When I first went to Mauritania I was briefed on the quarterly reports. These were huge pieces of deep number crunching and narrative that our overstretched volunteer staff were sending to USAID. And we were behind with them, and it was a stress. And when's the deadline? I asked. Well, there wasn't one, technically. We weren't obliged to send them in. We never sent another quarterly report.
Janice and I have been reading Francis Chan's 'Letters to the Church'. Here's really radical about asking 'what do we do on Sunday?'. Read scripture aloud. Spend as much time praying as you do preaching. Break bread more often. It sounds like the Bible!
When we first went to TCC, we reviewed everything, including Sunday, with the team there. We looked at the aims, and came up with something like: to teach the word of God, to express the vision of who we are as a community, to pray, to worship, to be a point of invitation. TCC had borrowed patterns from Platt and we tried to think how we needed to be a little different.
We in Hope Church have maybe been borrowing patterns from TCC. We've had great worship leading. Good teaching. People have grown in their gifts. But how can we reach those aims in the paragraph above. Are we missing something? Or am I being too restless? How can we tweak things to speak of the kingdom?
I know y'all don't comment too much on this, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on this...............
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