[learn_press_profile]
By the time I finally got around to asking Lori to marry me, we had been deep in discussion about our marriage. We knew that we were going to join our lives together, we knew that we were going to move to Chicago so I could attend seminary, we knew that we would be a ministry team together in churches, and we knew that we wanted to start a family! But we had not actually done the one thing that we needed to do – get engaged!
To be honest, by the time that I got around to asking Lori to marry me, we already had a few things in place. We had already been to a Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts seminar (little embarrassing at the table to say that I didn’t have a good proposal story because we had not actually decided to get married yet) and we had a date “reserved” at the church. Yet, it wasn’t until I slipped that ring on her finger (wrong hand – silly me) and she said “Yes,” that we could really get going on life together.
Engagement is a great word for what happens when two people decide to get married and start a family. Until they actually start the process, they are really just sitting on the outside looking in. It is like revving a car’s engine while it is in neutral; you can push the accelerator all you want but the car will not move. The engine can be running at very high RPM’s, but until you engage the car’s gears, you won’t make any progress in getting to where you are trying to go. For a car to move forward the gears have to be engaged. Just like with marriage, until you engage the process – until you make the commitment to getting married – dreaming out loud won’t accomplish anything. That is just revving the engine.
We are talking now in our church about missional engagement, and we are asking for people to work together to discover how we can “get engaged.” Over the years, we have had a lot of different conversations about mission and what we are trying to do as a church. We have done some wonderful things on this mission together! I hope that, with all of these conversations going on, you can name what our church’s mission is. Can you? But, unless we get engaged to this mission, they are just words on a web page.
Over this past year, I have begun to worry that we are just revving our engine as a church, and we need to find a way to get engaged. We can talk a lot about being on mission together, but until we are truly all on the same page together, it really is just a lot of talk. We need to take some steps together as a church to do what we say we want to do – we need to make the decision to engage!
Don’t get me wrong. I think we are doing some great work as a church. I think we are doing a good job of doing mission together. You as a community are always ready to see us try something new when Pastor Michel and I suggest it, but I am hoping that at this point we can begin to see this from a different point of view. I want us to see our mission through a prism of congregational engagement. I am asking that you get engaged on a deeper level, to move past the dreaming stage and into the active leading stage. I am asking you to decide to be a part of the work. Challenging you to become engaged in mission is something to which I think I give more lip service than opportunity. It is sometimes easier for me and for you if I just do it myself. That doesn’t work over the long run though – it just ends up making noise.
Bill Hybels wrote in his book The Volunteer Revolution, “We get to invite these people to be used by God in ways they never imagined. We have the opportunity to empower them to develop gifts they didn’t know they had. We can cheer them on as they courageously assume new levels of Kingdom responsibility that fill their hearts to overflowing. And we get to see the look on their faces when they realize God has used them to touch another human being.”
I want to see that happen! So, we announced the first step in that process at the congregational meeting. We are creating a Missional Engagement Task Force, that will seek to build a structure into our church life that gives you opportunity to develop gifts you don’t know you have, to assume new levels of kingdom responsibility, and to see God use you to bless another human being. You can see more info below about this task force.
Let’s get engaged to our mission!
