No Neutral Ground.

Ask someone to read Mark 5:1-20 to the group. 

For the last decade, Pete and Sarah Portal have lived in Mannenberg, South Africa, one of the most troubled townships in the Cape Town area. Created during the apartheid era, it is a community riven by gang violence and blighted by addiction, in which the spirit of apartheid is still very much alive. Seeking to give young people a sense of belonging, the Tree of Life Church is working to transform their community.

• Pete said that “the stories we live out are the stories we live in.” What do you think that means for him and his family, and what might it mean for us?

• Pete spoke of “evangelism through fascination”. What do you think are the things that most attract unchurched people to the good news of Jesus today? 

• What is it that people find most unattractive about the church and Christians today?

 
In Mark 5, Jesus introduces his disciples to someone who is in every way excluded from society – an ‘unclean’ dangerously demonised mentally ill naked man! But he was exactly the sort of person Jesus has compassion for. As Theologian Stanley Hauerwas says, “Jesus did not come to make us safe, but rather to make us disciples, citizens of God’s new age, a kingdom of surprise”.

• Put yourself in the place of the disciples. How would you feel in that situation?

• How do you think Jesus might want to take you out of your comfort zone?

 
Stanley Hauerwas has said, "The most creative social strategy we have to offer is the church. Here we show the world a manner of life the world can never achieve through social coercion or governmental action. We serve the world by showing it something that it is not, namely, a place where God is forming a family out of strangers."

• If we lived as if this was really true, how might it change the way we approach other people?

 
Writer and preacher Leonard Ravenhill said, "The only reason we don't have revival is because we are willing to live without it!” Certainly not everyone was equally enthusiastic about the miraculous transformation in the life of the Gerasene Demoniac, especially the owners of the pigs, who had just lost their livelihood and life as normal! 

• Do you have ‘pigs’ you would be reluctant to lose?

• How much do you really want to see a new awakening – for fresh fire to fall in your world?