Is this a question you would expect to hear from someone visiting your church?
How would you feel if a visitor came into your worship service and asked you, “Are you really God’s servants, or should we look elsewhere?”
This question is taken from Twelve Keys to an Effective Church: The Study Guide, and is based off of the first and most important key: Specific Concrete Missional Objectives. What does this mean? I was recently at a meeting of pastors, and at the church we were at there was a jar of peanut butter with a sign on it that read missioanl planning process. This is because the missional planning process is as clear as a jar of peanut butter. What is our congregational missional plan? Do we know where God is calling us and where He is leading us? Are we ready to go where He has called us, to follow where He is leading us?
If someone where to come into our worship service and ask if we are really God’s servants, just like John asked Jesus, how would we respond? Can we name concrete examples of how we are God’s servants, or are the items way we preach ourselves? If everything is about us and what we are doing, then we need to step back and take another look at the way we are doing what we are doing, or possibly re evaluate our whole ministry outlook. We need to be the revelation of God in this place, not the God that people want, or the God we think we need, but of God. This is why John was questioning Jesus, because Jesus did not measure up to what they had expected the Messiah to be. He was not freeing them from oppression? He was not being a king? He was not uniting the people? Or was he? He truly freed the oppressed, not the people of Israel, but the oppressed of the world. He did not come to be King of the Jews, but to be the King of all the World. He did not come to unite and lead the people of Israel to victory, but to unite the people of the world.
Can we say how we are being God’s servants, or do we need to tell our visitors, to look somewhere else?
aSacredRebel 