I’ve been posting a lot about our generosity initiative over the last few months. In fact, I haven’t really been posting about anything else because this project has been dominating my days and nights. Today I want to talk about stage design for a generosity initiative.

We’ve just come through our Generosity Initiative at Mosaic Church. One of the most important things that we did that I have not posted about yet is the special website. We discussed making it a separate URL but ultimately chose to make it an extension of our normal site, thisismosaic.org . So we went with www.thisismosaic.org/getloud .

I want to point out a few things about the site.

When you think about a Missional Community, I find that it is helpful to think about a team of missionaries in a foreign context. What characteristics would you expect to find in a healthy team of missionaries in another country? We expect certain things of missionaries who go serve in another country. Why would we not expect the same things of team of missionaries serving locally in our context? As I think about the expectations of teams of missionaries and apply those to a Missional Community, here is the list that I discover.

A Missional Community is a group of people who orient their lives around being on mission together to make the Gospel known among a target group of people (a shared network of relationships, neighborhood, or need in their city). A Missional Community is a team of Missionaries working together for the glory of God in their local context. There are three reasons why I believe Missional Communities are the best way for a local church to live out the gospel in community on mission.

Today at 1PM EST, I’ll be interviewed by the team at Innovate For Jesus on the role of the Executive Pastor. Tim Stevens will also be on the show with me. Tim used to be the XP at Granger Community Church and now works for Vanderbloemen Search Group.

Email is like a visit to the dentist. You don’t really want to go. You’re a little nervous about what you might find, but at some point, it just has to be done. It’s painful to open your inbox after only a couple hours of meetings to find dozens of new emails dying for a response. It doesn’t have to be this bad. But here’s the deal – to quote Smokey The Bear, “only you can prevent forest fires”. With each new crop of interns that come through our church, I share some simple tips for making e-mail less painful for those around you. These are rules I try to live by. I thought I’d share them with you in hopes that together, we can reduce the volume in our inbox, and the length of the emails in it. (Plus I wanted to link to this article in my own e-mail footer, maybe you should too!)