Where there is no vision, the people perish. Proverbs 29:18
The old preacher joke about that verse goes like this: “Where there is no vision, the people parish.” Without something that compels us to keep moving out and looking beyond we settle into a safe, comfortable parish, which the Bible says leads to perishing. Just look at the numbers of dying or already closed churches across our country. You have to believe that in their beginning was an adventurous spirit that dreamed and dared. What changed? My guess is it wasn’t a single experience. It's more like the ebb of getting used to things the way they are and becoming resistant to anything different. Before long, just holding things together becomes an impossible mission. But with vision, people persevere!
This Sunday I will do what I have done only a handful of times in my ministry, share a vision message for the church. This comes from the work of a group that spent the better part of last year discerning God’s preferred picture for the future of St. Luke’s. While it’s a group effort, it’s my job to speak it, and that always comes with a sense of foreboding. There is excitement about sharing what a group of people has discerned as God’s direction, but there’s also apprehension—what if the people don’t want to go there? In other words, Sundays like this give me a profound awareness of what it means to live out the pastor-priest role and stand between the holy and the earthly. Looking to God and sharing a divine dream is inspiring. Worrying about reactions and how to get people supportive is human. Times like this remind me not to elevate God’s role and not over-elevate my own.
My job is to speak what people have been hearing from God. My job is not to force people to come along, but to share a dream of what can be, and invite people to be a part of the dreaming process by sharing their ideas, having their own space to pray and see and feel what God is stirring in them. But a true vision requires at some point that we be open to glimpse what God wants, not just what we want; to measure the vision against what God might want to do through us not what we want God to do for us. A visionary community says, “God do your thing through us, even if it’s not the first thing we would have wanted!”
This is a big Sunday. Yes, I am somewhat nervous, but my nerves are settled by the knowledge that I am not talking to a dying church. St Luke’s has always been bold as we heard last Sunday. Our community will remain alive along as we live courageously. I believe this is a Sunday that will get our hearts beating.
See you then (or I hope to be seen by you!),
Rob