(4 votes, average: 3.75 out of 5)
Loading ...Live Sent by Jason Dukes
What if being ‘missional’ shifted from being about creating a worship gathering to living a well-crafted life? What if being ‘missional’ shifted from a conversion mentality to a contributor mindset? What is the crucial difference between ‘discipleship’ as program and ‘discipling’ as life? All of this and more is explored in Live Sent: You Are A Letter by Jason Dukes.
Jason sees the good news of Jesus working in a context of radical interdependence. Here’s how he puts it in his own words: “What’s my part in this epic called humanity?’ The people whom you encounter every day actually need you. They need you, and you need them. We all need each other – to know each other. Our lives both compliment and supplement each other. That’s how humanity works – together.”
You are a letter, his premise continues. Your everyday life is more than just a story being written. You were created to receive and send a message intentionally into the lives of the people you do life with daily. That’s how love is demonstrated and how relationships happen and how people find abundant life as they were intended to find it. We live out our intended purpose and mission when we live beyond ourselves. Are you giving yourself away in the daily, being to other people the letter of God’s love that has been written on your heart? We must be that letter together. Our community needs us. Our world needs us. Let’s live sent.
“If people think that missional is simply growing a worship gathering instead of releasing people into everyday life, they are misunderstanding missional. Missional is all about “living sent.” Jason Dukes is communicating a message that is vital for people to truly understand the mission for which they were created. I will recommend this book in my spheres of influence.” – Ed Stetzer
If this approach to missional living is something that resonates with you, be sure to check out this brief but fresh read.
Carrie Bevell Partridge
First-time author Jason C. Dukes has a heart and passion for the message he presents in his book *LIVE SENT: YOU ARE A LETTER. Jason challenges us to stop thinking about the Church as a particular time or meeting place. We ARE the Church, and Jesus told us to “go forth,” not try to get everyone to come to us. Also, being the Church means doing so every minute of every day–meshing our lives with everyone around us, caring for each other, striking up conversations, doing life together. One of my favorite of Jason’s metaphors compares some of us to e-mail drafts: “saved but not sent.” That’s challenging. What good is an unsent message?
Although Jason’s message is heart-felt and also extremely important, I imagine that his communication style is probably best in one-on-one conversation or in his teaching. I personally felt distracted by his overuse of quotation marks and very informal style of writing. It felt more like I was reading a blog or an e-mail. Of course, since the emphasis was on our being letters, maybe this was appropriate. Still, the grammatical errors, repetition, and asides made the book seem like it wasn’t properly edited. Then again, we don’t worry about all those things when we write or read letters and e-mails.
Overall, I liked this book, mostly because I feel strongly about the topic. I greatly appreciate Jason’s heart and ministry, and I am encouraged and challenged by the practical suggestions and stories he shares in LIVE SENT. This book would be great for Small Groups to read and discuss together.
*This book was given to me for review by The Ooze Viral Bloggers.
Carrie Bevell Partridge
http://www.oncarriesmind.blogspot.com
Twitter: CarriePartridge
Jan 22nd, 2010
Michelle Van Loon
Sometimes an overarching metaphor organizing a work of non-fiction can feel a little trite or forced. I admit that when I picked up Jason Dukes’ Live Sent: You are a letter and skimmed the chapter titles, I predicted the book would be a lightweight approach to the subject of missional living.
I was wrong, wrong, wrong. Dukes, a pastor, presents a valuable and eminently practical exploration of what it means to be sent by God into the life to which God has called you. He challenges, encourages and above all, simplifies the notion of mission in a winsome and accessible book. In some circles of Christianity, there is a lot of overblown, earnest and pompous talk about what it means to be missional. Dukes yanks the concept out of the think tanks and conferences and roots it firmly where it belongs – in God’s heart, and in our lives:
“As His church, we have a responsibility to humanity to be God’s letter of love. That’s why He started this movement almost 2,000 years ago that He called “the church”. So that we would love each other as He intended, as His family. And so that we would do more than “go to church”, but rather BE THE CHURCH to the people we encounter everyday, loving them as He loves them.”
In Duke’s hands, the call to follow Jesus becomes revolutionary – as it should be. He tackles the purpose of church, knowing and being loved by the Sender, contextualization, hindrances, our spheres of influence, our understanding of the world around us, disciple-making, dropping our self-protective mechanisms, and some pointed (and necessary) words to pastors about their calling to equip instead of control. Dukes salts his book with lots of practical examples meant to inspire us to see ourselves as the living letters Christ’s followers are meant to be.
One small beef – the book could have used a bit more gentle editing (there are a lot of words in “quotation marks”; this was a bit “distracting” for me). However, that small quibble does not negate the big value of this 139-page volume. You’ll want to read – and live – the kind of Christ-follower’s life Dukes describes in this book.
Jan 26th, 2010
Lon
Jason C Dukes does a great job in “Live Sent” sharing how every one of us ought to be living. We always need new ways of communicating our faith in a changing culture – and this one actually works.
From ‘the bulk mail that is humanity’, to the church gathering as a ‘post office’, to how each of us are called to ‘live sent’, all of us are letters of love from God… and those we encounter whether we know it or not are letters to us as well.
Dukes drills down being ‘missional’ as something in the fabric of our being. It’s not simply doing more ‘mission’ projects or trips (while of course that’s needed as well). Missions is not something to add to your schedule, “it is your schedule” It’s what you’re already doing, but how you convey God within all of that is what truly makes you personally a love letter from God to others.
One of the best concepts in presented in the book I felt was the idea of the church being decentralized. Not simply geographically or in our influence, but that the dreams of our church would not be whatever the leaders are cooking up, but that as leaders we’re here to cultivate YOUR god given dreams. It’s one thing to agree and follow along with a general direction of a church’s leadership, is a completely different thing to be passionately fueled and sent by the unique call God has on your life.
May we all live sent.
Jan 26th, 2010
prolepticlife
Live Sent, by Jason C. Dukes, pastor of Westpoint Church in central Florida, is a fairly new book published by Wheat Mark out of Tucson. The title sums up the theme pretty well. Dukes writes to encourage believers to see themselves as letters from God to the world around them. He wants them to see the church as more than just a weekly gathering, but as a people sent on mission into the world with a message from God.
The idea of a letter is carried consistently throughout the book. Dukes builds on it as he writes about junk mail, destination, postal routes, etc. Sometimes he changes the analogy to electronic forms of communication like email, but makes the same basic point – you are a letter sent from God and you need to live that way.
The author seems to think that the main hindrance to “living sent” is not thinking very highly of self. So he spends some time arguing that you are not junk mail and that you were worth dying for. He finishes the chapter about junk mail by stating you are “intended to live sent to a world who desperately needs to know they aren’t junk mail either.” He carries that idea forward into the next chapter, “When mail gets blocked,” where he writes; “People simply do not feel like they are worth enough to live sent…God thinks you are worth dying for.”
The book has a chapter on moving away from the idea of discipleship (programmatic church idea) to disciple-making (biblical concept modeled by Jesus). While there is not a great deal of detail about this needed exhortation, it is a good starting point to encourage a more biblical concept of the Great Commission.
I thought that the main thesis of the book is an important and needed subject to explore. In an increasingly anti-institutional culture and at a time when attractional evangelism is becoming less and less effective, the church body needs to have a paradigm shift. Believers need to move from a “come and see” mindset to a missional “go and tell” attitude. Or as the author says it, we need to “live sent.”
Having said that, I found myself struggling to finish reading the book even though it is relatively short. I was somewhat put off in the beginning by the grammar. Run-on sentences interspersed with incomplete sentences made it hard for me to follow the line of thought at times. It seemed to me that the book was a transcription of what the author might have said rather than what he could have written. If you aren’t as anal about that sort of thing as I am, you might enjoy the book more than I did.
For me, the book also lacked in the way of personal application. I finished wishing I had been given more practical ideas on carrying through with the concepts presented.
Feb 1st, 2010
JaimeeHolmes
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 2010
Live Sent— you are a letter
I got this book, by Jason C Dukes in the mail through viralbloggers.com. I haven’t completely finished it. It came at sort of an interesting time for me, so I have been kind of trudging through it bit by bit… taking my time to really read and digest.
My initial impression of the book was actually not super positive. I am sort of anti-gimmick, and the “hipness factor” seemed overdone to me at first… I was afraid this would be an easy to hear, easy to read type of book.
I was dead wrong.
It looks easy. It looks fun. It looks hip.
Maybe I’m the only one (I doubt it, and I hope not), but I am having a really difficult time reading of just the stark, real, raw way that God loves me… And this is only the beginning of the book! Mr. Dukes goes on to explain that Because God loves you in this way (He loves us, period. He chooses to love us. He loves us so that we will love.), we can turn around in His strength and love others in the same way… we can “live sent.”
I want to give you just a little taste of the book and writing style. This is really good stuff. No wasted words. And like I said, I haven’t finished it yet, but I feel like I can already recommend it.
“Herod wouldn’t see a young husband and pregnant wife returning to Bethlehem for the census as a threat to his reign. He would have been looking for a charismatic leader with a following. Herod wouldn’t look for a baby in a manger. He would have looked for someone staying in palatial accommodations. The problem is most of us don’t look below the radar in that way either. We have made godliness out to be prosperity and appearing to have it all together. Not an outcast couple who had to make it on the very least.” (pg 33)
“He love us, period.”
“He chooses to love us.”
“He loves us so that we will love.”
[do you actually believe that He loves you unconditionally?]
[do you think that love and respect and trust must be earned, or must they be given?]—OUCH (my words!)
[do you love people for how it makes you feel, or do you love them as a catalyst that causes them to love, even if you never get anything in return for your love?]
And just one more, and I thought this was really huge…
“When you commit to love someone—marriage, friendship, child, whatever—are you committing to love them for what they become and what they get out of it, or for how you feel and what you get in return?” (pg 39)
I can’t sit here and quote the whole book for you. Go get it.
Here’s some linkage to check out.
Book Blog
Personal Blog
Jason speaking at the LIVE SENT 2009 Conversation
Live Sent YouTube channel
Feb 2nd, 2010
Mark
Jason Dukes gets it!
I’ve just finished reading his wonderful book, Live Sent: You Are a Letter, and found myself saying, “That’s so true! Amen brother!” the whole way through.
Dukes, who describes himself as a follower and a leader, a learner and a teacher, a writer and a dreamer, a pastor and an entrepreneur and someone who tries to live sent daily, has captured the heartbeat of what the church ought to be.
Church is not a “what”, Duke declares, It is a “WHO!”
Church is not a place and time on Sunday morning. Church is the people of God — sent into the world as letters of grace.
Church health is not measured by how many people show up on Sunday morning — but how the people show up to bring God’s love everywhere they go.
Dukes advocates a decentralized approach to ministry — encouraging people to LIVE the mission every day.
This does not mean trying to find time in your schedule to fulfill God’s mission — your WHOLE schedule IS God’s mission!
Feb 4th, 2010
Warren Wade
I can appreciate simple metaphors. I sometimes really enjoy little one-sentence summaries that boil down a complex idea into a quip. “Kill two birds with one stone” means “be resourceful” or “be effective” or something like that. “It’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” means “it’s not impossible but when you focus on money, etc it’s more difficult to keep the Kingdom in your sights.” To that end, I appreciated Jason Dukes book “Live Sent: You are a letter.”
One concept that this book helped elucidate (nice, huh?) a little bit more for me was the semantical relationship involved in letter writing (and, by extension, Christian living): what I understand of myself as a letter or what’s written inside me and how someone perceives me as a letter and (again, by extension) the author as a writer or how they interpret what’s they’re “reading.”
What I mean is, I can think that I have the manifesto of God written in me but, if the language (and life) that is used to express the letter do not reflect the intentions of the writer than my letter gets misread. Conversely, I could be a pretty terrible letter and that’s going to affect how people perceive me (as a Christian) and thus the God I claim to represent.
I appreciated that Jason didn’t spend too much time defining the language, font, style, and layout that our letter has to be written. He was more playful than that.
All that being said, I have to say that I think that this book was too long. The simplicity of this metaphor could have been accurately represented in fewer pages. I’m saying this not because I wanted to read less but because there was a significant amount of time spent being somewhat tangential. In some books, that sort of stream-of-consciousness is appropriate and makes the writer more familiar. It kind of detracted from the message for me.
As always, I’d still recommend reading this book. Jason seems very well grounded. His life, mission and message are appropriate and timely. Today, many people are getting “Dear John” letters from God because of who they are. Let’s be more “John you are dear to me” letters.
Christ’s peace and God’s shalom.
Feb 22nd, 2010
for “Live Sent by Jason Dukes”
You must be logged in as a VIRAL BLOGGER to post a review.