Musings...

So I've been sitting here thinking about how short a time we've had with Jenand how little time is left...

I haven't had time to blog much this spring or last fall or last summer...Okay, yes, true confession time - I got out of the habit. With so many important-to-me-people leaving this summer (almost our whole church is moving away over the course of 3 months) it's very much time to re-acquire the habit.

So today, comments on change. Starting with how much I've changed. When we started this church planting effort, I was struggling with what I felt God asking me to be - and how little room for me to be that in the churches I had been part of. While I'm sure I'll struggle again with it - and the institutional bias that I struggled against before - I'm also sure that I have had a clear space to explore what it could be and what it may not be. Church planting is opportunity more than anything I've ever experienced to intensely imagine and examine what the church is and who we are as the "church" embodied.

In such a small group, it's easier to see how each of our individual influences affect how the church operates. My view of how a church works has shifted. Before, I was a "volunteer and get it done" person before and saw influence being exerted in the group dynamic of a church's "works." I was frustrated by the 80/20 statistic. Now I see limitations of the group dynamic - how church structures can limit our ability to accomplish small tasks at the same time they facilitate us accomplishing larger projects together. I can see a spectrum of responsibility - from our purpose of individually being responsible for what God is calling us to - to our cooperation as a group to do things that take on larger issues than we can handle alone.

Although we were excited as whole to take on this church planting effort and did not suffer from lack of ideas, we definately suffered from lack of energy to accomplish all we conceived. Part of the problem definately revolved around community - trying to acheive it. With so many of our members commuting long distances, trying to live out our local influence was difficult - first, in the sense that our individual circles of influence didn't overlap in our day to day lives. On the other side of the coin however, our seed is scattered widely and has touched more lives than otherwise. Secondly, with time spent commuting, the time we spend on projects and events is lengthened - it takes more to do less and this has led to more exhaustion for those who've had to commute. Do these problems make it any less worth doing? My answer, of course, is no! But it's definately influenced the culture of our church and what we focus on...

I'm still thinking some of these ideas through and this small ramble is more a matter of me trying to solidify some of the vague musing...so anyone else vaguely musing about how this has worked and looks is more than welcom to ramble with me...

One more vague suspicion I want to verbalized - can we recognized God's inspiration of ideas and purposes by testing them like the test of the prophets in the OT - does it come to pass? Does God inspire us with ideas and then give us the energy to accomplish the purpose despite obstacles? Some of the ideas for projects we discussed were great ideas - but didn't come to fruition despite how worthy the project might have been - were they just meant to be discussed and influence our paradigms? Can we forgive ourselves for that which we do not accomplish by purposing ourselves towards the things we have the motivation to accomplish?

I read this and I think I need to practice posting - I'm half incoherent. Frustrating but I'll post it anyway for the discipline of posting.