Two and a half years ago, my congregation in Hollywood, California, embarked on a journey guided by a question: “What would it mean for our church to have a genuine missionary encounter with our neighbors?” This question itself suggests a whole load of other questions.

In my freshman year of college, a professor handed us a piece of paper with a two- or three- sentence paragraph and told us to count the number of times a particular letter occurred, for example the letter H. I counted carefully and was confident that there were a total of six, only to be told that there were actually nine.