"I wanted to add just a thought to what John has already sent you," writes Organic DAWN colleague Mike Steele from America.
Both community and mission are vital but they are by-products of something else. They grow out of intimacy with Jesus - living from your heart. Living from your heart and hearing God's personal call to me produces passion that comes from the inside (internal motivation). If you see a lack of mission (or community) in people, it tells you that intimate conversation with Jesus is not yet at the center of their lives. This is the place to focus - this is what they need help with (how could a person who is intimate with Jesus not have His heart for the world?).
To focus on mission (or community) is the wrong solution to the problem. To focus there may produce some short term activity but in the long run it results in guilt and burnout and requires ever increasing pressure (external motivation) to keep people motivated.
One more comment. It strikes me that focusing on the heart relationship with Jesus (learning to hear His voice and do what He says) is truly organic and reproducible. That is, once a person 'gets' this, they don't need other voices to continually exhort them to be missional. And, once they 'get' it, it's easy to infect others with the same thing. There is an important place for missional stories but those should always point back to "this is what Jesus told me to do." And then, "what is He telling you to do?"
This is such a brilliantly simple explanation of the church re-founded & the outworking of it. Beautiful.
Posted by: Charis | August 17, 2005 at 06:23