Operation Lydia – an introduction

I have struggled with being on mission in my surrounding neighborhood for most of my Christian life.

Growing up in a Christian home, church, sunday school, and overall Christian environment, has led me far away from most non-believers. Maybe that was a good thing early in life….it kept me off of drugs, right??

The downside to this is that I cultivated a slightly sheltered view of people who don’t live like me—super holy, if you haven’t noticed (just kidding)—and its a view that took years to dismantle. So…now that I recovered from seclusion, I am progressively taking on the task of being social with non-believers. GASP.

This may seem simple to many of you. But it took me years to learn.

Having been raised in a culture that is largely church-oriented has made the concept of speaking, much less socializing, with the outside world a task as formidable as sending a middle-class white American family to live with an indigenous Latin American tribe for a lengthy period of time. Yeah, that’s right…

It feels like a missions trip in my own back yard.

Maybe some of you resonate with this. Perhaps you haven’t grown up in the Christian bubble your entire lives, but you still feel out of place when trying to reach out in a meaningful way with non-believers. Maybe you used to run with that crowd before, but have been so immersed in churchianity recently, that you need to find your way back to the mission of Jesus. If that’s the case, we’re on the same drive. You can ride shotgun.

The reason for this blog post is to set up a conversation with you.

I want to deal with these things in community (a virtual community, but a community, nonetheless).

About a year ago, we gathered at Adorn to see what the Scriptures say about being on mission in our context. The result was a project entitled Operation Lydia. It’s like an hour long, so there’s no need to rehearse it, unless you want to. Because for the next two weeks, I will be blogging each of the four bullet points in that series along with its Scriptural passage, and a list of questions. I’m still wrestling with these questions myself, so perhaps if you have some of your own, we can wrestle through this together.

Perhaps at the end of it all, we will come out less like a pseudo-ministry, and more like an equipped tribe on mission in the world around us for the Kingdom and glory of God.

See you bright and early in the morning.