October was our first “out” event. We had spent the month before collecting items for our yard sale and we had a good variety of things. We had a couple people come help us organize the things the day before and a couple more people show up to help us manage the yard sale itself.
On the day of the yard sale, we met around 30 neighbors. Our huddle was specifically looking for people of peace that might be people we could do family with. There were several potential people that we kept a mental note of to look for the next time around.
Another nice surprise was that one family came through looking for a youth’s suit for a funeral he was going to. We hadn’t had many men’s clothes donated and definitely nothing as nice as a suit in a boy’s size. He looked through the clothes and found a suit that fit him perfectly. He was happy and we were thrilled beyond belief.
Our family dinners continued. Each dinner we would go out and try and find people that were out to invite them to dinner before we started. One time, a small group met up with Fast Eddie and Greg. They came and immediately felt welcomed and part of the family, so they kept coming back. They quickly felt a part of the group and would invite friends to all the gatherings.
We had many visitors come through our family dinners from the various churches we attended or friends we knew. People wanted to check out what we were doing and “okay” it. By the end of the month, we had had almost 100 people come through for dinners and had a regular group of about 20. Of those, three were people that had come from the neighborhood and about 10 were people from our churches who had not come to Common Ground.
One thing Jarred and I started was dinners at our house once a week. This was slightly different from our large group gathering because it was not in our Holly Hills neighborhood and there was really no mission. The reason we started to do it was two-fold. First and foremost, we looked into the future and thought of what we would want our family to look like when we had children of various ages. It will be important for us to let our kids feel like they have authority to invite their peers into our lives as well and one way we could foresee that happening was to have a regular time to invite people over for dinner. We thought if it’s going to be important in the future to have such a rhythm, why not start now?
The second reason we wanted to do dinners once a week was to open our lives up specifically to Christopher and his girlfriend Erin. Erin was not in our huddle and Christopher up until this point had had the least access to our lives because he had not been in our section of Common Ground. Christopher also seemed to have the most potential to start the next missional community because he had many friends in the core group of the current MC and a burning mission for orphaned children. We wanted to make sure that if he was on the fast track to do MCs, he had a lot of access to our information as well as our lifestyle.
As always, we would love to hear about what you are doing with missional communities in your context. Please feel free to share in a comment below. Also, if you have questions about anything we are doing, feel free to ask and we will get back to you as quickly as possible! Thanks for following along.
Love,
The Irby's
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