Tuesday musings

I'm sitting in a Days Inn at about 6:45 am, Portaransas, Texas time. I've been here with Pastor Brian since yesterday meeting with my friend, Bill Easum. Bill is a church consultant and he's working with us to help us get our brains around how Grace will do mission and ministry as we begin moving toward our own campus. Yesterday was a very, very interesting time of discussion that carried on past the 4 hours with Bill. Brian and I are enjoying wrestling with what it means to form disciples through missional communities to follow Jesus on the bold, daring, reckless adventure of grace. As Bill put it yesterday, we are creating a ministry to call people to something they generally don't want to do--give up their lives for someone else and follow him! But I'm convinced that even though we may not fully understand the extravagant grace that comes with following Jesus, in the depths of our beings we really want to follow him. Creating the communities or groups through which we can discover with others what it means to follow Jesus, and making the time to get involved in one of those groups is the key. And that's what Brian and I are wrestling with these days--how do we continue to create missional communities that draw us in so that we can learn to be Jesus to each other that we might be Jesus in the world.

We hit round two with Bill in about an hour and then we fly home. So more to come...