Every year so far, for the first three years of Vintage Faith Church we have started the Fall with a vision sort of a series. It hopefully reminds us of the mission of the church and the overall strategy to be developing our lives and to be thinking and praying and understanding we are all missionaries in our local community.
For our vision/mission phrase we have used since we started that our prayer is that we are:
"Asking God to transform us into a worshiping-community-of-missional-theologians".
We start it with "asking God to transform us" as it needs to be God not human effort when we are serving on the mission and our sinful nature would likely make us more self-centered than others-centered - so it must be the Spirit of God changing us as we serve Him.
The series is called "Don't be a "Christian": Exchanging Religion for the Mission of God". ((Brian Jenson came up with the graphic as he does for each series. He is a volunteer on the creative team, I think 24 years old? How old are you Brian?))
What we mean by "Christian" (in quotation marks) is how we have culturalized "Christian" often into something that looks different than the adventure of worshipers on a mission in their world as described in the book of Acts and New Testament.
The word "Christian" was first mentioned in Scripture in Acts 11:26 for disciples of Jesus. We will not be trying to come up with a different word for Christian, I have no problem using the word Christian. I know some like using "Christ follower" or something like that instead of the word Christian. But I haven't had any issues with using the word Christian personally. But how it is defined is the issue.
I have realized that words mean different things to different people. You may say "Jesus", but what/who is the more defined Jesus we speak about? How much is how we define and think of Jesus specifically from the Bible and how much is our own imputing to how we hope or think He would be? Or if we say the word "hell", are we speaking of an eternal hell or do we mean a "hell" at is basically talking about suffering in this life and on earth only? etc. So words are important as we can say the same word, but mean different things. So I have been asking people to define the words a lot lately, especially with theology and the Bible, so I understand what they specifically they mean by the words they say.
So we will be using the word Christian, but trying to define what it means from the Bible and looking at what did the early followers of Jesus focus on and how did they live and what did they do - so we will contrast what can be a suburban-middle-class consumer "Christian" - to Christian as described in the Bible.
It starts Sunday, and each week we will be making contrasts of types. I am speaking this Sunday on worship and going to be tracing the word throughout the Hebrew Bible and New Testament and what the word means - and then contrast it to how we can become worship consumers more than actual worshipers of God. I know I sure fall so easily into more of a consuming selfish sort of life rather than an outward missional life. It is so easy to subtly become inward focused. I'll be teaching from Acts 8 and the story of Simon there and how he was viewing being a Christian. So, it shall be a hopefully good series encouraging us about what we are doing.
The series is laid out:
- September 16 Worshiping: Don't be a consumer - Be a worshiper
- September 23 Community: Don't go to church - Be the church
- September 30 Missional: Don't exist in the bubble - Be in the world
- October 7 Theologians: Don't close your mind - Be a theologian
- October 14 Communion Sunday - "asking God to transform us"
This series is also important, as last Sunday we made the formal announcement to the church (to both churches) that Vintage Faith Church is formally joining together with First Presbyterian Church (where we have been meeting in their facilities and already serving together for over a year and half) - and we will both be "Vintage Faith Church" as of January 1. So this is the first series now since we announced that and the timing is good as we move ahead and shape some of the values we will be striving for.
