As a Pastor of a church that has been through a lot of stuff in recent years (Church split, In-fighting, etc.) it is refreshing to come back and re-calibrate our hearts toward Jesus and out of that to have been given a fresh vision and mission as a church. When our new Pastor came on in November we started talking about priorities as a staff: What should our specific focus be as a church over the coming years? We thought, talked and prayed about it in our time together, went away on a retreat and focused our attention on what God was calling us to do. We walked away from that time not with all new revelation about the nature of God or anything, but with a better, more focused priority list than we previously had.
We decided there were a few things we needed to do as a church over the next 7 years:
(1) We needed to organize our infrastructure so that it was functional and most efficient for what we are trying to accomplish. That means looking at staff structures and ministries with fresh eyes to see who's who, what's what and where's where? This is a foundational step in everything else that then follows.
Included in this is looking at our present ministries and assessing how effective each one of them are. How effective are our church services (morning and evening)? How effective is our small group ministry? How effective are our youth and young adult ministries? "Effective", of course, needs defining when speaking about ministry and I will get to that.
(2) We wanted to minister to the poor and broken in our immediate community in way that we had not been doing. This led us to develop some plans for what we call Compassion Ministry including building a Hospitality House on our church property to help support and guide the broken (physically, spiritually, emotionally).
(3) We need to reach out beyond the scope of Delta. In an age where the gospel is being replaced by feel-good theology, and the good-news is being replaced by good-advice, it is necessary to plant churches, multiply campuses that teach and embody the raw, authentic gospel of Jesus. Study after study has concluded that "Planting new churches is the most effective long lasting form of evangelism available to us today." It is based on that reality that we have as a goal to plant three churches by 2015. The first of these plants will be launched in Fall 2009.
The churches will begin as Campuses, thus benefiting from the stability of an already established Eldership, Monetary support, etc. The connection between the churches (campuses) will help to provide people to lead in different areas of ministry until the church can exist on its own, at which time we will assess which areas of support can be pulled back. The goal is to have these campuses as self-sustaining as soon as possible.
Which brings me to our Mission Statement: We exist to Re-introduce Jesus one person at a time. I believe in this mission with everything I am. This statement is specific to our Canadian context. We live in a post-Christian Canada that needs to hear the gospel for the second time. It needs to be re-evangelized with the gospel of Jesus. C.S. Lewis described this post-Christian world (20th Century England) by comparing it to the difference between a virgin and a divorced person. The "virgin culture" has never been married (heard the gospel) and so marriage begins for them something new. The "divorced culture" has been married (heard the gospel) and rejected outright, now scared and nervous about. They have even been pained by it seeing all the dissension and pride and judgmentalism within it. They do no want anything that even looks remotely like Christianity as they know it.
Thus the need for us to bring them back gently and carefully to see that what we are proposing is not more religion or tradition or whatever, but we are taking all of religion off the table and putting Jesus on the table and asking them to follow him, to give their life to him and thus be given eternal life that begins in the hear and now. Thus, we are re-introducing Jesus to a culture that thinks they know him, and have met him before...but, though they may have caught glimpses of him, they need to take a second, third and fourth look. They need to be challenged to look through the pain the historic (present?) church has caused and evaluate Christianity not on its failed and fallen people, but on its Lord and Leader.
We have as our mission to re-introduce Jesus one person at a time. That is my heart and I will give my life for it.
2 comments:
I like your mission statement. After reading "They Like Jesus, But Not The Church" and "UnChristian" it is evident that there is a serious need to reintroduce people to the authentic Jesus--not the misconceptions of the "dogmatic Jesus" or the "culturalized Jesus."
Hi Mark, for the most part good post. However, I believe that it is impossible for missional Christians to accurately judge what is needed in the "post-Christian" world until they are actually willing to listen what that world is saying. Agreed, people do not like seeing the gross hypocrisy and judgmentalism, but this is the reason for "the divorce." People in the post-Christian world want to truth. That is it. Hope-filled, wishy-washy rhetoric is found to be transparent by the educated classes and this is what Christianity has become. There will always be hypocrisy and judgmentalism. The problem is that the post-Christian world has found Christianity to be based on ancient superstitions and historical gullibility.
Regards.
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