God has taken our family on a surprising and exciting journey. We have gotten serious about loving our neighbors—our literal neighbors. We’ve gotten serious about loving our city, a place I had previously looked for opportunities to escape. We’ve gotten serious about loving friends who orbit around our lives, friends whom I had once been content to abandon. This book is a call to come back home, a call to recover from farsightedness of heart. It’s time for the people of Jesus to live for Him right where we are.
Please know that I don’t believe I’m an expert in community, faithful presence or mission. I write this book from the posture of a learner and a storyteller, not an expert. In fact, I don’t believe there is such as thing as experts in the trenches, only committed (and usually struggling) practitioners. If I had written a book on fleshing out Jesus in place and space five years ago it would have had the tone of a failing cynic.
Yes, I would like for you to read Staying is the new Going. If you can’t afford to buy it right now email me through this site and I will send the first few responders a free book. I believe in the message, and it is resonating with people in different walks of life. I believe in being straightforward, so here are my intentions with the book.
I want you to examine your life and make changes that render you more local and relationally accessible.
I want you to grow spiritual roots in your current realities instead of living under a fantasy of wings.
I want you to follow Jesus into the mundane, ordinary, everyday moments of life and relationships.
I want to challenge “the success of flight” and share how people are choosing faithful presence instead.
I want to challenge you to rethink the exclusivity of pilgrimage.
We love escaping the daily grind and retreating to euphoric and beautiful places. We seem to find God there in the mystery, but we must not only find him there. In his striking memoir, The Pastor, Eugene Peterson describes his family’s annual Montana trip and the beauty and respite they experienced on their annual trip. One particular year the trip sparked the questions in him, “Why wait for August, why wait for Montana? What’s wrong with September through July, what’s wrong with Maryland?”
I challenge you to ask similar questions.
What’s wrong with right now in the guts of life?
What’s wrong with the ground you are walking on?
What’s wrong with the people who you are already around?
I would love your honest thoughts on the book. It may frustrate you. It may bore you. It may even fall short of giving you a grand plan for changing your community and the world. I’m okay with that. I just ask you to give it an honest read.
I believe God is drawing His church back to ordinary, local relationships among real neighbors, whole persons in a real context, not just far-off missionary conquests. This is not a book about devoting your conquest to God; this is a book about devoting your context to Him. I dream of the day when Jesus’ Church is known as the ones scheming for the good of their places.