Missional Imagination

Read this over at blindbeggar.org today and thought it was worth posting on my notes along the way. This is what Common Heart is about.

A missional imagination is not about the church; it’s not about how to make the church better, how to get more people to come to church, or how to turn a dying
church around. It’s not about getting the church back to cultural respectability in a time when it has been marginalized…. This [missional] imagination turns most of our church practices on their head. It invites us to turn towards our neighborhoods and communities, listening first to what is happening among people and learning to ask different questions about what God is up to in the neighborhood. Rather than the primary question being, ‘How do we attract people to what we are doing?’ it becomes, ‘What is God up to in this neighborhood?’ and “What are the ways we need to change in order to engage the people in our community who no longer consider church a part of their lives?’ This is what a missional imagination is about. —Alan J. Roxburgh and M. Scott Boren, “Introducing the Missional Church,” Baker Books, 2009, page 20.

Sabbath Rest

Last post I ended with thinking about a rhythm of life. Work dominates my life. Five days a week I head into Charlotte driving about 45 minutes each way. I am at work for 9 hours. I get an hour for lunch. This is not unlike many people. On Saturday I get up just as early to go to work with Common Cupboard. I am usually done by noon.

One basic rhythm is a sabbath rest each week. It is so important god put in in his big 10. I must confess, I have never truly practiced the rest of a weekly sabbath. I say I am too busy for it. During my spiritual formation group meeting this past Monday I committed to observing the 24 hours from sunset Saturday to sunset Sunday as a sabbath rest.

So I have been thinking this week how to go work free for my sabbath rest. I am going to have to change some things ... simple meals, laundry on a different day, no paper work. there is a couple will be continuing to consider the implications and then enjoy my sabbath rest this week.

Making room for the important

Last blog got me thinking about what I really value. I mentioned a few things that I say I value highly. Some I have made room for and discipline myself to do. Others I have not.

The thing about making room for the important is that something else has got to be replaced. I prefer to multi-task. But somethings just deserve my undivided attention. I must chose to make room for them and allow those things that are truly important to me to create a basic rhythm to my life. Other things need to fit into. that rhythm,

As I go through this day I am going to think more about what my daily life would look like built upon the rhythm of what is truly important to me.

Blog Regularly

Blog more ... This I know I can do. From July to December 30, I did not write a word on this blog. So blogging more is easy ... I have just done it.

But blogging regularly, that is a discipline. A friend of mine, Jeff Gardner, is the pastor of Threshold Church in Matthews. Now he blogs regularly at midweekjolt.wordpress.com. Every Thursday a new post, and in the past couple months he posts notes on Monday from his Sunday talks. So each Monday and Thursday a new edition is available. Good stuff too.

I mentioned the word discipline. I don't particularly care for it, to tell you the truth. I usually see the discipline of doing anything as constricting. I like to believe I am free and spontaneous. But the reality is I am not. I am constantly pushed by the many demands upon my life. Some are relentless. Some are just what I got to do. Others seem to scream out with urgency. Truthfully, I am not as free and spontaneous as I like to believe. Rather, I am driven by circumstances much more often that I care to admit. What discipline really does is make room for what I consider important. If I don't intentionally carve out time for these truly important things, my life will crowd them out. Some of the things I value highly are prayer, meditation, dreaming, spending time with my family, reading good thought provoking books, and putting my thoughts into words. So the discipline of regularity is more of a way to carve out time for what energizes and renews me.

So what will blogging regularly look like for me? Don't know yet! I would love to blog daily, but several times a week is probably a good rhythm for me. Let me think on it and I will get back to you.

Blog more

Strange thing about blogging. It can be just the random thoughts of the day. It could be a well thought out treatise on the Christian life. It could be more on my own dreams. It could be sharing the dreams, thoughts, words of others as I journey though this life.

One of my problems with blogging is that I want it to be significant. But the reality of life is that we often have no idea what is significant until we have traveled down the road a little more. The past sets the course of the future. And sometimes, if we have not placed a marker on the road, when we get to the place we realize that something significant has just taken place, we don't quite know what random thought, chance meeting, or slight adjustment of course it was that though seemingly insignificant at the time, led us to this significant place.

Hence, my post yesterday about blogging more. I know I had some potentially significant thoughts, dreams, understandings, and experiences, but I can not access them out of my memory. Some of these things that I try to hold in the hard drive between my ear, may need to find a new home right here.