End of the Year

Westmont,

It has been an interesting year for One in Christ. I'm so thankful for everyone that came to the meetings. I'm also thankful for WSM for helping us and providing us with funding. Most of all, I'm thankful to God who has turned our hearts toward His desire for complete unity in Him. Whatever success that this ministry has had this year, it was because of him.

Good luck with finals. Seniors, congratulations and we wish you the best. For all the rest, we will see you next year (or at least Emmet and Josh will, I'm graduating). Have a great summer.

God bless,
Joe

P.S. We will probably continue to update this blog during the summer. Stay updated with a feed tracker like Bloglines. It will let you know when we post new information. Very handy. See the link on the right.

The Key to Longevity for OIC

One of the hardest parts of working in a college environment, I think, is the quick turnover rate. As soon as you're starting to make some progress people graduate and a whole new group of people uninvolved in the discussion come in and we have to start all over. It's frustrating, and I confess that I haven't really come to terms with this fact of college ministry until just today, when a faithful member pointed out the amount of time we were talking about the "jargon behind our jargon," which he felt left out on. It would be so much easier, he said, if we held up the core vision of what One in Christ is about, in the form of a mission statement for example, as a sort of foundation for the conversation. This would be the main message that we would be bringing to the Westmont community, the vision that we would be discipling our members into.

Thinking about this made me realize the necessity of re-establishing ourselves for the future. In a sense, we have sort of invented the wheel on how to do reconciliation of this kind on a college campus. Sure there are still plenty of rough edges and bumps in our proverbial wheel, but all in all I think we have begun a very successful thing. But for OIC to be successful in the future, we need to provide documentation and resources of the things that we have done to be successful so that our future leaders don't have to reinvent the wheel all over again. It was challenging enough to do it the first time and we made plenty of mistakes along the way, but if we want OIC to continue, it would be foolish to ask our future leaders to do everything all over again.

So what I am suggesting, not just to the leaders but to the whole ministry, is to develop resources that would provide a foundation for future members and leaders. This might include the following:

• Mission Statement
  
• This is crucial
• It would be based on a Trinitarian model and the Church's relationship to it
• It would likely take several drafts and review by many different people
  
• Documentation of Meetings
• Including what we have done, how often we have met, when, where
• This would include our Wednesday night meetings this year, our Breakfast club meetings, the meetings with the leaders, and the meetings of last year too
• In the future this could be documented using a tape recorder or a computer with a microphone. If we're really ambitious, after it's recorded someone can type out a script
• It would be important to talk about lessons that we've learned about doing meetings, what has been successful, what hasn't
• Planned Activities
• Activities that we have done that have been successful
  
• Activities that we have wanted to do but haven't been able to
• Resources
• Books, blogs, podcasts, videos, professors, pastors, etc. that we have have found to be helpful or which we have used in our ministry
• Required reading for future leaders
• Books, other media, and people that we have used in meetings and their descriptions
• ie Professor Rhee, The Princeton Proposal, etc.
• Any other things that you can think of!

This would be something like a handbook or a scientific report that would describe the method, materials, and results in enough detail that someone else could repeat it and get similar results. Not only could this be helpful for future members and leaders of OIC at Westmont, but for other campus' that are interested in doing something similar. The work that we're doing at Westmont could be something that grows even to a global ministry. The world is flat!

We'll be talking more about this as leaders, in our final meetings, and during the summer over the internet and such. Leave a comment with what you think!

In Christ,
Joe

Church Re-Structure

Here's an interesting article by Alan Hartung about the need for re-structuring the Church:

CHURCH RE-STRUCTURE

His idea is to re-structure the service so that more people can get involved in the congregation. I like his spirit, but I he gets caught up with the symptoms and misses the much deeper problem. The deeper problem is even that for much of Christianity, the worship service is the center of Christian life. It's no mistake, I think, that we get very few examples of how to put on a fantastic worship service in the Bible. We do, however, get plenty of examples on how to radically serve the community.

My own comment to Alan's article (number 12) can be viewed at the very very bottom. Or here :)

Unfortunately, Alan, in my humble opinion, the heart of the problem lies beyond church structure to the very way in which we look at the church and its purpose. The problem is that we spend way too much time focusing on the church and how to make it better. What we are really doing is focusing on ourselves. This self-love (or self-hatred) is at the very heart of the problem that you are writing about. Unfortunately, in a way, you are feeding the problem.

Who, in the Bible, spent the most time focusing on their own internal structure; who started their own sect because the one in power wasn't good enough, holy enough; who stoned the one's that broke the rules? The PHARISEES! Jesus, however, went into the community. He went to the poor. He went to the sick. He healed people on the street. He taught in the hills. The focus for Jesus was not the temple but the community.

For the Body of Christ, the Church--yes, that's right, the Church is Christ's body present in the world--the church service is like the cardio-respiratory system. It supplies blood and oxygen, life and vigor to the body parts. But if that's all the Church is then we have a dead Church. Where are the muscles? Where are the hands and feet at work in the community? THESE ARE WHAT PEOPLE CARE ABOUT? WHAT "SEEKERS" ARE LOOKING FOR? No one cares if someone has a really good heart and set of lungs if THEY ARE NOT USING THEM!

What I say is stop worrying about structure. Stop caring about the 80-20 rule. Instead let's get our hands and feet dirty in the community. Let's love our brothers and sisters in Christ. Listen to them. Pray for them. And lead them out to the streets and preach the good news with our hands and with our mouth. In my humble opinion, that's the Church!