Community, Cross, New Creation

For the past two months, I've served as the pastoral intern at Redeemer Sugar Land. This has been a very enjoyable experience. I've been challenged, stretched, discouraged, empowered, transformed, hurt and everything in between. This has been a great and realistic taste of ministry.

Last week I was at Panera Bread catching up on Barth's Church Dogmatics when I met two pastors from local churches here in Fort Bend county. Both of them were extremely nice individuals with some great perspectives on ministry. There was one thing they both agreed on that initially took me off guard. In fact it was something that quite honestly disturbed me. Both of them told me that I wouldn't be able to effectively communicate the vision of Redeemer to visitors/seekers if I could not do it in the space of a paper napkin. I was confused. Was this a form of savvy advertising? How could I boil the vision of my church into the space of a napkin?

Later that evening, I realized that I had overreacted. Despite what the two pastors had in mind, I began to realize that it wouldn't be a bad thing to encapsulate Redeemer's vision or "DNA" in a short and concise message. This would be a great thing if not only for the sake of clarity.

This past Monday, at the request of a friend, I picked up Richard Hay's The Moral Vision of the New Testament. As I was reading about abortion and pacifism, I was hit by Hay's New Testament paradigm for interpreting ethical issues: community, cross, new creation.

Although I am taking these three concepts out of their original context, I believe they are a very helpful way of articulating Redeemer's vision. And they create an alliteration-- which is nice.

Community:

*By emphasizing the importance of community, we are witnessing to the reality that we are ultimately created to experience and enact love in the context of relationships. In a culture and age of rampant individualism, we want Redeemer to be a place where we wrestle with what it really means to live "life together".

*By community, we also desire to stress that the church is the only organization that doesn't exist for the sake of it's members alone. We aren't being the authentic people of God if we are not reaching out to our local community with graciousness and love.

Cross:

*For us the gospel is absolutely central. Christ is our great prophet, priest, and king
who loved us so much that he gave his life that we may truly live. The gospel and the gospel alone shapes our identity. We are more broken and sinful than we would ever dare confess and yet more loved and accepted then we would ever dream possible.


New Creation:

* This world is not all there is. God has an answer to all the present suffering and brokenness. His answer is a "new heavens and a new earth". Although we now live in the already/not yet tension between the cross and the second advent of Jesus Christ- there will come a day when all the broken and hideous things that flood our world will be transformed by grace into whole and beautiful realities. This is the world's hope.