One benefit is that I have been continuously challenged in my thinking. My thinking about church. About God. About my salvation and the process that has occurred since. My thinking about people - both those who believe and those who don't. Issues about gender and homosexuality. Issues about the nature of thought and perception. The complexities of communication, on both micro and macro scales. And perhaps most of all, about what in the world God wants to do with me, with Amy and I, with our family, with the new little community group we're a part of since early November, and what he might want to do with our now upcoming church plant.
The fact is that that could look like lots of different things. We had a prayer meeting a couple of nights ago. After laying out a few updates on what we've been up to in the last month, and before we took some time to pray together as a group, a couple of wise and more chronologically experienced members of our group asked some important questions. "What is your plan for this thing, say in 5 or 10 years?" "Have you given any thought to how you'll do church once you start having a regular gathering or church service?" I'll add here that these questions were not meant to stump me or to put me on the spot. These two people had listened to our update, and just spoke what they were thinking, which I appreciate.
After taking a few moments and trying to really wrap my head around both of these questions in order to give a real answer, (as opposed to a pre-packaged and neatly wrapped response) I tried to paint a picture that was neither too specific nor too general. I have found that much of my life in the last two (or ten) years has been spent walking through that tension. Amy and I have dreams and ideas and hopes and wishes for what this might look like in 6 months and 6 years, but absolutely none of those things are poured in concrete. They can't be. There's too much that God has yet to reveal to us. And I think we are learning to be okay with not knowing. So much of our story has been about that work in our hearts. And so much of the story of scripture, particularly related to the development of faith in people, has to do with the principle of "going without knowing".
Control. Security. Predictability. Safety. We've had to leave all of these notions in God's hands. We've had to let go of things. We've had to practice setting things down. And then re-setting them down after we picked them back up in a moment of worry or panic. Only to realize that we had to do it once again when we had picked things back up out of busyness or distraction. And while that hasn't come without some pain and discomfort at times, we can also look back and see that it truly was "for our good". And in that process, God has slowly and purposely and consistently chipped away at some of our old ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving. We came across a statement by John R. W. Stott in a book we were reading a couple of weeks ago that really brings this to a sharp point: "To me, the essence of being a radical is being willing to subject one's inherited traditions and conventions to biblical scrutiny."
In that prayer meeting, one of things that I shared was the vision statement for Fringe Church. It has gone through a few permutations over the last 9 months, but I think we may have something solid here:
Love God Wholeheartedly. Love Others Sacrificially. Make Disciples Intentionally.
As I look back at my experience of church over the last number of years, I realize that I have spent time at all three of these things. But if I'm honest, I have viewed these as singular activities or purposes, as though I'm doing one of them in isolation. I've put my "spiritual activities" into categories. And I've come to two conclusions. 1) If I'm doing something out of a genuine love for God (not to earn his favor, but because I know I am a well-loved son of God already) then it is likely that what I'm doing falls into at least two and possibly all three of these categories. 2) I will not practice any of these three principles accidentally.
Said another way, Jesus and his kingdom must occupy the central space of my life. Imagine your life as a wheel with spokes that spread out from a central hub. If I choose it, I can place myself (my wants, my will, my desires, my priorities) at the center of that wheel. And the spokes of that wheel, as I move through life and the wheel goes around, the pieces of my life that extend out from that center will spin around me, and as a result will all point back at me, and will be representative of the things I value. Each spoke has a different name. Family. Work. Hobbies. Marriage. Children. Church. Jesus. Friends. Laundry. (I don't know about you, but laundry takes an inordinate amount of time for what it really is.)
If, instead, I choose to put Christ at the center of that wheel, make him the hub around which all parts, pieces, and aspects of my life revolve, then the wheel takes on a totally different look. Do you remember "spin art"? It was this toy that had a flat, little table that sat on top of a little motor that made the table spin. You would clip a piece of paper to that table, turn on the little motor, and the paper would go around in circles. And as a burgeoning artist, you would take a squirt bottle of paint and, with supreme caution or reckless abandon, drip different colors onto the paper, making incredible patterns that would be nearly impossible to duplicate if the paper weren't rotating. Whatever paint you put at the center of that spinning piece of paper would spread outwards, and whatever color you used the largest volume of would become the primary color of that new piece of
art.
The same principle applies here. If we place our selves as the center hub around which our lives spin, then "me" ends up as the primary color on the canvas of our lives. Or, if we put Jesus there, then our lives, whatever spokes of that wheel we might name, start to take on a Jesus-hue. They start to sound like, look like, feel more and more and more like Jesus. He will begin to permeate all of our activities, and thoughts, and priorities. And this is what I want. I want it for me. I want it for my marriage. I want this for my children. I want this for the church we will plant. I don't want Jesus to just be one spoke, one hour a week, one set of activities - one of many priorities. I want him to be the hub around which my life revolves. In 50 years or a week, whenever the days of my life come to their unpredictable end, I want someone who looks at the canvas of my life to see Jesus splattered over it, in every part, piece, and corner.
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