The following is from the updated Leadership Manual, which is expected to be finished NEAR the end of this month.

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“The common concern with grace is that if we offer it freely it becomes cheap. But intentional grace was never cheap. It always costs something. To offer grace meant someone had to absorb the cost of someone’s brokenness.”

Sometimes we just need a space to be heard and to speak what is true regardless of how morally correct it is.  The following excerpt is from the Q4 Workbook – When God Breaks In.

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Objective #2 – Being Heard: Once a safe space has been created, the second objective is for each participant is to be heard, to speak what is going on in his/her heart and life.  Communicating what is going on in the heart is a vital work. So often what causes a breakdown in our personal lives is the fear that grips us from the unknown, the inability to deal with a problem, or denying what is true in the present.  By addressing it in a safe space, the participant can begin to see that he/she is not alone in the experience.  Others are there for support.  In communitas we can address and stand up to the fear with courage.

Often the tension of being heard is that we won’t be saying “the right thing.” Often we feel something that is not morally or politically correct so we deny the reality of how we feel.  We don’t want to say it because of how others will think of us.  Yet, in denying that reality, we are denying what is true in the moment, that we feel a certain way.  Instead of speaking it, we hide it, which allows it to embed itself into our lives and fester.

Integrity means first speaking what is true about how we feel so we can begin to root out what is not true.  It allows us to put words to the tension we are experiencing and to be honest about how we feel. But in speaking honestly we can begin to unpack what we feel, why we feel that way and the story behind it.

Most of the time really addressing the concern or fear and figuring out what the person feels about it provides very deep work.  This initial process allows the person familiarity with what is “really” going on and stepping into what is honest, even when it doesn’t feel morally right.    By putting language to the concern provides real meat to the matter.  It becomes something they can grab onto and work on.

As human beings we live in stories.  The Bible is one grand story.  A central part of the journey is hearing our own stories.  To help foster this approach, each teaching includes a story of real life, one that hopefully captures the dissonance, joy, tension, and wonder we all face. The following story is from the Q6 Workbook – Into The Desert.

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6.01 – Stories – Hungry

Sarah had never seen such a voracious appetite from anyone.  The woman with the blue shirt seemed to shove the food in her mouth, the pockets of her stuffed cheeks looked like two mice bouncing up and down to the rhythm of her chewing.  She had stacked three plates full of food in front of her, more than she could possibly eat.  “There’s more food,” Sarah said.

At first the woman didn’t say anything, more engrossed in the act of eating.  But then she stopped and stared at Sarah.  It was a penetrating stare that said, “How can you possibly know what I’ve been through.”

Sarah had joined the Red Cross out of college with the desire to make a real change in the world.  Her dad had been a lawyer enjoying a successful career in tax law and hoped she would do the same.  She wanted to see the political side of the world and use what she thought were real resources available to a hungry world.  Her new role allowed her to actually target disaster areas and bring needed food and supplies where most needed.  There hadn’t been a day yet that she regretted her decision.

She was now leading a team serving the Galveston region, which had been devastated by Hurricane Charles. Several larger buildings had collapsed and rescue efforts had discovered the woman trapped underneath a building for nine days.  Her only water source was the rain that had dripped over her face as she was trapped between rubble.  Physically, she was in decent shape but as she devoured the food her hands shook, a physical reminder of the toll it had taken.

“Can I get you some water?” Sarah asked.

“Do you have any grape soda?” the woman responded.

“No.   We have water and Gatorade.”

“The woman scratched her head, as though the decision required more thinking than she was prepared to do.  “Do you have any coffee?”

“Yes,” Sarah said, realizing she had a coffee, too.  She turned to get the coffee and hit the corner of the table with her leg.  Something was different and it was capturing her attention.  Sarah had been through a few large scale “events” as her boss liked to call the operations.  She had even heard of the teams who served Africa and the level of poverty that were common there, but something in this woman seemed to jar her senses.  This was the first time she had seen someone affected to this degree by the lack of food.

She thought back to her childhood and could not remember a time when she went without food.  She had fasted before but the reality was that she could always eat if she wanted to.  As she poured the coffee, she turned to look at the woman.  She wondered what the woman must have been feeling at this moment to feel the need to devour her food.  There were no words in her vocabulary to describe the element of poverty this woman was feeling.

The wet rains had been almost constant following the hurricane and the second they stopped everyone in the building noticed.  The moment served as a reminder that the worst was coming to an end.

Behind every person is a story.  And central to the journey is taking the time to listen to each other’s stories.  To do that, groups engage a process of writing and then sharing one’s narrative.  It’s a risky but deeply rewarding process of self discovery and disclosure.

The following is an excerpt from the Q2 workbook, which explores this practice.

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Stories

How many of you have a good story to tell?  A great party or dinner is always more interesting when someone shares an interesting story. It captures our attention as we imagine the drama, the characters, the tension and the resolution.  Everyone loves a great story.

Over the rest of the quarter, we will be listening to each other’s unique narratives, or stories. Each of us is a story.  Moments in our lives become words.  Days become sentences.  Years become chapters stored in complex network of the brain.  There’s a distinct rhythm to each story.  There’s the ups and down, the twists and the turns, and the goods and the bads.  We wake up with the possibility of “conquering” the day.  We encounter difficulties. We engage friends and adversaries.  We fight for what we believe in.  We stumble over things and at the end of the day we turn out the lights, hopefully a better person.  To rest well is a sign that things are okay.  There’s a beginning to our lives, mostly forgotten, remembered only in pictures.  And there’s an ending we have yet to live.  In between is the story, the mystery of our lives.  We can’t erase yesterday and we can’t write tomorrow.  We can only live in today.

Stories are the lifeblood of community.  They are the most common way we communicate with each other to relate what has happened or is happening in our lives.  Historically, before the Internet, the television, the radio, the newspaper and even the printing press, communities related through story.  They created a rich tradition of history in stories.  Parents would tell stories of their ancestors as a way to continue that tradition.

Relationship deepens when we become part of each other’s stories.  They are the most common way of relating with another person.  Someone tells a story about what happened and we think, “I know what that feels like.”  The story may not be exactly the same but we’ve experienced something strangely similar in mood and emotion.  We felt what that person has felt.  Stories create a shared experience with life and let us know that we are not alone in this world.

If you look at your history, you remember life through a collection of experiences, which are encapsulated stories.  Life is shaped by our stories.  They provide meaning to our personality and a context for where we’ve been.  The more we know our history, the more we can understand ourselves. They also provide a connection point between people.  Each experience in life becomes a connection point with another person to say, “I know what that feels like” or “I was part of your story”.  These connection points become the anchors in relationship we share with each other.  The more connectors, the more we can relate to another person.

And as we listen to each other’s stories, we begin to encounter each other.  We learn a little bit of history that makes each of us tick.  We learn the stories that have shaped us into the person that walks into the room.  And by listening carefully we discover how human we all are.  We discover that our similarity radically outweigh our differences.  We are the same humanity.

We’re in the process of updating the Leadership Manual to include a section on the content of the teaching, called the Teaching Map.  So over the next couple of weeks I’m going to be posting the teaching summaries of each workbooks to give you an idea of what the teaching sections look like.

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Y1 | Q1 – Come Follow Me: An Orientation To The Journey

1.01 – Missio Dei: This week begins an overview of where the group is doing over the next three years.  It’s called Missio Dei and it means engaging God’s mission of restoration. This week also discusses the gift of participation and why we should participate.

1.02 – Communitas: This week explores the concept of Communitas as a context for the group meetings.  Communitas is a deeper form of authentic community and sets the table for effective mission.

1.03 – Good News: This week we begin to look at the grand narrative in Scripture.  What is the big picture look like and what is God trying to accomplish.

1.04 – Four Relationships: This teaching explores the nature of the mission and what is being restored.  The fall was a loss of relationship and the mission is about restoring them.  There are four that we will specifically look at in this teaching.

1.05 – Love: This teaching explores the nature of love and wholeness and what abundant life looks like.  Love is central to the mission of God.  It is through the truth of His love that we are transformed.

1.06 – Redemption: This teaching explores the role redemption plays in the journey.  Redemption is the process of trading in what we have created and leaving it at the cross.  When we trade it in, we are now able to receive what God has for us.

1.07 – Restoration: This teaching explores the cost of our brokenness and the value of the examined life.  What does it mean to step into restoration and wholeness?  The call to follow is to step into that space of exploration.

1.08 – Reconciliation: This teaching explores the role of reconciliation in the mission.  Reconciliation is central to community and yet is often avoided because of the conflict.  This teaching sheds light on the process groups use to practice reconciliation.

1.09 – Voices: This teaching explores the nature of what it means to listen to God’s voice in our lives and how we can learn to follow the leading of the Holy Spirit.  Learning to follow means working past hearing and listening and engaging what His voice calls us to.

1.10 – Two Kingdoms: The teaching looks at the two opposing kingdoms. God kingdom is primarily defined by love and restores us.  The enemy’s kingdom is defined by fear and control.  We are born into the enemy’s kingdom.  Following means coming over to the winning side.

1.11 – Enemy: This teaching explores the presence of the enemy; it’s history, how it works and how we destroy its work in our lives.  The primary work of the enemy is through lies.  Restoration comes from removing those lies.

The following is a letter to all new leaders who are considering starting or are starting out in the Thrive process. Sometimes we just need a little perspective for the journey. (Excerpt, Leadership Manual, pg 7)

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Friends,

I want to welcome you to the missional leadership journey.  Engaging God’s mission of restoration is the journey of a lifetime.  It will stretch you, pull you, push you and twist you in ways that will give life meaning.  You were meant to do this and we at Thrive applaud you for taking the risk.

Much of the leadership questions and processes you will need are here in this manual.  But there is a side to the journey that can never be in the manual.  And that is your specific route.  I want to launch you by telling you a story that describes the freedom to discover that route.

If you live in the twenty-first century you’ve probably tried an online map service.  They’re really great. They provide detailed instructions as well as a picture of what your route to your destination looks like.
A couple of years ago, I took my family on a trip to Disneyland and punched in the route to one of these services.  The site promises to provide me with the best possible route to my destination.  It felt really good leaving with all the information I would need to get there fast.  We left in the morning and hit Los Angeles about 2:30 PM.  It was a hot day.

Little did I know that Highway 5 in Los Angeles is now a parking lot.   Millions of cars were moving at the speed of a slug, all seeming to want to get to the same destination as me.  I honestly could have walked faster.  It was the kind of slow death crawl that brings out the worst in little children.  Mine were not spared.  It felt like a scene out of Chevy Chase’s Vacation.  “When are we going to be there?”  “I’m hot.”  “He touched me.”  Little children are not meant to sit in a car shaped box, strapped in for longer than two hours at a time.

I used to live in Los Angeles and knew of other possible routes, but my memory of the freeway system seemed hazy.  Sensing a need to get out of the parking lot, I took a chance and cut over on some main streets and winged it.  Before I knew it, I was flying down another highway feeling sorry for anyone who had to drive the 5 on a regular basis.  I was a free man, but something troubled me.

You see my map had fooled me into thinking it was THE path to follow.  It had provided me with the best potential route, but it had no way of knowing there was going to be traffic, and heat, and screaming children.  This was a recipe for disaster.  My printout only had this one route, so I was left to inch along the 5 or venture out and try another way.  For most of the route it had served me fine.  It was easy.  But at some point I had to make a decision to detour, mostly for the sake of my sanity.  By doing so, I had opened myself up to getting lost a long the way, but also to potentially a quicker, more effective route.  I took a chance and we got there in once piece.

As you navigate your journey with your group you will often be left with a decision when to discover your own path.  This material is like a map in that it is meant to provide an interesting route to wholeness but it is not the only route.  This is A map.  Not THE map.  This is a very liberating thought when you really think about it.  What this means is that you can take detours, tread new uncharted ground, and figure out a different path along the way.  Just remember that when you venture into uncharted territory there are usually no WalMart along the way.  You may be on your own.  If you do, seek wise counsel along the way.

As you tread along the path, remember that you carry the promise of the Holy Spirit to guide you.  Where ever you go, look to the Holy Spirit to lead you into a rich experience of faith, hope, and ultimately to love.  I encourage you to try new ideas, take chances, and see what works for you.  If you sense the Holy Spirit’s leading you in a direction, which is different from this material, trust the Holy Spirit.  He is your true guide.  This material just provides you with possibilities and options.  You can always come back to it, or even stay with it as it serves you well.  You may find that it is exactly what you need most of the way, or just some of the way.

Blessings on your journey!

Jonathan

One of the more valuable spaces we learned to create was the process of check-in.  It’s the fourth part of the protocol that allows us to take 5-10 minutes really processing where we are at before moving ahead. With the exception of the first one, the questions change over time to address the focus of the quarter. Check-in requires us to slow down and really listen to our heart.  It requires us to really listen to the mood or story we are bringing to the group as opposed to just rushing right in.

We usually pick two questions, how we are checking in, and one other one, to share out loud to the group, but no storytelling. We also provide an emotions chart with definitions, which allows us to really process what emotions we are experiencing at the moment.  It really helps become emotionally aware.

A large part of spiritual formation is the process of becoming self-aware and learning to really listen to the heart, as opposed to just the head.  So much of the pain in life calls us to shut down the heart.  This process helps open it back up.

The round usually leads to some insight into each person that we didn’t know.  It allows us to seek what is at the heart level and if something really needs to come out in the work round.

Here is a sample of the check in questions. The workbooks have space to answer the question each week.

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3.02 – Reflection Questions

Instructions: Spend five to ten minutes reflecting on your own life and answer the following questions as honestly as you can.

1. How am I checking in?  Try to identify the story or mood that I am bringing to the group meeting.  How do I feel right now?  What emotion comes up (ex: happy, fearful, anxiety, angry, content)?  Briefly explain why.

2. How did I experience God this week?

3. How is God speaking to me?  Am I listening?

4. If I were to reflect on something in my life that is frustrating or not quite right I would look at (fill in answer).

5. What is one way I can begin to let God love me?

The following is an excerpt from Thrive Year 1 Quarter 2 Workbook, pg 12.

For a free digital copy of our Leadership Manual, send us an email.

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The problem with seeing is that it often requires us to see the darker side of life.  We don’t get a pair of glasses at birth that allows us to see only what is good.  We read or hear about the injustice in the world or right around the corner and it often weighs on us like a plague.  Our hearts cry out, “When will the pain end.”

Being alive means dealing with the world until we can no longer deal with it.  “For this people’s heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes.”  Have you ever felt like this?

What Jesus is saying is that it is possible to reach a point in life that we can no longer see.  Our eyes close and you just shut down the intake valve. Our heart becomes calloused because someone wounded us in such a way that made us say, “I can’t let this happen again.”  And this person wasn’t a neighbor.  It was a friend, or a parent.  It was the people who were supposed to take care of us.  And the only way we can deal with it is to close the world off and become numb.

So often we meet people who are angry or confused or don’t want to see the truth and we walk away with the impression, “They’ve got a closed mind.”  But what Jesus is saying is that it’s not the mind that’s closed.  It’s the heart.  Something in life has broken them and the only way they can protect themselves is to shut down.  New information just means potential pain and that’s not going to happen.  And sometimes that person is us.

The following is an excerpt from Thrive Year 1 Quarter 2 Workbook.  The ethics are a way of operating in the group as a community.  Groups review the list of ethics each quarter as a way of participating.

For a free digital copy of our Leadership Manual, send us an email.

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Be a beginner. Move with a sense of discovery and humility as though you have something to learn, even in areas that you are familiar or even an expert.

Engage the process as a participant. A participant is someone who is actively engaging in God’s mission of restoration.  This does not require activity at all times.  It means a willingness to listen and follow the leading of the Holy Spirit into the areas needing restoration.

Take a prudent risk. Prudence is cautious action forward.  Learn to step outside of your comfort zone for the sake of your own restoration.

Own your own actions. Use “I” statements.  Don’t speak “You do this,” or “We do this,” statements.  Don’t generalize them as absolutes for everyone.

Earn the right to be heard. Earn the trust of those around you by making offers of help with discretion. Do not assume you know the answer to someone’s problem.

Protect the dignity of those around you. You validate your own dignity by recognizing and protecting the dignity of others.

Work patiently towards each other’s wholeness. Wholeness is the intended goal of the group.  You must find the delicate balance between allowing someone the freedom to sit quietly and following the leading of the Holy Spirit to push someone at the appropriate moment.

You have the freedom to say no. Throughout the journey you will encounter moments that you need time to process what is happening as opposed to just moving forward.  Grant that freedom to others as well.

Practice trust with each other. Each person in your group has taken a risk to be part of the journey.  Grant each other trust even through the process of reconciliation.

Be real. Bring honesty to the group.  Don’t hide what is real.

Laugh with each other not at each other. Laughter is often the best medicine for what ails us but it can be a bitter pill when it is directed at someone.  NEVER laugh at someone’s expense.

Lead with grace and mercy, and whenever necessary, forgive. People will make mistakes, including leaders.

Practice integrity. Lead by example and do what you say you are going to do.

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.