.::: TeSt PloT:::.

2006-06-21T16:32:00.000-04:00

Transition: From Relgion to Relationship

By Wayne on Uncategorized

I am blessed to be able to finally have a recording of the most important teaching I do around the world to help people sort out how to move from religious thinking about their life in God and learn to live relationally as he designed us to. Recently on a trip to Pennsylvania, I did eight and a half hours of teaching over two days helping people sort out how to live out a relationship with God that is not manipulated by our shame nor based on our performance. Instead it is motivated purely out of God’s love for them as we discover how to respond to him.

I felt impressed to make this audio series available to anyone in the world free of charge and without any sense of obligation. We have posed downloaded mp3s of all eight and a half hours on the Transition page of the Lifestream website.

If I could recommend anything to you, it is not to rush through it. Listen to it in bits and as God makes some things clear to you, ask him to work those things into your life so that you can walk in its reality, not you’re your mental agreement. Feel free to make CDs of if you like and pass it along to others as Father leads you.

If you’d prefer to have a CD series of this teaching, you can order it from Lifestream for $30.00 plus shipping.

Living the relational journey

2006-05-13T22:49:00.000-04:00

Via Wayne Jacobsen's Blog....

Don’t go this alone, or wait quietly in your home for fellowship to break out. Just live each day open-handed and gracious to everyone you can, without any agenda, and watch what God will do through you to bless others, and through others to encourage you.

more here

Who is Wayne Jacobsen

Are you using your living room?

2006-05-07T10:53:00.000-04:00

The size of the groups depends on the size of the home, says Zdero, adding that when a gathering gets too big it will split into smaller groups."Once you reach the limits of your living room, the question isn't `When do we start building?'" Zdero says. "It's `Who is going to open up their living room?'"

Read the rest in the Toronto Star Article

radio allelon

2006-05-02T16:22:00.000-04:00

FEATURED

\|\| SPIRITUAL FORMATION
	Part1: The Relationship of the Kingdom to the Church by Todd Hunter 1st May, 2006
	Why Spiritual Formation Is Not An Option by Eugene Peterson 14th April, 2006
	Spiritual Formation in the Ways of Christ by Dallas Willard 1st April, 2006
\|\| MISSION
	God’s future for the world has arrived in the person of Jesus by NT Wright Future of the People of God conference, used with permission http://www.opensourcetheology.net 14th - 16th July, 2004
	Understanding and implementing Jesus’ gospel in the present by NT Wright Future of the People of God conference, used with permission http://www.opensourcetheology.net 14th - 16th July, 2004
	Reimaging our mission as God’s agents of new creation in the world by NT Wright Future of the People of God conference, used with permission http://www.opensourcetheology.net 14th - 16th July, 2004
	Fulfilling God’s Kingdom project for the world as a mission-shaped church by NT Wright Future of the People of God conference, used with permission http://www.opensourcetheology.net 14th - 16th July, 2004

Need For Missional Church AV Presentation

2006-04-26T09:17:00.000-04:00

"When you have a new world, you need a new church. Not a new gospel, but a new embodiment of the gospel."

Windows Media File of AV Presentation

President David Dunbar speaks on the need for a missional church.

Biblical Seminary, PA

Biblical Seminary Website

Brian Mc Laren

2006-04-24T20:40:00.000-04:00

Brian's Personal Web Site

Mp3 message on "aprenticing Jesus"

Brian's Kingdom Manifesto

the God Journey Podcast

2006-04-21T10:33:00.000-04:00

http://www.thegodjourney.com

Below is taken directly from there "about" section of their site

Christianity for the Rest of Us

The God Journey is co-hosted by Wayne Jacobsen and Brad Cummings and is designed to facilitate an ever-expanding conversation with folks who are thinking outside the box of organized religion. Our primary desire is to encourage people on their spiritual journey by providing insightful commentary on Scriptures, current events and cultural trends, as well as fielding questions related to the challenging spiritual issues of real life.

We are two brothers on a journey to discover the fullness of God's life and want to share that journey with you. As former pastors, authors and counselors, Brad and Wayne offer an engaging mix of wisdom, humor and compassion for those sorting out who God is and what it means to follow him. We’ll talk freely about the failures of religion and the fallacies of secularism in our culture in an open, accessible dialogue that will be equally helpful, enlightening and entertaining to believers and nonbelievers alike. We will deal with the present day challenges of upholding Christian values in an ever-increasing secular society, without compromise yet maintaining a continued engagement in and with the world around us. We want to equip today’s believers to more effectively enter into the joy and adventure of a life in Christ, as well as attract the spiritually curious by making this life intelligently accessible and practically relevant. Jesus Christ is still the most exciting, most controversial, most fascinating, and the most genuinely relevant life and personality there is to talk about and we want to share that conversation with you.

Wayne Jacobsen

As a writer and teacher Wayne hosts Lifestream.org and travels the world helping believers sort out what it means to live freely in the life of Christ. He was a pastor for 20 years and a Contributing Editor to Leadership Journal and has authored 6 books and numerous articles on spiritual formation, relational community and engagement of culture As President of BridgeBuilders he is also a nationally-recognized specialist and mediator in resolving cultural and religious conflicts. He resides in Oxnard, California with his wife Sara and enjoys his new granddaughter who lives not far away.

Brad Cummings

A former pastor for 12 years, regular conference and college campus speaker, taking teams of young people into UK, Europe, India and Africa, in addition to his work with Wayne on the God Journey, Brad is now focusing on writing and producing films. He is currently Executive Producer for an animation remake of The Ten Commandments due to be released in 2006. Brad graduated from Pepperdine University with a B.A. in Telecommunications, Film & TV Broadcasting and received his Masters of Divinity from Fuller Theological Seminary.

Recommended Podcasts to listen too......

Relational Leadership

koinonia cultivators

children unplugged

what about worship

complete podcast archive

the way of jesus

2006-04-12T21:25:00.000-04:00

book web site ... way of jesus

The Way of Jesus
A Journey of Freedom for Pilgrims and Wanderers

Are you attracted to the way of life and spirituality promised by Jesus?

Have you wondered why there’s such a gap between the life of Jesus and today’s church?

Do you hunger for a deeper spiritual experience with others?

The Way of Jesus is written for those on journey—from spiritual sojourners to religious refugees. With a focus on the yearning for Spirit and spirituality, this book opens pathways for experiencing the powerful simplicity in the life and way of Jesus.

All journeys are spiritual by nature, even if we can’t always see the full picture of where God is leading us or why. In their own twenty-year journey, Jonathan and Jennifer Campbell have joined with others to re-discover and re-embody the life of Jesus. They share a way of living out their spirituality from the core of their being to the very connections that define our humanity. The Way of Jesus weaves their poignant story with a thoughtful exploration of the intersection of culture, community, and spiritual identity. Their adventure is a journey with Jesus toward freedom and a life filled with his love, truth, and power.

The Power Of A Good Story.....

2006-04-08T11:58:00.000-04:00

Every once and a while you meet a person with a great gift for writing. The story is not just a story but it is a portal that allows you to enter in to the journey. My friend Tom Lane is one of those of those people with this type of creativity and gifting. His blog Living In Tension Alley is his springboard to share his story. Two of his recent stories are well worth reading and pondering.

Get Me To The Church On Time....

About My Boat....

From van's mission thinking...

2006-03-03T21:09:00.000-05:00

We spend so much time attracting people to hear the “gospel” when we need to spend more much more energy in understanding how we can best embody and articulate the Gospel. We need, more than ever, to start developing the QUALITY of the church, and stop paying so much attention to QUANTITY. We need to use subversive math. Where we stop counting, and figure out what counts.

rest of this blog post here...

living as an ordinary radical

2006-03-02T19:44:00.000-05:00

What other people are saying about this book

Sample chapter of the book

The Simple Way Community website from Philly, PA

consumerism and christianity

2006-02-23T21:24:00.000-05:00

Why Celebrate St. Patricks Day

2006-02-22T17:44:00.000-05:00

Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day!

Rob Lane, Jim and Syndie Best

What comes to your mind when you think of St. Patrick’s Day? 4-leaf clovers? Shamrock decorations? Green beer? Maybe it’s wearing green in order to prevent getting yourself pinched (not sure where this tradition came from). While these are fun things the significance of this day encompasses so much more than these traditions. The life of St. Patrick is modeled so closely after Jesus and is one worthy of imitating. His mission to the Irish Celtic people is an inspiring and significant story.

for the rest of this article download here(word) or

here(pdf)

Ordinary Attempts?!?

2006-02-22T15:36:00.000-05:00

Brought to you by Jim Henderson at Off The Map

What is an Ordinary Attempt?

Ordinary Attempts are stories chronicling a very nontraditional approach to evangelism -- ordinary activities that you’re already doing. Not a program, pitch or presentation, but a simple shift in how we view the people formerly known as lost.

Jesus said, “If you give a cup of cold water to a little child because you are my disciple you won’t lose your reward.” Matthew 10:42

Our culture's equivalent of a cup of cold water is attention.

Help in praxis of ordinary attempts

OA Blog

OA Library

OA Study Guide

AKA Lost

The Need For A Missional Church

2006-02-20T18:30:00.000-05:00

Here is a good PDF resource from Tim Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in NYC.

Six Habits of Missional Living

2006-02-11T21:17:00.000-05:00

Mennonite Church USA has put together some great resources on missional living.

Missionl Churching

Six habits of missional living pdf

Cultivating Misional Communities newsletter archive

Marks of Missional Church

2006-02-09T17:52:00.000-05:00

via the Bolg Blog
Ryan Bolger ... Professor at Fuller Seminary

Marks of Missional Church

Discipleship In America

2006-02-09T17:42:00.000-05:00

Here is some good reading regarding discipleship in america by a person in the kingdom trenches in the Minneapolis, MN area.

Discipleship in America part 1

Discipleship in America part 2

Discipleship in America part 3

Discipleship in America part 4

Discipleship in America part 5

Discipleship in America part 6

Coming Via This Blog

Missio Dei

2006-01-27T15:53:00.000-05:00

Being Precedes Doing

2005-07-30T21:44:00.000-04:00

“Being” Precedes “Doing”

At some point in my time at college I remember a professor quipping off the cuff that “being precedes doing”. At the time it really resonated with me and began to cause, in the language of the Matrix, a “mind splinter”. As I continued to navigate my way through college I found very little teaching or preparation to help me in the art of “being”. Almost everything was focused exclusively on doing.

Since finishing college I have continued my search to find ways of developing my practice of “being” as a platform or extension of my “doing”. This search has brought me to a place where I have had to fly into the face of the current American idols of pragmatism, speed, pride, and shallowness. In spite of the prominence of these idols in our American culture there is a subversive undercurrent developing as people are beginning to see the shortcomings that these realities produce. Such things as the Enron fiasco, a President that had a sexual fling in the Oval Office, a war based on false pretenses…i.e. weapons of “mass destruction”, and the list could go on for both national and local levels.

One of the things that I have discovered in my search is this: our “being”… that which we “are” as opposed to that which we “do”, is basically our character. It is the wellspring that everything else in our life flows from. If our character is weak or flabby than we will have a wimpy life of impact and meaning in what we do and say. Another image you could use to think about “being” is that of an iceberg. If you see an iceberg in the water what you are looking at is really only about 10% of the total iceberg. The rest of it is submerged underwater hidden from the initial view of onlookers. The same is true for your life.

What people normally see in your day to day life is really only about 10% of who you really are. Yet so much of what we are taught and trained in focuses on the 10% instead of the 90%. Why is that? Why is so much time spent on this relatively small part of our lives when there is so much more of us than initially meets the eye? My guess is that this is done because it is easier to see the outer world than to brave the murky depths of our inner worlds. It’s easier to keep up the appearances of the small segment of our lives that we allow to be visible to others than take the time to explore what really hides beneath the surface. It’s far less complicated to project an image that we like by “doing” things that we can control than to do the hard task of studying the part of us that we keep hidden and attempt to just “be” that person. In spite of the hard work needed, the development of “being” or our inner world is one of the most important things we can do for our world. In doing so we will be making great strides in creating an environment that will develop, nurture, and spread the vital DNA necessary for the world to be visibly a better place.

In II Corinthians 2:15 (NLT) our life of character or “being” is referred to as “fragrance… a life giving perfume”. People do not have to be told that they have been exposed to a fragrance. Have you ever thought about that? You don’t have to announce it when you spray perfume or air freshener into a room. People can smell it. They can sense it. This is the type of “being” that we need to strive to have. Maybe if we focused more on getting our own lives to a place where we are emitting a fragrance of joy, hope, and well being we will find that there is little, if any need for announcing our intentions or plans to others. We just might find ourselves at a new place to do life and ministry that is culturally relevant and meeting the unspoken inner needs that are universal to everyone.

This past week I came across an article in Leadership Journal written by Gordon MacDonald entitled, “Cultivating the Soul… Spiritual formation can happen, without saying a word”. He quotes a story from Anthony Bloom regarded a Desert Father {ancient monk}, “If my silence does not speak to him, my words will be useless.” This gets McDonald thinking of five virtues that can be developed and practiced without saying a word to the people around you. I think they bear repeating here;

The first is the virtue of humility. He defines humility as, “not something one achieves, it is the results of other pursuits”. By that he means that humility is vitality important but it is a product of secondary causes, not primary ones. It is cultivated in the daily pursuit of a life well lived against the idols of our culture.

The second virtue is that of compassion. “Compassion is the ability to identify at heart level with the vulnerabilities, fears, and sorrows of others. And to identify in such a way that one is not paralyzed but energized with great love.” All too often the vibe that people get from Christ followers is that we are angry, judgmental, and uncaring. Jesus’ own creed while he walked the earth was to love God and love other people. This is a creed that we need to re-implement into our daily lives.

The third virtue MacDonald suggests is that of steadfastness. “Steadfastness is not stubbornness, nor is it resistance to change. Instead it is a ceaseless embrace of certain purposes and commitments from which one will never retreat.” Too often we have made a big deal out of the minor issues and glossed over the majors… those things worth being steadfast over. “Fix your thoughts on what is true and honorable and right.Think about things that are pure and lovely and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise.” Phillippians 4:8 (NLT)

The fourth virtue is faith. “Faith is an ability to trust in and draw upon the power of God beyond my rationality, my instinctive pessimism, my willingness to settle for less than best.” MacDonald gives the story of the widow and her two mites as faith in a nutshell. “A calm, quiet, unostentatious offering of all her assets believing that God would provide for her needs.”

The fifth and final virtue suggested in this article is that of self-control. According to McDonald, self-control is asking ourselves how to bring healthy limits to our lives. He says, “Self-control is in play when a person is opposed, slandered, unappreciated, ignored, or required to go the second mile. How does he/she respond? Self-control speaks to our use of money, our handling of power and influence, and our response to inflated adulation.”

Do you notice a common theme in all the things that Mc Donald has laid out here? Do you see that not one of them are things that you “do”. Rather, they are things that you “are” or more realistically, “are becoming”. You don’t DO humility… you become humble. You don’t DO compassion, you become compassionate. You don’t DO steadfastness, you become steadfast. You don’t DO faith, you become faith-filled and trusting. You don’t DO self-control, you become self-controlled. Do you see the difference? You make a difference in your world not by DOING something but by BEING something different.

Jim Best is the Co-Instigator of SpoRAdic http://beingsporadic.blogspot.com

(with Rob Lane). He works full time as a Custodial Supervisor at a local Catholic School and leads a Missional Community in Westland, MI where he lives with his wife and their 3 children.

In addition to this article in Leadership Journal by Gordon McDonald Jim highly recommends the books In the Name of Jesus by Henri Nouwen and The Jesus Creed by Scott McKnight.

Are Movies A Waste Of Time?

2005-07-26T22:12:00.000-04:00

Jim Best- Co-instigator of Sporadic

What is a movie to you? Do you think of it as a diversion, entertainment, or a learning window? I used to personally think of movies as a diversion from the daily grind or entertainment to make me laugh, cry, etc, but now in the last couple of years I have come to experience my movie watching as a window of learning.

Movies if you let them will become a window of learning on how to live life to the full. Movies will generate haunting questions, create tension for reflection, showcase a side of life/culture we are not accustomed too, tell a story that lingers, or it can celebrate life in all of its varied splendor.

Almost every movie you watch can be a potential window of learning, but in order to “open” the window and learn about life there are some specific habits (question to ask) you can begin to cultivate in your movie watching. Below are some of the habits I have discovered along the way and continue to cultivate in my movie watching.

Ask the question “why”. (No script is written in a vacuum)
What emotions does the movie elicit from you? Why?
Does the movie plot intersect with your personal story?
Are you inspired to make the world a better place?
Can you do something similar?
If the movie is a “mirror” what doe you see about yourself?
What does the movie say about our society/culture?
Try to come up with your own.

I would suggest you look over this list before viewing your next movie in order to have these questions lurking in the back of your mind while you watch the movie. After you finish watching the movie re-read the list and take time to answer the questions and reflect on what you have learned as you opened a new window.

Some suggested movies to try this out with are listed below.

Chocolat
I am Sam
The Big Kahuna
The Whale Rider
My Big Fat Greek Wedding
My Life
Antwone Fisher
Bruce Almighty
The Mission
Cheaper By The Dozen
Ground Hogs Day

The Story Unfolds...

2005-07-14T20:40:00.000-04:00

SPorAdIC

When I think of the word sporadic, the image of a dandelion comes to mind. As the weak wind blows through a dandelion, its seeds spread. No one knows where these seeds land. All we know is that whenever we play in a field, grass, or yard we find more dandelions. Wherever the wind takes its seeds is where they plant and bloom. Often times you will find one in the middle of a lawn, a cluster in a field, or many throughout a hillside. Dandelions spread sporadically and randomly.

Being sporadic is being missional for the sake of a Kingdom come. God has empowered us to be salt and light. As we come in contact with those in our sphere of influences, we always have the privilege in joining God’s redemptive mission for the world. Whether it is the UPS man, the mailman, our child’s teacher, the next door neighbor, our fellow employees, our softball team, on the basketball team, the cashier at the grocery store, the garbage man, and much more our place to be salt and light is positioned right in the middle of a sporadic life.

As we share life with those around us, we partner with God’s heart to spread kingdom seeds throughout the fields of life. We do this by excitedly celebrating missional attempts, cheering and applauding those along the way. When celebration becomes central, those are the kinds of things that get done. We believe people will be motivated to implement mission as a lifestyle when they know how they are living is right and deserving of great importance to the kingdom of God. People matter in the kingdom and their contribution is crucial to the ongoing mission of God.

Sporadic’s mantra is making a difference by being different. This message if forefront to our way of living, thus empowering others to do the same. This is an adventurous mission that God has called us to. We get to partner with God’s way of being light and salt and contribute to His redemptive plan for His people. Because of this, we are passionate to spread the message of sporadic for the sake of the Kingdom of God.

rob lane @ sporadic