SE041909
RE: VISION
1. Compassion
In Malawi, I met a pastor from Pakistan, named Rashid Masih. Since I met him, I’ve always known that Rashid lived in a hostile zone, which regularly sees Churches burned, Christians imprisoned and tortured because of their witness. But all was unreal, until Tuesday morning this week.
Tuesday, I picked up the phone for what has turned into an almost weekly call from my fellow pastor for encouragement and prayer. I was ready to hear Rashid’s relentlessly happy voice and braced myself again to try and understand him through a thick Urdu accent.
But this Tuesday was different. On the other end of the phone was a hushed, distressed voice. Rashid told me he was in hiding, in a village 40 miles from home. His family was sent to another town 100 miles away for their safety. You see, his church members were attacked this Monday. 12 of them are in the hospital after being beaten with field hockey sticks.
All because they dare to be part of the Church. But you know how that phone call ended? Not with thoughts of backing down or moving away. He put a young church planter on the phone who wanted prayer for a new work. They were relentless about building the Church.
I was just moved again by the same thing that moved me when we started AC3: The Church is worth it.
- It’s worth sacrifice and
- It’s worth diligent effort.
- It’s worth our best leadership and gifts offered up to God to build it.
o Because we steward the life-changing message of Jesus Christ.
As a pastor I think: we ought to be constantly asking ourselves:
- Am I committed to Christ’s mandate? Relentlessly? Fully?
- Are his last words, my first concern?
Matt 28:19-20 …go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you…
REACH and TEACH. Are we doing this two fold mission well? Can we do better? Would God have us tweak different parts of our ministry to be more effective? No church has ever arrived, so in what ways could we, should we REFORM, to mine out more kingdom potential from this motley crew?
Well, this series is the distilled fruit of almost 2 years of prayer and seeking God’s face for how we can do what Jesus called all churches to do even better. So after searching the Scriptures and conducting research, this is the overall impression we have of God’s RE:VISION for AC3.
It’s our deep sense, that the Holy Spirit of God is moving us to become a warmer community. In the next four weeks if you discern a theme running through the plans and initiatives you’ll see immediately that it entails us evolving from a more heavily program centric ministry to more of a relationship centric ministry.
Here’s reality: We’ve always desired to be a safe place of God’s grace at AC3.
- what we were really shooting for were good things like not being high pressure, not being in-your-face, not being offensive. And we’ve succeeded at that. And I think God has been pleased judging by the fruit we’ve seen over the years. People who wouldn’t step foot in another church have come to AC3 because it was safe place to investigate faith in Christ.
And this is our unique thumbprint as a church. But this is our next step of growth. To add to our reputation as a safe community by focusing more intensely than we ever have on being relationally warmer…
- FOR THE SAKE OF REACHING SEEKERS and
- FOR THE SAKE OF TEACHING BELIEVERS
There was just a convergence of Scriptural mandate, congregational feedback and community polling… that this is where God is moving us. And it all converged eventually into a 5 year plan which I’m calling, “GETTING WARMER”.
- It says God’s call on us is to get warmer relationally and
- it also says through constant reform we’re getting closer to being that redemptive New Testament community we’ve always wanted to be.
GETTING WARMER then broke out into 4 big initiatives and we’ll handle one a week:
- COMPASSION: Allen Creek Community Center
- ALIGNMENT: Re-designed Weekend Services
- RELATIONSHIP: Discipleship Environments
- LEGACY: The Next Generation
So today let’s talk about the first initiative ALLEN CREEK COMMUNITY CENTER.
It is a goal to launch and maintain a public space where a church meets, not a church space that tries to appear public. This COMMUNITY CENTER will be a multi use facility that will be home to our Seeds ministry and various other community outreach services which I’ll elaborate on later.
This initiative began with answers to two questions.
- WHAT IS A CHURCH SUPPOSED TO BE ABOUT?
- WHO IS ALLEN CREEK ALLEN?
WHAT IS THE CHURCH TO BE ABOUT?
Regarding the first question, the answer came from Scripture in two Greek Words:
- Martyr
- Diakonos
Which means:
- Witness and
- Servant.
The church has two roles in the world. So a huge piece of who we are in the world is to call others to consider the evidence for Christ and invite them to repentance, literally a change of mind, and spiritual rebirth.
But the second role is to be Servant. Our role is to serve real needs. Jesus proclaimed the coming of his Kingdom with these words:
Luke 4:18-19
The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to release the oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."
Compassion was central to everything Jesus did, feeding the hungry, healing the sick, doing good. Why isn’t this as high on our priority list as it was on Jesus’?
- we think meeting physical needs might be a distraction to our prime mandate to talk about the gospel.
- maybe we think an emphasis on compassion would chase away one group of seekers who would look with disdain at those in physical need being served and stay away.
- Or maybe we think it would diminish the need for true repentance and turning to Christ for our sin problem, if people see us doing good deeds and start to think that helping poor people is how you get to heaven.
Either way, it was a false dichotomy. The early church was radically committed to compassion, to servanthood, to helping others. AND it was radically committed to persuasion evangelism, calling people to person faith in Christ as Rescuer and Leader.
- Martyr AND
- Diakonos
So the more we looked at Scripture and our own experience, we could see God pushing AC3 to unleash unprecedented amounts of compassion onto our city and our world in the future. (Actually it has been starting long before today. God’s already working. We’re just joining him where we already see him working).
But then the second question formed the Allen Creek Community Center initiative:
2. WHO ALLEN CREEK ALLEN?
Allen Creek Allen is our template of the quintessential non-church going person in Snohomish county. We’ve wanted to understand him, what makes him tick, what are his views of church and Christianity because if we’re going to be effective in turning him into a fully devoted follower of Jesus some day, we better know our starting point.
In 1995 when we polled our average non-church going person, we asked him one question: “Why don’t you go to church?” We noted that his objections to church were primarily stylistic. He was actually quite open to coming to church. He wanted to come, but because of forms and technique and language and stylistic barriers he felt like an outsider. So we went about crafting a service that was designed to remove some of those barriers without removing the unchanging aspects of our Biblical faith.
A safe place to hear a dangerous message, we said.
But people and cultures change and we wanted to know now how Allen has changed if at all. So we surveyed him again and these were some of the responses we got:
- “I’m a good person…don’t want to be told I’m not one”
- “organized religion contributes to …backwards attitudes.”
- “going to church not necessary to being a spiritual person”
- “don’t believe in either God or the message of the church”
- “bad childhood connections”
- “time and proximity issues”
- “I’m not religious enough, it’s scary.”
Some of the same issues were still there: Fears of judgmentalism, and bad experiences with churches in the past still are very prevalent. But what struck us is that Allen’s philosophical objections are much stronger than 15 years ago. 15 years ago, Allen didn’t feel bad about church so much as confused by it. He was willing to give it another look, if it could make sense to him.
Today, church doesn’t confuse Allen so much as anger him. He’s not sad to be left out, he’s indifferent. And his feeling is that Christians are narrow, bigoted and dogmatic. And so our services are much less of a concern to him than is our politics and his perception that we’re exclusive, closed minded, anti-science, anti-homosexual, heartless about the poor and careless about our planet.
And the crowning discovery in all of this was uncovering the fact that Allen Creek Allen, is for the most part, staying away from AC3. At a church that prides itself in reaching earnest spiritual outsiders, that was a shocking thing to discover!
- 2% of you said you were at the “almost-convinced” stage of your spiritual journey. Actively seeking and open to becoming a Christian, just needing more information.
- 3.5% of you said you were open spiritually and seeking answers.
- And then a last category of people were those who identified as simply, not a Christian. Skeptical, hostile or indifferent. This would be the quintessential Allen Creek Allen’s. Guess how many of these people are at our church? 0. 0%!
We said, look, if we’re constructing programs and services inside this building thinking that Allen Creek Allen, at the beginning of his journey is willing to come here to check it out, he is not.
So if we want to do real evangelism, and not just attract new, young or nominal Christians to our church, we have to find ways to touch Allen and Alice and break down their barriers to the gospel outside these four walls. Because by the time they get here, they’re usually Christians, or well on their way (REVEAL survey).
So catch this:
- ALLEN needs an even safer place than one of our very safe, low key, non-threatening, fun, relaxed, relevant (if I do say so myself) services to come to. AND
- ALLEN needs to have the reputation of the church redeemed in his mind. He needs to seek Christians as salt and light in the world.
So what do we do with these two insights?
1. We emphasize relationship at AC3 more and more. We have to open our hearts and our homes to our unchurched neighbors before we invite them to a service. And the way we do that is through compassion. How do you convince your neighbor that just because you believe in Jesus, you don’t also believe in oppressing women, hating on the poor and being blindly intolerant? You’re going to have BE NICE! Imagine that. Do compassion. Actively, regularly. “Do good to all people,” as the Bible says.
2. Second, we will divert people and money resources that are aimed at the hard core skeptic in our services and turn them elsewhere. We’ll talk more next week about how that changes our services. But
3. Third, where will those resources go? Into developing a space outside of services for relationship building with Allen. A place even safer than a safe church service. How do you do that? Allen needs relationship. More than home, more than work, a THIRD SPACE to meet people and be a part of something.
a. Enter the Community Center. Look at the building next door, which we are in the process of purchasing. Now,
i. imagine with me it’s transformed into a Center in the heart of our city that brings the church TO people instead of asking Allen to be brought to church.
ii. Imagine a place outside the walls of church that gives opportunity to build relationships corporately and individually.
iii. Imagine a space where people can come and belong, people hungry for God, even if all they know right now is that they’re tired of the rat race, the empty promises of materialism and the isolationism of suburbia… even if all they are ready for is to be part of a community.
b. The Community Center will have multiple phases.
i. The first part of the center is our Seeds distribution center. The goal was to have them moved in by March. Mission accomplished!
ii. The second part is a coffee house, designed to be both a meeting place for you and your friends, small groups, neighbors AND a for-profit revenue stream to support other ministries and employment opportunities. The goal is to have limited “coffee service” by fall 2009 and full time management and hours by 2011.
iii. The third part would be public meeting spaces to host community activities and groups.
iv. Fourth, it will be a place for a variety of compassion programs: Tutoring, parenting classes, vocational training, outreach pre-school.
v. Eventually we see a sports court in there and a café with food service, a performing arts center that can be used for local artists AND a meeting space for AC3
Why? To love our city. To BE the tent in the center of town.
