Author: MC

Out of the Seats and into the Streets

An interview with mobilizer Jeannie Marie about her brand-new book

By Shane Bennett

My friend and colleague Jeannie Marie knocked it out of the park with her wise, warm, and winsome book, Across the Street and Around the World: Following Jesus to the Nations in Your Neighborhood… and Beyond. With engaging stories and practical insight, she points the way for normal people to make extraordinary contributions to God’s kingdom.

I am loving this book and expect it to become a significant tool in the mobilization toolbox. Jeannie graciously answered some questions for us about the book and her life and offered some suggestions for us as mobilizers. Read her thoughts, then grab a copy of her book.

Q: Who do you hope will read Across the Street and Around the World?

• Ordinary believers who know they want to make a difference in the world, but just don’t know where to start.
• Small groups who want to practice reaching out to internationals right in their city and need practical steps to know how to do it well.
• Teams going overseas on short-term trips who need a good, comprehensive training tool that lays it all out in one place.
• Pastors who hope to inspire their people to fall in love with God’s heart for the nations and need a simple resource anyone could read.
• Jesus-following college students, millennials, and retirees trying to figure out if God could send them to the ends of the earth.

Q: What do you hope to see Across the Street and Around the World accomplish?

I’d like to do for discipleship and global church-planting conversations what When Helping Hurts did for poverty alleviation. That is, to help regular people with passion not mess it up too much—and do it well— because now they get the whole picture. And to see ordinary people with a global spark know how to light it up by taking a first step, then keep it going.

I’d love to see people trying things they’ve never tried before, right where they live, like having a refugee family over for dinner. And then a few of those people finding themselves on the other side of the world, speaking Urdu, eating chicken liver on a stick, talking to a rickshaw driver about Jesus.

And the visionary part of me? I imagine that Revelations 5:9 scene with all the peoples from every nation, tribe, and language worshipping the Lamb. I’d like to rub shoulders with the Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists who came to faith in Jesus Christ because somebody picked up this book and did it.

Q: What is your favorite part of the book?

I smile to myself when I re-read chapter ten. I like stories about people changing. I remember a short trip to Morocco in which I was wrapped in a colorful sheet they call a mulafa in the desert, returning to the white-picket fence suburbs to wrestle with such different worlds, then ended up living with my family in a bright green house in the middle of ten million Muslims in India. That was fun to write.

Q: What was most challenging thing to write about in this book?

How to inspire people to identify and surrender their cultural expectations about things like prayer, church, and even their own religious labels so they can step into someone else’s space with just Jesus on their arm and not a lot of other expectations. It’s tough to describe such a radical theological shift gently without offending traditions people hold dear—and at the same time not use a lot of big, theological words that lose people’s interest.

Q: In your opinion, what five things that will make the biggest difference in reaching the world?

1. People who spend so much time with Jesus, they know his voice and do what he says.
2. People who pray. For real. For hours, because they enjoy it and see God doing things.
3. People who take thousands of small steps in an intentional direction towards the pain, the poverty, and the people with least access to Jesus.
4. People who plant themselves in strategic places surrounded by millions who don’t have access to Jesus. They learn the language, cry the tears, and bleed the blood, until they can train up local people to reach their own.
5. People who figure out strategies such as how to foster movements in urban poor cities, how to mine the potential of social media and cell phones, and how to adapt our good news messages to each new generation.

Q: Have you ever seen a mobilizer be really annoying? How can we avoid that?

Mobilizers who only talk about their specific group, trip, or organization without customizing the message (or even totally dropping it) based on who is in front of them feel stale to me. We could listen to people first and find out their passions, interests, and experience. Then, if it makes sense, connect them to a story we could imagine them living.

Here’s a fun way to make the conversation all about them. We can ask them to take this quick quiz on their phone: What Kind of Global Goer Are You? Then, if they’re a Bleeding Heart, a Strategic Thinker or an Adventurous Traveler (see chapter ten!) we can tailor our message and invitation to fit the way they’re wired.

Q: Any tips for getting our pastors to read Across the Street and Around the World?

Put a copy of the book in their hands and tell them it will get their people out of the church seats and into the streets, right where they live. Tell them it’ll guide ordinary believers to take a few first steps, starting soon and starting small right where they live.

As their people start putting a face that’s a friend on the big word “nations,” they’ll start going into the city, and a few will venture across the sea. The people they shepherd will grow closer to Jesus in the process—and influence the world.

You can point out the small group plan at the back of the book and all the useful tools at AcrosstheStreetandAroundtheWorld.com, like sermon-series plans and an all-church global challenge where the whole church eats beans and rice for a week while they send a team to love on refugees.

Q: What’s the next book coming from the Jeannie Marie keyboard?

This two-and-a-half-year-old baby just got born yesterday, and you’re already asking about the next one?! Actually, I live so far in the future inside of my head that book two and three are already written in my mind.

Dress for Heaven shows how to practically live out the way heaven is meant to be, where God is in charge right here on earth, in different spheres of our life: career, family, marriage, purpose, play, and such. If you write and tell me what you think about book number one, I’ll tell you about book number three!

Q: Toward the end of the book, you lay bare the American dream. Talk about your journey of surrender.

While reading the audiobook in the studio, I kept stopping the sound engineer during chapter eleven. I could only read a line at a time in parts because I would start choking up with tears because I lived it. Like when my rich uncle died at a ripe old age and God advanced some of my parents’ treasure in heaven ahead of time through him after they’d followed Jesus for fifty years around the globe. When I finally gave up my beloved dining room table to move overseas. And when God changed the address of people I knew living in foreign countries and gave them an address in heaven.

Surrendering the American dream gets real and personal. A good mobilizer lives it out so we help other people get a feel for the story they might get to live, too.

A Word from Shane

I almost never use this Practical Mobilization column to sell stuff, but I’m asking you to buy this book. If our tribe helps the book go big in its launch week, we’ll contribute to its broader success, help build momentum, and encourage both Jeannie and her publisher, Thomas Nelson, to produce and distribute more good resources like this. Thanks.