Welcome to March and to our Mission Critical as we learn and begin to implement the 5 everyday ways to love our neighbor, change our community, and the world.
For the past two months, we have been discovering, learning and implementing the 5 Everyday B.L.E.S.S. practices. We have been discovering that these practices are grounded in the Old Testament but lived out by Jesus. They are:
B: Begin with Prayer – We’ve identified over 500 persons that they are praying for 3 times daily.
L: Listen – The importance of listening with our hearts. Listening like Jesus.
E: Eat – Learning the importance of eating that moves us into deeper relationship for sharing
S: Serve – Serving together in our community alongside others to build relationships
S: Story – Each identifying our story of when God was most real and do storytelling.
Now we’re focusing on loving our neighbor, our family, friends and those with whom we work. Our goal, like Jesus, is to learn to live in relationship with one another. Like the words of Saint Francis of Assisi – preach the gospel at all times, and if necessary use words captures our imagination. Together, we are learning to be a spiritual influence in our neighborhood and in our community.
- We are learning to love our neighbor the way Jesus did. l We are working on avoiding ways to make the Good News complicated when it should simply come from the heart.
- We want to learn to move beyond relationally-awkward conversations, because the gospel was meant to be shared in our routine exchanges between friends and neighbors.
- We want to put into practice the five simple ways that can bless people within the rhythm of their every day lives!
- We want to make sure that we understand what God’s responsibility is and what our responsibility is.
- We are learning and then implementing what God has asked us to do. This is not a program, it is our “Lifestyle for Daily Living.”
- We believe in faith that the people we are loving and living around us will come to know the love of God and follow Jesus because we have been a blessing to them. It’s that simple.
Let’s come, all together, throughout the month of March as we head towards Easter to see the “Fruit of our Blessing.” Each Sunday, we will be sharing together and hearing as people share their faith stories and discoveries in blessing one another. We will also be launching some “B.L.E.S.S. Small Groups” where we can voluntarily share our “Blessings Ministry” and how we are blessed in return. These small groups can provide us an opportunity to strengthen one another by holding ourselves accountable and share the results that we have seen in the lives of the persons we are praying for daily.
Join us any Sunday and join us in being blessed so we can be a blessing. We’re putting to the test what is the mission of Jesus – it’s simply unstoppable when Christ-followers recognize the opportunities around us and the responsibility to help people experience the love of Jesus. God is with us! Go Be the Church!