God calls us and forms us as Christ’s Body to participate in His mission. We are well aware that we face a new frontier with challenges that our past training and experience have left us ill-prepared to deal with. If we are going to navigate the new waters of our current culture, we must nurture missional habits or rhythms to help us connect with God, one another, and what God is doing in the world around us.

Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

In the past, I developed some habits or disciplines that shaped my spirituality and nurtured my relationship with God. Habits like prayer, Bible reading, attending church, Bible study, all of which are necessary for spiritual growth. These are good disciplines, but we’ve practiced them so long that it is difficult to bring new missional rhythms alongside them. To understand – you are habitual users of your cell phone. Try moving two or three apps you use all the time and see what challenges come up.

Five Missional Rhythms of “Sent Ones”

Here are five missional rhythms that every one of you can practice.

1. LINK – We need to connect to our context in the same way that Jesus connected to his. Look for people and opportunities you can link with. How can you daily intentionally connect with people?

2. LISTEN – Intentionally listen and observe others in your daily routines; listen for openings to engage in conversation and spiritual discussion. Listen to learn about your neighbors and co-workers; ask questions; listen to their stories. Listen to the Holy Spirit’s promptings.

3. LOOK – Pray with your eyes open. Normally when we pray, we close our eyes to shut out the world and focus on what we are saying to God. Praying with eyes open is a missional rhythm because as we see what is going on around us, the Spirit will prompt us to pray for things that we would probably never have prayed for. Reggie McNeal in Missional Renaissance suggests that…

If you look while you are praying, you will see that the heart of God is bigger than you imagined. You will see broken families, homeless people, lonely immigrants, at-risk children, stressed teenagers. And your heart will be shaped by the heart of God to address what you see.

As we pray when we drive to work, shop for groceries, walk the dog, God will connect us with people and reveal his work to us that we might join with him.

4. LOVE – Serve with love. Your service is a reflection of Jesus’ love. Your serving is an avenue to bring people to Christ. Look for at least one way, each day, to intentionally serve another person in Jesus’ name. Speak a word of affirmation, share an act of kindness, give a gift of love?

5. LEAVE – Leaving is actually a missional rhythm. We will have to leave to go back home or to our next appointment. But the wonderful thing is that God continues to work in and through the contact you just made.

Habits for the Everyday Stuff of Life

I believe that as we develop these disciplines, the Holy Spirit will work through them to change us and our neighborhoods and the places we work, learn and play.

This is an “everyday spirituality,” which, instead of retreating from the world, engages with the world. As we do this, our relationship with God is not compartmentalized but is integrated into the daily stuff of life.

Dorothy Bass and Craig Dykstra in Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People write:

When we see some of our ordinary activities as Christian practices, we come to perceive how our daily lives are all tangled up with the things God is doing in the world. Now we want to figure out how to pattern our practices after God’s, and it becomes our deepest hope to become partners in God’s reconciling love for the world.

Missional Challenge

Intentionally practice the missional rhythm of linking for one week.  In the everyday places you go  – the grocery store, restaurant, work, walking your dog – you get the picture. Now, while there, consciously and purposefully pray, “Lord, who can I link with who might need a touch from Jesus.”

Grace and peace on your missional journey.