Many of you have gotten to know my friend, Ken Sweers. Ken is the outreach pastor (although he keeps telling me he’s not officially ordained) at Immanuel Reformed Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Brian Smilde (the senior pastor there) and Ken brought the Doable Evangelism Seminar to their church last summer and then did the DE Course Consult with me shortly afterwards. Ken has been a relentless fan of Ordinary Attempts, and actually took our four-week course and made it into a six-week version, which seems to fit better in the one-hour Sunday School slot. I’m a big fan of his.

Quite frequently, when doing a DE Seminar, I get asked how a church can become more “user friendly”. My initial response is that the church is people, not a building or program, and so the solution at the core is to get your people to become user friendly, which is what OA’s can help do. Once people start seeing evangelism as a spiritual practice (instead of a program) and actually celebrate ordinary attempts at it, the whole atmosphere in the “building” begins to change. Your people begin to see everything through the eyes of “outsiders” who now matter to them deeply. That will affect how you do business in the building eventually.

But that is rarely a sufficient answer for most pastors who are eager to change the church environment/mission. So when Ken sent me a little update on what he’s doing, I thought I’d just pass it along. He and his “mavericks” are working hard to connect with their neighborhood in organic, missional, and doable ways. (the links are mine, not Ken’s…just in case some of you were wondering what these terms mean).

I see from the DE web site that you’ve been busy and blessed. I’m busy here too. I and a hand full of mavericks here are in the process of spilling some ‘new Kingdom wine’ into a neighborhood where a lot of kids we are mentoring in a public elementary school live. Lots of needs. We are going organic, so there is no master plan. Our first step is to simply go in and prayer walk for a few weeks to see where God is already working and how the Spirit might lead us to participate. We are incorporating the OA principles in our prayer walks: Notice, Pray behind their backs, and Conversations/listen. Pretty ordinary stuff you’d think, but it is wa-a-a-a-a-y out of the paradigm of the traditional church thinking. We’re going to get off the ground on April 20, after spring break