It was a great pleasure to spend an evening eating food at a resteraunt in Kansas City and hear a number of the great minds and voices of the Missional/Incarnational conversation share their thoughts  I was invited by virtue of who I know, not what I know.  These voices included Michael Frost, Alan Hirsch, Mike Breen, Hugh Halter, Kim Hammond and Canada's own Cam Roxburgh.  It was a thrill to hear the discussion and to try and evaluarte  the validity of each thought through the lens of our Leduc context.  This was easier to do with some than with others.  

I was doing some follow up reading of some of these great thinkers and was intrigued by the following thought from Alan Hirsch:

The language in our best theology is that a church exists as a “sign, symbol, and foretaste, of the Kingdom of God."  It’s a scratch-and-smell experience for the people around. When people rub up against the church, a Kingdom aroma should waft from it; they should catch a glimpse of life as God intended it to be lived in the first place. And just so we don’t forget, the reach of the Kingdom of God is not just local; it is regional, universal, in fact it is cosmic in scope. It’s a big purpose and thinking about it in this way changes the game.

I love the picture of the scratch and smell experience for the people around us.  I would love to know what the general thought is for people who have rubbed up against some of our LFC community.  I guess that would be determined by who they rub up against.  I am very excited by the growth that I see in many of our community, and yet I have to scratch my head sometimes when I run up against some who hold a deeply engrained "old-Church" model of how they think people in our community need to be addressed and dealt with.  

I pray that those who are starting to taste the beauty of God's plan for incarnational life will rub off on the rest.  I know that this is something that I, personally, think I am just starting to scratch the surface of.  But the aroma is attractive and adictive.