Category: Connecting to Community
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Simple wins.
In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz writes that too many choices can actually be a bad thing. Let’s say Ted to buy a new television. He walks into his local Buy More and is confronted not with two or three tvs, but with a wall of options. Now, he knew he wanted a new…
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So these three theologians walk into a …
Seminary’s a weird place. You’re learning a lot about God. Some of it’s even useful and incredibly beneficial. But you also get stuck in this “other world” with terminology and ideas that can separate you from normal, everyday life. That’s why I love this joke a buddy sent me today. It’s the only seminary joke…
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Becoming missional communities
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what it means to be a “missional community” – how small groups can organize around outward mission that enables those relationships with God and each other to grow and be developed along the way. Alan Hirsch has a lot of great things to say about this here. The…
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Learning from other pastors…
David Fitch (author of The Great Giveaway) writes about the things he wished he’d done more of during the past few years as a missonal pastor. I found them enlightening and encouraging. The first three are below. Click through to his blog at the end to read the rest… Over the past several years of…
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Do something. Just don’t do everything.
As you can probably guess from my quotes page, I really believe that what we DO gives us much more credibility than what we KNOW or what we SAY. We can hold a lot of beliefs and ideas, but how we live says a lot more about what we truly believe. I’m beginning to realize,…
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Presence and proximity
Real connection – real progress – is about presence and proximity. This even applies in businesses. Google talks about it below (From the Google Blog). Traders in the same location tend to make the same trades at the same time. The trades of cubemates within a small radius is the best predictor we found. By…
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Accountability
Keeping accountable to others can be the difference between finishing well and failing miserably. But most of the time, it isn’t done in a way that provides much more than a slap on the wrist and a guilt trip. Usually there’s a list of questions regarding different sins you could have committed that week. Did…
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Partner for impact
I mentioned Elevation in an earlier post. In my “research” (aka googling “Elevation Church”), I also found a site that tells how you can connect with the church. They’re doing something cool for outreach… “Instead of replicating ministries already doing a great job reaching out to meet specific needs in our community, we’ve identified the…
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Another lesson from that coffee shop
I normally don’t write the “how church can get better by adopting business practices” posts. A lot of people are already doing that. Plus, I don’t believe it’s always a one-to-one comparison. There are different forces at work in church life (more community focused, outward oriented, God-driven) that don’t always neatly mesh with the consumerist-based…
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Community takes work!
We just wrapped up an outdoor movie night in our apartment complex. As Community Coordinators, Grete and I get to plan periodic events for the community – this time we did an outdoor movie (that almost got rained out – it rained all day in Pasadena! I haven’t seen that in the whole year we’ve…
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Do two things well
In one way of looking at it, church exists for two things: a message – to tell the world of God’s love. To share they have a way, a hope. a movement – to be the incarnation of that love in the world. Here and now. An exciting thing has happened over the past…
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My next steps (part four)
Here’s my final “next step” thought from the class I took with Alan. I’ll process more of the ideas from the class later, but these are simply a few of the things I need to apply from the time personally. As with any classroom environment, it’s easy to get stuck in the theory and never…
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My next steps (part three)
The third post in my series of next steps I’m taking after a class with Alan Hirsch. Read the first two here and here. Gospels – Most of the communities we talked about centered most of their learning around the Gospels. We get most of what we know about God from Jesus, so we need…
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My next steps (part two)
Continuing from the last post, here’s another next step I’m taking after finishing up The Forgotten Ways. Practices – The Western church is all about knowledge. If we KNOW enough, we’ll start DOING the right things, right? It hasn’t really worked, has it? I love how some churches we discussed have embraced practices instead of…
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My next steps (part one)
So I haven’t blogged much about The Forgotten Ways since last Monday’s class. The week flew by! But I will be writing more about some pieces soon. We finished with the classroom portion last Friday. I’ll just say it was a powerful week – listening to Alan, processing the ideas, hearing other people’s stories and…
Jon Sampson 