Please check out www.CultivatingDaily.com where I will be blogging going forward about living sent & cultivating the Gospel daily. Thanks!

If you showed up here looking for more than just info about the LIVE SENT book, like you thought it might be worth your while to read a blog post or two, then by all means scroll back through the previous posts!!!

If you are wondering when the next post will publish, then head on over to CultivatingDaily.com for future posts about living sent and cultivating the Gospel daily.

Thanks!!!

-jason

Is ur church family living on mission together, or are you just doing missions? @JeffVanderstelt suggests what “missional” really is.

Jeff Vanderstelt and his family are being the church together with SOMA Communities to Tacoma, WA. In this five minute video, he suggests what it actually means for a local church expression to be living out the mission of God together. Trust me, it’s worth your time to watch and then share with the local church expression with whom you walk.

Are you living sent together with a group of people who are family together on mission making disciples of Jesus who make disciples of Jesus?

Are you “pursuing the sick or the healthy” as a church?

The Upstream Collective asked me for a response to the above question. Read how I responded and share your own thoughts by CLICKING HERE.

Grateful.
-jason

LIVE SENT is now available as a “Nook Book” with B&N. Get it & get a special treat. Here’s how…

LIVE SENT is now available as a “Nook Book” with Barnes and Noble. CLICK HERE to get it.

Did you know that you don’t have to have a Nook to read a “Nook Book?” Like Kindle, you can download the Nook app to your smart phone or iPad and read it like a Nook on those devices, as well.

Forward me the email that you purchased the Nook Book and I will send you a chapter from a book I wrote that is releasing in December 2011 entitled beyond MY church. You can read a little more about it and even pre-order it if you want to by clicking here. 

Hope LIVE SENT finally being in digital form will be helpful to you.

Grateful.
-jason

Join us online for the 2011 #LiveSent Conversation this Friday and Saturday!

If you aren’t able to actually make it in person to the 2011 LIVE SENT Conversation this coming Friday and Saturday, then please tune in to this LIVE SENT blog or to the Reproducing Churches Network website for blog updates and comments and thoughts from the conversation.

Hard to be believe this is the 5th year of this event. Grateful.

-jason

Check out this story from my new friend @TransformWords about how he and some friends tried to put #LiveSent into action…

A new friend of mine, whom I met because he read LIVE SENT and so we connected online, shared with me that he and some friends tried to put into action the LIVE SENT message at a protest rally earlier this month in Dallas. Here’s that story…

The scene was a protest rally of people against Gov. Rick Perry’s efforts to call Texas and the nation to prayer. Don found out about the protest. Instead of deciding to protest a protest (there’s a Proverb about a kind word turning away wrath or something), he decided to message out via Facebook and Twitter to some friends of his to see if they wanted to head out that coming weekend and serve the protestors by providing them with bottles of water during the 100 degree heat.

That’s what they did.

Here’s what Don wrote in his reflections on the day:

This weekend went amazingly well. There were six of us that went down. Two people from TVC, including me, and then some friends who are part of other church families. This worked out because there were about 20-25 protesters, and that was a good ratio that allowed us to serve them and get into some good conversations.

There are a couple lasting relationships that seem to have been made.

David is an atheist, but seemed to really take in and process what Alex (friend who leads the Bible study I’ve been part of over the summer) and I were saying. He didn’t necessarily agree with our views, but he at least philosophically understood where we were coming from. I’ve added him to my FB, and am hoping to be able to meet up with him again soon.

Jessica is an atheist as well, and she’s the person who organized the protest. She’s much more closed off, easily getting her emotions rattled. Still praying about how/if to engage her and her boyfriend (who I didn’t know was there until we were leaving).

Thank you all for your prayers and support.

Grateful for your heart to want to give yourself away, Don. Praying friendship with David and Jessica and her boyfriend will blossom. And that the Kingdom in their lives will, too.

May we actually live sent…

Check out these awesome resources from @VergeNetwork & @JeffVanderstelt & @DreamAwakener on living sent daily.

Check out these videos and articles actually equip followers of Jesus to make disciples in the everyday rhythms of life. Hope they are helpful and catalytic for living sent.

:: Jeff Vanderstelt from Tacoma, WA teaching about being equipped to live sent in the everyday spheres of our lives:

Jeff Vanderstelt sharing about equipping to live sent in the everyday

:: The Verge Network posted this article about living sent in your neighborhood:

25 Simple Ways to Be Missional in Your Neighborhood

:: Also from the Verge Network, here’s a great resource about living sent into the marketplace:

30 Simple Ways To Be Missional In Your Workplace

:: JR Woodward worked hard to put this resource together – a compilation of stuff that actually equips:

A Primer on Today’s Missional Church

:: From the Verge Network again, here’s Mike Breen sharing a very thorough missional communities series of articles and posts:

The Missional Communities Series

:: And if you are into videos, you will dig this page:

Verge Network’s Video Resources

Are you living sent into the darkness and lostness of our world. Read about one guy who’s been doing it for more than 40 yrs…

There are those who say they “live sent,” and yet their lives are lived immersed in church culture and church cultural activities. And there are those who live their lives, alongside a few other followers of Jesus typically, out into the often hostile and uncomfortable culture of our world. Dallas Willard does the latter and has for over 40 years. He is a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California.

The other day, I came across a transcript of a speech he delivered at the CS Lewis Foundation Summer Conference at the University of San Diego on June 21st, 2003. The speech was entitled “My Journey To and Beyond Tenure In a Secular University.”

For anyone who is wondering whether they may need to take a few other followers of Jesus and venture out to bring love and light and hope and no-condemnation into the dark areas of our culture, this transcript of Dr. Willard’s speech is well worth reading.

Enjoy…

 

“My Journey To and Beyond Tenure in a Secular University”
Faculty Forum Luncheon Remarks by Dallas Willard
C.S. Lewis Foundation Summer Conference, Univ. of San Diego, June 21, 2003

I have ten minutes…let me first talk about my road to tenure.

I love literature and writing and thinking. I always have. And so, without really intending it, I was drawn into graduate studies. I started out at Baylor University and finished up graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin. That’s where Stan Mattson and I were drawn together – discussing, thinking. I had not decided to be a university professor. In fact, I never decided to, I just ended up there.

After I finished with Baylor, we went back to Jane’s home in Georgia. There for a year I taught English Literature in high school, and Jane taught junior high literature. I was Associate Pastor of a Baptist church there. During that year I became convinced that I really was a hazard to the people who had to listen to me. I really didn’t know…especially about God and the soul. And by that time I knew that I wouldn’t be able to study those topics in seminary. And I knew that I wouldn’t be able to study them in psychology. And I knew that philosophers spent more time talking about these topics than anyone else. So I decided to study philosophy for a couple of years.

I didn’t intend to take a degree, but one thing lead to another. We were deeply involved in Christian events around campus and in a little Christian Missionary Alliance church nearby. One thing led to another. I finally took the degree, and they invited me to stay and teach there the following year. Mark Singer primarily was the one who did it, I think. During that year the Lord said to me, “Now if you stay in the churches, the university will be closed to you; but if you stay in the university, the churches will be open to you.” I know that the Lord said that to me because I sure didn’t have enough sense to understand what it meant. I really didn’t. The church was still the cultural authority. It wasn’t for long after that, but it was still the cultural authority in 1964. I had no idea what was happening culturally, and so I just say that the Lord moved me step by step. We were offered a position at the University of Southern California, without even applying. So you can see it’s certainly not due to me.

Now here’s the part that might be interesting to you. And I really do believe this is just me – it may not be you, that’s all right. Basically, when I decided to start teaching at Wisconsin, I said “My role is to share understanding with my students.” I can guarantee that I loved philosophy, and no one had to give me any incentive to do that. When I left home after graduating high school, I left as a migrant agricultural worker with a Modern Library edition of Plato in my duffel bag. It sounds kind of crazy, but I loved it. I loved the stuff. Before I knew there was a subject called philosophy, I loved it.

I decided I would do nothing trying to secure myself or gain advancement. I am very much a literalist in terms of the Bible. The Bible says promotion does not come from the East or the West, it comes from the Lord. So OK, I don’t have to do anything about promotion. But what I did was this: I said, “I am going to do the best work I can by God’s help,” and that meant in writing and teaching. And once again, it wasn’t that I was smart. The Lord just guided me. So I worked on papers, and my idea was that, if it was any good, I would be able to send it to the best journals (where no one knew me), and it would be accepted.

The first two papers I published were each two solid years in writing. They came out in print 12-15 pages long, but they’d probably been re-written 65 times. That’s what I tell my students now. “Work on it. Work on it. When you think it’s good, it’s probably not. Just keep working. It’ll get better. All writing is re-writing. You never get it right; it’ll just get better. When you’ve gone through it many times and replaced the one word with another word, and then replaced that word with the same word again, you’re getting there.” So that’s how I worked.

Just before school started in the Fall of 1965 at USC, I sent an article to Gilbert Ryle, who edited arguably the leading philosophical journal at the time called Mind, and within a week and a half I had a really wonderful letter back from him saying, “We want to publish this. We don’t like the last few paragraphs, but that’s OK.”

So on to the next paper. My strategy was this – do really good work. Do work that you would think God had to help you with to get you there, and then do some more. Just stay at it. That’s the only strategy I’ve had is to work in that way. My view is that, if you are in a good field, you must work on the things that are really central and essential to that field. And you ought to believe that God will enable you to do work in that field that will be a benefit and challenge to everyone. And going back to some things that Calvin (Edwards) said so well earlier — what we as Christians want to do — we want to get to the point where people scattered around the academic world are worried about what we are doing. They sit up at night and think about us. They get on the internet, and they chase our work down. I really challenge you to believe that about yourself, whatever your area of work is. Not because you are so good, but because God is so great.

I don’t know anything more to say in terms of how I work, because that’s all there is to it. I try to teach classes well. I pray for my students. I pray as I set up the course schedule and the outline. I pray for them when they come in to interview. They don’t know I’m praying most of the time, but I pray for them, and I pray for the class. I say, “Lord, let this be a class that will really help these students in their work, in their field, in their self-confidence.” Because, you know, many of the students I have, especially in the beginning, don’t know they have a mind. One of the things I will do often in a large introductory course is say, “How many of you would like to be known as thinkers?” Of 150 people, you may get 3-4 hands, and those will be tentative. And then I say, “How many of you would like to be known as feelers?” They all want to be known as feelers. So you know that you have to start working to encourage knowledge of what it’s like to learn, to build their foundation, to help them to come to understand how the mind works.

I’m not there to be a witness. I’m there to do a good job as a teacher and writer. I will be a witness. I can’t help that. The only question is, “What am I going to witness to?” And I take a lot of comfort from Jesus’ statement that you cannot hide a city that is set on a hill. So I don’t have to think about it. I have to try to do real good work; and that’s my business – to do real good work. I wouldn’t say it’s the best in the world or anything like that, others can make judgments, but my intention is to do the best work possible. And by that I don’t mean within my human limitations; I also mean God helping me. I’m going to put my human limitations on the line, but my expectation is not from them. I expect to see something happen that I could not possibly do. And I would do that if I were preaching or witnessing on the streets, or doing whatever wherever. I want to see something happen that I couldn’t possibly do. And that’s what I would encourage anyone in the academic line of work to do: to say “I know what good work is. I’m going to do it, and I expect God to help me. I will give my life to it.” Of course, I will be a prisoner of Christ; that’s what I am. Because when I am doing my work as a philosopher or a writer, that’s what I’m doing. Of course, I write a lot more in philosophy than I do in religion, but few people read that. That’s kind of the way it is in the academic world, the writing in philosophy helps me in everything else I do. So I really want to do very good work in my field. I guess that’s the simple thing I would say: I just want to do good work.

I’m afraid to say this, because I’m afraid to burden someone else. But I never ask for a promotion. I never ask for money. Of the books I’ve published, all have been solicited from me by the publishers. And I’ll tell you why I have approached things in this way. When I was at Baylor University as a young man, as a very green young man, I was watching other green young men trying to find a place to preach. And the Lord said something very simple to me: “Never try to find a place to speak, try to have something to say.” If you read my books, you know that I really do believe the Lord speaks to us. And one reason I believe the Lord speaks to me is because I don’t have enough sense to know things like that. So that helped me a lot, just in terms of what I don’t have to mess with and what I then can concentrate on.

I don’t know if that may have helped anyone, but it is really all I have to say about my path to tenure and beyond.

Check out this video of @BillHybels responding in a “live sent” way to @Starbucks CEO, Howard Schultz.

This 7 minute clip of Bill Hybels’ response to Starbucks’ CEO Howard Schultz is well worth your time to watch. Whether you like Bill Hybels or not, whether you agree with what he says in this video, you can’t deny that this is a great learning case on leading graciously and generously.

It’s interesting to me that the signatures of 717 people prompted Schultz to cancel his contractually agreed upon appearance to be interviewed during the Willow Creek Leadership Summit. Especially when there are now over 32,000 views of the video below, not to mention all the other views of the videos and transcripts out on the web of this event. Lots of learning lessons in this scenario.

May Hybels’ example challenge all of us to lead with love and grace, in a way that is catalytic for sent living.

 

My @UnionUniversity friend @TimEllsworth has co-authored a book about @PujolsFive. Read my interview with Tim here…

I majored in Biblical Greek in college. By the time I got to my senior year, there were four of us in a class taught by one of my favorite people on earth (Dr. George Guthrie) in which we “exegeted” Paul’s letter in the New Testament of the Bible called “Philippians.” One of the guys in the class, whom I have always had deep respect for, was Tim Ellsworth. He now works for our alma mater, Union University, and has recently co-authored a book about Albert Pujols.

I emailed Tim to ask him if I could do a short blog interview with him about the book and about why he wanted to write on Pujols (besides the fact that he plays for Tim’s beloved St. Louis Cardinals). I think you will find the questions and his responses interesting. You can read them below.

Grateful for a guy in the spotlight like Pujols, living sent for all to see the Sent One.

ME: So, are you a St. Louis Cardinal fan or something?

TIM: Yeah, I grew up in and around St. Louis, and my dad is a lifelong Cardinals fan, so I think I was predestined to be one. They’ve been my love affair for pretty much my whole life.

ME: Why write about Albert Pujols? 

TIM: He’s got a great story. He grew up in poverty in the baseball-obsessed Dominican Republic, then moved to the United States with his family as a teenager. He excelled in baseball in both high school and college, and yet inexplicably fell to the 13th round of the baseball draft in 1999. From there he spent only one year in the minor leagues before becoming one of the best players ever. So the baseball story in and of itself is compelling. But what’s even better is that Pujols is a devout follower of Christ, and he uses his celebrity to make a difference for the Lord.

ME: Why did Tim Ellsworth get to write about Pujols?

TIM: Because my college roommate and co-author Scott Lamb asked me to work with him on the project. I had a few baseball contacts over the years that certainly helped with getting the interviews we needed.

ME: Three lessons you learned in the process of writing this book?

TIM: This has proven a difficult question for me to answer. I can’t say that these are the most important things, but here’s what comes to mind:

• There’s always room for improvement, but sometimes meeting a deadline is more important than perfecting your prose.
• Be flexible and open to correction. Your writing is not perfect.
• When working on a project of this magnitude, don’t hesitate to ask your friends and fellow church members for prayer.

ME: One of the most memorable stories about Pujols in the process of writing this book?

TIM: Adam Wainwright told a fascinating story about Pujols’ generosity in buying Wainwright an expensive painting. Wainwright was only in his second year in the big leagues and wasn’t about to spend $5,000 on a painting, but Pujols insisted on buying it for him. “You’re going to let me buy that painting for you,” Pujols told him, “or you’re going to Triple-A.” It shows Pujols’ sense of humor as well.

ME: Where is baseball in Pujols’ list of life priorities? Why would you say that?

TIM: I’d place baseball third, behind his relationship with Christ and his family. You could make a case that baseball is even fourth, behind Pujols’ concern for those less fortunate, but I’ll consider his generosity to them to be a result of his relationship with Christ.

ME: Your all-time, any-era, best players ever baseball team? (one player for each position, including DH and relief pitcher)?

TIM’s lineup:
1B: Lou Gehrig (Pujols may surpass him by the time his career is over)
2B: Rogers Hornsby
3B: Mike Schmidt
SS: Honus Wagner
CF: Ty Cobb
RF: Babe Ruth
LF: Ted Wiliams
C: Yogi Berra
SP: Walter Johnson
RP: Mariano Rivera

ME: Ball park you most want to go to? Ball park you most want to go back to?

TIM: I’ve always wanted to go to Fenway, but haven’t had the chance to. I’ve been to Wrigley several times but always welcome an opportunity to return, even though the stadium is home to the stinking Cubs.

ME: Union University is our alma mater. Tell the people reading this why it’s the best university on earth?  

TIM: Wow, there are so many things I could say. For starters, Union is a place that is driven by the pursuit of excellence in all things, is devoted to Christ, His Word and His church, and is a community where people genuinely care about one another. Our president, Dr. Dockery, is one of the finest men I know and is a model of what a Christian leader should be. It’s an honor to be a graduate and an employee of Union.

Thanks Tim. Grateful for you. And grateful you did not write your book in Greek.

You can visit and read Tim’s blog by CLICKING HERE. You can purchase the book he co-wrote on Pujols by CLICKING HERE.