My View

Sitting at the airport in Oslo, Norway, writing down some of my reflections from a great trip. It’s truly been a wonderful time meeting up with the national partners of LifeShapes in Scandinavia. We’ve had great fellowship, food and drink. And we’ve done what I enjoy most (almost); we’ve talked strategy. What’s God doing in Scandinavia at the moment? How is he transforming his church? It was also great to meet some of the people in Norway who have been affected by LifeShapes. They were mostly young (as in under 30) leaders with vision for change in themselves and in the churches and people they lead. Hearing people share vision makes my heart race, so you can imagine what this was like.

There’s hope for Norway!

The other thing that really struck me was seeing these guys really taking the simplicity of LifeShapes and using it. You can dig into a shape and study it for hours (or weeks or years), but you can also present the core of it in a few minutes. That’s potential for life changing discipleship if anything. Mike Breen has said that this is “simple and hard, not easy and complex”. Simple to grasp, hard (work) to implement, but not complex to grasp and easy to implement. So true.

If you haven’t run into LifeShapes yet, read A Passionate Life by Mike Breen and Walt Kallestad. Or even better, visit St Thomas’ Church in Sheffield, UK. It will blow your mind (both the book and the church).