FISHERS OF MEN OR KEEPERS OF AQUARIUMS
One of the first men I met upon our move to Phoenix was Pastor Steve from the central corridor. I will not soon forget Steve’s explanation regarding his radical paradigm shift for the mission of his church. He had been feeling bad about the declining membership and praying about why the community was not coming to their church. Steve recollected the day he clearly heard God say, “Quit wondering why they are not coming in to your church and go out to them.” You can imagine how this philosophical shift drastically turned this church’s day to day operations upside down, or as Steve quipped, “turned everything right side up.”
Sadly many churches and non-profits are more about their name than their cause. The proverb “It is easy to write a mission statement and hard to live up to it” is legitimate. One of the great questions we must continually keep in front of ourselves and our teams is “Who are we and why do we exist?” My supposition is that the answer to this question will nearly always lead our church and/or organization to be externally focused and mission oriented. I speculate that rarely will the answer to this question lead to “holy huddles” but instead to decentralized institutions attentive to their cause and focused on changing the world!
Consequently, there are many churches and/or organizations that remain focused on who they are and why they exist – many are having powerful and profound results in changing lives and communities. Recently, I had the privilege of speaking at a small church in Payson, Arizona and was amazed to hear the story of how they have impacted their own community. Expedition is a church for people “who don’t like to go to church” and was launched with the philosophy of giving away half the money it recieves from offerings. Donovan Christian, the pastor (seriously, if you had to give a pastor a name could you get much better than that?), shared that a quarter of their resources is directed to aid international efforts and a quarter remains to help their own community. One week the leadership made an innovative choice to allow the people of the church to give away the money as “they are the ones who know best where the need is.” So on a Sunday everyone 13-17 was given $50 and everyone over 18 was given $100 with the direction to use it that week to meet the needs in their community. The results were staggering and as Donovan shared, “There is no way our leadership team could ever have planned or identified all the needs met that week.” Consequently, this radical idea stemmed from the words of Donovan and one of Expedition’s core beliefs, “We don’t exist to build our own kingdom”! (For more information on Expedition you can read an article from their local paper here.)
A pastor recently shared with me, “We have quit being fishers of men and have become keepers of aquariums.” Few of us would argue. Yet, there are many who have not allowed their focus to become more about their name than their cause, many who don’t exist to build their own kingdom, and many who continue to ask, “Who are we and why do we exist?” And like Expedition Church they are part of changing the world!