One of the goals I set for myself is to meet 20-25 new people in DeKalb each week and to sit down and have coffee with at least 3 people that I have met in previous weeks. God has been tremendously good in opening doors for me and allowing me to meet so many people here. Honestly, it’s one of our early successes. Seriously, it’s imperative for growing successful churches.

Here are a few things to keep in mind that help me personally as I seek to grow my missionary mindset and make connections with people in my community:

1. See your city as a mission field. This means shifting our view of Starbucks as a place to buy coffee and begin seeing it as a place to begin and continue spiritual relationships and conversations. “Adopt” a local business as your mission field for a month and then begin doing as much business, or spending “intentional” time there as you can.

2. Pray for opportunities and open doors for conversation of any kind, ultimately for spiritual conversation. I don’t do this in a general sense, or at the end of my day. I do it while I’m sitting in my car, or driving to a place just before I walk in.

3. Be intentional. 90% of the time you’ve got to take the initiative. Make a connection to something their wearing, reading, listening to, part of a conversation your hearing them talk about, then, gracefully, invite yourself into it. People don’t usually mind, especially in coffee shops (though don’t get stuck in the coffee shop rut of evangelism – you need people in your churches who go to bars too…see the whole city). Then just make natural dialogue. Get to know their name. Eventually invite them to have coffee or lunch with you. I do this by explaining that I’m a Pastor trying to learn more about my city wanting to hear peoples’ stories and learning what they think about things. Eventually spiritual conversation is going to take place, even if it takes a few weeks, when it does engage them with the Gospel (or at least a part of it).

The other 10% of the time I find people coming to me (mostly because I have a really unique computer). When they do take advantage of it – see it as an opportunity for building relationships and working towards spiritual conversation.

The other MaJoR part of being intentional is that you MUST get out of your “safe places” (office, study, the public place where everyone already knows you). You can’t meet new people unless you go to new places and Facebook or Twitter people don’t count! Ha!

One example of this working practically is a girl I met at a local coffee shop. A few weeks ago she was discussing some new movies with some friends, I invited myself into their conversation, asked them, “oh, have you seen this?” We chatted, she ended up recommending a movie for us, which we eventually watched. After watching the movie she recommended we talked about it the next time we were both at the coffee shop. As we talked she mentioned that she was about to leave the city and take a “gypsy” tour of the West explaining that her “spirit” was calling her out that way, and since she’s been living in her car the last three months she had nothing to lose. That’s were I entered in with the Gospel and talking about spiritual journeys. It took about a month, and what started out as a chat about movie reviews ended up with encouraging her that even though everything she’s attached herself to has fled her that the God of the Bible persues those He loves and fled heaven to live, die, be buried, and resurrected for them. Good stuff!

My hope is that this would encourage many of you to begin seeing the local businesses and cultural centers of your communities as places not just to buy coffee or groceries, or read books and listen to music but instead to see them as places where you can begin to build and strengthen relationships with the people in your community, sharing and encouraging them with the Gospel.