The Vision Thing

Two presentations at the recent Presbytery meeting focused on church renewal. Both presentations used similar material, and each emphasized that for a church to develop and maintain its vitality it must have a vision that drives everything that it does. It is not enough to have programs or to develop relationships among members; those programs and relationships must serve a purpose, and the church must know what that purpose is. Our churches do many things--among others, they provide for the public worship of God, education for adults and children, and opportunities for fellowship, they support those who experience difficult times, and they serve their communities and the world. Each of these things is important in itself, but the church needs a unifying vision of its ultimate purpose in order to know how they relate to each other. Without a vision, every separate thing that we do stands on its own, and the whole cannot survive.

Many organizations, of course, sense the need for a vision in order to understand what they are doing; in business circles it has become a cliche. The difference for us is that we do not need to create a vision of our own; we need to discover the vision that we have been given. Each church, in its own way, needs to understand, accept, and act on the vision that Jesus has given us. That vision, in short, is to be Christ's body on earth and, with His help, to work for the coming of the Kingdom of God. This may not be our first thought as we think about our churches' purposes, but it should be. As Harold Kurtz pointed out a year ago, in reflecting on the results of an exercise on "Who Jesus Is" at the November 2008, Presbytery meeting,

we have neglected the central teaching of Jesus—the Kingdom of God or Kingdom of Heaven. Jesus used our word for “church” three times in the Gospels and the Kingdom over one hundred times. In what we read and hear in Christian circles that is almost reversed—the “church” used one hundred times and the Kingdom three! The Kingdom needs to come to every aspect of our communities and of the world. That is the prayer Jesus taught us. Jesus has given us an overwhelming agenda but we have focused too much on the internal church operation and our personal lives. Jesus was concerned about those but in the context of His major agenda--bringing the Kingdom to this world. This distortion began centuries ago and became focused in the Holy Roman Empire. We are still living under that shadow and don’t realize it. That Empire co-opted the Church for its nationalistic interests and the church of the western world still puts nationalism above the Kingdom.

http://www.cascadespresbytery.org/Who_Jesus_Is.pdf at 18-19

As Jesus and the prophets have shown, and as our rituals proclaim, God's Kingdom is one of love, peace, and justice. That is the vision that we need to apply to everything that we do. Jesus has told us in some detail how we are to live with each other in other in peace and in love, including how we are to attempt to resolve the inevitable disputes that will arise among fallible humans. He has also made clear that the purpose for our doing so is not ourselves alone but so that we may be a light to the world. We take care of each other in good times and bad not for internal institutional reasons but because by doing so we give the world an example of the Kingdom in action. We educate ourselves and our children so that we may learn what God wants us to do in the world and be prepared to do it. We reach out into the world because that is where we find needs that we can alleviate--and where we find injustices that we must challenge. In short, our churches do not exist for the purpose of maintaining their institutional structures but in order that we may use those structures to show the Kingdom to the world and to bring it closer to fruition. Without a vision of the Kingdom and our place in it, our churches cannot understand what they should be doing. If our churches do not understand what they should be doing, they cannot prepare to do it. Vision is not only essential, it must be the vision that we have received, not one that we create on our own.