Thursday, June 14, 2007

tunnel vision...my goals



Everyone usually wants to know what the leaders goal is. That way they can understand his decisions and decide where [or if] they should be onboard and online with that direction.

My goal is very simple:

"To turn unchurched consumers into self-sacrificing missionaries for the glory of God."

In order to do this a church must have 2 things that it does very well.

  1. Understand the various means that should be used to present the rescue-story of Jesus to people who don't know him or have missunderstood the message he has entrusted to his followers. A church must be highly skilled as missiologists [people that know how to pull off Jesus mission] and be willing to forego personal desires and ambitions in light of the much higher value of saving people literally from "burning buildings."
  2. Understand how to develop new believers into marine-missionaries. Every believer needs to be mentored and developed into the sort of missionary that God desires. Video/film-maker; blogging; lawn-mowing...missionaries. In order to become a missionary a believer must be fully discipled from a variety of sources and primarily by the Holy Spirit.

Thus my questions about every initiative will be again two-fold.

  1. How does this new thing which will require time and resources allign itself with the mission.
  2. Is this initiative balanced with the mission. IE Do we already have a lot of missionary building initiatives and not enough outreach initiatives.

My assumption has always been the following:

  • People develop best while moving in a direction of service, not by sitting around playing with concepts.
  • People have emotional balance because of worship and connection with God primarily, and with other believers secondarily. If people don't connect with God personally...no amount of fellowship will ever make things ok.
  • Having adventures with God builds internal momentum and creates an atmosphere of hope, expectation, and excitment. Waiting for someone else to lead an adventure is an abdication of connection to Jesus...your true leader who is always up for an adventure with you.
  • Little disciplines build character...character makes the big decisions and actions easy.
  • Nobody becomes a "saint" sitting around talking...it is thier actions that have defined them in history and in our Bibles.

These are general concepts. But they help you start to understand my thinking. A church should never be focused on or accepting of survival or personal or family happiness as a goal. It views itself as a missionary making headquarters for revolutionary world conquest through the love and revolutionary grace of Jesus.

Jesus is something EPIC and so are the lives of His children

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