Working With or Against God

Tony Morgan offers a summary of some of the points made by Andy Stanley at the recent Drive Conference at North Point Church. His post is titled "Smart Things Andy Stanley Said: Part 1." Here are some of his summary points. They relate closely to some of the subject matter in our Go series.

• We all do ministry in communities where people think church is for church people. That's the type of world we live in. People care about God. People want to connect with God. There's a hunger for God, but the church is in the way. "I'm giving the rest of my life to change that."
• Since the beginning of the church, the "insiders" have been making it difficult for the "outsiders." From the very beginning, the church has tried to change the outsiders before they can connect with the church. (Acts 15)
• If we create obstacles for people to connect with the church and God, we are working against God.
• The majority of churches have made it difficult for people to turn to God.
• The gravitational pull of your ministry is to create insider language, rules and programs that makes it more difficult for people to turn to God.
• We had to create empty seats at optimal times in order to make room for people who were unchurched. Otherwise, I would have just been talking to the Christians.
• When a local church gets off-mission, God gets uninterested. God says, "They don't need me."
• We made a fundamental decision years ago that we were going to be more committed to reaching people than keeping people.

Watering Down the Gospel

Lois and I took a little time away in Wisconsin this weekend. What a beautiful state! It's incredible living in Minnesota, with all it has to offer, and then to be so close to Wisconsin...icing on the cake. On a getaway like this, we love hiking, working (I've been working on the 2007 message schedule and Lois is doing teacher work), watching movies at night and other stuff.

We were hiking Friday and talking about the kinds of things the "Go" series is about. Lois said, "We've been watering down the gospel for too long. We get loving God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, but we don't love our neighbor as ourselves. We get the part about loving God, but we make it an internal thing that's safe. We neglect the active part of it that Jesus called us to do, like caring for the poor. No, I've watered down the gospel like that." I thought that was an interesting take on the idea of "watering down the gospel."

The irony is that she's already doing everything I'm going to be talking about in this series. There's an old youth camp song with the refrain, "Please don't send me to Africa." The song's about the fear many people have that God will send them to some far off place if they yield their lives to his leadership. Well, Lois would go in a flash. She was born in Africa, and she always hoped we'd end up doing international ministry. To this day I think she feels she would have found greatest fulfillment in that context.

But she's not sitting around pining for something she didn't do. She's on the go with Jesus right here and now. She's one of my "Go" heroes. But here's another irony: most of the people who went out of their way to call me or pull me aside to tell me how much my first "Go" message challenged them were among my other "Go" heroes. I'm watching and learning from them.