Written in Heaven

Over the past few months, God's given me the priviledge of forming relationships and working with people that are connected in the business world, the academic world, and the government world. These are people of high intelligence and incredible insight. Our paths crossed through the common goal of obtaining a Master's Degree in Strategic Communication and Leadership. During the orientation meet and greet, we had to pair off and gain enough information about the person we were paired with to introduce him to the entire class. It was a lot of fun. When I was introduced by my friend Michael as a "pastor," there was this collective "hmm" that kind of went throughout the room. It wasn't really an intimidating thing, more of an inquisitive, "why is this guy here" kind of noise. In talking to people throughout that weekend and since then, I've gotten a good look into where that noise was stemming from. Basically, the majority of people don't associate pastors with leadership. They see the communication side, but not necessarily the leadership side of it. Pushing it further, the reason this is true is because they really haven't seen many (if any) churches that were on a streamlined, intentional mission. They see church as many people do as a building, a religious confine, or something good you're supposed to do on Sunday.

I'm wondering why though. I mean, why do churches fear declaring a mission, calling people to that mission, and maybe even calling people to change everything they're doing in order to fulfill the mission God is calling them to? Now, if you're a church person reading this, you already know the answer, as I do. We're afraid. We're afraid the congregation will leave, we're afraid the board will ask us to leave, we're afraid of rejection, we're afraid of failure.

A couple weeks back we started a series at BridgeWay called "One Prayer." This is a series that's put on by Craig Groeschel out of Lifechurch.tv. This series is designed to unite churches across denominational lines in an effort to unify Christ's body, for at least a month. The premise here is this: if you had one prayer for the church as a whole, what would it be? "Lord, make us ________." Check out the One Prayer website for a number of different video teachings done by some real quality teachers. Dale opened the series here with "Lord, make us courageous." It's an awesome message speaking to this issue of mission.

But that's what it's going to take. We have to be courageous through the Holy Spirit to see anything of value happen in our churches. The fear should never really go away, because frankly if you're not at least a little afraid, you're probably working in your own strength and not God's. Courage through the promises of God will allow God's church to do amazing things.