This past weekend Trina and I made a trip out to the DFW area to see our new buds Andrew and Heather get hitched! Andrew and Heather met at Harding and have connections to us through their friend Jonathan, who is the little bro of Daniel, my undergrad buddy and co-conspirator for the Kingdom. Together, Andrew, Heather, Jonathan, Chelle and Lucas have formed a mission team to Chicago while they were together at Harding University through the Outreach America program there.

We’re only really acquaintances at this point, and though we have similar passions and visions (however rough the drafts may be) for mission work/church planting in Chicago, we don’t know exactly what God has in store for us just yet. So how do we move forward from here?

We COULD draw up the blueprints of a well-oiled strategy, that drums up support from lots of churches and creates a sense of purpose and gives us outcome-based goals that move us forward intentionally toward a planned future.

OR we could find a weekend a few weeks down the road (and let the newly weds have a honeymoon!) and plan a weekend together. The only planning is what food to bring - the rest is up to the Holy Spirit. What might happen if we just got together and had a picnic? What sorts of strategies would emerge from a game of putt-putt (besides “bank if off the clown’s nose and through the windmill”)? What if training for team-missions was centered around a barbecue? I think the most strategic focus for missionaries is to simply be friends who like Jesus. The rest will grow from our time in friendship and in shared imaginations.

It’s like the Fellowship of the Ring. In that intense moment when leaders of men, elves, dwarves and hobbits sat in circle around the Ring, they began with strategy. Almost instantaneously a fight broke out among the dwarf and the elf, and before long everyone was in a distrustful fight against how they would proceed.

It took a humble hobbit, too small to fully understand his actions, to volunteer not a strategy, but a fellowship.

“I will take the ring…but I cannot do it alone,” Frodo said. It melts everyone’s fear and hate, and transforms the fighters into a fellowship; a fellowship that would have to learn to trust over time, but before it was over they were willing to give their very lives for one another.

So could this be an irresponsible way of building a mission team? Might this be expecting too little? Too much?

Last 5 posts by Mark

• Brain Dump - October 8th, 2008
• God is Wholly - October 2nd, 2008

This entry was posted on Monday, July 30th, 2007 at 12:45 pm and is filed under Chicago, Listening, Missions, Saturation Church Planting, Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.