and then to find community and spiritual growth within the church, you join a small group.  Inherent in this is an a priori mindset that says, “These groups are for people at our church, and therefore we don’t expect the group to include with non-church people or to live any kind of shared mission together.”  Small groups in most churches are just satellites for people who belong to the mother planet.

This is why I like this darn Village concept.  I’m not just talking nomenclature and pragmatics here– it’s a mindset difference, where you are saying, “This little cluster of people is in and of itself a discipling, missionally living, incarnational relationship building Jesus community.  It happens to be linked with a bunch of other similar Jesus communities, which are networked together for accountability, good worship gatherings, and big shared mission endeavors.”  It occurs to me as I type this that when we do not think of small groups this way, we inadvertently communicate to our small group leaders that it is not really their place to fully pursue the Kingdom mission of Jesus with their little community.  We say something unspoken like, “Just take them through a little study booklet… that’s you job… no need to try to, well, you know, change the world with your group.”

I wonder what it would be like to have Village pastors who, instead of just wondering what their group ought to study next, ask their group, “So where is this adventure taking us?”  I do think we can have special classes and groups for new people who walk in the “Sunday morning front door”, but I think we should let Villages arise that see themselves, really, as an outpost of the Kingdom.  In addition to time together growing, praying, caring… They should throw parties the friends and neighbors come to, and invite all their non-church people to join them in mission.  Do you guys think this makes sense?  Do you think it is possible?  If not, how will we end the isolation of the Christians from the culture?  And conversely, how will we show new disciples that the Jesus-way is more than verses and 7 days a week with Christian friends?

I am just curious if you guys realize what you have at Lifespring. Over the last 12 years I have floated from church community to church community. Most of them have been kinda nice and had their good points…but they went about church as if they have it all figured out.

The people here are always questioning, always tweaking, and always asking the deeper..and sometimes tougher questions of life. When someone smiles at me or hugs me I feel as if they mean it and it is not a duty.

The core of this body of people is about getting to know each other and making a difference to the community..be it local, on the East side of Joliet, or Haiti. People are genuinely excited about that. Sure, fine, some things may need tweaking…but the road the group is on is wondrous.

As someone trying to create a body of people in Bolingbrook, there is no better place to be than here. The interns that you guys are talking to and taking under your wing..they are in amazing hands. Yeah, maybe from church plant to church plant communion may look a little different, worship may have different instruments, and the small groups or villages may have slightly different looks and feels…but if we who are under your wings and tutelage can grasp that core and partner with Lifespring in this direction for the long haul…we have an opportunity to not only get what you guys get, but to lift up Lifespring. I am beginning to think that this is not planting new bodies so much as it is an organic growth of Lifespring with us simple folk as your disciples.

The spirit in this place is simply outstanding and as a “newcomer” (even though I was here once before) there are not words to describe it…but there are lessons to learn.

FROM FRAN LEEMAN…
We just realized that our posts are not showing who the author of the post is… our tech guys Brian Z. is working on this.  In the meantime, the post below about following Jesus together is from me… jump in and join the conversation.

Before I get to anything else, I have to say that I got up this morning a bit depressed.  I have no real reasons to be depressed– I am not starving, love life, know who I am, have a wife who loves me, and great kids and friends.  After a bit of pondering I realized that the malaise in my soul was just more of this perplexity I’ve been carrying around about the lostness of what we call “church” these days.  I went into my office, picked up my guitar and worshiped, became aware of God’s beautiful and great presence, and walked out of my office freshly grateful for the life of God and freshly motivated to see our church community develop in ways that make sense and bear fruit.  So here is the heart of my perplexity…

I have given up on most of the “models” of doing church that are well known to us now in western culture.  Don’t misunderstand me– I’m grateful for every expression of the church, because people come into relationship with God through all of them– but I am convinced that mega models, seeker driven models, church growth movement models, etc. all have shown themselves incapable of the kind of community, discipleship and penetration of the culture that would be most fruitful and most glorifying to God.  If you aren’t over your own fascination with mega success models, get over it, because all the studies show that we are mostly shuffling sheep with all that.

Of course, it is always easy to be critical of what we think isn’t really doing the job, until I remember that I lead a community that is also trying to do the job.  The things I LOVE about LifeSpring are that there is a very high degree of authenticity (people are real), we are at a size where many people have found significant transformation, we have a good balance of serious thought and childlike joy, and we have a few small group pockets where rich community and some good discipleship is happening.  These are no small things, and I am grateful for them!!!  Yet we have some struggles, like…
–Many people in the church who have not found significant community even though they have “attended” for a long time
–Some of our small groups are more like “church small groups” than connected, joyful communities
–The church is still too isolated from the broader community in which we exist

I’ve been reading The Tangible Kingdom by Hugh Halter and Matt Smay.  These guys planted using some of the aforementioned models, got frustrated (as I sometimes am), and then planted a community in Denver called Adullam (Hebrew for “refuge”) http://www.adullamdenver.com/adullam_about-01.html.  What has struck me as interesting as I have read the book is that they are structured just like LifeSpring, but some (not all) of their mindsets are different.  The church is about our size at this point, and has a Sunday morning worship gathering that still remains the “front door” for some people.  What’s different is their mindset about the smaller communities that make up Adullam (which they call “Villages”).  The ways the mindset seems to be different are:
–The villages are the primary thing (that’s easy to say, harder to do with the way we usually think about church).  They care MORE about whether you get to your village than to the Sunday worship gathering.
–The villages are real communites, so they are multifaceted (more than Bible study and chips)
–The villages do a lot of things (feasts, parties, missional endeavors) where it feels natural to include and invite friends, neighbors, co-workers, etc.  (from St. Paddy’s Day parties with green beer to feeding the homeless).  What this does is puts Christians who care about people in proximity to those who don’t know Christ yet as a community.

To grasp how different that last one is from how we usually do church, think how most people’s “church friends” and “non-church friends” are separate groups that never meet or mix.  But why?  Have we in the church lost our ability to just hang out with people, enjoy them, and let who we are rub off?

Anyway– I highly recommend The Tangible Kingdom, and I’m deeply perplexed and wondering how we can pursue incarnational, missional community.  Even with all the gains we have made at LifeSpring (which are huge!), I sense that there are still some shifts to be made in the way we think about being the church.  Our culture has shifted more than we thought, and to incarnate Christ to people in a way that actually opens the door to transformation for them is going to take a very authentic kind of community that doesn’t just feel like a worship event or a contrived living room event.  Thoughts?

Hi everyone.  I’ve had this idea for some time that we should have a place to talk about how we are living out this Kingdom of God thing in and through our LifeSpring Community, and so Brian Z. has been building us this blog.  Click on the “Comments” tag below this post and you’ll be taken to a page where you can register as a new user.  Once you are registered, you can comment on any post (any conversation topic) I have started.  YOU can also start a new topic.  If you write a post (start a new topic), it comes to me initially for approval to show up where everyone can see it (since anyone can register as a user, this is just to provide a little control over the topics that are posted).  Comments on existing posts are simply immediately published.

From time to time, any of us can start a conversation about a topic we’d like to see people converse about.  My hope is that it will enable us to engage more frequently with one another, but at everyone’s convenience, especially about topics like our journeys with God, the teachings of Jesus, and understanding and living out the mission of the Kingdom in the suburbs and the world.

So go ahead and register, and keep your eyes peeled for the first “post of substance”.