Where Are We Headed?

In 2008 the church I pastor went through many changes. We had changed our name, our philosophy, many of our methods, and even our mission statement. The theme for that year was, “Keep Your Coins, I Want Change”, and man, did we ever live up to it. We did change… I think for the better, as we focused our lives on being exactly who Christ has called us, uniquely, to be.

In 2009 our theme was “Relate”. The ‘t’ in the word was formed by an arrow pointing up, and the cross bar formed with arrows pointing in both directions. The idea was that we were going to concentrate on relating better to God, and others. This is the time we began purposefully going out into the community to attempt ‘being’ the Church in what we refer to as DC-W.O.W. (Desperation Church With Out Walls) weekends. Because our mission statement is, “Love God, Love Others”, the theme of ‘relate’ was a good one. So good, in fact, we decided to keep it for 2010.

Now it is 2011. It’s time for a new theme. Some may consider it odd, or even cheesy, to have a yearly theme for a church. I disagree. It’s been said that “without vision, people perish”.

What if that's true? What does it really mean?

I believe it is imperative to keep the vision before us, to know exactly what it is that we are striving for personally, and corporately. Truly, when we don’t have a specific goal in mind, we can find ourselves spinning our wheels and going through motions, all while never really accomplishing much of anything, except weekly meetings. Of course, mission statements are important for this reason as well. However, while the mission of the Church (to love God and others) should never really change, the vision that God gives to a people will need to transform from time to time, as His Spirit moves and flows with where the culture is at the time.

To me, the vision is expressed in the theme.

In the context of a church family, the theme should be seen in a multitude of ways. Obviously, it will be woven into each sermon, but more than that, it will be incorporated into each worship time, each Bible study, each retreat and event, and hopefully become one of the defining characteristics of our community. For this reason, the theme is vitally important, and one that I have approached with much prayer and consideration. I totally hope you’ll like it.

What is it?

I’ll share it with the family this weekend at Desperation Church, I hope you can be there. If you can’t, don’t fret, I’ll share it here too, early next week.
See ya then!