Radius Church is at it again.  Our small groups have increased in number from 15 to 30, and we are pumped about that.  But we don't want our small groups to simply be places to hang out and do some kind of dry study that it totally separated from following Jesus by loving your neighbor.  Therefore, we have given each of our 30 small groups a $500 grant from our church offerings and instructed them to seek God together and ask how they can honor Jesus with this money.  One group is going to help a single mom, another group is going to help with medical expenses for a child with cancer, and others will do and execute things that are so far removed from our leadership team that we would never even know of these needs, much less do something about them, if we didn't actually empower our members to be missionaries.

This is the part of our church that I love the most - the fact that we empower all of our members to do Jesus' work in this world.  It is so easy for people to see needs around them and say, "The church should step in and help these people", and then they call their pastor and ask him to help.  NO, NO, NO.  Jesus put that in front of them, so they are the ones called to help, not the pastor.  In fact, THEY ARE THE PASTOR IN THAT SITUATION!  They are closer to the situation and have been touched personally by it, so they are actually in a better situation to discern how to help.  Furthermore, they have the same open line to Jesus that the pastor uses, so they should be the ones asking and wrestling with God about how they are to help.  But this breaks down unless they actually have access to the resources of the church.  If only the pastor can turn loose the resources of the church, they can't get the church to respond.  We want to turn that paradigm on its head a little and give them the resources of the church and let them respond in freedom.  

It should be a lot of fun as we go forward and unleash an army of 200 missionaries armed with $15,000 and all asking God, "What would you have us do in our community to cause the name of Jesus to be highly esteemed?"  Stay tuned . . . . the stories will begin to pop on our website soon.