welcome to the story.

I just wanted to issue you guys another invitation. We�re going to be gathering again Friday, January 27th at 7:00 pm. Tad and Kimberly Thompson have graciously offered us their home for the evening. They live between the Mall of Georgia and Lawrenceville on Hwy. 20. I�ll email directions out next week. We�ve also bumped the time back about 30 minutes to allow everyone time to get home from work and to make that transition. And we�ve added another wrinkle to the food situation. Instead of doing a full-fledged dinner, we�re going to do some �heavy� appetizers, like cheese sticks or something along those lines. And we�ll still have coffee and hot chocolate. For this gathering, we�re going to be discussing movement two: towards hope. This conversation will have a couple of aspects. The first will be on how do we engage with those that disagree with us. On what levels should we engage? How should we engage? Why should we engage? As we discuss this, we�ll take a look at the idea of �belonging before believing� and how that differs from the philosophy of many churches and Christians where their mantra is believe �rightly� before you belong. The second side of our conversation will focus on what happens when our engagement with those that are different than us begins to turn to opposition or disagreement. We�ll ask ourselves the question of how should we remain positive in the midst of negativity. So hopefully, that should get your thoughts going. I�m probably going to send out a 2 or 3 page excerpt from the book, The Celtic Way of Evangelism, by George Hunter, in the next couple of days. This excerpt should give you a little bit of background about what we mean when we say �belong before you believe�. And hopefully, it will spark some thoughts and conversation next Friday. And as always, invite any one who you think might be interested in a conversation like this. And if you have any questions, give me a call, email, or post a comment. Look forward to hearing from you. Kavod.