SAFE Tragedy

I’m currently reading The Tangible Kingdom by Hugh Halter and Matt Smay.  It’s been a great book for making practical the esoteric writings of many missional church and emerging church authors.  When you hear “embeded incarnational communitas,” what do you think?  If you’re like most, your head is full of static.  But these guys do a good job of offering simple pracitces to live into.  Right now I’m reading four chapters that each divulge 4 rhythms of missional living – they are:

“Leaving” – leaving your place of comfort to be “out there” where people gather.

“Listening” – allowing others to truly feel heard by asking good questions and genuinely finding interest in the lives of others.

“Living Among” – enlarging your view of discipleship to include behave like Jesus would with the types of people Jesus would hang around (celebrate with “sinners”)

“Loving without Strings” – PLEASE don’t equate evangelism with sleazy outdoor sales.

Toward the end of the chapter, the authors mention there is an internal resistance to each of these four rhythms.  They are:

Selfishness is the enemy of “leaving”

Arrogance is the enemy of “listening”

Fear is the enemy of “living among”

Expectations are the enemy of “loving”

They actually didn’t spell out “SAFE” in their book – but I just noticed that it so happened to include these four letters.  How do you resist the 4 rhythms?  For me – “leaving” is the hardest part of missional living.  Just getting out of my head, or my home and getting out there with others.  Its tough as a family man, and I don’t even have kids!

For me, the SAFE resistances is what has kept millions of Americans from truly hearing/seeing the Kingdom of God.  This is tragic.

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