Holiness Reeducation

Happy Anniversary!

Yesterday was our churches 10th Anniversary or 10th Birthday, I can’t figure out which one is more appropriate. But regardless we had a wonderful celebration of all that God has done at DCC in the past ten years. We had a wonderful worship service followed by a Hog Roast. The Hog Roast is a yearly tradition for us and it was nice to line it up with the celebration yesterday. Bill, our resident and lifetime appointed Hog Czar did a mean job cooking up porky and Chris busted out some awesome deep friend turkey. The food spread was something to behold.

Beyond the food, however, it was good to see some old friends that hadn’t been to the church in quite a while. There were numerous comments from our guests and our old friends that it is really exciting to see the church moving forward and to witness the excitement and sense of purpose that is growing among our people. We are moving forward together and into God’s vision for us.

Speaking of Vision

Yesterday as part of my sermon I unveiled our new church mission statement. Here it is.

Cultivating God’s Wholeness in a Broken World.

It was a painstaking process coming up with our mission statement, but it brought such clarity to us as the leadership of the church. We worked hard to connect our vision with the heart God has given us for the lost and to capture the fullness of the Gospel. Here is how we ended up with our statement.

Cultivating – We wanted a singe verb that captured the entire process of working to bring God’s truth and grace to the world. Cultivating was by far the best word we came up with. As you think about cultivating, you think about the whole process of bringing forth a harvest. You have to understand the seasons, you have to know the soil. You have to work the soil, tilling it and fertilizing it. You have to know when and how to plant the seed. You have to water the seed and protect it. You have to know when and how to harvest the crop and over the years how to rotate the crops and keep the soil from growing barren. I can’t think of a better word that captures all of these roles of the church in our world than cultivating.

God’s Wholeness – As a Nazarene people, we talk a lot about holiness. God’s Wholeness is really just another way of saying holiness but we wanted to say it this way because we think this is language that people can grab hold of and understand better than holiness. God wants us to be whole. He wants us to not only be forgiven, but working towards his perfection. He wants us to be whole physically, spiritually, emotionally, and mentally. We don’t want to be a church that merely focuses on one part of wholeness, we want to do what we can to help everyone we can find wholeness in Christ.

In a Broken World – We had some talk about whether or not this phrase was too negative in our mission statement, but in the end, especially after looking at all the mission statements that Jesus made, we wanted to make sure our mission had motivation tied to it. We are working so hard to cultivate God’s wholeness because our world is desperate for it. Our world is full of shattered people, torn apart families, fractured communities, and incomplete lives. We want to be reminded each day that we have the opportunity to offer the people we encounter something different than the brokenness around them.

So no we have a mission statement and I love it. We feel really excited about it as the leaders of the church, and now we get to figure out how we live in to it as a church. We have figured out the what, now we need to figure out the how.