Last night at the UGA BCM worship Gathering we had the opportunity to hear from Drew Hooks and John Younker as they related their summer missions excursion to Lesotho in south Africa. Like many who come back from such experiences, John and Drew shared the ways that their encounter with a culture vastly different from their own impacted the way they now see the world. Perhaps the most important lesson they learned in the village where they lived was that the only way to be missional was to actually model their lives and daily activities after that of Jesus. Like Jesus, they had to be incarnational. The Gospel became more about living and less about following rules or trying to live up to someone else's ideas about holiness, oughtness or "Christian living". Each day they attempted to do the things Jesus would did with everyone they encountered. In so doing, they discovered and experienced freedom and grace in new, vibrant ways. Today both men are trying to apply what they learned thousands of miles away in their "normal" lives as students at UGA. They are finding that it really is not as different as they thought it would be.
