HABITS for MISSIONAL living......

How do you move to become more like Jesus?  For me, it requires stop and doing.  I have some habits which are more about a  TRADITION than about becoming like JESUS.  When I stop something, I always need to start DOING something else.  I need to re-imagine how Jesus engaged people in his context and embrace those spiritual practices.

Sometimes as an organization, a church, we need to re-imagine our spiritual habits of forming a community and reaching a community.

David Fitch re-imagines some spiritual habits on his blog (click through the title above to read the full article).  Here is a summary:

1.) Kindly Reject doing Outreach Events. Instead direct imagination towards ways of connecting with people where they are.

2.) Kindly Reject evangelism as a one time hit on a target with a preconceived outcome. Kindle imagination toward seeing mission as part of regular daily, weekly and monthly life rhythms where out of our regular life God works to use your life to impact people for the gospel in unforeseen ways. 

3.) Kindly reject building multiple use buildings as if by building a gymnasium on the church campus we can bring people into the orbit of the church. Instead stoke imagination for what can happen when we go inhabit the gyms already in the neighborhoods. We should build less third spaces, and inhabit more the ones already there.

4.) Kindly reject one-on-one evangelism and the techniques associated with such apologetic persuasion. Instead direct imagination for inhabiting places in two’s or three’s or more. 

5.) Kindly reject the Sunday morning gathering as an evangelistic event for it cannot be that in the new post Christendom cultures. Instead fire up imagination for the formation that comes from a communal encounter with the living God in Jesus Christ. 

6.) Kindly reject coercive persuasion and argument in our witness.Instead stoke the imagination of your people for seeking “one person of peace” (Luke 10) among the lost of their neighborhoods. 

7.) Kindly reject presumptuous postures of power as we live our lives among those who do not know Christ yet. Instead direct the imagination towards the way Christ always enters the human situation in humility. 

8.) Kindly Reject Surveying the neighborhood – Direct the imagination toward exegeting the neighborhood. 

9.) Kindly Reject problem solving – instead direct the imagination towards “appreciative inquiry.”