Being missional in Georgetown township

Being missional is hard.  It took me 24 years to have a missional mindset that worked for me.  Before that, it was a lofty ideal, a thing that good Christians did.  It was a concept I didn't really try to understand because I wasn't that kind of Christian.

Then I arrived at Penn State.  My Christian bubble had burst.  The surface was pricked and the tension broke, collapsing upon itself.  I was terrified and mortified that someone would notice I was a Christian.  They would lambast me and humiliate me in front of my peers.  I would feel stupid, exposed and lose everything.

It didn't take long to make friends among my cohort.  We three, Athos and Aramis and Porthos, from Calvin found friendship among our peers.  For myself, I made some of my first non-Christian friends.  Some were atheist, others agnostic (a self described atheist-agnostic even), some Muslims, others Hindu and many were just apathetic.  It was classes like Transport (Deen), Statistical Thermodynamics, and Reaction Kinetics that really brought us together.  It was confusion and unending problem sets and projects, that kept us together as we pored over our derivations and code.  It was Anupam's understanding of calculus that was so so so superior to mine XD.

And just like that, I had friends who didn't think like me.  In some cases we were diametrically opposed.  And we had lunch together nearly every day.  We drank too much, ate too much (purse bacon) and partied together.  And we had long conversations about politics and about science and about how "I'm right and your tensor has the wrong rank!"  But eventually, about "how can we solve this?"

It was in our second year that we a few of us started having deeper back and forths about meaning and religion and belief and unbelief.  It was coffee and lunch and interviews and dialogue.  It was friendship.  It wasn't Hudsonville and it wasn't Georgetown township.  But it can be.

You like going to that brewpub down the street?  Make a friend there.  No strings attached, a friend.  Do you have neighbors that aren't Christians?  Befriend them and have dinner parties.  Don't steer the dialogue, have conversations.  Did your firm hire a new guy/gal?  Get coffees or beers after work.  Talk about hobbies and dreams.  Those guys and girls on your floor in college that don't go to church?  Spend time with them, watch movies, stay out late doing nothing together.  Cause mischief.

Go where the people who don't know Jesus are.  They aren't going to walk into your church.

But when should I ask them to come to church?  Try this first: work at a friendship.  God doesn't need you.  But that doesn't mean God doesn't want to use you.  God works through Christians that are open to seeing life through in the long term.  That doesn't mean shelving the gospel or hiding your faith.  It means real friendship without conditions and taking the opportunities that God gives you.  Unless we make space and trust for these conversations to happen, they won't.  So make friends and let God work.