Ritchey’s Saturday Evening E-Mail

I had some thoughts last night that I thought I would run past you today.  I was contemplating and thinking about the vision and mission of the church last night, and it hit me.  I think I may have stumbled upon something that keeps us from being visionary at Grace.  It has to do with the word you receive each year.  I’ll tell you up front I’m not here to challenge the validity of what you receive, but instead its application.

It struck me that the word you had for 2005 was “destruction” and then Katrina hit in August of that year.  The striking thing to me is that the congregation had nearly eight months of hearing the word “destruction”, but when destruction actually hit, as a church we were left impotent.  I think back to our response, or rather our non-response, and I am pretty ashamed.  Other than going to a shelter to fold clothes on one Wednesday night, we did nothing collectively as a church to respond to the most devastating disaster that has ever hit our state.  And yet, it seems that we had eight months to prepare our hearts for a more productive response.  If instead of hearing destruction week after week, what if we would have been hearing about “reconstruction” and “building up”?  When Katrina hit, we could have rightly charged our people that now it is time to respond with what they had been challenged with all year, that of “reconstruction”, “building up” and “redemption”.  In the same way, what if during 2009, we would have been hearing about “light”.  Instead of pondering how bad things are in our world, we would have been thinking in a visionary way of, “How can we be salt and light in a dark world?”  I believe that these are the thoughts that lead a congregation in a visionary way.

I know that you bring in the antonym of the word of the year at times during your sermons, but what if the antonym is the word for God’s people.  What if the antonym is what we are supposed to major on?  Prophets in their day would comment and speak of the wickedness around them, but the main charge for the people of God was for repentance.  I contemplated the idea of what if the word for 2010 for God’s people is “order”.  What would happen if we spent the year contemplating on the theme of “order”?  It seems that we might at first ask ourselves if there is disorder in our own lives and the life of Grace.  I believe that we can answer that in the affirmative.  From there, we would be able to repent and address areas of chaos in our midst, treat them, and nourish them back to health.  Then, when we see areas of chaos in our local community or in the world, we would have a better framework to respond and the desire to actually do so.

Here is a final illustration.  Contrast the differences between what people’s reaction would have been to Haiti if starting on January first you would have been preaching the word of the year.  If you would have been preaching “chaos”, people would have thought, “Bob is right… we are screwed.  Chaos is all around us.”  But what if you would have been preaching “order”.  We could have challenged people that “the order of the people of Haiti has been rocked, and that God is a God of order and that we want to respond to this crisis in such a way that the gospel of Jesus Christ returns order to Haiti.”  When people are challenged week after week to “heal”, “be light”, “rebuild”, “reconstruct”, “have order”, etc. it leads to a vision.  It is a vision of who we could be, and who we are called to be.  I am afraid that when people hear that the world is heading toward destruction, darkness, collapse and chaos, they will shrink in fear.  It seems very clear to me that the past several years God has been calling us to get our church in order.  I believe that as we have sought to bring order to Grace, He has been, and continues to prepare our church for powerful ministry in the name of Jesus Christ.

Food for thought.  Give me a call.

Ritchey