A quick upload of Session 1 notes. I’ll clean them up later.

Mark Beeson: Session 1: Stop Talking

  • Can we just be the Kingdom the next few days
  • God has you here for a purpose.
  • The church has not kept up w/ the population growth of America. But the church has talked and talked and talked. But maybe we should, as churches, stop talking and start doing.
  • Some of us have been in the ‘church bubble’ for so long that we have truly disengaged from a world in desperate need. So many of us have not experienced real poverty. Poverty of the spirit, economics, soul, mind. We forget there is an urgency and desperate need. And the world is waiting on us to stop talking, and start DOING something to help w/ those needs.
  • Sometimes we shift from acknowledging God for who He is and relying on His power to trying to tell God how things should be done.
  • What if we could get clarity on Truth and stop talking about it and do something about it.
  • “we know there are people and marriages zooming down the road towards disaster and we need to step in and do something instead of just talking about it.’
  • WHo wants to be balanced
  • You can’t move if you don’t lean. You have to lean to make progress. Lean into Christ, into the Word.
  • If you lean in you might fall down. YEAH
  • If you want safety, don’t lean into anything. You want success, you gotta lean into it.
  • Staff salaries have been frozen for a year as they lean into getting a grip on their economic issues.
  • There is a real danger out there. The church is on fire. The world is on fire. And the church is flapping its gums more than anything else. And marriages are going to be wounded, children hurt, lives crumble. And there is no one else lined up to do what God has called us to do.
  • The Gospel of Mark has an immediacy to its message. That word, that idea is repeated over and over. Mark was writing to a Roman culture.
  • Could our churches be an outpost of God to where they have impact on the natural order. In an immediate way.
  • We need to bring up there down here. That God is shown to our communities through the presence of our church.
  • The challenge is that we need to maybe boil the truth down  to where there is an immediacy to it. So people can digest and respond to the gospel.
  • BottomLine: We must immediately diagnose reality. The world is headed for a crash. We need to define an alternate path that leads to life. Do it with image and story bring it to bear on the desperate bottom line of our people. We need to wrap it in image and story to impact