Recently I got a chance to watch Bryan Loritts’ opening talk from the Downline Summit this spring.  He offered a challenging question: is your church a battleship or a cruise ship?  Take a moment and let that hit you.  Is your church taking the battle to the enemy, with every person fully committed to winning the cause?  Or is it a cruise ship, existing merely for the comfort and enjoyment of its many passengers?

Convicting concept and powerful metaphor.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the metaphor easily extends beyond “the church” when I consider who the church is.  The church, you see, is me.  And you, if you are a follower of Jesus Christ.  So I have to look at my own life.  At my own family.  At my own checkbook.  I have to ask myself, am I in the battle or on the cruise?  So I thought of a few questions I am wrestling with that you might want to ask yourself as well.

1. Am I getting orders from the Admiral or giving orders to the cruise director?

2. Do I eat and sleep where my commanding officer tells me, or do I spend my time deciding which buffet to visit?

3. Do I start each day equipping myself for battle or do I begin my day planning how I will entertain myself?

4. At the end of my days am I weary from work for the cause or am I unsatisfied because I have spent my day feeding my appetites?

Talk it over with your man or woman. 

Tomorrow, a classic article on “Consecration to a War Time Lifestyle” by Dr. Ralph Winter.

So the name of this blog is R3ally.  It sort of looks like rally, but it has a 3 in there.  It’s clever and confusing.  Is that good marketing?  We don’t know.  But we do know that we are passionate about the r3 concept.  But after a few weeks (and months … is it years already? This is our 350th post!) the original vision starts to lose some air.  It’s like the helium balloon on “The Office” that was up in the rafters of the warehouse … eventually it floated down to the floor and they smashed it with a forklift.  Rather than letting our r3 vision float down to the floor for smashing, we’d rather rather pump it up every now and then.  So here goes:

the first R is for REACH.  This means reaching people for Christ.  This means taking the good news that even though things on this planet are a mess, there’s an answer.  The answer is a person and his name is Jesus.  We want to reach people with the good news that Christ died for their sins and wants to invite them into a resurrection life that begins now and lasts forever.

the next R is for REPRODUCE.  This means DISCIPLESHIP.  We don’t want to reproduce ourselves… one of each of us is enough.  We want to reproduce CHRIST in someone else by investing our life in them.  This is what the bulk of the content on this blog centers around.

the final R is for RELEASE.  We don’t make a disciple of Jesus Christ so we can set them on the shelf and admire them.  They aren’t trophies, they are arrows that we want to fire into places we could never go.  We want to release them to Spirit-empowered ministry. 

And here’s what we like best about it: that released disciple is released to  … you guessed it… REACH someone for Christ, REPRODUCE Christ in them, and RELEASE that person to biblical ministry.

I lied about one thing.  That’s not what we like best about it.  What we like best about it is that it CAN’T FAIL because it’s Jesus’ own method and it’s exactly what the New Testament is all about.

And that’s why we are here.  That’s the single reason we are posting five times a week and tweeting and Facebooking and tumbling … because we want to be your ALLY in living and R3 life. 

Got thoughts?  We’d love to hear from you.