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Green Timbers Covenant Church – this multi-cultural, multi-generational Christ centred community – has a mission and it is our responsibility as a church to live into that mission in its most full sense! We are called and committed to “cultivating God’s values in the world.” That means we want to see this world begin to look a little more like the Kingdom of God. And it means that we are going to do everything in our power to make that happen!
Thankfully, we aren’t just dependent on our power – we have the power to be his witnesses to the end of the earth. That is what we are taught as we listen to Jesus in the book of Acts. The disciples were told that the Holy Spirit was going to come upon them and make them witnesses to Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and to the ends of the earth. When we Keep in Step with the Spirit, we have the power to share the Good News of Jesus with the world and make the world a little bit more like what God wants it to be! That’s what we mean by cultivating God’s values in the world.
We want to be EFFECTIVE at doing what we say we are going to do. If we say that we cultivate God’s values in the world, then shouldn’t our world be impacted by our lives and ministry? We want to be EFFECTIVE at being who we say we are. Shouldn’t we be growing in our ability to share in relationships across cultures and generations!? Sometimes, I get a little discouraged with our ability to be EFFECTIVE bearers of the Good News that feeds our mission! Sometimes, I wonder if we even understand WHO we want to be, who the world NEEDS us to be and who God is CALLING us to be. I hope those three things are the same or we will always struggle to be EFFECTIVE.
There will always be challenges in front of us (money, COVID, time, discouragement) but we must remain focused. The mission is what we are seeking to accomplish. If we are not cultivating God’s values in the world then we are not being EFFECTIVE in being who we say we want to be. Let me be even more blunt – if you are not cultivating God’s values in the world around you – then we are not being EFFECTIVE in our ministry as a church. Of course, I can change that pronoun around to a first person pronounce, too, and that is just as true and just as demanding for me. I encourage us all to read that and ask ourselves “Am I cultivating God’s values in the world around me?”
To say that our mission is to cultivate God’s values in the world is the simplest way of saying what we intend to do, but there is more to our “mission statement.” We say how we are going to become effective at carrying that out. We have two parts to the how of our mission statement. First, we do this by “nurturing a community of disciples who are committed to…” and this is where the second comes in, “building relational bridges into our life-circles, our neighbourhood and the global village.” The how is a very important part to our call to being EFFECTIVE cultivators of God’s values in our world. We do that by allowing ourselves to be changed and to be used for the Kingdom. We don’t just become EFFECTIVE at sharing the gospel and cultivating God’s values without first being transformed into disciples of Jesus. We don’t have the power to be witnesses for Jesus, without being nurtured and formed into disciples by the Holy Spirit. That is what we do at church on Sundays.
And that brings us to the AFFECTIVE side of our ministry. We can get far too caught up in being EFFECTIVE that we don’t ever truly allow ourselves to be changed and transformed. We like the EFFECTIVE side of ministry because it is the visible part. We can see things. If we do something that makes an impact on the world, we can reap the rewards whether that is attention from others or good feelings about ourselves. Actually, I think the desire for being EFFECTIVE even clouds our understanding of the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. We think that if we can see the effectiveness of the spirit (usually with gifts of tongues, healings, or other important ministries,) then the Spirit is really moving. But the true effectiveness of the Holy Spirit and the Church is dependent upon affective change.
When something is EFFECTIVE it demonstrates results – it deals with exterior markings.
When something is AFFECTIVE it demonstrates feeling/emotion – it deals with interior change.
Ronald Rolheiser in his book Prayer says that “Affective prayer has a single aim: to draw us and our loved ones into deeper intimacy with Christ.” That is how we become EFFECTIVE. We are drawn into deeper intimacy with Christ. But we run the risk there of making that our EFFECTIVE goal, when the true goal is to become what God wants us to be and to act that out in the world.
For us, our AFFECTIVE ministry is to draw people into intimacy with Christ, so that they can act upon that. We build disciples SO THAT they can cultivate God’s values in the world. And we know that we do that not by winning but by sharing! We do that by inviting others into an intimate relationship with Jesus. We invite others – we build bridges – so that others can experience the AFFECTION of Jesus.
We are going to spend the summer digging into this even more as we Keep in Step with the Spirit. We are going to be looking at the idea of “Effective Prayer!” But, our understanding of effective prayer is not accomplishing things, it is about becoming something. It is surrendering into Jesus and listening to him. We are going to seek to become EFFECTIVE in ministry by practicing the AFFECTIVE nature of becoming a disciple. We are going to work to develop the kind of prayers that Rolheiser described in his book, ” You must try and pray so that, in your prayer, you open yourself in such a way that sometime – perhaps not today, but sometime – you are able to hear God say to you, ‘I love you!’ These words, addressed to you by God, are the most important words you will ever hear because, before you hear them, nothing is ever completely right with you but after you hear them, something will be right in your life at a very deep level.”
I hope this is just confusing enough to keep you coming back for more. If not, my writing just isn’t very EFFECTIVE this time. Or at least it hasn’t tugged at your heart strings enough to AFFECT your life.
