Summary: What is a Gospel Neighboring Book Mash-Up? It's obviously the Gospelicious Monster Truck Rally of book reviews. We take sacred and secular books and plunder them for Gospel Neighboring wisdom and fling said wisdom out into the interwebs for our fellow Gospel Neighbors to apply to their efforts at bringing the truth, goodness, and beauty of Jesus to their city, one neighborhood at a time. Mashed-Up in this Episode: ReWork About the Authors Jason Fried and David Hansson are co-partners in the incredibly successful web application company 37 Signals --- the outfit who makes the web-based project management interface known as Basecamp. Fried and Hansson provide a series of contrarian entrepreneurial and business proverbs for the new connection economy. Big Ideas Embrace the new world in which we live and move and have our being...a world where we have tons of tools at our disposal. We no longer live in a world where you need to know a millionaire or big bank to fund a big idea to make a profit. Leave the old world, and especially its assumptions about work, behind. Forge ahead. Plunder Don't make plans; Take action. Planning is essentially guessing. Don't grow just to grow. Why should a church, or a missional community, aim to be bigger and bigger? Why not find the natural right size and then be content? Do one thing well; delineate details later. Simplicity in our Gospel Neighboring rhythms is key. Underdo or ignore your competition. Especially in kingdom work, it's odd to copy and compete. Do something radically different from everyone else. "To reach people that no one else is reaching, you have to do things that no one else is doing." - Craig Groeschel Liberating Good News We should be freed from obsolete, unbiblical ruts. We have the liberty to rethink our methodologies. And we should liberate our fellow Christians from artificially constraining methodologies and extrabiblical church practices so that they might better pursue their neighbors. God is calling us to rest easy and to know that his Spirit is more eager than we are to make Jesus the big hero of our neighborhood. The Big Challenge We have a moral obligation to rethink our methodology. Why do we do what we do? We want people to meet Jesus in a real tangible way. Will we seek out the best ways to arrange that meeting, even if it's "not the way we do things in this church"?
