If we are going to make the effort of organizing a day of food and games, why not be creative to think of ways of inviting the wider community to take part in the fun? We need to remember that much of our salt and light is the shared life that we enjoy together. The more we can get ourselves out of the building and out into the wider community, the more the basket will be lifted and our light seen.

Here is a question that I hope everyone cares about: How can we do more mission together as a congregation?
Now, there are two ways to answer the question. The first and more obvious answer is simply to do more stuff. More activities equal more mission. Therefore, if we want more mission, we just need to add events to the calendar. The logic is clear here – but so is the cost. Doing more requires asking more of people. If this method is effective, it is also taxing. A church that is intent to always do more will be a church whose members are often flagging.
Fortunately, there is a second way of answering the question. This is not to do more, but rather to do better. Here the objective is to take what is already happening and to continually improve it. Often, this might mean not adding new missional events to the calendar, but adding a missional element to something already scheduled. For example, a youth event can simply be an in-house event for teenagers already attending HEC, or a banner can be printed and a wider invitation offered so that the scheduled event becomes a missional outreach.
The great benefits of this second method are ease and simplicity. By focusing on doing better (instead of doing more) we conserve the limited time and energy of our members. We ensure that people are not so tied up with church activities that they lose their freedom for the other frontlines that God has given them i.e. work, family, friends, and additional service opportunities.
Keeping the latter model in mind, we will soon be adding a missional element to two regular events that happen in the life of HEC.
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As Side B continues to grow, Hill says it has many gifts to offer the broader church, including robust understandings of spiritual friendship and singleness. “I think we challenge the way evangelicalism has often romanticized marriage and child rearing, as though if you want to be mature, you need to be married and having children,” he said.

(RNS)—When Grant Hartley first discovered he was gay at age 13, he adopted what he calls an “ex-gay mindset.” He saw his attractions as a sort of test, something he could overcome with faith. But no amount of prayer changed him.
“I started to think of it more as a gift, as a strength,” said Hartley, now 28 and openly gay. “Maybe there is something about the beauty I am able to see that straight men are not able to see.”
This kind of evolution isn’t unusual among the roughly 4-million LGBTQ Christians in the U.S. But perhaps less commonly, since coming out, Hartley has also chosen to pursue celibacy. While grateful for the experience of being gay, Hartley sees his gay identity as something that goes beyond just sex — “I never say that I’m grateful for same-sex sexual desire,” he said — it also includes aesthetics, culture and worldview.
Hartley is part of a small group of openly LGBTQ Christians who, while embracing their sexual orientation, also believe God designs sex and marriage to occur exclusively between a man and a woman. The group, called “Side B” (as opposed to Side A Christians who celebrate same-sex marriage and sex), is a largely virtual community that sits in a rare liminal space between two sides of a culture war.
Despite their relatively small numbers, the group is experiencing its own renaissance, with thought leaders (like Hartley) producing podcasts and publishing books and group members gathering at conferences.
Many credit Episcopal priest Wesley Hill, now an associate professor of New Testament at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan, with being one of the first to outline a “Side B” perspective in 2010. As Side B discourse was finding its way into online forums, the flagship Christian ex-gay organization Exodus International closed its doors in 2013 after decades of using conversion therapy on LGBTQ individuals. Many LGBTQ Christians who had been harmed by the ex-gay approach — but still held to traditional church teachings on marriage — turned to Side B for a more accepting community.
At first, Side B was mostly offering a theological pathway for Christians to both accept LBGTQ as a God-given identity and uphold a traditional stance on sex and marriage. Now, Hartley said, the group has taken on a cultural weight.
“Over time, Side B has felt less like a theological position and more like a distinct sub subculture,” he said.
Many Side B Christians feel called to celibacy, and a select few are in celibate same-sex partnerships or mixed-orientation marriages where one party is straight and the other is not. These experiences have led Side B Christians to develop alternate models of belonging that honor single, celibate lifestyles.
One such model, Hill says, is spiritual friendship, a deeply committed relationship that’s more spiritual vocation than casual Facebook acquaintance. Hill says these sorts of intentional, celibate friendships deserve public recognition and support. Side B folks also find community by creating chosen families — mutual support systems made up of non-related members — or, in the case of Eve Tushnet, through communal acts of service.
“There’s a wide range of ways to give and receive love,” said Tushnet, a gay celibate Catholic writer and speaker with a forthcoming book. “For me personally, my friendships are a huge part of that, and my volunteer work. I volunteer almost exclusively with women. That was the first thing I sought out, when I was trying to figure out, how am I going to lead a life that is in some ways shaped by the love of women.”
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We live in a world that is not scandalised by the claim that Christ is Saviour or Lord. We don’t even get that far. Rather, the world is scandalised by the claim that Christ is the Creator. And this means that our conversations (or attempts at them) increasingly stop far short of discussions about the Gospel. 

Christians expect to be hated. But what do we expect to be hated for?
When I was in secondary school, (2004-2011—simpler times, dear reader), I think there were generally three things which would rile people up when it came to my faith.
The first was the exclusivity of the Gospel Telling people that we were all sinners in need of saving, whose good works counted for nothing, and who could only be saved by faith in Christ, offended even the sensibilities of my fellow teenage boys.
The second was personal piety. I was doubtless not as good a witness on this score but, in God’s goodness, my relatively pious lifestyle was evident enough to generate a good deal of mockery.
The third (closely related to the second) was personal love for Jesus. The most mockery I ever received was after introducing some friends to dc Talk’s “Jesus Freak” whilst on a school residential. Perhaps not the best idea in hindsight, admittedly—they found it eye-wateringly hilarious. The idea of expressing specific and personal devotion to Jesus of Nazareth, of saying “I love Jesus” or “I’m a Jesus Freak”,  was just too much (and, let’s be honest, reading those phrases probably still makes most of us cringe). It was quite meta, really—sitting there as a Christian, being mocked for listening to a song about being mocked for being a Christian.
I am grateful that I was well prepared for all this as a teenager. The teaching I received in evangelical youth work was very clear that I would be persecuted—hated, even—for being a Christian. And, in general, it was assumed that such persecution would be due to the above reasons.
We could group all of these causes into the realm of “grace”. They all arise from the unexpected and undeserved interruption of God into history. The fallen human heart recoils at the suggestion of its sin, the rejection of its good works, the offer of unconditional forgiveness, and the possibility of a transformed life.
Being hated on account of grace is a thoroughly biblical expectation—the Gospel is after all, in the Apostle’s words, a scandal: “Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block [skandalon] to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” (1 Cor. 1:22-23). All forms of human pride are dashed to pieces on the rocks of the cross.
Accordingly, there is a clear New Testament imperative for Christians to ensure that they do not put unnecessary stumbling blocks in the way of the divinely appointed stumbling block that is Christ. Christians are to live a quiet life (1 Thess. 4:11), to pray that rulers would let us live quiet lives (1 Tim. 2:2), and to become all things to all men that we may save some (1 Cor. 9:22). If people are going to reject Christ, we want it to be because they rejected Christ, not Christians.
Christians, then, have long been reconciled to people hating us on account of grace.
But the world is changed.
We no longer live in a world which simply hates grace; we live in a world which hates nature—and understanding this fact is one of the most urgent priorities in Christian discipleship today.
These days, the reality is that people trip over the ground under their feet long before they’re in sight of the stumbling block. As I noted when I first launched The New Albion, we are in what Aaron Renn has dubbed “the Negative World”—a time (post-2014) when Christian faith acts as a net negative to one’s social standing. 2014 was when I graduated from university, and so my aforementioned time at school was all carried out in the Neutral World (1994-2014). We should note that, in the Neutral World, aspects of the Christian faith did serve as social negatives for people (see my “Jesus Freak” episode), but these were more or less balanced out by lingering social positives. These negatives were largely the things I’ve mentioned: exclusivity, piety, devotion.
However, the primary cause of Christians’ negative social capital is no longer exclusivity, piety, or devotion. It is nature.
The Christian faith requires confession of the Gospel, but it also requires confession of creation. “I believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen”—so begins the Nicene Creed. We are witnesses not simply to the fact that God has acted to redeem the world, but that he created it in the first place. Insisting that there is such a thing as Reality, and that this is evident to all human beings, has been baked into Christianity from day one.
The reality of Reality, however, is no longer a settled fact. In a technocratic age, in which the digital world divorces us from the limiting factors which have defined human identity throughout all of history up to this point, all things can be remade. There is no such as a “human nature” which should determine our behaviour and rein us in—or if there is, our technological innovations are as much a part of that nature as anything else, and so should be seamlessly welcomed into our very selves as we slide imperceptibly into the posthuman.
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