I hate being gone…today I am running around trying to catch up like a…well, you can insert your own image here! Fact is, it is usually more work catching up than it’s worth being gone, but that is not the case this time. The Fruitful Congregation Leadership Institute was well worth the aggravations I’m suffering today. The workshop, with a theme of Radical Hospitality, focused on those in our community that we often don’t even see. I have stated before that there are people in our communities who do not see our churches anymore. We are nothing more than uninteresting scenery to them. They have driven by our buildings for so long, never seeing any activity there (cars in the parking lot on Sunday mornings does not count as an activity), that they no longer wonder what goes on in there. It's like we've become a secret society to them. To complicate the matter, we church folk are the same…we have seen un-churched and marginalized people in our communities for so long that they no longer stand out to us, or if we still see them we avoid the places they congregate, and well, out of sight, out of mind. We all know that Christ died for them too, but how do we re-connect with our communities? Isn’t that what Jesus calls us to do…reach the lost with the good news? Church we’ve got lots of work to do, all of us, and until we decide to seriously carry out the Great Commission, we will never break the bonds that render us ineffective.
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