ECG Dispatch 3: Knowing Jesus a Little too Well

Yesterday afternoon's break-out session focused on helping your ministry write and articulate a vision. It was a good workshop with a great leader, Erica Liu from Pres House at UW-Madison. They are very lucky to have her!

As part of the workshop, she led us through a mini-visioning process to introduce some of the steps. One person at the table described their context and a ministry priority and that was the focus for the group. The observation was made that it is hard to vision when you only know a very little about the context and community and their priorities. Erica pointed out that although they is certainly true, it can be good to have new ears in the conversation because we know so much about our own contexts we often make lots of assumptions on what everybody knows.

I wonder, how much of our "church growth and evangelism" challenge is actually a challenge of our own creation? A challenge built not out of resistance to the gospel from outside the church but assumptions about the gospel from inside?

Consider young adults. Survey after survey shows that the current young adult generation are both deeply committed to community and open to spirituality. If ever there was a ripe harvest for the church since the implosion of Christendom in the 1950's, this should be it. So why do we have such a hard time with the YA generation?

More and more, I think the problem is less about YA (or anyone's for that matter) resistance to "tradition" than about our assumptions about the vision of the gospel. We assume that the point of the gospel is providing a foundation for the church. That's pretty orthodox modern view Augustine/Calvin stuff. Most YA I know see the church as providing a foundation for teaching and living the gospel rather than the gospel providing an excuse to have a church. More and more we see that for YA it is the gospel that is the point.

Why then do we think that "if we don't get more young people the congregation will die" is not a persuasive vision for the future? Isn't the whole point of the work of the gospel (reaching out to the world) ensuring that the church will survive for another generation? In too many churches that assumption is the uncritical basis for a vision for the future.

Assuming that the gospel is propelling us into the world to love and serve the people of God so we might realize the vision of not seeing the thing we love die is an assumption we cannot afford to keep making. Not just with young adults but the whole of our communities.

So, what to do. If I had that answer I would charge to read this blog. One thing I am going to try is to make sure that when my congregations start to vision for the future, there will be someone in the room who doesn't know Jesus in exactly the same way we do and might just press back on some of the assumptions bred by outer familiarity.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:PC(USA) ECG Conference