God's Missional Initiation:
What Does Missional Mean?, Week 2
by Adam White
What Does Missional Mean?
What comes to mind when you hear the word “initiation”?
For me, I can not help but think of people being initiated into a Greek collegiate society or social club. It seems like persons being initiated are willing to go to great lengths so that they might be accepted into whatever group they are wanting to become members of.
Read MoreOpen to Grace
by Melanie Dobson
Melanie Dobson is a pastor at Myers Park United Methodist Church in Charlotte, NC. She will be participating in the fall 2017 cohort of Launch & Lead.
Hebrews 4:16—Let us approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.
Read Moreby Andrea Lingle
What is Missional?
Missional is...
Well, missional is…
Exactly.
So, we hope to spend the next several months talking about what mission means, to us, and to you.
Read MorePhotography as a Spiritual Practice
The Missional Wisdom Foundation is proud to announce the launch of Journey, our newest educational initiative.
As we experiment with alternate forms of Christian community in the Missional Wisdom Foundation, we also stop to share the lessons we've learned along the way. Journey is a hub for learning and engagement with standalone courses taught by our exceptional group of instructors. Earlier this week, subscribers to our Journey email list received a one-time code for 20% off a course. To get your code and receive notifications when new courses become available, sign up here.
One of the courses now open for registration, Photography as a Spiritual Practice: Reclaiming Our Encounter with God, is taught by Ryan Klinck:
Read Moreby Justin Hancock with Lisa Hancock
Growing up in a medium-sized, almost rural, West Texas town, the kitchen table played a prominent role. It doesn’t matter if it was sitting down for Sunday dinner at my great-grandparents’ house, with what felt like a billion relatives to my 5-year-old sensibilities, or rolling up to the table as the smell of homemade Chex Mix that my mother had just taken out of the oven filtered through the house during the Christmas holidays. The kitchen, and more specifically the kitchen table, has exerted an almost primal hold on the most tender part of my heart for as long as I can remember.
Read MoreBuilding Community through Group Leadership
The Missional Wisdom Foundation is proud to announce the launch of Journey, our newest educational initiative.
As we experiment with alternative forms of Christian community in the Missional Wisdom Foundation, we also stop to share the lessons we've learned along the way. Journey is a hub for learning and engagement with standalone courses taught by our exceptional group of instructors. Earlier this week, subscribers to our Journey email list received a one-time code for 20% off a course. To get your code and receive notifications when new courses become available, sign up here.
One of the courses now open for registration, Building Community through Group Leadership, is taught by Karen Doucette.
Read MoreThe Dance of Community
by Wendy Miller
As we prepare to begin a new series of devotional thoughts in a couple of weeks, we have asked some Missional Wisdom Foundation staff members to share some thoughts with us.
Living in intentional community is a dance. I took ballroom dance lessons when I was thirteen. My older brother did just fine. I fretted over what step my partner planned next and felt tight—anxious. Not fun.
Read MoreOn the Horizon
by Rachel Wells
As Andrea mentioned in the devotional above, today marks the one year anniversary of Missional Wisdom Foundation’s Wisdom for the Way publication. We have been working hard - alongside many of you - to continue our mission of experimenting with and teaching about alternative forms of Christian community, and we have a number of new programs nearing completion.
Read MoreConclusion - One Year:
The Active Presence of the Holy Spirit, Week 10
This journey into the life of the Spirit has been both revealing and cursory. I could sit and type for years and never nail down the proper metaphor. There is no book to study, no theology to memorize, no sage to question that could reveal the truth of the Spirit. We could never meditate or contemplate long enough or well enough to truly see what the Spirit is.
Read MoreBeautiful Future
by Matt Johnson
For many of us, the work that we do is slow, subtle and small, at least in the beginning. This reality presents many challenges, particularly since we are living in the age of “short-termism” (a phrase used by Ari Wallach in his TED Talk, “3 ways to plan for the (very) long term”). But occasionally we catch a glimpse of the fruit of our labors. I’m learning it is really important to cherish those moments, and remember them, for it is through remembering those moments that we sustain ourselves in the present, and prepare for a beautiful future.
Read MoreReceiving the Spirit with Humility:
The Active Presence of the Holy Spirit, Week 9
by Adam White
Which do you prefer, giving or receiving?
For me, I would much rather give than receive. I have gotten better with this over the years, but my preference to giving and my aversion to receiving are two issues I still wrestle with every so often. It is not that receiving something from others, be it help, complements, or a gift, is above me. I get that we all need help, remember?
Haw Creek Commons Easter Egg Hunt
by Karen Doucette and Holly Roach
Last Saturday, the day before Easter, we had a neighborhood Easter celebration with an egg hunt, and lots of activities for kids and families. We were fortunate with fabulous weather, had a nice turn out with about 90 people, and got to show off our latest additions to the Haw Creek Commons community - 4 rapidly growing baby chicks! Kids took turns bouncing wildly in the bouncy house, played games including a water balloon toss, and got their faces painted. It was good to meet so many families from the neighborhood!
Read MoreFreedom from Failure:
The Active Presence of the Holy Spirit, Week 8
by Adam White
Nobody likes to fail.
Even just reflecting on the words “fail” or “failure” bring back memories from school assignments, sports performances, and life moments that still find ways to linger in my mind. You have heard of a cloud of witnesses; I think of this as a cloud of failures. I think we each have our own cloud of failures that arise and follow us around during certain periods of time. This cloud can stay with us for quite a while if we let it hover over us and pour down things like doubt, insecurity, and fear.
52 Weeks of Neighboring
by Matt Johnson
We were created in the image of the Triune God, designed to be in meaningful relationships that form community, and we are taught by Jesus to love our neighbors as ourselves. While these truths are good news, living into them is very concrete, sometimes difficult, and easily forgotten. We struggle to love our neighbors.
SoCe Life, a hub of the Missional Wisdom Foundation, is a non-profit organization located in the South-Central neighborhood of Wichita, KS. The founding belief of SoCe Life is that everyone is gifted, and as individuals share their gifts for the benefit of others, they experience wholeness and the community becomes stronger. This belief drives the daily work of SoCe Life, connecting neighbors based on gifts and interests.
One in the Spirit:
The Active Presence of the Holy Spirit, Week 7
by Adam White
It may be hard to admit, but I have not always paid the closest of attention to the lyrics and meanings behind the hymns and songs that are sung in church. However, in the last year discovering their meaning has been a practice I have attempted to grow as a form of prayer. Regarding our missional relationship with God’s Spirit, I don’t think there is a song that better captures that dynamic than the hymn “They’ll Know We Are Christians by Our Love.”1
It has everything! Within the hymn text we find the unity of our identity within the Spirit and a prayer that our worldly divisions might be restored...
Happy Tents
by Meredith Ball
Happy Tents is a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting families today. For the past few years we have been working to help families see every day life from a different view…God’s view. When we look at our families through God’s eyes, we see God at work.
We believe that through God’s grace and the Holy Spirit’s guidance, we can see a glimpse of eternal life within the moments in our family life. Each week, we write a devotional on our website to capture these moments from our tent in hopes that it inspires you to see God at work in your tent. Sometimes God’s work is funny, sometimes it is sad and sometimes is stretches us into new relationships or understandings. Though we do not know where God will show up in our family, we constantly know that God is at work in each of our lives individually and together.
Living In, Guided By, and Bearing Fruit of the Spirit:
The Active Presence of the Holy Spirit, Week 6
by Adam White
We all need help.
I do not know specific predicaments you may face, but needing help is a truth for all of us. I don’t think I truly embraced the reality that I needed help, holistically, until I met, and committed my life in sacred union with my partner, Blair.
Hear me out—I knew I needed help before that time and sought support from others for certain issues that surfaced throughout my life. For instance, I desperately needed help with math during high school and sought out a tutor—Thanks, Mrs. Pyle, for making sense out of Algebra for an ADHD teenager, no easy task! Or when I struggled with the pain of my mother’s suffering due to dementia, I needed support from friends, family, and ultimately a counselor.
A Christian in a Hijab
By Anastasia Marcum. Anastasia participated in our pilot program for Clarify in Asheville last summer. For Lent, Rachel has chosen to wear a hijab in an attempt to appreciate the Journey of Muslim women in America. She is blogging about her experience, and we are honored for Rachel to share with us here.
Read MoreJoining the Dance:
The Active Presence of the Holy Spirit, Week 5
How, then, shall we live?
For me this is the central question of all theology. If we spend ten breaths talking about what the Spirit of God is, we should spend ten hundred talking about how that understanding should shape our behavior and ten thousand walking, along with Christ, doing whatever it is that our theology calls forth from us.
Truly, how, then, shall we live?
The Holy Spirit is like the breath.
The Holy Spirit is like the womb.
The Holy Spirit is in the swirl of the Trinity's dance.
Read MoreThe WaySide Community
by Diane Rheos, current Launch & Lead student
The WaySide Community came about when pastor Linda Quanstrom had two unconnected conversations with church members. Diane Rheos is a Launch and Lead participant and had been sharing with her about Missional Wisdom and her search for intentional community. Soon after, Nathan and Laurel Howard mentioned to her that they had been researching intentional community. "Miraculously" at the same time, the lease on the Fremont United Methodist Church parsonage came up.
A new community carried by the flow of generosity.
It's amazing how fast our first four months have gone by! We began The WaySide, our intentional community, last November. Our house is located in the parsonage of Fremont United Methodist Church, in Portland, Oregon.
