One Word: SENT

That word defines the church.
At the core of our identity is our having been SENT into the world to give the world a glimpse, a taste, a hint of the love of God and the mercy of Jesus Christ.

That word also defines the new paradigm we at FirstChurch have committed to stepping into.

It is our present future.

Last week, our session voted to reduce our funding for mission from 17% of the general budget, down to 10%. That decision was based on the hard realities of a budget deficit we face over the next few years. At first glimpse, it definitely appears that this decision flies in the face of what I wrote above. How can we spend less on missions and yet profess to be defined by our having been sent into the world? How can we act like we care about the poor and then turn our backs on those who are feeding them, sheltering them, serving them?

Good question. Hard question.

Interestingly, for me, this decision is full of hope. In fact, I believe it will propel us into the new reality we are seeking to embrace. I believe this decision will help move us towards our emerging vision of being a "sent" church.

Here's how: During the month of May, we will be having a month long focus on our "sent-ness". We'll spend a full month living in the values of our sending God. For 4 weeks, we'll come face to face with a world in need; with real people who have real longings for community, for purpose, for hope, for mercy, for love. Ultimately, we'll be forced to decide: are we here for ourselves? Or are we here for them?

I think the answer will be clear. And I am confident our response will be strong. We will live as a people SENT.

Are you ready?

A finger slammed in the door

Over the holidays, our little girl got her finger shut in a door. It was an inside door in our house. The shocking part to me was that her finger got slammed in the hinge side of the door and the door shut completely. How does that happen and your finger not just come off?

So she has a pretty good gash on her finger and we run her to the ER and she actually falls asleep in the waiting room. I guess crying furiously for 45 minutes is kind of exhausting. Eventually we get in to see the doctor. The really funny part was that while the doc is stitching up the gash, I all of a sudden realize that I'M getting sick and about to pass out. The doc sits me down and puts a cold cloth on my head. My brave little girl handled her gash far better than her old man.

So i got to thinking about this later and found myself thinking of ways to try to keep this kind of thing from happening again. I found myself wanting to control her life situations so as to keep her from having this kind of accident.

But then I had that "duh" kind of realization: that was probably the best possible thing to help her learn.

Then came the really profound "AHA" moment: I realized that so much of our church life is structured to try to prevent us from having accidents. We are so careful to avoid making mistakes. We set up so many committees and task forces and teams to try to control situations and minimize "accidents."

But the result of all our good intentioned "parenting" is that we keep ourselves from stepping into the new world that is emerging around us. By trying to insulate ourselves from danger, we actually keep ourselves from experimenting with new ways of thinking, new ways of reaching out, new ways of doing church.

I wonder if we are actually preventing ourselves from growing into the full maturity of our faith. I wonder if we are keeping ourselves from growing into the future God is calling us to.

As we grow and mature, the world that we see and interact with changes. And our ability to interact with it changes. For us to grow and mature, we have to experiment with this new world. Without world, there is an ever changing world "out there" and it is a world for which the church is increasingly irrelevent. I think that may very well be because we are stuck in 1950, trying to control our every step so as to not make mistakes.

Maybe the time has come for us to step out into the world and shut our fingers in a few doors. There may not be any other way for us to learn how to interact with the world around us.

A vision for church 2008

Our conversation on Sundays at the Launch is asking a single question right now:
"Who are we called to be?"

Maybe a better way to phrase it is, "what is the Launch all about?"

In a sentence it is this: "We are a mission minded community of Christ followers who worship, serve, and live life together."

Each of those words is packed with meaning. And we'll be talking about that sentence for the next 4 weeks.

For now - the starting point: Mission minded. This does not refer to our mission program (though it includes that). This does not refer to missionaries who go to other countries (though that is a part of it). When we say that we are mission minded, this is what we mean. We recognize that the fundamental reality of our identity as a church is that we are sent into the world. We believe that God has raised up our church (and every church) with one primary purpose - to give the world a little foretaste of what God intends for the whole world. In other words, God has called us together as a church in order to send us out to the world to show them God's extravagant love.

So in everything we do, we have our eye on those who are not with us. We exist not for ourselves, but for our neighbor. So as we craft our worship services, we are thinking about those who don't really understand why we have liturgy and an order of worship. When we form small groups, we are thinking about those whom we might invite into our small groups who probably wouldn't come to church just yet. When we think about building a church in the SW cornfield, our thoughts are not on how the building will meet our needs. Our thoughts are on our SW neighbors whom we can serve through our building. When we think about how God is calling us to use our resources, our thoughts turn first to those who need God's wholeness, those who hurt, those who suffer, those who are without. Our thoughts are on a world full (and our own neighborhoods full) of people who could really use a little taste of God's love right here and now. That is our mission. Our lives are mission. Everything is mission.

We are mission minded...