We're on a Mission from God... Part 1

May 4, 2014                                                       

Neh. 8:1-3, Acts 2:14,36-41, Luke 4:14-21

I pose a question… Is Cana Lutheran on a Mission from God? 

Or Is Cana Lutheran on a mission for herself?

We are going to be reflecting on what Cana’s mission might be over the next 5 weeks as we prepare to ready ourselves to call a new pastoral leader. This will be an interactive opportunity for you to add some voice to what your next leader may look like… more about this later.

 Let’s begin with Prayer

The terms Mission & Vision have been buzz words for the church for the last 20- 30 years.

So…What is your mission or vision?.... You need a vision and mission… Many ask, What is Mission?  What is Vision? Yeah… So What!

Many understand mission work in the church to mean… to go to another country and convert people. That’s what has often been referred to as the “Mission Field.” According to Gallup… that’s what most Christians believe when asked what it means to be in mission or a missionary. The same Gallup poll also points out that the US no longer sends out the most missionaries into the world. The poll also says that other religious traditions in other countries believe the richest mission field is the US, and they are sending missionaries here… most are Christian missionaries from Africa. Most Americans think the mission field is in Africa.

The BIG BIG questions are…

            What is your Mission?             What do you think it should be?

            Should you even have one?  If you do… Why is it important?

For many congregations their mission has been to bring people into the church. Back in the day the church was the place where God was… the place you learned about God. With this understanding it was an easy mission to fulfill because people were immigrating to this country and depending on your ethnic background you went to a corresponding church.

If you were German, Scandinavian, or Dannish… you went to a Lutheran Church

o    Polish, Italian, French, Irish, Hispanic you were most likely R C

o    English… Anglican or Methodist… Scottish… Presbyterian… Dutch… Reformed

It was easy to fill the churches mission… they just came. It’s what you did… the church was the center of society & culture. Today for better or worse this is not the case… in fact, it hasn’t been the case since the 1960’s... and participation has been dropping ever since.

Today you have to be intentional about connecting with people, and therein lays the problem for us. In the past they came… religious life was part of society… it was what you did, even if you didn’t believe… Today it isn’t the case, and because we never had to connect with others… unless we wanted too… we don’t really know how. And we still revert back to this understanding all the time. This happens at nearly every meeting I attend with you when the questions revolves around how we do things…  How can we get people to come here.

In the OT… Nehemiah… was the prophet who lead the Israelites back to Jerusalem after the Babylonian capture… and found in Neh. 8:1-3 was their  Mission from God… that the people were to read from the Law of Moses. Their mission was to be grounded in the scriptures… So they did that. Our Acts reading the Mission for Peter was to Preach, Baptize, and invoke the Holy Spirit. Our gospel reading from Luke, Jesus’ Mission was to tell the Good News to the Poor, announce Freedom for the Prisoners, give sight to the Blind, and Free those who Suffer. If you noticed, from our reading in the OT to Luke, the same scenario as ours has happened. The mission was to read from the Torah… the Law of Moses… if you noticed that’s the church… they were in the church. In Acts… they start to go out… Peter preaches outside of the church. While Jesus started in the temple ie church… but Jesus doesn’t stay there, he goes out… and says nothing about being in the church or being a church.

So… Why is this Important?

It’s important because God is a God who Moves

Warren Schulz of the Albin Institute says, “We have most often looked at God as a “Noun”. But, God is a God who moves. God is really a “Verb” God does things, God gives vision, God acts.”

To say this bluntly with grace… if your waiting for people to come here… we may be waiting for a long time. My friends… Jesus may have been in the building at one time…though I doubt it… but today and in the future… Jesus has left the building. Jesus and God are on the move, and they are active whether you’re with them or not. God desires us to walk with him… to act with him…You see… our God doesn’t sit still… God desires us to be active with him, and thus… I believe there is an expectation for us to act alongside of God… In other words, God expects us to leave the building sharing good news because it….

It Matters to God

It matters because God loves and forgives all of us… John 3:16… God so loved the world he sent his son Jesus to make that love known. God loves the whole world and God wants us to do our part in our little section of it. God desires us to live into his vision of engaging the our part of the world. You see… our Vision and Mission is not our doing, but God’s If it’s up to us… our agendas, our interests we will not go far, but with God everything is possible… HOW… How can God move us? The Holy Spirit my friends… we’ve been talking a bit about the Holy Spirit lately. You see the Holy Spirit empowers us to be hands and feet serving not our mission & purpose, but God’s mission & purpose.

In our Acts passage we see this being done. Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit preaches repentance and grace… God acts, and 3000 believed and were baptized… 3000 lives were transformed and changed that day. With the Holy Spirit among us God transforms us into Belonging… into Becoming… and into Believing people of faith sharing the good news.

The mission of God is important because God acted intentionally to come to us in human form to share a message of Love, Grace, and Forgiveness and we need to share that with others.              "The Entrepreneurial Church” Pr. Dennis Meyette

I emphasize the words WE NEED to go out and share… and it’s not only in the Warming Center or Crop Walk, or in collecting money… Those things are good and we need to do those… but it needs to be in all that we do… and my friends… I believe you can…and will… Sharing the good news needs to be intentional and it needs to be in building relationships with others. Sharing life and faith with people we meet. Sharing how the transforming, life giving love of Jesus in our lives. That’s how Cana Lutheran will impact the community.  

Closing:

Over the next 4 weeks we will have an opportunity to share our thoughts on what God is calling Cana Lutheran to be about. 

     What is God purpose at Cana?...What are your mission priorities?.. 

     The type of Pastoral Leader… and areas of ministry focus.

My hope is that we will start this discernment now, continue the conversation on June 15 with our last congregational event, and continue as your top goal with your new pastor to complete within a couple of years.

Close with story… I shared this before, but it bares repeating..

In a modern parable, the story is told of a community of people who lived on a stretch of dangerous seacoast where shipwrecks often occurred. Eventually, some of the townspeople decided to put some time and effort and money into a rescue operation. A small life-saving station was built and the devoted members of the rescue team kept an ongoing watch over the sea, ready to use their little boat to search for survivors in case of a shipwreck. As the result of this volunteer operation, the town became famous because of the many lives that were saved.

More and more people joined and became part of the team. Soon a new building was erected. It was much larger than the first little building and it was beautifully furnished and decorated. And as more and more amenities were added for the members' pleasure and comfort, the new building was slowly transformed into a kind of clubhouse. As a result, some of the members began to lose interest in the rescue operation.

But then a shipwreck occurred and many survivors were rescued and brought into the clubhouse for first aid. During the period of the operation which lasted for several days, the frenzied activity caused the attractive "clubhouse" to be considerably marred by such things as bloodstains on the lush carpeting.

At the next meeting there was a split in the membership. Most members felt that the life-saving operation was a hindrance to the social life of the organization. Those who disagreed were told that they could build another little station further down the coast. And, as the years went by, history continued to repeat itself.

Today, so the story goes, that seacoast has a number of exclusive clubhouses dotting the shore - but no one in the area seems to be concerned with rescue operations.