Since Sunday, I have not been able to stop thinking about the beauty and potential of the local church. If you missed it, you can check it out here.


Srikumar Rao is a business professor at Columbia and London Business School. He challenges his MBA students to take a vastly different approach to business. “He asks them to stop living in a `me centered’ world and start living in an `other centered’ one” (Time, “Inside Business”, April 2006). He imagines a future where business leaders begin to ask, “What can I do to make things better?”

What would happen in our church and churches all over this land if we started to do away with "me centeredness" and instead focused on being “other centered” churches? I believe we would have nothing short of a gospel revolution in a short period of time.

As Phil Stevenson points out, "Churches tend to be more inward than outward looking. We tend to be driven by finding the best practices to entice people to come through our doors. We look for strategies that will puff the numbers, fill the chairs, “spike” our average and leave us feeling better about ourselves. And why not? This is the value that is primarily rewarded in today’s church culture."

A slightly different approach, though, is to operate from a missional mindset! This perspective will push us out our doors and into the community to connect preChristian people to the gospel. The same spirit that caught our corporate hearts to respond so readily to Hurricane Katrina can and should be applied to our neighborhoods. God has placed newhope church in central North Carolina to lead an indelible mark on the spiritual landscape of this great state.

Steve Sjorgren in his book, The Community of Kindness, says “We believe the power of God’s love is what brings people to Christ—not slick programs, not telling people how bad things are, not evangelism and not theology.” People best encounter the love of Christ when the church is BEING the church. It is the church storming its community with practical “need-meeting.” It is the church asking and answering the tough question: “What can we do in our community, for our community, that if we were no longer here we would be missed?”

As we get ready to move to our post near the Streets of Southpoint, THAT IS A GREAT QUESTION TO ASK!?

“What can we do in our community, for our community, that if we were no longer here we would be missed?” (Steve Sjorgren)

As we ponder these kinds of urgent questions, here are some suggestions:

· Drive or walk or run your particular community and pay attention
· Go to the Chamber of Commerce and inquire about community needs
· Read the local paper and see what is being reported
· Go door to door and ask and talk to people
· Spend an hour in a local gather place (Starbucks, Southpoint Mall, etc) and watch and listen.

After you have listened and observed and prayed - let us know your thoughts/ideas. Together, we can pray and discern what God is calling us to do for the sake of His Kingdom in this part of the world.

I can't wait to hear your thoughts and ideas in the weeks, months, and years ahead.

The best is yet to come...