Kingdom Workshops

Chris Tress and his wife Colleen work for Urban Youth Impact, a ministry to inner city kids in downtown West Palm Beach. When we first met Chris a few years ago, his situation was one of the things that helped me formulate the attitude our community would take towards people who were living and doing kingdom work outside the "umbrella" of our corporate identity. One of the most frustrating things for Chris was being approached by churches offering to help his ministry, but then being asked to "come under their authority" or something ridiculous like that. So I vowed that we would instead seek to become an upside down umbrella - giving to those in need as we were able and expecting nothing in return.

A few months ago, T and I had a series of conversations with Chris about the need to expose some of their full-time workers and volunteers to training that would move Urban Youth beyond convert-making and into disciple-building. We struggled with this question for quite some time, not least because I had been resistent to the idea of simply providing information to people without the potential for long-term learning and application to occur. Chris too, frankly, was tired of seeing people go through training programs and then get wrapped up in a culture of busyness that is such an easy path to follow in an active ministry.

T and I also recognized the need for some more intensive learning opportunities within our own community and within the larger network of friends we have in the area. This was the impetus for our trip to DC in March to visit the Servant Leadership School. A lot of good came out of that trip, but we discovered that SLS is in quite a period of transition right now and not prepared to directly support any new projects like ours. So, the question became, what is the next step?

In DC, a theme that kept coming back to us was the centrality of Jesus and the kingdom of God. Talking about servant leadership, being a disciple, justice, healing, spirituality, the inward / outward journey, etc. doesn't mean much without having the kingdom of God as the context and Jesus as the central figure for that conversation. It was obvious when we returned to West Palm that the kingdom was something on the minds of a lot of our friends. So if the kingdom should be the content, what should the context for learning look like?

We recognized that there would be some who would want a more formal classroom-style environment with opportunities for actual credit towards a degree. But in the majority of cases, we would be dealing with people who just wanted to make sense of Jesus and his kingdom "on the ground" so to say. We looked at opportunities that the Vineyard offers like VLI or VBI as well as smaller, more local expressions like Palmer's Underground Seminary. All wonderful things - but in our context it is hard to imagine those providing the environment for learning we were looking for on a larger scale (meaning more than just one or two people).

So if you've read this far, you're probably interested in what we've come up with: Kingdom Workshops. I've created a little website that will give you all the details so I won't go into everything here. Very briefly, Kingdom Workshops will be 2-day collaborative learning experiences around different values of the kingdom. They will not primarily be informational, but will be aimed at helping us understand and appropriate kingdom realities in our real lives. From the website: "The goal is to create a shared learning environment that enables everyone to participate in the discovery process. In God's world, there are no experts, only explorers." In other words, it will not be myself or T or anyone else getting up and lecturing about the kingdom. There will be some ideas offered, a lot of questions posed - but primarily it will be working out the implications together. The first one will be over Memorial Day weekend on the kingdom of God being the basis for the gospel Jesus preached.

Anyway, read over the site. We'd love feedback from our wider community of friends and welcome any help, ideas, etc. I will also be posting stories from the weekend and updates as we progress along this path together. Kingdom Workshops are not the "end" of this question, but really only the beginning.