Keeping Our Vision Clear
“Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” Jesus replied: “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’This is the first and greatest commandment.And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22:36–40 NIV)
Introduction
If I met you for the first time and you asked who I was, how much detail would you want? Do you want my earliest memories? Do you want all my thoughts on politics, religion and raising children? Do you want my university transcripts or results from personality tests? Probably not. You want to know my name and perhaps a couple of key facts. My name is Steve, I am a pastor and a husband with five perfect children. What if you asked me to tell you about Christianity. Would you want all the details of the various theories of creation and the end of the world? Would you want to know all about the Trinity and the human and divine nature brought together in the incarnation? Or I could just start reading the Bible to you, beginning in Genesis. None of this is likely what you are looking for. But I could tell you that God so loved the world that he gave his Son Jesus to die on a cross in order to reconcile humanity to himself and that by faith we can receive eternal life. What if you came to me to ask about the church I pastor? Would you like a flow chart of the committees and programs? Or would you like me to just read the constitution? I could do better than that. I could tell you in a brief statement who we are and what we do: “First Baptist Church is a loving family that seeks God through worship, prayer and biblical teaching and embraces our community through acts of service and compassion.” This is what we call our vision statement. In some ways, the popularity of vision statements came out of the business world. Businesses have to know what they are about and be able to motivate their employees to focus their energies toward accomplishing that vision. There are elaborate lists of vision statements, mission statements and core values. It is fair to ask: is this really what the church should be looking to? Are we not more spiritual than regular businesses? First of all, the secular-sacred divide is not as clear cut as people often think. Jesus taught the kingdom by telling people about fishing and farming and even stories from the business world. All truth is God’s truth, no matter where it comes from. The question is: is their a biblical example of this?
Jesus’ Vision
Sometimes visions are developed in board rooms as leaders intentionally decide that they want to take their organization to the next level. Other times vision emerges in the face of a threat. That is the case with the passage from Matthew that we are looking at. The Pharisees sent an expert in the law to ask Jesus what the most important commandment was. They were not asking out of curiosity or out of interest in a friendly religious conversation. The Pharisees felt threatened by Jesus’ popularity. They could not beat Jesus in a head on debate, so they decided to find a way to alienate him from some of his followers. Judaism was very much commandment focused and there were a variety of interpretations of which ones were at the top. The hope was that no matter what commandment Jesus chose, there was going to be some followers who would disagree. Jesus was being put into a position to define this movement that he was starting. Every movement has to get to this point. At the beginning you can have lots of people excited about something new but eventually you need to start defining things, establishing what you really stand for. Normally this leads to large numbers of people losing interest. Imagine the pressure that Jesus was under to come up with this definition. Yet it is here that we see the brilliance of Jesus. Jesus quotes two passages from the law: love God and love your neighbour. Jesus links them together so that he does not have to choose between them. The problem for the Pharisees is that it fails to divide people. Who is going to raise their hand and state that they disagree with loving God and loving people? All the other commandments are actually included in these two commandments. But this was not just a sneaky way of Jesus avoiding a trap. He was actually setting up a proto-vision statement for his followers. Jesus is demanding that we measure all we do by the vision of a life of love. All church vision statements must include this in some form.
First Baptist Church Vision
Some time ago, we came up with a vision statement: “First Baptist Church is a loving family that seeks God through worship, prayer and biblical teaching and embraces our community through acts of service and compassion.” The purpose of this was not just fill up space on our bulletin or to give us something to put on our letterhead. This defines us as a church and guides us as we move into the future. Let me just quickly go through what this looks like.
Loving Family
First of all we are a loving family. We are not perfect but we are a family that loves each other. For us, a smaller congregation is not a weakness but a strength. We notice when someone is missing and when someone is going through a hard time. We rejoice with each other in the good times and we support each other in the hard times. I hear over and over from new comers that they notice and appreciate the family feeling in our church. Things like singing happy birthday are not just a gimmick but an important part of what we do.
Seeks God
Being a family is a part of loving people but we are just as committed to loving God. We do this in three primary ways. We worship. That is through singing, praying, public reading of Scripture and whatever other way we can find. Our services are not performances, they are acts of worship. Worship is worth-ship and we proclaim that our God is worthy. We also pray. We pray for each other in worship services. We pray for needs with our prayer chain. I know from talking to many of you that you pray for each other daily. Prayer is wonderful in that bridges love for God and love for people. We also seek God through biblical teaching. This happens through sermons. I try not to give fluffy sermons that just tickle ears. I attempt to take my training, my reading and all that I have learned and help all of us know more of God. Even my writing is inspired by my congregations, I seek to build biblically literate Christians. This also takes place in Bible studies. I so appreciate the small groups that get together for study. I learn so much from our discussions.
Embraces Community
If you have been part of the church for a long time, you might not realize what many outside the church think. Some see the church as something that wants to take and take. All we are interested in is filling our offering plate. When I have talked to people, I have been accused of trying to get them in our building to have access to their wallet. We of course see the value of giving money and that is one of the ways we worship. But that is not our main purpose. We reach out to our community, not to take from them but to give to them. We do this through the food bank, turkey dinner, Operation Christmas Child, Yonge Street Mission and so on. Our job is to transform the church’s image, demonstrating that we want to bless our community both locally and globally.
Conclusion
Why do we need a vision? We must be able to define who we are. We must be able to define for our own sake, for the sake of those interested in the church and for the sake of those critical of the church. A vision describes what we are doing and what we know we should be doing. A vision corrects us when we go in the wrong direction and a vision spurs us on to new ways of accomplishing it. Let us keep our eyes on the vision.
