I want to make another post about some of the things my pastor, Stephen Hammond, said in his message on Sunday. If you want to listen to all of it, you can do so through his podcast here. The section I am quoting below begins at 13:00 from the July 20 message.

What would our community look like if we began to really understand where God was wanting to take us?

Could you imagine a community where everyone was accepted?

Could you imagine a community where everyone got a chance to participate in what God was doing? Even our friends who haven’t yet trusted Jesus? There’s a starting point for them too. Even for our atheist friends, or for whatever friends you may have. Even for people who have been Christians for a long time. What would it look like if everyone got a chance to play, and service wasn’t just for the paid staff?

Imagine a community where everyone was forgiven, and if you hurt somebody, they would just say, “You know what? I forgive you as God has forgiven me.”

Imagine a community where everyone is accepted. Democrats hung out with our Republicans, and our Librarians hung out there too.  I mean, Libertarians. Librarians are welcome also.

…We are a community that wants to help take care of the world’s problems. Imagine a community where AIDS is taken care of in our lifetime. Imagine a community where no one in El Salvador has to drink dirty water again.

Imagine a community where whatever your race, whether black, or white, or Hispanic, or Asian, when people looked at you, they just saw a heart, a soul, and a spirit.

I really like Stephen’s thinking here (which is part of the reason we attend Mosaic). I think all of us must continually imagine and reimagine the church, what we could do, what we could look like, and what we could accomplish, if we simply changed a few things.

I have a blog post I’ve been working on for over a year now called “What if?” It contains all my musings about how the church could function differently and more effectively than it does today. Someday, I’ll get around to posting it, though right now, in it’s present state, it is so long it would take over 20 posts.

On a related note, I just received an advance copy of Frank Viola’s Reimagining Church in the mail today. I am pretty excited to read it. As I was browsing the book, I found a short section on p. 27 called “I Have a Dream” which is where he lays out his dream for the church. If a get a chance later this week, I will post his dream.

I was recently talking to a pastor who was telling me about the amazing things God was doing in his church. The church is 150 years old, and had gone into steep decline. Up until a few months ago, they were averaging only 8-10 adults on a Sunday, all of whom were over 65 years old.

The pastor shared with me that recently, in response to many years of prayer, God had brought “revival” to the church, and they were now averaging about 150 people!

I was amazed and impressed. The church went from 10 to 150 in a few months! And while I believe in the power of prayer, I was amazed when the pastor said that, aside from praying a lot and building a brand new building (how did they fund that with only 10 people?), they hadn’t really done anything different with outreach or their worship service.

But as I talked longer, it came out that the 140 people had come from a big church across town that split.

My heart sank at the news. This pastor was thrilled at the “health” of his church, and the “revival” that God was bringing in response to years of prayer, but really, not a single new person in the community had come to faith in Jesus. Instead, a church across town experienced a messy split, and 140 people came over to the church in town with a new building. Is that really a “work of God”?

As I sat there fuming, trying to decide if I should burst the pastor’s bubble by telling him what I thought, and that it was probably just a matter of time before his church split also, God reminded me that in my first pastorate, I was actually praying for other churches in town to split or fold, and for other pastors to have moral failures, so that my church could possibly receive some of the people in those other churches. It saddens me to even think about it!

But this is what the American church has come to…feeding off each other as we try to survive a nose dive into oblivion and cultural irrelevance. If we want to not only survive but thrive, we need to change. I think I am beginning to see and envision what some of these changes will mean for me. The question now is whether or not I have the faith and courage to follow through on them.