Now that we have begun a new year I'm struck by the new opportunities before us. 2011 seemed like a year of growth in so many ways, a year that positioned us to make significant Kingdom contributions in 2012.
Reflecting on the journey we have been on brought to mind patterns we've observed in our various approaches to "church." Traditionally, the church was viewed as the primary receptor and distributor of God's grace (sacraments, etc.), and the focus was on "going to church." Everyone needed what the church provided in order to survive on the way to God's Heavenly Kingdom.
That model of church served us well (at least from around AD 100 to the 1970s). Then a new generation (my Baby Boomer generation) began to see the need to innovate, to change things up in the church. The focus became more on "church growth" and being "culturally relevant." Whether it involved a "seeker-sensitive model" or the more recent "emerging church model," the emphasis was on "doing church." Our various congregations were judged on how successfully they "did church" in their immediate context.
The more recent Baby Boomer model of "doing church" measures success in terms of Bodies, Buildings and Budgets. How many bodies are we attracting onto our church campus? How well are we doing building elaborate structures that house our new, culturally relevant ways of doing church? And, because "if you build it they will come," how well are we able to raise the money needed to keep feeding the seeker machine?
It was Dietrich Bonhoeffer that noted the absence of a well-developed doctrine of the church (ecclesiology) in America. For that reason, we are free to tweak our model of the church any way we desire, so long as it meets the need of the moment. However, at some point it might be nice to ask how the Bible defines and describes the church, and how we match up with that description. All of us claim to be a "New Testament Church," and even an "Acts Two" church, but are we really?
For us, 2011 was an opportunity to take a critical look at how we view the church and compare that to what God says about the church. For that reason, we are moving away from the "Bodies/Buildings/Budgets" scorecard to a "Transformation Scorecard." At our New Community Church Vision Night service last week we described the new scorecard in terms of "Communion, Community, and Commission." "Communion" refers to our personal relationship with God and our progressive experience of being transformed into the likeness of Christ. "Community" clearly points to the fact that spiritual formation can only take place in relationship; we need God, but we also need each other. "Commission" acknowledges that Communion and Community alone has the potential of turning us into a spiritually inbred club. We are called to live on mission with Christ in the world. The simple fact is this: Transformed people transform the world."
And so, we are asking God to do something new, something more in and through our lives this year. We want to do so much more than "go to church" or "do church." We want to "be the church." We want to experience true transformation as a people in community, and then represent Jesus as salt and light, as instruments of transformation in our time and place. And this we will do, by God's grace.
