Rethink Mission: Inspiring gospel-centered missional churches

Session 2 on Thursday night was Francis Chan, pastor of Cornerstone Church in Simi Valley.
-

Exodus 33:13
If God’s presence doesn’t go with us – then we won’t go. Is there anything else we want in life besides the presence of the Lord?

My motives in ministry have not been pure. “I want to be funny and engaging – or I want a big church – I want to do that.” All these things enter your mind and you loose sight of what you had at the beginning – where you just wanted to be with God.

Verge: to be on the edge. We really seem to be on the Verge of seeing something happen – more than the traditional “We’re going to change the world” excitement of every other conference.

It seems that the Holy Spirit is speaking the same thing to a diverse group of people. There is no pressure to start a movement – a movement has started – the Holy Spirit is starting it. This is Biblically driven – it’s theologically driven. It’s not just the hip thing.

Be courageous – Biblically. Erase what you’ve seen everywhere else – and just go to the Bible. Don’t just go around to other patterns – to tweak what other people are doing. Have the courage to read the Bible and do what it says.

Anyone can create a new religion and take verses from all over the place and force them together and make them work. We have to ask ourselves – looking at our churches – would I ever have come up with this just from scripture? Usually the answer is no.

If I just read the scriptures – I wouldn’t care so much about the gathering. If I read the scriptures, I would see that we are on a mission. That we are to make disciples. Then, what would happen, is that the gathering would just naturally happen – because I would be on mission and I would stick out and I would need other people to help me to do that – to hold me to that.

We would look at the Great Commission – which we’ve all memorized – and we would actually do it.

Go, make disciples – this is what Jesus says to do.

We change everything in church. We look at the Great Commission and don’t take it literally.

Unlike the game “Simon Says,” with the church, if Jesus says it – we just memorize it – we don’t do it.
If I ask my daughter to clean her room, I don’t want her to come back to me and say, “Dad – I memorized your words. I can say them in Greek. We did a study on what it means to clean my room.” No – I would just want her to clean it.

In Acts chapter 2 – the early church just gave all their stuff away. It’s insane, it’s radical – but it makes sense. They had just seen a man rise from the grave. What wouldn’t make sense is – after seeing a man rise from the grave – they just got together in a room every Sunday and sang some songs and listened to someone teach. You would look at that and say, “you didn’t see someone rise from the grave. You’d be doing more than that if you saw someone rise from the grave.”

Scripture says that it’s through our unity – through the way we love each other – that people will see that Jesus came from God, not through our apologetics.

What would it look like for the church to live this out – to have a real sense of inter-dependence in the church… to be able to ditch life insurance because we know that we are going to cover one another?

The disciples did not get together and plan out the day of Pentecost. It wasn’t a plan. It was the Holy Spirit, working through a bunch of diverse individuals to create a unified result.

We cannot create or plan a “movement.” This seems like something that the Holy Spirit is doing. We don’t have the power to make the wave. “God, I think you’re starting a wave here. But if you’re not – let’s just go home.”

There’s a story of a village that had an old tractor. Over the years the villagers had forgotten that the tractor could run and they had forgotten how to use the tractor. So, three months of the year, the town would gather the strongest in the village to move the tractor around on the field through mere strength. They were able to plant some crops – but it was only enough to feed the town.

Much like that tractor, in the church we hire the brightest and most talented to try to grow the church. What we really need is to read the owner’s manual. When we do, we will discover that the church, like the tractor, has an untapped power and life of it’s own. Power enough to plow more fields than we can possibly imagine, to grow more crops, to feed more people than we could imagine.

Let us not care about our salaries, our reputations or any of the other things we build our churches on. Let us strive for the simplicity and purity of the word. Let us be a people act like we really believe that a man rose from the grave.
-
See all updated sessions from Verge here »

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 9:23 pm and is filed under Verge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.