On Sunday we had a review of where we are at as Upstream Communities.

Kent did a great job of leading us thru a significant question of identity but in 3 hours we were only able to cover a certain amount of ground, so the conversation continued tonight.

What blew us all away was how we ‘heard’ so many different things yesterday.

“I thought we said ‘X’… ”

“No no!!… we actually said the opposite of ‘X’… ”

Hey?

How does this happen? How can a group of people sit in the same room and hear so many different messages?

It is a reminder of the complexity of communication sometimes. Just hearing stuff doesn’t mean we have understood it. Agreeing to an idea doesn’t mean we all see the idea in the same way.

We had some good fiesty conversation tonight as we thrashed some stuff around. We’re back at it again next week and I’m praying we get it sorted quickly. I am sure the enemy of action in so many churches is the people sitting on their butts debating terminology, and yet the problem of not having a shared understanding of what we are doing is that we operate on different frequencies.

I know the challenge is for us to make missional community as simple as we possibly can while retaining the rigour and integrity required to stay true to our calling.