I spent last Thursday evening and Friday in Edmonton, Canada at the annual Breakforth Canada Conference. I hadn’t been to this event before but was invited to do a one day workshop with the generic title of “Missional” with no modifiers attached. This was a delightful change from other events where the missional language has some modifier, such as ‘church’ attached to it and one has to spend a lot of time explaining why missional isn’t primarily about church.

Having supper with a group of church leaders in Pasadena this week, I was reminded again that more than anything else this missional journey isn’t about models and plans or big ideas and fancy concepts but how in Jesus we are invited to be human again.

I was listening to people tell stories. Mark Lau Branson described the everyday practice of Dwelling in the Word that we have made so much a part of our working together. In a multi-cultural church he has spent a year of more simply dwelling in Scripture, doing what he calls lectio - not the teaching of Scripture as much as learning to live with a text and listen to the ways God speaks through each other in the text.