39: Love for the Gospel, Love for People

Guest: David Durance

• “An effective missionary is someone who follows Jesus’ calling on your life and that you look like Him.”
• “What can we do in TeachBeyond and organizations like TeachBeyond, to help facilitate that in our members and in the work that we do around the world? If we’re saying that TeachBeyonders need to be like Jesus to be effective models, then we as an organization, as a community, need to come around each other and say, ‘How can we do that well together?’”
• “Right at the core of our understanding of effectiveness is that our people have to live out the mission.”
• “Our mission is transformation. We’re desiring to see that happen elsewhere, but that has to be inside us.”
• “If we’re being transformed and transformational, we’re loving God and our love for God spills out into this awesome way of seeing the world God’s way.”
• Psalm 24:1
• Romans 9:2
• “A love for God and love for people is ingrained in someone’s heart.  We can help foster that [...] but for people to be engaged in the mission, that must be ingrained in their heart.”
• “[We have] this shared calling to be followers of Jesus in this world of education.”
• Galatians 3:28
• “As we strive to be as diverse as the Church itself, we want to be where the Church is serving. Our rich understanding of what it means to love God and love people, that core value, we come together and have a deeper understanding of that because we think about it differently.”
• “By God’s grace, we can be both unified and diverse at the same time.”
• “What does the learner need to learn in this environment? That’s a question we want to ask in every environment, and it’s going to end up with wonderfully diverse answers, and I think that’s one thing that we want to celebrate within our TeachBeyond community.”
• “[A] precursor to being in TeachBeyond is that you care about excellent education. That cannot be a prescription of a curriculum or a prescription of what a classroom must be designed like.”
• “We want to not be behavioral experts, but experts of desiring God to do something in our hearts so that flows out to the world around us.”
• “As we are desiring to follow Jesus and be that beacon of light, saying let’s go together toward Jesus and become more like Him [...] we have a richer, deeper understanding of what it means to be missionally effective.”

• Keane: Moving to North Carolina
• Heather: Cooler mornings and sitting on the balcony
• David: Completing the dissertation and a swim/run competition