Last fall I was invited to speak to a conference of Methodist pastors and lay leaders in Portland, Maine. The organizers of the conference had read It Takes a Church to Raise a Christian and asked if I would be willing to come and address a group of the "movers and shakers" who were looking at new ways of church.
Now, usually, I decline outside speaking engagements because I love my church and love being at my church and have plenty of challenges speaking and teaching within my church. But when I agree to speak somewhere it is usually because it is 1) with a friend I want to spend time with, 2) in a place I want to visit or 3) I think there is something I will learn by doing it. This one fell definitely into #3. I wasn't sure what I would learn, but I had a hunch that there could be something in this setting that God wanted me to get at.
So, I flew off to Portland, Maine for a quick turn around trip (left on a Thursday, was back on a Saturday and was preaching on Sunday back at SCPC). I gave three talks on the theme of the church as the answer to Jesus' prayer "Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." This set of talks has been my standard "road set" for a year now. It's the theme I most want to encourage people to consider. I like to raise a missional vision for what the church is supposed to embody for the world and I always challenge them to consider that their home church, whatever stripe it is, whatever bent, wherever it is located, is supposed to be the embodiment of God's will, the foretaste of God's new creation, a glimpse at what we long for when we speak of "heaven" or "resurrection" or "new Jerusalem." That the CHURCH is God's demonstration of his character, his love and his truth. And I challenge people to consider what that vision means to THEIR church and THEIR lives.
And then I usually leave.
But this time, they asked if I would do a "talkback with the speaker" session; a Q & A with people who want to follow up on the issues I raised in my talks. So, that afternoon, approximately 60 of the 300 or so people who attended the conference came to my "talkback". I asked the group if we could get all the questions they wanted to discuss on the table and then we'd decide where there was the most interest and energy. So, I went around the room and gathered up all the questions. It went something like this...
Question #1: "How could we get our church more involved in some place like Africa, the way your church is?"
Question #2-58: "How do you turn around a dying church?"
Over and over again that was the theme: Our church is dying and "renewing it" is killing us as leaders. We so want to lead into the vision of the Kingdom that you talked about it, but no one is following. What can we do?
I hadn't spoke about church turnarounds, or leadership issues, or bringing change. I had spoken on a missional vision, of the church being the embodiment of the Kingdom. I had wanted to encourage a group of movers and shakers by giving them a grand sweeping vision of what I contend the scriptures lead us to see of what God wants the church to be and that vision had only raised more discouragement.
And this has got me thinking. A lot.
I am a big VISION guy. I believe with all my heart that without a vision, people perish and that without a biblical vision churches become stagnant, complacent and consumeristic. Recently, I have been polled and surveyed and interviewed because SCPC is one of the few growing churches in our denomination and for the better part of ten years, my explanation for why has been our "missional vision".
But more and more I am thinking that Vision, while necessary, is not nearly enough. And the huge challenge of our day is not only recapturing a biblical vision for the church, but re-learning what it takes to lead into that vision.
The "Methodists in Maine" that I met were a great, earnest, sincere, hardworking, Bible-believing, Kingdom-committed bunch. But like most churches in America today, we are facing some uncharted territory in a culture that at every turn is opposing the way we are best at living out our faith and presenting the gospel. And in many ways, I see these same forces at work in my church, too.
To meet this challenge we are going to need a clear, biblical vision and a whole different set of strategies, skills, habits and behaviors. Vision and practices. A clear picture and a new set of skills. And exploring why this is so, and what we need to do about it is about the only conversation that I am interested in being in these days.
