Thursday, November 17, 2011

We Have a Calling

I believe every church should have a calling - a God ordained directive that influences its daily decisions. Without this vision in place, we naturally begin to drift into chaos. It my be well-intentioned chaos; nonetheless, it is still without direction or target.
This coming weekend, I'm excited to remind us, again, of who we are supposed to be. Connections has a specific vision. I'll be breaking it out in detail over the weekend, but I want to lay out the big picture here. This is the most succinct way I know to explain our calling.
--Connections is a Bible based community for your lost friends and family.--

We will probably never put that on our website or in our print material, but it's who we are supposed to be. All of us (and I mean ALL OF US) have friends and family who either don't believe or, more likely, have walked away from God. Maybe they got mad at Him, maybe they just drifted away, either way, we desire to see them have a strong relationship with God. I want CX to be a place where you can bring your friends and you don't have to worry about them being embarrassed or offended. We use phrases like, "Turn to page 89," instead of, "Open to Luke 9." We say things like "Right living" instead of "righteousness" and we focus on being more relevant than simply reverent. We have never taken an offering and rarely talk about finances from the stage.

This doesn't mean that we water down our messages or God's word. We say what needs to be said, but make sure we say it as clearly as possible. And we choose, when possible, to look at the positive side of an issue instead of the negative. Jesus said, "Do to others what you want done to you." Interestingly enough, most religions teach, "Don't do things to people that you don't want done to you." Jesus looks at the positive side of things. We try to do the same. We have a sermon coming soon about life. We'll be talking about the joy of life and value of life. We'll spend 30 minutes talking about it and watching interviews and never once use the word, "abortion." People will get the message.

The term evangelism means good news. Most of us have heard that before, but we need to be reminded that we're bringing people some amazing hope, not eternal judgement. That's what Connections is called to do. If you're around this weekend, we'd love for you to join us. We'll be looking at how these philosophies practically play out at CX. If you can't make it in person, we're live online at 10:30 (another easy way for people to hear about Jesus). Just go to our website and jack in!