As a pastor I feel like this has been a year to grow in faith. To peal away the many layers of what it means to be the church ------- and attempt to get down to the core -------- it is an intriguing and exhausting process. Continuously I have people ask me how it is going? I have learned that I don't even have the language to answer that. For my vocabulary has changed ------ and that is mostly due to the fact that I can't use words like buildings, land, and money. When you stop talking about buildings, land, and money ------- what are you left with?
What you are left with is discipleship, but it is not a discipleship that is programatic or didactic or top-down management. Instead it is a discipleship that is relational, compassionate, restorative, and eclectic. It is a discipleship that has to do with following Jesus ------- because followers of Jesus actually follow Jesus. Therefore, we do not follow buildings, land, money, programing, smoke machines, laser shows ------- which in many ways are just an expensive ad for something cheap. Instead we follow a revolutionary Messiah who calls us to lay down our own lives for the benefit of others ------ for the common good.
As I reflect upon this last year I have hope. Hope for what the church universal can be. For we are called to a life that is radical ------- but at the same time so simple. We are called to a life that looks like Jesus ------- not to a life that is a never-ending committee meeting. The Holy Spirit fills us with the power to embody hope to the world. And in that calling to lay down our lives, we will find who we are truly to be. This is the place where we have peeled back all of the distractions of what people have made the "church" ------- and instead we can go and be the church by being a sent people ------- for God so loves the world that he has sent us.
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