Houseguests that are fun!

No, this isn’t about O.J. Simpson and the world’s most famous house guest.

This weekend we hosted a missionary couple in our home who was visiting First Baptist. Since we have a few things in common I had a feeling we would get along… but I totally underestimated how much we were going to like having the Whiting’s with us.

The are just as crazy as we are. If by "crazy" you mean, "faithful enough to follow God out of Ur" or "faithful enough to want to capture the Promised Land."

These aren’t the first missionaries from the church we’ve hosted, so when the visit began I’ll admit that I was a little on edge. Within 10 minutes of their arrival we were sitting in our living room and I was answering questions about all the changes at the church. I wondered, "Are these people here to tear us down or are they just curious?" In fact… not only were they curious, they were exceedingly happy with all we’ve been up to. We both wrote down ideas that one another have used that we’ll consider here and they will consider in Croatia. (Local churches there call them crazy, too! We are not alone.)

By Sunday afternoon we had progressed from sharing stories to coming up with new ideas discussing how to look at this community "more missiologically." And yesterday, before they left we talked again about engaging a culture and following Jesus’ command in Matthew 28 to "go" to our culture instead of waiting for them to come.

One thought that sticks in my mind was his categorization of things in the New Testament church. He put things into the category of historical Jewish methods (come to us, be like us, to be reached by us) and historical Jesus methods. (go to them, be like them, to reach them)

Here’s my thought for the day: Since America has become a mission field and there is general acknowledgment that we need to act like missionaries in order to reach our communities… we shouldn’t be studying the methods of church… we should be studying the methods of effective missionaries. (For another day I’ll contrast "effective missionaries" with "systematic missionaries.")

Here’s a Gene Whiting thought to chew on: In Europe there are traditions based on centuries of history. In America, change is the tradition itself.