Urban Idealist

I really wanted to write on my blog tonight…I don’t want everybody thinking that the only thing on my mind is still the Colts’ Super-Bowl win! This entry is more of a blah-g and may end up just rambling.

So over the past few months we’ve started a new group at our place. The first few weeks were great and then a big change came into our lives…you guessed it…Maisie. A big part of our group is the idea that there isn’t only one leader, but that we all embrace the different giftings that God has given us and lead from those (see Romans 12, Eph 4). My personality naturally has a problem with stepping back…I just don’t do it well…and honestly, never have really tried! So the idea of not being the dominant leader-type is against the grain for me. So, for nearly all of January I just stopped planning stuff when our group would come around. This was mostly because I wanted to see what would happen and who would respond how, but it was also somewhat because I’ve felt pre-occupied with sorting out things in my mind lately. Three or four Sundays ago, a few of the guys came to the group and expressed frustration that things weren’t more organized…I was glad they saw this because Jen and I were also frustrated that group didn’t seem to be forming any direction…it was hard not to be defensive as I realized that their expectations of me were a bit different than I thought…But in the end this was a great learning lesson for me. I now realize that the whole, “Where there is no vision, people perish” thing is in the Bible for a reason…and I realize that God has made me to be me…and I need to use all that I am to serve and not be afraid of being too used…I can be life giving and inclusive of others without having to exclude myself. (processing this is still a work in progress)

Tonight I posed this issue: The reality is that right now most churches in Paris are reaching the same type of people…yet very few are really making an effort to be the Church for the millions of people who would never go to a ‘normal’ church. There continues to be a widening gap between the Church culture and ‘normal’ culture and with every passing generation it only gets bigger. Somebody must be willing to radically rethink the way in which we think about Church and how it functions or we will ‘worship service’ our way into irrelevance. I challenged our group tonight to begin to ask the question: What will it take for us to be the Church and reveal the message of Jesus to the people in our lives who would never attend a traditional style church? It will be a very big challenge as most people here who are not a part of the Jesus traditions really don’t know and don’t care much about it. The gap is already a monstrous one to cross. My hope is that we can be creative, be biblically guided, be bold, and be passionate about this effort.

On a recent trip back to the States one of our teammates was told that maybe they should just ’shake the dust off of their feet’ as the people here are obviously unresponsive to the Gospel…That makes me want to puke. To think that Church has really done a good job in the past few hundred years of telling the true Gospel would be a far stretch…I believe that we have been trying to put the new wine (meaning the emerging generations of Europe) into old wineskins (non-inclusive and non-accessible models of Church) and they just can’t hold it. We need new wineskins…and I’m privileged to be amongst my friends here discovering what that may be like here.