One of the things that people always ask about Thrive is, “Why does it have to be three years?”  It’s a great question.

The truth is that no group makes a commitment for three years.  We broke up the process to engage a commitment around quarters, or eleven weeks on with a two week break in between.  Each quarter is a covenant period that the group commits to.  And this process helps create a rhythm that groups get used to following.

So why the three years?  When we originally started we had no idea of how long we would meet.  But we knew what we were doing was good.  We were discovering healing in ways that were astounding.  We were learning what it meant to trust.  We were learning what authentic community and communitas looked like.  We were in essence finding our tribe, and it was good.

In the traditional experience the door to community was revolving.  We were used to seeing people come in and out with little to no expectation.  But in our tribe that intentionality and time created a space to work through what it meant to trust, to resolve conflict without abandoning the relationships, to work through our own issues without running away from our obstacles.  We were in essence engaging life together.

And as we began to explore God’s mission, we discovered that God was interested in restoring relationships.  This was the mission.  And as we began listening to what Jesus did, something became clear.  Jesus simply gathered a group of rag tag people together to practice engaging God’s mission together.  And he did it for three years.

What was interesting is that the first iteration of the original group lasted four years.  But at the three year mark something happened.  We began to get restless.  Something wasn’t working.  We wrestled through what it meant to break up and go out to make more disciples.  And the decision was tough.  What would it mean to leave our tribe and go create new ones.  And in the end we realized that what Jesus had created was a space to work towards healing but also required going out and helping other do the same.

What we discovered was that the stepping out to create new group who would practice following Jesus by engaging His mission was the Great Commission.  And the process was continually recyclical.  There would always be people looking for healing, wrestling with love and trust, and longing for community.  To go and make more disciples was the natural next step.

But we weren’t going out into thin air.  We now knew what we were doing because we had practiced it for more than three years.  Was it scary?  Sure.  But it was worth it.

If your church is wrestling with the “make disciples” part, we can help.  Contact us today to get a free digital copy of our leadership manual.

Jesus said, “Go and make disciples.”  What fascinating words.  This is the Great Commission, the calling of every believer and the heart of the missional life.

Much of the dialog around the missional life has been renewed on the “Go” part.  This is a good thing.  Churches are no longer accepting the idea of “Come and See” or simply remaining attractional.  Pastors are actively looking for ways to send people out.  To go out into the world is to enter the missional field, even if it is simply the neighbor next door.  Go is active, it’s energized, and its the beginning of the process.

But what churches, leaders and pastors struggle with is the “make disciples” part.  What does it really mean to make disciples?  We get that.  We were in those very shoes.  How are we to make something if we don’t even know what we’re making?  We’re sending people, but we’re not quite sure what we’re sending them for.

At Thrive we’ve taken a deep look at this process of making disciples.  We’ve developed a framework for you to plug in to.  We’ve done the homework and tested out what this question really looks like.  And not surprisigly, it looks much like what Jesus did.  It’s a journey into trust with a God who loves us.  It happens in a small community of intentional and like minded people engaging God’s mission of restoration and reconciliation.  It is restorative, forgiving, graceful and meaningful.

The “make disciples” part gives people a story to tell of a God who is actively moving in the world.  It engages them in a journey towards restoration and reconciliation, towards love and trust, towards community and away from isolation.  It offers them a way of love that redeems us from our guilt and shame.

If your church is wrestling with the “make disciples” part, we can help.  Contact us today to get a free digital copy of our leadership manual.

Being missional is a growing conversation in the church.  People are beginning to wonder, “What is missional?”  And if it is important, “What does that mean for my life.”  At Thrive, we’ve been asking these questions for a long time.  We would offer that Missio Dei is central to the Christian life and to following Jesus.  It calls us to a more profound way of living as human beings.

But where to begin?

Participation involves many things.  But at the foundation of what it means to engage a missional life is love and trust.  These are the two pillars of what we practice.  We call them the meta-works or practices that lay the foundation for the Christian life.  Missio Dei is about restoring relationships, restoring trust.  And fundamental to these relationships is our relationship with the Father.  Jesus was always drawing people back to the Father, to trust again.  And from this single relationship, we could gain His Spirit, which was the power to live.  We could participate in what He was already doing to restore the world.  And with this restoration and renewed living, we could be Jesus in the flesh.  We could love.

Love and Trust.

But to get there we had to participate.  So one of the fundamental questions we’re always asking in Thrive is, “How am I or can I participate with God in what He’s already doing?” This could be in your own life or in the life of someone around you.  It could be engaging your own restoration or being Jesus to someone in the moment.  The point is to participate.

How would you answer this question in your life?

One of the real values of having people we can truly trust is the ability to be honest when we really, really need to.

Many people ask, “Why do we begin with the Old Testament in the Thrive Workbooks?”  And they usually follow with, “But isn’t the real story in the New Testament?”  Great questions.

The first workbook is an orientation process to engaging God’s mission of restoration and reconciliation.  But from there we begin with Genesis and continue with the story in Scripture.  Eleven out of the twelve workbooks tell the story in Scripture.  It was our desire to tell the entire narrative.  But it wasn’t always like that.  We’re a ministry in process, you could say.

When we first began the process of developing the workbooks we considered all kinds of possibilities for spiritual formation and what would lay the foundation for teaching in the Thrive groups.  Many were based on really good methodologies.  We knew we wanted to engage what it meant to follow Jesus but the rest was sort of up in the air.  The early iterations were good but ultimately we kept finding ourselves wanting to tell the story of God in Scripture.  We were discovering the value of a narrative approach to Scripture, or seeing the story God was trying to tell, and we decided to simply tell that story.

And as we made this shift we discovered some surprising things.  God had an amazing story to tell.  And it began in the Old Testament.  In fact, much of the story of spiritual formation, of learning to trust in relationship, and of coming out of oppression and into wholeness resided in the story of Israel.  And the more we listened to that story the more we saw the bigger picture emerge.  God was drawing us into a relationship of love and trust.  It wasn’t about some grand principles (even though there were some) but about relationship.

Much of the stories in the Old Testament are of humans just like us wrestling with the idea of what it meant to trust God, which was a central component of spiritual formation.  And the story, although not always pretty, gave us a real picture of this process.  It gave us permission to be human AND continue to step forward in relationship.  God was inviting us to wrestle with him and sit with our Papa.  We essentially discover a love story.

The Old Testament also gave us a perspective of what problem God was trying to solve.  The relationship issue that was shattered in the Garden.  So much of the story we were reading was understanding the trustworthiness of God and seeing His character in action.  And the more we stepped forward in trust, the more we were restoring our own hearts.

And it occurred to us in the middle of the process that God was not an angry God looking to “get” us, the great cop in the sky as so many of us had previously learned.  He was a compassionate God relentlessly seeking out our restoration.  He was deeply pursing our reconciliation so we could engage His Spirit.  And much of the story He was trying to tell was of His desire for our wholeness.  And the pinnacle of that story was Jesus.  In Jesus we found the true expression of both the Father and our humanity.  In Jesus we found the love of the Father complete.

To read the story without understanding the problem God was solving was like reading  the last two chapters of a great Grisham novel.  It was good and interesting.  But it left us with so many more questions than we started with.  To read the whole story was to see the big picture unfolding.  Ultimately we realized that there was a really great story of trust to tell.  And we wanted to tell it.

Over and over again, I here this question.  Is it possible to trust again?  And what is sad is that the question comes from those in the church.  And just that last sentence makes me cringe.  It’s just not supposed to be like that.  Bu the reality is that we are in a period of history that doesn’t just allow us to vent, but also allows us to be heard.  The Internet has changed the conversation.

I get the question.  It was my own almost seven years ago as a group of men sat in a meeting that became the foundation for what would become Thrive Ministries.  I have the unexpected pleasure of being the one to say, “It’s just not possible.”

It’s interesting to be seven years removed from that question, now sitting on the other side of the fence.  It is possible to trust again.  It just takes work.  And there were many days over the last seven years that I wanted to quit.  It would just have been easier to remain on the outside of trust.  But this is not who I wanted to be nor who I was designed to be, my Heavenly Father constantly nudging me forward towards restoration.

Trust was only possible for me in a group of people willing to put trust on the line again.  This was a slow often painful journey towards learning forgiveness, reconciliation, facing my own wounds, and ultimately realizing that they didn’t define me.  They were simply events that could break me or shape me.  And as I lived in this intentional community, I began to realize that I had the space to let them shape me.  I had a group who would reveal love to me.

This is the footsteps of Jesus.  It’s the willingness to trust again.  It’s the willingness to run back to the Father with no preconceived notions but to be unexepectedly embraced in a way that is profound.  It is to discover my dignity rests in my Father’s love.  And with this love I can face anything.

Learning to trust again wasn’t about everyone else suddenly changing.  It was about me growing up into the person my Father had designed me to be.  And that was Jesus.  It was about me learning to love and be loved.  It was about me learning that I was not defined by my stuff, or what I did, or who I knew, or how smart I was.  It was about knowing the embrace of my loving Father and then sharing that love.  But to get there required trust.

Was it hard?  Absolutely. But it was worth it.

The Thrive group that I’m part of is now a little over halfway through our second quarter. Our first meeting was on May 18, 2008, five months ago from today. As I was looking through old emails to try to find the exact date I had a good laugh at something that I had written.

I was inviting the people that I felt I was to start the Thrive group with, and I was so afraid that it was going to be a dismal failure. Every single one of us had enough bad experiences with groups that we were all pretty wary. We’d been disappointed so many times that the thought of trying again didn’t have much appeal. On the other hand, we all felt drawn to start to gather together in some way. Have you ever had such a strong sense that you cannot stay where you are, but you don’t really want to move either, being afraid of stepping in the wrong direction? That described us.

So, in deciding to see if maybe Thrive had something to offer us, I wasn’t even vaguely trying to “sell” the idea to anyone, because I had no idea if it was going to tank or fly. In one of my first emails to the people that eventually formed the group I wrote this line: “…this is an experiment and it may end up a disaster.” How’s that for a real vote of confidence? I laughed when I read that because I had forgotten just how little expectation I had that the Thrive materials would lead us into what we were longing for. We were (okay, still are) all so anti-program and anti-structure, but we had also found that just meeting socially to see what would happen didn’t really cut it for us.

Jonathan has often talked to me about the “risk” involved. It wasn’t until I read my comment today about the possibility of things ending up in disaster that I understood why he uses that word. Our fears were: Would we risk being disappointed again? Would we risk being vulnerable with each other? Would we risk hoping one more time? Could we bear it if we tried one more time and it failed miserably? Yes, it was a risk, and a huge one at that.

Five months later I can only say that this has been one of the best risks I’ve ever taken. I’ve never been part of any group like this. The vulnerability, the upholding of each other’s dignity, the rawness of our meetings, the safe haven it provides, the hearts being transformed, and the honesty have all combined to make our gathering together far exceed my hopes.

I felt led to share this in case someone reading this may be considering these materials but is wondering if they will disappoint like everything else you’ve tried. I cannot answer that question for you, but I did want to let you know that I understand the fear of risk that you’re facing. Sometimes it is comforting just to know that someone else has faced the same fear you are now facing when considering stepping into something new. I’ve been there. I understand. It seems it’s an inherent part of risk.

The following is an excerpt from Thrive Year 1 Quarter 1 Workbook.   For a free digital copy of our Leadership Manual, send us an email.

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It’s probably fair to say you come with a bunch of questions, and rightly so.  Some of these we will answer right now.  Others will be answered with time.  The first question you might ask is, “What are we doing?”  The answer is quite simple.  You are choosing to follow Jesus by engaging Missio Dei, or the Mission of God.  Since the fall of humanity, God has been actively working to restore His creation to wholeness.  The perfect reflection of this wholeness looked like Jesus.  It was a call to restoration and maturity as human beings.  It meant facing our brokenness with courage and resolve so that each of us could rewrite our own story.   Missio Dei invites us to engage this restoration and discover what the best of humanity looks like.  It calls us to embrace love because this is what we are designed for.  And as we experience this restoration, we then have something to take to our neighbor.  It’s not someone else’s story or good news.  It’s ours.

But to get to love, we have to first connect to the One who loves, our Heavenly Father.  Missio Dei seeks to restore the relationship between God and humanity and bring people out of oppression and into wholeness.  Jesus first announced his ministry with a quote from the prophet Isaiah, and it served well to help clarify the mission.  He said:

“The Spirit of the lord God is upon me.  For he has anointed me to bring the good news to the afflicted.  He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives, sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim a year of favor from the Lord.” (Luke 4:18-19)

This is a mission statement.  Missio Dei is first about bringing people out of suffering and into relationship and restoration.  But it begins with an assumption, that we are broken and need restoration.  As we read the story, we will find out how and why this is true.  And we will find out why our own bodies attempt to protect against and even ignore this brokenness.  We’ll learn what drives humanity to break itself through a well meaning but failed search for validation.  We’ll also learn how to restore our own hearts by participating in His mission of restoration.

Jesus was actively working to restore all of God’s creation, first by restoring access to God and then giving us a clear image of the Father.  He showed us what love looked like and what it meant to live in a deeply connected relationship with the Father and empowered and led by the Holy Spirit.  This is a relationship developed over time and established on trust.  It calls us into maturity, finding its fullest expression in love.  And the sad reality is that love never chooses to control.  We don’t have to participate in his mission.  We can choose to walk away, hoping that our best is good enough.  But we’re assuming you want more than good enough.  We’re assuming that you really do want to know the real reason Jesus came.

Another question that often follows is, “Why would I want to follow Jesus?”  It doesn’t take a scholar to realize that Jesus died, painfully.  His journey was not easy.  The cost was extremely high.  “Why would I want to follow that?”  Fair question.  But it is also fair to say that in the process he transformed the world.  He lived a life bigger than just himself.  He lived a life that people talk about and read about and want to follow for over 2,000 years.  He was the perfect reflection of what we were designed to become.  And in doing so he invited people to follow him so that each participant could become the fullest reflection of his/her design.

Is this costly?  Sure.  But what is the real cost when we answer his call to take up our cross?  If you really think about it, the cost is our brokenness.  The cost is the worst of what we have become as we live outside His Kingdom.  The cost is the plastic, fake self that we create to protect our hearts.  It’s the wounds that keep us locked in a state of fear and confusion, loneliness and ego.  It’s our fragile way of living that hides us from adventure and mystery; cutting us off from the abundance that Jesus was promising us.  The cost is our boredom and restlessness, our oppression and angst as we show up in church wondering what this is all really about anyway.  These are things that can only be let go at the cross.  Otherwise we have no place to put them.

This process, or journey as some call it, is not easy but it is worth it.  You may be questioning that right now and rightly so.  We can’t know what we’ve never experienced.  But historically those who chose to follow Jesus willingly gave up their lives for others.  They lived in such a way that astounded those around them.  Why?  Consider the possibility that they discovered something deeper about the way of Jesus.  They discovered that love was the fullest expression of who they were as humans.  They saw the value and dignity of each person in all of humanity, even their enemies.  They understood and embraced the idea that we were worth it to God.   In fact he went so far as to give His son’s life to prove it.  But the only way to discover if this is true or not is to choose to follow, to engage His mission.

So the next question you might ask is, “So, how do we really engage Missio Dei?”  What did Jesus really call us into?  Over this first quarter we will be taking a look at the mission and what it looks like as you begin your journey.   Think of it as something like an orientation to the mission. Jesus was inviting us to follow him into His Father’s mission to restore ALL of creation, including each person in this group.  He was actively working to restore the divide between God and His creation.  And in doing so, we gained access to the Father we never really knew we had.  We gained His Spirit, which transforms us from the inside out.  And we gained the possibility of becoming the whole person we were designed to be.

Understand that this restoration process takes time.  Real change happens through consistency.  It takes a community working together, watching out for each other, protecting each other, and loving each other.  It takes courage and perseverance to face our brokenness and remove our selves from oppression.  It takes a willingness to relearn something we always thought we knew, maturity.

In this journey you will discover what it means to be loved and to love.  You will learn what it means to restore your own dignity and the dignity of those around you.  You will learn what it means to redeem a broken and hurting world. You will love, laugh, cry, stretch, grow and look inward, outward, upward and onward.  You will spend intentional time focusing on trust, reflection, relationships, being real, discovering what it means to be a child of God and to love deeply, all in the context of what we call “communitas”, which we’ll learn more about next week.

Another fair question you are probably asking is, “How long do we do this?”  This journey together lasts up to three years but the mission lasts a lifetime.   Three years may seem like a long time in the beginning but for some reason Jesus gave us this example.  We’re sticking to it.   But what if Jesus realized that we needed that long to process the mission and learn what it means to restore and reconcile?  What if He understood that it takes time to rewrite the story of how we see the world?  We invite you to find out.

We also recognize that making a three-year commitment seems daunting.  But actually we are only committing to a three-month quarter at a time.   Each quarter last eleven weeks with a two-week break in between.

The last fair question you may be asking is that, “This doesn’t look like what I’m used to.  Can we really do this?” The answer is a resounding yes.  In fact, what you are doing looks more like the first century church than you may know.  Historically the first century Christians met in houses and took a risk to discover what it meant to practice love.  We need these types of communities in our lives, the ones that encourage us to better things.  As you begin to participate with Him, everything changes.  As you begin to align your heart to what He has for you, the Holy Spirit begins to change you from the inside.  Anything becomes possible in His kingdom, and restoration of your soul is at the top of his list.   Why?  Because you are worth it to Him.  And don’t you forget that.  EVER.

What if the Gospel is really choosing to live?

One of the things I love about Jesus is that He rarely rescued people.  Instead he invited them to participate with Him in their own restoration.  He invited them to get up, to step out, to take up the mat, and to feed the people.  I love this.

We often think of Christianity as something God does through us.  And to a certain extent, this is true.  Following Jesus is a life empowered by the Holy Spirit.  It’s a process of surrendering to a God who works through us, and in us, and for us.  But to some extent we can take this for granted.  We say things like, “God, take this fear from me,” assuming God does everything and we do nothing. We’re bystanders in the cosmic process.

But what if instead of rescuing us, God is waiting for us to set it down, to let it go, and to leave it behind?  What if it is us who won’t let go.  What if the very thing we expect God to do for us, is something He is waiting for us to do for ourselves.

And this act of participating with God, becomes our restoration.  It becomes our path towards maturity and wholeness.  Will it be risky?  Sure.  But that’s what grace is for.  Because the reality is that fear is part of the journey, but so is choosing to live.

At Thrive, we encourage what we call, “open hand leadership”.  It is the idea that we are stewards of what God has given us, but at any moment we may be called to surrender a part or a whole of what has been given.  In many ways this has been liberating.  There is something infinitely more rewarding that comes from nurturing and stewarding something as opposed to trying to control it.  But recently I had an experience that reminded me that this practice must continually be revisited.

A couple of weeks ago, my tribe went on our Q7 retreat.  The week leading up to the retreat we participated in an exercise designed to speak wholeness into our lives.  It was simply spending 30 minutes listening to how Jesus saw me. And during this exercise I asked him what I was being called to do.  With my eyes closed, the only image I was given was of my hands.  That’s it.  Nothing more.

So with this my tribe went to the retreat. And on Sunday, we had the opportunity to spend time alone walking with Jesus and really listening to how He wanted to speak into our lives.  And much of my work during the weekend was with family.  At one point I stopped and just enjoyed the surrounding beauty of the mountains trying not to force anything.  And as I closed my eyes I began to ask, “What have you been trying to tell me Jesus?  I want to listen.”

And what happened next surprised me.  Jesus took my hands and held them out with my palms down, as if covering something.  He said, “This is what you are trying to do with your family.  You are trying to control them.”  My heart broke because I knew it was true.  I knew that my own wounds had driven me to create unreasonable expectations for my family.

When we try and control the world around us, we inevitably get in the way of what God is trying to do.  We hold onto the image of what we expect and miss what God is already doing.  By trying to protect my family and control who they should be, I was getting in the way of what God was doing.  And worse, I was missing out on what He was already doing.

And then Jesus did something that restored me.  He took my hands and turned them over.  He said, “This is how I want you to participate.”  And in that moment I suddenly felt the weight of expectation drop off me.  It was incredibly liberating.  By letting go of control, I was letting go of an unreasonable burden that I had picked up along the way.

And then I learned something that I had never seen before.  When we returned as a group we shared our stories and then closed in prayer.  We typically hold our hands out together.  One of my brothers jumped in a read Colossians 1, which takes about seven minutes to read.  And normally I hold my hand out palm down.  And what I’ve noticed in the past is that during a long prayer my hand starts to fatigue.  And as he was reading I could feel the weight of all the guys hands on top of mine.  When he was finished, my hand was physically sore from trying to hold up my hand and the guys on top of mine.

And then we closed in prayer, but one of my brothers did something that I had never experienced before.  He turned my hand upwards.  And as we prayed I realized that the burden of the weight wasn’t as hard.  Structurally it was a better posture for my hand.

Thank you Jesus.