from the Willow Creek Leadership Summit:

Many of us have taken our mission statements from "Love God with all your heart, soul, mind" and "Love your neighbor as yourself." But there's a little interpretation problem: who is that neighbor? We act like it's "someone like us." It's the homogeneous principle that "likes attract" (Donald McGavran), which caused churches to grow, but developed a consumer church.

We're called to develop a church that is contrarian, abnormal, difficult–the path of a third-culture leader. What is a third-culture? Adaptation. Painful adaptation. The mindset and will to love, learn, and serve in any culture, even in the midst of pain and discomfort.

When Jesus told the Good Samaritan story, it's an Eastern way of telling the story, orbiting the point, not telling it directly, to let the listener discover the point. And the point is: Love someone who's not like you. The world will stop and say, "That's beautiful," when they see us loving someone we hate.

How ...