Thinking with Christ-centered mission intention:

What subcultures are you involved in?

• Neighborhood/Apartment Complex
• Sports
• Work
• School
• Clubs
• Hobbies
• Public Service
• Etc.

How are you working to build meaningful relationships inside of these communities (friendships that allow you opportunities into their homes and other communities)?

How are you lovingly serving these people (not treating them as projects with time frames and expectations that they must meet)?

Are you willing to live an inconvenienced life?

Gospel Communities will be meeting together in various locations to be part of this training. We’ll pass back to GC leaders to continue the discussion.

Live TV : Ustream

Romans 12:13 says “Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality.”

Hospitality is the divine enablement to share with others our home, our lives, our personal space and resources without communicating a need for performance or an expectation of return.

There are a few points I want to go through using this definition of hospitality. The first thing that has to be established is that all gifts are given by the Holy Spirit including the gift of hospitality. This is the “Devine Enablement.” We cannot function in our gifts outside of the Holy Spirit. This is not about us hosting an amazing dinner party or making the best food, it’s about being led by the Holy Spirit to do whatever and serve whoever he commands us to.

Secondly it’s important to distinguish who we’re showing hospitality towards, who the “others” are in our lives. If the purpose of hospitality is to show and demonstrate God’s love for his people then we must pray that our sinful, selfish hearts are replaced with God’s heart. Otherwise the “others” we choose to show hospitality for are those we feel deserve it, though the gospel says all we deserve is death. We’ll show partiality to our close friends, family and people we like, at the expense of the lost, poor, sinful, broken people that Jesus is trying to reach. As a church family we should be showing hospitality to each other as Romans 12 says, but that same heart should be missional and seek to reach and impact the lost.

Next is the concept of sharing our home, our lives, our personal space and resources. This is a tough thing for our flesh to fully grasp, we need the Holy Spirit to show us how to to this. I think that most of us are happy to have people in our homes and our lives and maybe even in our personal space. But sharing all of that takes it to a new level that I think a lot of us struggle with. The definition of share is “to divide, apportion, or receive equally.” That means that literally our house our lives and our personal space and resources we are to share equally with others. Our home, our lives and our personal space is not ours but The Lords. We are to share it with others.

Last is we are to do it without communicating a need for performance or an expectation of return. The strangers, friends and church family that we share our homes, lives, personal space and resources with don’t need to do or give us anything in return. Can we say that we do that when we invite someone over and they leave without saying the food was good or that they appreciate the invitation or appreciate us? As Jesus was dying on the cross and giving man the gift of salvation we spat on him and mocked him, there was no multitude saying “thank you Jesus!” Yet Jesus asked the Father to forgive them, for they do not know what they do.

Selfishness in the church is a deep rooted sin that we all need to repent of. We find it hard to give to the church, to give to the saints and to give to the community God’s placed us in. Hospitality starts with a broken spirit, desperate for God to come and do open heart surgery as Aaron’s been preaching on. To change our hearts to be a giving people, a people that want to see people cared for and brought to know Jesus. Then this heart becomes the driving force in our mission and every day lives.

If your gospel communities are struggling with hospitality then please contact me and let’s pray.

UPDATE: Live training session went great, you can watch the recorded training below.

I hope you can see that we are trying to get you as much help as possible by providing some helpful resources to equip you in being a part of and serving your Gospel Community.  I was able to have a great talk with my new friend.

Ryan Eland at Praxis Church

Let me know if recording my conversations with other leaders is helpful and I will try and make it happen more often.

An A29 church has created a free study guide to go along with the Re:Lit book Total Church, by Tim Chester and Steve Timmis. The well-designed 32-page study guide is available for free PDF download here.

The study guide was designed by Veritas Community Church in Columbus, Ohio.

Tim Chester and Steve Timmis, the authors of Total Church, foundedThe Crowded House church-planting initia

tive in the UK and direct the Porterbrook Network. Steve Timmis is also Director of Acts 29 for Western Europe.

I thought this would be a great resource for all who are wanting to learn more about what these Gospel Communities are and how they practically work.  This would be a great resource for all of us to download and walk through the only thing you would have to change is the name of the church from Veritas to Life Connection.

I am currently reading a book called Tangible Kingdom. At times, as I read, I am feeling challenged and convicted; at other times I feel puzzled and confused.  Although this book is so far, in so many ways, from my former ministry experience, I love the challenge and it is causing me to think and grow in many ways.  I would love to read this book with some people and have a discussion about it because I have a lot of thoughts I’d like to filter through.  I wanted to use some thoughts from this book as my first equipping for the Prophets and Teachers of our Gospel Communities.  So, anyone can read this and comment, but I really would love to hear from specifically Prophets and Teachers.  I will give you a few quotes from the book and then some of my thoughts:

“Posture represents attitude of the body: the nonverbal forms of communication that accompany what we say.  As you may remember learning in your freshman interpersonal communication class, the nonverbals are more informative and honest than the verbal forms of communication.”

“Words communicate what we know; posture represents what we believe and feel.”

“Sometimes I wonder how we got to this point.  Why did the pagan onlookers hold the early church in such high respect, but today’s non-Christians view the modern-day church with such disdain? I think one of the main culprits has to be our paradigm of evangelism.  In the name of “getting someone saved,” we have primarily focused on communicating a message of truth to the world.  There’s nothing wrong with that, except that we’ve prioritized the verbals over the nonverbals, the message over the method, that is to say, the proclamation over the posture. We assume that if we can just get the idea across, then it will be up to the person to respond, whether we do it correctly or not.  Maybe we also think that in order to get God’s approving glance, it’s our duty to share “truth,” even if our modus operandi is “obnoxious for Jesus… and loving it.”

What he ends up addressing is a valid problem in the church.  I was thinking how great this applies to our Gospel Communities – these are really a place where the teachers and prophets need to care about the non-verbals.  We need to be willing to communicate the gospel but we need to be willing to posture ourselves so the people who are listening will receive what we are saying.

1 Peter 3:15 but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect,

This verse puts emphasis on the posture of honoring Christ. When you are honoring Christ people are going to have a question about the hope that is in you, and you need to always be ready to give an answer.  These are the greatest teaching opportunities: the times that people are asking to learn, and you, because of your life and relationship, have shown that you know what you are talking about.

The authors of Tangible Kingdom, say to the people in their network, “We suggest to them that if people aren’t asking about their lives, then we haven’t postured our faith well enough or long enough”

So here is the point of all this for me and how I think this will help us in training as prophets/teachers in these Gospel Communities.  We know that we need to be talking about Jesus a lot in these groups but I do not want us to miss the power of the non-verbals.  I think what we can learn from 1 Peter 3:15, is that as a teacher in a Gospel community, we need to be prepared at all times to give an answer.  We may not have had the time to prepare an outline or curriculum, but our best teaching times may be when someone sees our lives together as a community and wants to know about the hope that is in us.  Then with gentleness and respect we need to be able to preach the gospel.

So the practical steps to this are, if we are teachers/prophets and want to use that gift in our Gospel Communities what must we do to be prepared in season and out?

1. Have a regular consistent time of reading/studying the Bible.

2. Be reading a book or training materiel to be sharpen your understanding

3. Be writing in a journal all your notes, revelations, and teaching ideas.

4. Be praying the Holy Spirit will give you opportunities to teach, that you would be bold enough to present it, and humble enough to have the right posture.

Ok guys lets all meditate on 1 Peter 3:15 and I would like all of you to send me a comment back on what God taught you out of this text and how it can make you a better teacher/prophet in your Gospel Community

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UPDATE: Below is the captured video.