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How many of us relate to (or are guilty of) this announcement?:

“The Christian Education Team needs 20 people to sign up for 45 minutes to be with the kids during Sunday School this Fall.

We’re asking all parents to take their turn. You don’t need to do anything beforehand since the lesson is already prepared. Once you complete your turn, you are done until next year.”

Not so inspiring.  What about this, instead?

“Sally, you know that the new vision of First Church is to proclaim, enjoy, and share the good news of God together as disciples of Jesus Christ.

This year, we are blessed with a class of 25 toddlers. We want to  nurture their formation as disciples of Jesus on Sunday mornings.

We believe you have unique gifts for this ministry. It’s an opportunity to live out our common calling, to nurture your own faith, and the discipleship of our young people. Would you prayerfully discern if you feel called to serve in this way for the next four months?”

Same topic, different approach. Vital churches start with the “why,” the big reason for which the church exists.  Every ministry and detail of the church should flow from and come back to that.

People are generous and exceedingly gifted by God. Is it not true that we — ministers, staff, and laity — want to share our gifts toward something whose purpose we understand and believe in?

To do this effectively, a church needs a good vision.  Some people call this a vision statement.  Others recommend that a church have a vision and a mission statement.  I use the terms interchangeably.  The goal is to identify the purpose for which your church exists.  A few key points:

• It should come from God’s story.
• It should connect to scripture.
• It should be concise, and easy to remember.
• It should be relevant to all people in all their diverse incarnations.
• Finally, It should be really important.  Something you want to base your life – not just the church’s ministry – around.

Even if you haven’t thought about your church’s vision in a while, or if it’s number nine on a list of ten things to tackle with the church board during its spring retreat, attention to this matter among the body of Christ is time very well spent:

A church that lacks a clear vision sets itself up for unnecessary conflict, malaise, and apathy.

A church that knows, believes in, and lives out a great vision is a church empowered to effectively share and enjoy the promises of God.

It will take some time and some faithful people to spiritually discern or reform your church’s vision. Once you have it, make sure you repeat it.  People have a lot going on.  They may not hear or “take in” the vision the first fifteen times it’s announced. The vision should be present enough so anyone walking in the door will know what the church is about:

• Each Sunday, have someone share aloud the vision of the church in worship. Print it everywhere.
• Start each gathering and meeting by reflecting on how the activity relates to the church’s vision.
• Teach it to your children, talk about it when you are out and when you are at home (Deut. 6:4-9)
• Here is a good litmus test: If the church doesn’t consider a vision important enough to occupy that much space in people’s lives, then the vision it has is probably not important enough.

People become a part of congregations whose actions and behaviors match the values and vision they set for themselves.  Make sure new and long-time members, staff, and ministers are good stewards of the vision.

In a rule, people trust, and open themselves up to those who “walk the talk.”  Of course, a bunch of humans, however Christian we are, will not always get this right.  That’s okay.  People outside of the church are not looking to join a bunch of “perfect people,” either.   But a statement that acknowledges our authentic attempts to live into something that makes all the difference in our world and in our lives — and honest confession when we fall short – provides a model pattern for the Christian life.

I have a colleague whose church asks new members to sign a covenant promising two things:

1. “I will deal with conflict God’s way,” and,
2. “I will be a steward of the vision of my church.”

The church is growing, my colleague says, because those within and around the church have rejoiced to see the consistency between what the church says it believes, and what it actually does.

Atlanta new church development focuses on the journey, not the institution

Special to Presbyterian News Service

by Erin Dunigan

BAJA CALIFORNIA, Mexico

Editor’s note: this is the latest in a series of stories about experimental ministries that typify the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s effort to establish 1,001 new worshiping communities in the next 10 years. ― Jerry L. Van Marter

Kairos Church, a ministry experiment of the Presbytery of Greater Atlanta, is located in downtown Atlanta. But it was born out of a small rural village in Japan.

Beth and Thomas Daniel, co-pastors of Kairos since it began in their living room in 2007, first met in that Japanese village when they were both part of a teaching program.

“I had not been inside a church for probably 10 to 12 years,” Thomas said. “But one of the other teachers … was getting baptized in a house church run by two Norwegian women and invited us both to come.”

It was his first time seeing an adult get baptized. “It was a wonderful experience,” he said, and started both he and now-wife Beth on the journey of marriage and ministry.

After the two returned from Japan, they were married and attended Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga. Subsequently, while serving as a co-pastor in Illinois, Daniel was invited to preach at Peachtree Presbyterian Church in Atlanta.

“After the service I had lunch with some of the folks from Greater Atlanta Presbytery and they told me they had funding from a private source to start a new Presbyterian church,” he said.

The funding was from a family foundation and was born out of a concern about the lack of young adults in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

“They wanted to see if a Presbyterian church could get started and have the freedom to think creatively about itself and its mission without the laser light show and the multi-million dollar budget — could there be young adults who would get involved with that?”

The name, Kairos Church, came early on as part of that sense of call.

“Kairos is this idea of a God-given moment or opportunity. Unlike a lot of church planters, Beth and I didn’t have a five-year dream to do this — it felt like the Lord brought it about, a kairos moment rather than a long drawn out process,” Daniel said. “The name seemed to fit the crazy nature of what we were doing.”

Because the funding came from a foundation, Beth and Daniel had the freedom to stray from the playbook of standard new church development. So, in September 2007, the couple started meeting with seven others in their living room.

Six months later they moved out of the living room and into space given to them by First Presbyterian Church of Atlanta. A group of about 80 met in a classroom there until the presbytery invited them to move into an abandoned church building downtown, where they’ve been for the past two years.

“We normally have about 200-220 people on a given Sunday, and probably two thirds of them are under 40. While we are still very young by most church standards, we’ve actually gotten a bit older as we’ve grown,” Daniel said.

He attributed the church’s growth to its mission.

“I think that what is drawing people is that this is an encouraging place, not a rule-based, guilt-laden Christianity. We don’t spend a lot of time on who is outside the circle — we try to be welcoming and encouraging for all people. At the same time, it is clear that we are following Jesus. We are inclusive but unapologetically trying to follow Jesus.”

A lot of traditional churches make a mistake in assuming that younger people want a watered-down version of the gospel, Daniel said.

“When you look at Jesus, what he is calling us to is revolutionary. They are saying, ‘Don’t hold back — hit us with it,’” he said.

As Kairos studied aspects of the early church, what struck them was that it didn’t form an institution but instead gathered around values that shaped their lives. It’s important for churches to build on what they stand for rather than simply defining what they are not, Daniel said.

One of the images that Kairos Church has used to define who they are is that of an airport. “We are an airport, not the destination,” said Daniel. “Kairos itself is not the point.

“We lose our focus and create an idol of our churches so easily. But the reality is that Kairos might not be around in 50 years, or five years. It is wonderfully freeing but also wonderfully frightening because I want to be the point.”

It is not that the airport is not important — it is critically important in its ability to connect people with where they want to go.

In many ways Kairos reminds Daniel of that house church in rural Japan.

“I didn’t walk away from that house church talking about the church — I walked away talking about the message and the community. In many ways, Kairos has allowed me to get back to some of that.”

Erin Dunigan is a freelance writer, photographer, and pastor who lives in a small coastal community in Baja California, Mexico when she is not following her wanderlust out into the world.

Vision Frame

In September 2007, a group of eight lay people and two co-pastors began meeting together as part of a launch team for a new church development of the Presbyterian Church (USA).  Three and a half years later, Kairos Church is a vibrant congregation with an average attendance of over 200 adults in our Sunday worship, more than half of whom are under age 35, as well as an average attendance of 40 children under the age of 10 . . .

Seven of the eight lay people in our core group had either not been involved in a congregation since their youth or had never been in a church at all, and there was a mixture of excitement and skepticism about exactly what we were doing in this mission.  At our first gathering, one couple actually asked that we not call ourselves a “church” because the word had so many negative connotations for them: They stated that the word reeked of lifeless institutionalism and meaningless ritual, and they desired instead to be a part of something that was far more dynamic and life-giving, both to them and to the world.

Church participation is declining throughout the United States, particularly among younger generations.  Research by David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons suggests that when asked about the church, a rapidly growing number of Americans, including 49% of 16-29 year olds, “admit they have a hard time actually seeing Jesus because of all the negative baggage that now surrounds him;”[1] more than 40% of these young people do not have any active association with a congregation. In describing the state of the church in North America, Hugh Halter and Matt Smay write, “the world around us is growing increasingly disinterested in our Christian story.  Statistically they respect us less and less every year.”[2]

The desire to call ourselves something other than a “church” gave the group our first issue to discern as a community.  Thus during the first few months of our existence, we gathered in one another’s homes to sing, pray, and look to the scriptures for the  meaning of the word “church.”  We discussed how the book of Acts depicts the church as the gathered community of Jesus followers rather than an institution or denomination.  We saw that the word “church” was primarily about people committing themselves to a Kingdom-oriented relationship of reconciliation with God and neighbor.  The group was invigorated to watch the word transform before our eyes and to imagine capturing scripture meaning in each of our lives.

It is important for any congregation to understand why so many young adults are not involved in a Christian faith community.  Research of young adults in the book unChristian discovered that even though the church is incredibly unpopular, these young adults often distinguish between their feelings about Christian spirituality and about organized Christian religion. Kinnaman and Lyons write, “Jesus draws an interesting set of reactions as he receives much more favorable ratings from outsiders.”[3] On the other hand, many see Christians as “antihomosexual (an image held by 91 percent of young outsiders), judgmental (87 percent), and hypocritical (85 percent).  These ‘big three’ are followed by the following negative perceptions, embraced by a majority of young adults: old-fashioned, too political, insensitive to others, boring, and not accepting of other faiths.”[4] Kinnaman and Lyons come to the conclusion that the institutional church has become known for what it is stands against rather than what it stands for.  These sentiments were prevalent among the young adults in our core group.  However, in examining the biblical narrative of church as a community dedicated to a redemptive relationship between God and neighbor, our group quit focusing on what they did not like about the modern institutional church and instead started dreaming about what the biblical definition of church might look like today.

As 2008 dawned, we began to feel that it was time to formalize our values, to record them, and to consider opening our gathering to others who might feel led to explore our community.  There were different ways that we talked about doing this and in the end we decided on an approach known as a Vision Frame described by Will Mancini in his book Church Unique.  We appreciated Mancini’s emphasis on congregations clearly articulating both their mission and their values.  In addition, our group believed in formalizing Kairos’ definition of “success.”  While many Christians do not believe it is possible to quantify when a church is “successful” Mancini disagrees and so did our core group.  We decided to follow the process of writing a Vision Frame as outlined in Mancini’s book.  This consists of coming to a consensus on four basic questions:

• Mission- What are we doing?
• Values- Why are we doing it?
• Strategy- How are we doing it?
• Mission Measure- When are we successful?

For weeks we talked through his questions, and eventually we unanimously adopted the Kairos Vision Frame.  The mission of Kairos Church is encouraging one another daily to follow in the way of Jesus. This answers the question, “what are we doing?”  It is a statement that is inherently relational with both God and our neighbor.  Every one of our ministries seeks to draw us closer into relationship with God, one another, and our global neighbors.  Thus, discipleship is as much about building relationships as the transfer of information from teacher to student.

The Kairos Vision Frame shapes everything that the community is and does – it is not a finalized document stored on a shelf and forgotten.  The Kairos church and Vision Frame can be reviewed at www.KairosAtlanta.org.

Thomas and Beth Daniel, Co-Pastors of Kairos Church, serve together in ministry in Atlanta, GA.

A sermon by the Rev. Joanna M. Adams

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit…Matthew 28:19

There are two reasons why I am not yet a blogger.  First, I do not feel deprived of adequate communication outlets and inputs. In fact, sometimes I feel over-blessed in those departments. The second reason I don’t blog is that I tried one time and failed miserably. A preaching resource journal that I subscribe to had asked me to share my sermon ideas for Christ the King Sunday on their popular blog space which is used mainly by preachers who are pulling their hair out on Friday and Saturday because, so far, they don’t have anything to say on Sunday.

I worked all one morning on my blog submission. Reluctantly I tore  myself away around the middle of the day for a doctor’s appointment. After that, and after eating lunch, I returned to the computer and slaved away for another couple hours. The deadline was 5:00. At 4:58, I hit “send”.  Instantly, everything I had worked on vanished from the screen. No, it had not reached its destination. It had simply disappeared into cyberspace. In its place were the words, “User not valid.” In distress, I called the editor of the journal and told him what had happened. He said, “Oh, well, I guess you timed out.”

“I didn’t know you could time out!”

“Well of course you can,” he said.

“Now you tell me,” I said to him, perhaps not using the manners my mother taught me in that particular phone conversation.

In the closing verses of Matthew’s gospel, Jesus, using his authority as the Risen Christ, hits “send,” and the timeless message of the gospel goes forth into the world he came to save. He hit “send,” thereby commissioning his disciples to go and “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, of the  Son and of Holy Spirit.” (Matthew 28:19)

In the gospel of John, the risen Christ hits “send”.   He appears to his disciples in a locked room where they have hidden themselves away in terror. He says to them, “As the Father sent me, so I send you.” (John 20:12)

Imagine what would have happened if the disciples had not done what Jesus had instructed them to do and had empowered them to do with his authority and assurance that he would be with them always and with their descendants always to the end of the age?  There would have been no telling of the good news. There would be no church, whose primary responsibility is to “proclaim the gospel for the salvation of humankind.”  That is the first of the Six Great Ends of the Presbyterian Church: “the proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind.”  This mission, this mandate never times out. It is as much our privilege and our responsibility to proclaim the gospel as it was the responsibility of James and John, of Peter and of Andrew.

In  recent weeks, there has been a great deal of talk about change. Change. Change. Change. Our society needs change; both parties are talking about change. I came across something that President Jimmy Carter said in his inaugural address, quoting his high school teacher, Miss Julia Coleman: We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles.”  Certainly, that is what the church must do. We must know and be involved in our changing world, while presenting the message of hope and reconciliation that never times out. Our charge is to show forth Christ, the Lord of History, to all who will receive him.

Why? Because he asks us to.

Why? Because God loves the world.

Why? Because when you have good news that transforms your life, why in the world would you want to keep it to yourself? The world is starving for good news.  Our society is starving for an alternative set of truths to the half-truths that are presented as whole truth.

Since you already know I can’t blog, I’ll confess something else. I don’t know how to text message. My husband does, but I just don’t trust my thumbs to say what I want to say. But I trust to the core of my being, the message of the Biblical text, the good news of Jesus Christ and of his kingdom present here and now, whenever people are kind to one another, wherever the spirit of reconciliation, rather than division,  reigns. I trust the text, not because it tells stories  of events that happened long ago, but because it tells of a present tense Christ in a present tense world. The story invites us to re-imagine who we are now and what the world ought to be now, in light of the story that the Bible tells. (1)

I once heard a grandfather recount a conversation he had had with his six year old grandson, just before bedtime. “Tell me a story,” the boy said.

“What kind of story would you like to hear?”

“One with me in it.”

Walter Brueggemann suggests that is exactly what the contemporary church needs to do, and “what Christian and Jews have always done – Tell ‘the old, old story,’ but tell it in a way that impacts every aspect of contemporary life, both public and personal.”   These stories, these message, this gospel are the vehicles by which all things are made new, including you and me. Imagine yourself – imagine our world made new. (2)

I’ve avoided a particular word as long as I can today. The time has come for me to say it out loud, from the pulpit. It’s a ten letter word. Most people dare not utter it in polite company, or in progressive churches. Before I say it, I will tell you about a teacher who told her students on the first day of school, “There are two words I will not allow in my classroom. One is ‘gross’ and the other is ‘cool’.”

A kid raised his hand, “So, what are the two words?”

Have you guessed what is the “gross” and “un-cool” word in most Presbyterian churches? It starts with an “e”.  Evangelism. Did you hear the groan? I heard it. The original meaning is actually quite gladsome. It comes from the same root as the word “angel”. It means sharing the message of the good news, bearing a message of hope in a world of despair, a promise  of light where shadows loom. Certainly preaching and teaching are primary means of evangelism, but I have always been drawn to the wise words offered by St. Francis of Assisi, “Preach the gospel at all times. Use words if you have to.”

I am reminded of something Mahatmas Ghandi said when asked if he’d ever considered becoming a Christian, “I would have become a Christian were it not for all the Christians I have known.” Arrogance, mean-spiritedness, the demeaning of others, manipulation, the Crusades, all these things done in the name of evangelism come  to mind. I am particularly concerned about some modern day evangelists who try to bully people into believing, frightening them with threats of eternal damnation if they do not repent and/or send in money.

A friend of mine who teaches at Union Seminary tells of a preacher who was in the middle of a hellfire and damnation sermon when he noticed that a fellow was asleep on the front row. It infuriated the preacher. He walked down out of the pulpit and went right to the guy and said in his face, “Didn’t you hear me say that every single member of his congregation was going to hell that didn’t come forward this morning and be born again?”

“Yes, I did, but I’m not a member of this church.”

I don’t care whether Morningside Presbyterian Church uses the word “evangelism,” but I passionately believe we must be engaged in the work of evangelism, not in the sense of “a program strategy but in the sense of a revolutionary way of enacting the hope and energy” that come to us from God.(3) Why would we have this wonderful transformative story to tell and yet think  it’s the right thing to do to keep it to ourselves?  If the church is to be the place keeper for the ways of God until the end of time, then here and now, we are the ones who are to bear witness to God’s will and purpose. In word and  deed, we tell the story of God’s saving love in Christ Jesus.

I remember  one occasion when I was a little timid about telling the story. I’d only been ordained a short time when I had the privilege of preaching for a Lenten service at Ebenezer Baptist Church, the Church that was the spiritual home of Martin Luther King, Jr. and his family. I got through the sermon all right and was  relieved it was over.   We were singing the closing hymn. We were at the last verse, when Joe Roberts, the pastor,  leaned over to me and said, “Joanna, I want you to open the doors of the church.”

I looked at the back of the sanctuary, and the doors were standing wide open.

I said, “Joe, the doors are open.”

He said, “That’s not what I mean. I want you to give the invitation to come to Christ.” The organist started playing.

I went to the pulpit. I did my Presbyterian best. No one came forward that night, but I was reminded of how the church exists to invite people in. The church exists to go out into the world with the message – to embody the message.

At a church officers’ retreat in a congregation I served some years ago,  an elder wearing a red flannel shirt sitting by the fireplace announced that  he thought  our church had enough members and wondered what we could do to make sure that no one else came. I responded by asking what might have happened to him and his family when they had first visited that congregation.  What would have happened to his daughters, to his whole family, if they had been told a membership cap was in place? What if those early Christian communities we hear about in Acts had turned away the many people the Lord wanted to add to their number? Of course there was not room for anybody else. Of course the resources were inadequate, but they figured out what to do; they shared everything.  They were rich in hospitality and in the capacity to give, and there was always room at the table for one more or ten more. It didn’t matter. What mattered was the new way of life made possible through Christ. Do you know what the first Christian creed was? “Kurios Iesous,” “Jesus is Lord.” Not “Kurios Kaisar,”  “Caesar is Lord,”  but “Kurios Iesous,”  “Jesus is Lord.” (4)

Does our world today not need to hear an alternative message to the message that money is lord, that materialism is lord, that the American Empire has been destined by God to rule over all?  Who is going to invite people to leave behind the old world of false truths and to step into the  story that is everlasting, where the operative principle is divine grace,  both saving and amazing.

In his letter to the Romans, Paul writes, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel.” Neither should we be. Of course, we ought to respect other religions. Of course we ought to assume that God is working in other religions, but we should never be ashamed or timid about the gospel itself.  We should be shamed of how it’s been applied and misused, but never ashamed of  the gospel itself.(5)

I remember reading about a newly minted minister who ended  his first sermon by saying, “But then again, what do I know?” We need to be convicted about the lordship of Christ. Our hope lies  in the promise that of his kingdom, there will be no end,  but we should never be arrogant about it. God loves all people. God is free to work through philosophers and through the arts. God is free to work through secular  organizations that relieve human suffering and work for justice. But we are free as well, to do our job, which is to be about the business of bearing witness to God’s healing work and presence in the world.

Today we will commission new elders and deacons, and I hope when we do, you will feel God’s hand on your shoulder, commissioning you to live a committed life, to go and love and tell and follow Christ wherever you go, whatever you do.   I love what D. T. Niles once said of evangelism, “It is just one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread.”

It is said when Jesus arrived in heaven, after his ascension, he hurried to God to report on his adventures on earth. All the angels and the archangels gathered around and listened intently. When Jesus got to the part about entrusting the spreading of the good news to his followers, one of the angels asked in horror, “Oh Jesus, what if they fail?”

Jesus answered, “I have no other plan.”

(1)  Walter Bruggemann, Biblical Perspectives on Evangelism, Abingdon Press, 1993, p. 8.

(2) Ibid.

(3) Ibid., p.13.

(4) Fleming Rutledge, “Not Ashamed of the Gospel,”  Cathedral Age, Summer, 2006, p.6-9.

(5) Ibid.