In January, as is typical in a new year, we were excited to get back into our rhythms. We hadn’t had a family dinner in a month and we were looking forward to possible fruit from the caroling. Jarred and I had also started opening up our Wednesday dinners to more than just Christopher and Erin and we had about four other regulars by the time the month was out.
Before our first family dinner of the New Year, our huddle went around to the neighbors that we remembered from the caroling that had stayed out and interacted with us. We went to about 10 homes but two stick out as important.
One of the first houses we went to was the one were the woman had come out and been so touched she had started crying. We went up to her house and she remembered the event more than any of us particularly. We invited her to dinner the next night. She had a couple of questions for us trying to see who all was invited and why. Once she felt sure enough about being invited she said she would try to come. While we were at the next house, she ran out after us and asked, “I’m gay, is that ok?” Jarred responded, “We’re straight is that ok?” She has been part of the family ever since.
The second house of note was Don’s. We were talking about how he had come out and sung along with us the night of caroling but we were having a hard time remembering his name. Jon and I went to the door and we were listing off three letter names because that’s as much as we could remember. Then, from down the street we hear, “Hey, it’s Don! I’m over here!!” He had been at Katy and Jon’s house to see if they had a coat for him from our yard sale stash. He was just walking back to his place and ran into us. We walked back to the house with him and tried to find a coat. We invited him to dinner. For a season he came with various members of his family to dinners.
Don teaching Jon how to dance.
With the New Year and our newly solidified vision we had some time to take a little family inventory. Besides those of us in the huddle, there were about 5 people that still came from Common Ground and about 4 people that had started coming when we launched in the fall. We realized that they did not know our family vision and that they probably would not want to devote their lives to South City like we wanted to do. So we started the ball rolling on what we would later call the Major Pruning of our MC. We split up the list of people and each of us was going to talk one on one with them to cast the vision and see if they wanted to take part. If not, we wanted to have one last act of discipleship and help them to see where God WAS taking them and what steps they could take to get there. We estimated we would have between 0-4 people stick after that. After all our conversations, we had three say they would stick around. By the time the month was out, one of those people realized that he would rather pray for us because he loved what we were doing but wasn’t called to where we were. When it was all said and done, Kelsey was the only one who stuck.
Family dinners were smaller, sometimes 6 people, but we had made room for the fruit.
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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