I've been reading Donald Miller's blog, he of the A Million Miles in a Thousand Years and many other books. The fact that I am going through the deepest struggles ever about church and some other significant changes in my life, this was something I needed to hear from him.
"In John 7, Jesus decides to go to Galilee and avoid Judea because the Jews in Judea were hatching a plan to kill Him. I often turn my faith into voodoo like seances and emotion-filled prayers in seeking God’s will, while Jesus Himself just uses common sense. I’m not going to Judea, He says, because those guys are trying to kill me. I’ll go over to Galilee instead. I hear they have a Dairy Queen.
I remember reading a big report from a church I used to go to, a vision statement outlining the plan for the church to grow. It involved buying new property and building a new building and more than quadrupling the size of the congregation over the next twenty years or so. When I read it, I remember thinking that the vision lacked common sense. The church was in a rural area, and there was no growth happening in the community. It seemed like, if you wanted to reach more people, you’d just send another pastor into an area closer to town and plant another church. It would be a lot cheaper to do it that way anyway. But the vision was couched in a lot of God talk, a lot of talk about how it was “bathed in prayer” and the sort of language that creeps normal people out. That vision statement came out ten years ago, and very little has happened, save a church split and a lot of controversy.
I find it suspect when a vision for power and glory for man is couched in a lot of religious talk. I usually suspect that its one of two things, if not both:
1. Justification for doing something we really want and God didn’t ask for.
2. A way of defending what we want so nobody will argue with us or push back. How can they? We prayed about it and stuff.
Miracles happen and people get visions for sure. But mostly God gives us a hoe and some seeds and introduces us to the miracle of work and a lot of common sense."
2 comments:
Eugene Peterson asks the question: “Why do pastors so often treat congregations with the impatience and violence of developers building a shopping mall instead of the patient devotion of a farmer cultivating a field? The shopping mall will be abandoned in disrepair in 50 years; the field will be healthy and productive for another thousand if its
mysteries are respected by a skilled farmer.
“Pastors are assigned by the church to care for congregations, not exploit them, to gently
cultivate parishes that are plantings of the Lord, not brashly develop religious shopping malls.
No, the congregation is topsoil—seething with energy and organisms that have incredible
capacities for assimilating death and participating in resurrection.”
I remember reading a comparison between treating the 'landscape' like a shopping mall vs. a garden. I am much more inclined to go with the garden metaphor, if for no other reason than Jesus seemed to use it on more than one occasion. It also makes me responsible; but not ultimately responsible.
Press on, Beim!
Post a Comment