Joy, that feeling you get when you are “glad to be together no matter what” is what fuels and motivates us within LK10 (John 14:10). Instead of living out of shame, guilt, or duty, we take time to connect heart to heart with each other. We also ask God, “how do you feel about being with us?” This question gets at our root motivations and consistently brings relational peace as it reveals God’s deep enjoyment of us fueling us to move into our world full of life and presence.

Because Jesus desires to have an intimate, conversational relationship with His followers (John 10:27), we train ourselves to relentlessly listen to Him individually and with others. From our family meals all the way to our board meetings, regarding every single aspect of our lives and work, we ask, “Jesus, what do I/we need to know about this?”  We seek to listen and follow what we sense Him communicating/saying.

LK10 is a large Community of Practice made up of many smaller Communities of Practice. Therefore, everyone is a practitioner and everyone is both a teacher and a learner. Like athletes and musicians, we train in groups.  In our case, the training is relational skill based for the purpose of godliness, or growing in being Jesus-led (1 Tim. 4:7-8).

If church = family, then it follows that leaders = spiritual parents and grandparents (in the best sense of the word).  We are committed to training mature spiritual moms and dads who love wisely, and empower others to growth and maturity. Jesus lived out this value by functioning as a father with his disciples (Jn. 14:9).  He spent three years with the disciples “reparenting” them, so to speak, so that they inhabited the Kingdom culture they were to pass on. Paul and his team also lived out this value by functioning as mothers and fathers among the Thessalonians.  (1 Thes. 2:7-12).

We see God in His multifaceted wisdom when we function as a multi-gifted, intergenerational, interdependent community (Eph 3:10).  We call this an “Ecosystem of Grace”. Even a church of just a few (like a family) can display this diversity of God’s love and purpose, where everyone has a voice and every voice is heard.  This radical vision of a local micro-community incarnating the reign of God now, of God’s future penetrating the present through a Spirit-led extended family, was vital to the dynamic witness and power of the early church. Since every member has been given a measure of grace, when God’s people gather, it is essential that every voice is heard (1 Cor. 14:26). We commit to living in and daily nurturing church as family, in the best sense of the word.