My friend and mentor, Kent Smith, has recently made publicly available a book he’s been working on for over a year. It’s small (about 40 pages) but its profound, and I believe it has the potential to revolutionize one’s spiritual life, as well as how North American’s understand what following Jesus looks like.

Think about the universe, think of a flower, think of your DNA, think of just about anything we consider beautiful…what do they have in common? A repeating pattern around a center. But what are the patterns in your lifestyle? What is your center? Or rather…WHO?

Kent is interested in a little experiment - and needs your help. Read below to find out more.

Friends,

I want to invite you to join me in testing an exciting new tool I have developed with the help of some friends. It’s a short gift book called Centered, and it is designed to help people take a deeper look at what it really means to follow Jesus.

Last Sunday 250 Million people in the U.S.A. did not attend church. That’s five people out of every six—and their number is growing by about 10,000 per day.

Many of these people are very interested in spiritual reality, just not church. Chances are you know some of these people. If you’d like to take your conversation with them to a deeper level and help us learn from your experience, here’s what you can do:

1) Buy a copy of Centered at the website listed below, read through it and jot down your impressions, good and bad.

2) On reflection and prayer, give or lend the book to one of your friends who seems open to spiritual things with the offer to discuss what they think of it over a cup of coffee (or whatever!).

3) After that conversation, write out your impressions of what impact the experience has had on you and your friend and e-mail them to me.

That’s it. Early indications are that this tool will make a big difference for many people—and I will be delighted and grateful if you choose to be part of the team that helps us refine it even more. (But still love you if this isn’t a good time for such a venture!)

Here’s the website

Blessings in this season. Looking forward to hearing from you!

Kent

So go ahead - purchase a copy; help out a missionary here in North America, and then be blessed by a great message! If you don’t have Kent’s email, feel free to drop me a line by commenting on this post. We’ll make sure the message get’s back to him!

Okay - everyone’s gotta check “Talk to Jesus” out.

Pointless avarice that defames our Lord? Or culturally relevant tool for Gen X?

As we have been living into this missional, simple Christ-lifestyle, interesting questions have begun to pop up…questions that one normally wouldn’t ask if “going to church” and being a decent member of society was all it took.

In Abilene, I am deeply connected with MRNA, a graduate program functions as a mission-sending agency. It trains students to think missionally, and prepares them for the post-Christian culture of North America. It helps them to ease into a new life with Christ, where he is the head to an organic body, a body that spreads right across the globe - spiritual families meeting in homes and in pubs, others functioning as new monastic communities, and others celebrating God through massive weekend festivals, and more.

So as this year progresses, the MRNA students have been encouraged to begin visiting some of the existing house churches in our city, to get a sense of what is going on citywide. This is where the question comes in:

Does “house church-hopping” make any sense whatsoever in this new paradigm?

ACU students are famous for sampling any number of congregations without ever really placing membership somewhere. And even if they cast their lot with one group, that’s not to say that they don’t have at least two or three other churches where they regularly attend services. In a paradigm that puts the individual first, where spiritual consumerism is top priority, church hopping as a reality makes perfect sense. But when “church” means “family of natural relationships” is there any way someone should even consider sampling from the buffet of choices?

One lady in an organic church here in town told her group that she didn’t feel like her needs were getting met and decided to move to another fellowship. As if severing ties with her family were as simple as showing up for dinner at someone else’s house. In reality this broke the hearts of those in her faith family, and through that conversation they discovered that if her needs weren’t being met, it wasn’t because the church had a problem, but because for one reason or another, this lady couldn’t find the “well spring” inside herself that Jesus promises all those who accept his invitation to abundant life. Through that conversation, life erupted.
First thoughts: Church hopping in organic churches is an echo from a past life. We are still feeling the ripple effects of the “me first” mentality that comes from many traditional churches. In High School, it was impossible for me to skip around between lunch tables looking for who could give me the best lunch and conversation.  I would have been seen as shallow and greedy.  When we begin to see our spiritual families as the organic relationships of our lives, bouncing from one table to the next for spiritual goods and services doesn’t make much sense.

Thoughts?