Michael De Ruyter is a husband, father, and pastor who lives and serves in Midland, Michigan. Mike serves his city and his church by focusing his ministry on pastoring the city. In this episode Mike shares how he and his church increasingly saw a need to not only pastor their congregation but pastor the city from within the congregation. Thank you for listening to this conversation!
MFJP 05: A conversation with Dave Runyon The Art of Neighboring
Show Notes
- (3:10) We have found that if you are gonna go after a city the size of Denver you need to break it into small pieces.
- (4:05) When we talk about going after the city we are talking about trying to demonstrate the gospel
- (5:20) An example of demonstrating the gospel
- (7:30) A story that led to the writing of the book The Art of Neighboring.
- (9:10) ”Relationships always trump programs”
- (13:15) God is using this discipline of neighboring to put me into relationships with people who are in different seasons of life, who think about the world and think about God totally different than I do.
- (16:25) Neighboring can begin with simply learning and remembering a name
- (17:35) No matter the kind of neighborhood you live in there are people in need all around you.
It’s what we don’t say When I learned to be deeply grateful for friends who speak the truth in love to me
On December 1, 1955 Rosa Parks refused to move out of her bus seat to make room for a white passenger in segregated Montgomery, Alabama. So much has changed since then. So much hasn’t.
In many ways it feels like we are in the early stages of a second civil rights movement in the U.S. This seems to me to be a part of the larger experience that I’ve written about recently as we live in a transition to a Fourth Great Awakening. I celebrate all the good things that happened as a result of the courage and sacrifices of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., and their contemporaries. And I applaud and am attempting to stand in solidarity with the new wave of courageous, peaceful, persistent insistence that has arisen in more recent days in movements like “Black Lives Matter.” We must not stop until the work is complete even though seeing it through will require that we live with a season of turmoil – perhaps chaos. [Read more…]
MFJP 04: A conversation withNate Pyle How Jesus Redefines Manhood, the Importance of Intentionality, and Our Need To Be Known
Nate Pyle serves as Lead Pastor at Christ’s Community Church in Fishers, Indiana. Nate has written, “As I follow Jesus, I have found that I need to unlearn how to live in the world in order to learn a new way of living. The way Jesus lived.” He shares his thoughts on this new way of living through his blog and his new book “Man Enough.” Thank you for listening to this conversation with Nate. [Read more…]
So what do we do in the midst of transitions of this magnitude?
In my recent posts I’ve expressed my belief that we are living in the midst of a massive cultural shift that is changing everything about how we experience life. This shift is called A Fourth Great Awakening by author Diana Butler Bass. Author Phyllis Tickle reads similar data and refers to the transition as The Great Emergence. These authors and others describe the deep challenge that we all face as we live in these times of massive transition.
Personally and at an institutional level, this transition is having impact. It is easy to see that government, education, business, law enforcement, and church are institutions that are struggling to know how to serve effectively in this transition. And in the face of the struggle, we all get anxious. The presence of anxiety makes clear-headed thinking more challenging than it normally is. I believe that one evidence of this is all the polarizing public conversations that fill the news and the social media. [Read more…]
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