A New Rhythm in the Journey: Public Narrative

Jesus has always attracted attention – and attenders; But he calls disciples. The Church that Jesus has been building is not made up of attenders, graduates, or the water baptized…but rather the ones He calls “disciples” – His friends. (John 15) They are those who have accepted both His death, and His life (Luke 4:27).

It is for this reason that Mission-link was formed in February 2009. The vision was for a reformation movement dedicated to renovating of our paradigm of church. It began without a Sunday Service, and met in homes. There was teaching on the basics, but more than anything, there was established a core of disciples, and “Rhythms” of followership with the Lord Jesus Christ.

Worship        >           Kinship         >          Friendship         >          Fellowship         >         Leadership

We learned these from studying the life of our Savior, the way He walked out these rhythms, and the things He taught us about following Him:

1 John 2:5-6 “By this we know that we are in Him: 6 the one who says he abides in Him ought himself to walk in the same manner as He walked.”  And,

John 13:35 “By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.”

We learned that “eternal life” was not a reward for praying correctly, but that according to Jesus is meant to actually “know God, and the One He has sent.” (John 17:3)

We found that being a follower of Jesus was costly, and seemed easy to start, but not so easy to finish. So we reminded ourselves of what we learned with a saying:

“Know God, Love People, Don’t Give Up”

Having begun with first things first, our vision is shifting to the missional, public ministry of Jesus – the rhythms that interfaced with a lost world, and facilitated a connection with those outside of the circle of disciples. We know that Jesus engaged on a regular basis in “public narrative” – establishing a way of telling the story about life and God, that generally flipped peoples understanding on its head. (We might call this “head flipping”)

Having built a culture of “simple church”, in which the church cannot be connected to a particular building, we recognized that this rhythm would certainly have been misunderstood had it been the first thing we did. So, we are listening for the leading of the Spirit as to how to walk this out. We already have an opportunity to do this monthly at our larger Gatherings, but we are listening for the Spirit’s input through others about what the heart of God is on this.