Image via WikipediaLooking at the rhythms of community life.  It's a rhythm of mission and community, with each one feeding the other.  Community feeds our mission.  Mission feeds our community.

This is what I was reading this morning from NextReformation:

Neither mission nor community has priority; neither can exist without the other. Mission and community intertwine like the strands of DNA. We are a community because we share a common purpose — a mission that began when God sent Jesus. We are a mission because the reality of the Spirit in our common life generates an overflow of love.

At Girdwood Chapel, we've been hitting the whole "mission" theme pretty hard.  Being outwardly-focused is a good thing.  After all, we have some solid roots in Wesley and his "practical divinity" and the United Methodist emphases on social justice.  Even  our "4 Areas of Focus."  We put an emphasis on DOING.

But sometimes we miss out on BEING.  Sometimes we find ourselves on our missions but we're unsure exactly why it is that we're doing it.  Even as we have our panic attacks about not having young persons and tell our churches that they need to be doing more social justice ministries and have more service projects to attract more young persons to our pews we sometimes lose sight of the fact that our life together needs to feed into the mission that we do...that we need to be rooted in God and his work in us to be involved in the work in the world.

What are the ways we need to nurture our community life so that we can be about the Misseo Dei in the world?  In Girdwood, Alaska?