Together before going out

I am blessed with a wonderful wife, who very often see things that I don't. We were praying the other day and I was thinking about how to relate more to the people around us in the town. So far we have been working mostly with the people in the church, some that used to be in the church and their friends. I don't want to get stuck there, and it's easy to do that. Especially I'm interested in the Catholicism here and how to relate to it. No doubt subject for another post.

As we were talking however my wife cautioned me saying that "we need somewhere to bring people to". That somewhere doesn't have to be a building or meetings, but more like an environment, relationships, a community. Being married for over 20 years I recognized the wisdom.

Today I bumped into this blogpost where Ben Sternke argues for "centralization-before-decentralization". He writes: "Discipleship is the “intense centralization” process that happens before the “decentralization” of mission. Discipleship is where the core values are hammered out, where people are socialized into a new way of life before being “turned loose” to join Jesus in the renewal of all things."
 
That is probably where we're at. We have to build more internal first, disciple as it were. Especially here where the system hasn't really been geared for mission and growth, more for attendance.

The challenge is that often we teach and preach about these things, we give information, but that rarely changes peoples lives. I'm doing a course with 3DM and the have a illustration of this:

The point is that information must be followed by imitation, practice with someone, before we get a life that reaches other lives. And that's the challenge folks, living a life worth imitating and sharing that.