I just arrived home last evening from a week away.  While there were a few days of visiting family in Portland, the reason for the trip was ministry related.  I was attending the second of four meetings with fellow pastors and leaders from our North American Baptist family.  These meetings are worth the time and effort due to the relationships I have experienced, but there is an added bonus as well.  The bonus is that each time we are together we are visiting a ministry that is evolving and finding fruit with regard to being on mission in the context that they find themselves.

This last trip was the one that I had been waiting for.  We were gathering in Tacoma, Washington at one of the neighbourhood churches of Soma Tacoma.  Soma until recently has been under the leadership of Jeff Vanderstelt.  I have known of Jeff for many years and have enjoyed watching what God has and is doing through him.  I was not disappointed with our time.  I was sufficiently challenged during the time with Jeff and the team that is now giving leadership to Soma.

As I sat down to begin writing this post, I was reflecting on what we experienced last week.  I was amazed at the degree to which Jeff and his Soma community were on mission to their neighbourhood(s).  The truly were about the mission of God where God has planted them.  One thing Jeff mentioned was “Mission is inviting those who need Jesus into our everyday life.”  They are all about living with people who are in need of the gospel and then finding opportunities on the natural path and pace of life to present them with the Good News of Jesus.  If we are living to bring glory and honor to God in every moment of life then all we have to do is invite those in need of Jesus into our everyday life.

As we live our everyday life, trying to serve Jesus and at the same time become more like Him, we will have countless opportunities to share the gospel.  Jeff said it this way:

“Every time you live out an attribute of Christ you create a metaphor for sharing the story of the gospel.”

His point with this comment was that when you treat people with the love and respect of Christ, we will be given opportunities to explain why we would do such a thing and this will be accomplished through sharing a snippet of the gospel story.  We will be able to tell people of the God we have been changed by and the work that He has called us to in bringing hope to a hurting world.

I will write more for Thursday’s post about what an everyday missionary does, but for now consider how to go about the task of “Inviting those who need Jesus into our everyday life”.  If you do this you will be well on your way of doing what an everyday missionary does!

Well, did you do your homework?  Did Jesus open your eyes in a new way to those around you?  Did you feel the nudge of the Holy Spirit with regard to some in the natural path of your life?  I hope you genuinely prayed for this and that you were open to the Lord working as you asked Him to.

If you did you may have noticed people in any of a number of areas of life.  In their book “A Field Guide for Everyday Mission” authors Ben Connely and Bob Roberts, Jr. list a number of different places that you may have noticed “everyday mission field” people in the natural path of your life.

• Your workplace or school
• Our literal neighbours
• The marginalized in our society
• The world: both here and there
• Our families

The above list may surprise you a bit, as I asked you to think about those in the natural path of your life.  You may think that the marginalized and the world, here and there, may not seem in the natural path of your life.  They may very well be, depending on where God has planted you.

I must say that when I first saw the list above I was a bit shocked, but then I prayed that God would open my eyes and heart to what he wanted me to see.  He did just that and over the last few days.  He has shown me the marginalized that I pass every day in different contexts that I would have never said were on my natural life path but they are.

I also have come to a new understanding of the natural path of my life and how it is not restricted to the few miles I travel each day around Leduc.  I realized after praying today that over the last three days I have had a connection with dear friends in Ethiopia and Europe numerous times this week.  Some of those connections have been with believers, but a few have been with those in dire need of the gospel.

Now I ask you to do the same thing I did in the last post.  Please pray again that God would open your eyes even more as you pray for those around you.

I recently had a well-meaning person tell me that they appreciated my work in Africa.  I was excited to hear this, but then they continued.  “I am glad to see that you DO have a heart for missions” were the next words out of their mouth.  I was not suprised by this comment, but more saddened.

We have for too long designated the Church’s work overseas as missions and the work at home as discipleship.  I am not sure what neighbourhood you live in, but mine is as much, if not more, a mission field as is Africa.  This week in our look at the idea of everyday mission, I want us to be reminded of this.

I want us to be ever mindful of the fact that the mission field, our mission field, is made up of those in need and those who God has placed in the natural path of our lives.

In the book of James Jesus’ brother himself tells us “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world“ and “If you really fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself,’ you are doing well.”  James 1:27 and 2:8

Over the next few days take a serious look at where you spend most of your time.  For most of us, if we don’t count our sleeping time, we spend most of our time at home or school/work.  Keep a track of how much time you spend where, and keep your eyes open to those who are around you.  I mean really open your eyes to see the people.  Not the people that you always talk to or hang out with, but the people that are there that you may not know much about as well as those you are connected with.

Ask Jesus to allow you to really see people and their needs.  Make a conscious effort this week to connect with someone that God lays on your heart as you pay attention to those around you.

Pay close attention to the nudging of the Holy Spirit with regard to those around you, and then act on the nudging.  I find that when I do this I am always glad I did. I am sure you will find the same!

Have a blessed week as you tune into the what God is doing and wants you to do.

I am a news hound.  I have always loved  watching the news to keep up with what is happening in our world.  While I like the news, I often find it very frustrating.  I am amazed at how often I will watch a news story and in the end have no clue what the story was about.  I often have more questions at the end of the story than I did before I heard it.  Quite often I find that the reporters do not answer the fundamental questions that the general viewer would have.

In their book “A Field Guide to Everyday Mission: 30 Days and 101 Ways to Demonstrate the Gospel” Ben Connelly and Bob Robert’s Jr. the authors’ desire is to help those desiring to me missionaries in their neighbourhoods answer the most important questions.  The questions they want their readers to answer are:

1. Who is my everyday mission field?
2. What does an everyday missionary do?
3. When does everyday mission happen?
4. Where does everyday mission happen?
5. Why should I even care about everyday mission?
6. How do I share the gospel without killing the relationship?

Over the next ten weeks, I want to unpack these questions very carefully and thoroughly.  These questions may seem very simple, and maybe some are, but answering them is only part of the solution.  The other part of the formula is learning to put the arrived at answer into everyday practice.

We will seek to address these questions with a particular focus on our context of Leduc, Leduc County and the other locations where God has planted our LFC community members.

I want to make sure that we as a community at Leduc Fellowship wrestle with these questions and put our faith into action.  As we are studying through the Gospel of Mark, we have and will see the hope that the Gospel brought into the world as Jesus “moved into the neighbourhood”.

Next week, I will begin to unpack the six questions above looking at one question each week.  As we prepare for the journey ahead please be in prayer about these six questions and the four vision questions in the previous post.  Don’t try to answer all of the questions just begin to feel the freedom to ask the questions.

 ^“Dear friends, do you think you’ll get anywhere in this if you learn all the right words but never do anything? Does merely talking about faith indicate that a person really has it? For instance, you come upon an old friend dressed in rags and half-starved and say, “Good morning, friend! Be clothed in Christ! Be filled with the Holy Spirit!” and walk off without providing so much as a coat or a cup of soup—where does that get you? Isn’t it obvious that God-talk without God-acts is outrageous nonsense?”   James 2:14-17 The Message

Before we get to the official “Five Questions” for every neighbourhood missionary, we want to look at some bigger picture, vision based questions for those who want to be salt and light to the neighbourhood.

The first question, one that is so obvious that it might easily be overlooked, is “What is a “Neighborhood Missionary”?  I do not want to assume that we all have the same level of understanding and/or acceptance of what God is calling us to.  At the same time, I hope that for most this is not new information.  I feel very strongly that God has called his followers to be a community of people on mission where ever he has called them.  This calling includes our families, schoolmates, teammates, coworkers, and yes, our neighbours as well.  We are called to be salt and light wherever God has planted us, but I think we need to reclaim our neighbourhoods as an obvious place that God desires us to shine forth for him.

All that said, a neighbourhood missionary is one that acknowledges their God given call to love those who cross their natural path of life in the natural rhythm of life.  So the first important question we need to answer is “Do we acknowledge and accept the call of God in our lives to be on mission  for and with him?”  I believe we need to be able to answer this before we can move forward with knowing how to care and love our neighbours.  I am not sure that most of us have really wrestled with this question.

There are a number of other big picture questions that I think are foundational to the calling to be on mission with God.  Some of those are:

• Am I actually called to make disciples?
• Can I even make friends outside of the Church?
• What does it look like to share the gospel today?
• What does it look like to live out the mission of God in my everyday life and at the natural rhythm of my life?

As we begin this journey let’s start by focusing on these foundational questions.  Take some time over the next few days to reflect on these questions.