Seek Opportunities (2018.02.04 Sermon)

February 5th, 2018 | John Chandler

John Chandler continues our new Mission & Methods series with a teaching on our fourth method: We seek opportunities to expand beyond a fellowship of sameness to reflect the breadth of God’s kingdom.
Quotes & Resources Mentioned:

• Whenever the church speaks of love or holiness, the psychology of disgust is present and operative, often affecting the experience of the church in ways that lead to befuddlement, conflict, and missional failure. — Richard Beck in Unclean
• The best way to understand the full complexity of the gospel message is to learn from others who are seeing the story from a different angle. — Soong-Chan Rah in The Next Evangelicalism
• We need to turn off autopilot and take the time to honestly examine our polluted perceptions. I do this periodically by making a list of different cultural groups and writing down what I think (what I really think, not what would ideally like to think) about them. Once I’ve named the specific biases that I hold, I can be on the lookout for them as I go about my day. — Christena Cleveland in Disunity in Christ
• The work of reconciliation is often excruciating because it is the work of the cross. If reconciliation work isn’t painful, I’d venture to say that it isn’t really a reconciliation work. Reconciliation requires that we partner with equally imperfect individuals who are also clumsily scaling the cross cultural learning curve, forgive those who carelessly wrong us, repeatedly asked for forgiveness, engage n awkward and unpredictable situations and, like gluttons for punishment, keep coming back for more. — Christena Cleveland in Disunity in Christ