I am hearing this question asked over and over: "What if we actually started cooperating to saturate the city, and we didn't care who got the credit?" This is not my first rodeo, so my cynicism (unbelief?) seeps in with great regularity. Could it be that we could honestly sing with the Psalmist, "Not to us, O LORD, not to us but to your name be the glory..." Psalm 115:1
In my "domain" I would ask the question more specifically: what if we saw a lot of churches planted in the city, and we neither got credit, nor took credit for it? What if we contributed what we could to make everyone successful, and nobody ever knew? What if we didn't care about our brand or our name? What if we never wrote a book? What if we shared what we knew or funded other people who got more credit than we did? What if we stopped ripping off each other's glory and gave it all to the only One who deserves any credit?
I didn't expect this, but I guess I shouldn't be surprised. There is a convergence happening at our Church Planting Essentials Training, a weekly day-long gathering that runs for 8 weeks. There is a conversation emerging among Presbyterian USA, Lutheran, United Methodist, Free Methodist, Pentecostal Holiness, Evangelical Free, Hispanic, African American, House Church, Independent evangelical...and our own two church planting residents. One is driving in from Dallas, another from San Antonio. Some are sent to the urban core, others to the suburb, one to African American students at UT, some to East Austin, South Austin and Kyle. The common "sending agency" is God!
And they are hungry, eager to learn--energized and engaged by each other's ideas and thinking. We are sharing a field manual that is far more than a project plan for starting a "service." These guys are exegeting communities, asking questions about what God is doing in the city and how they can unpack the Glory and Grace of Jesus Christ in ways that make sense to people. They are thinking...doing...debriefing...doing...sharing ideas...doing...translating to their environment. (Get it?)
The Missio Dei has never been more apparent! The Sending God continues to send men from many backgrounds to pursue the thousands of pockets of unreached people in the city of Austin. No one group can possibly do it--mega or micro, mainline or independent. It will take movement overlaid upon movement to reach who they can uniquely reach until we saturate the city with gospel communities that make the Kingdom tangible to everyone.
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