Jesus in Your Blood

Hypothesis: When you enter some churches, they just smell like mission. Like pizza, it's a smell hard to describe, but we all know what it is when we enter a room. In a church that "smells like mission," mission is the organizing factor, the central principle that guides everything it does. Our church, in contrast, has a couple mission projects in which some people participate.

I have spent the last couple of days home with a sick son.  He has a fever, and the official diagnosis is ‘something viral’.  That puts his cure and recovery outside the hands of modern medicine.  That means Jesus has to take over.  And quite frankly, that is nothing but frustrating from where I sit.

And if that is so very frustrating here at home, in the pastor’s home, how much more could it be at the church?  You see, we pay lip service to what Jesus says in the Great Commission, “All authority in heaven and on earth have been given to me.”  But we don’t really surrender ourselves to the power and control of Jesus when we do church things.  You know how I know that?

Because when I go to church meetings, it doesn’t feel like it does right now.  It doesn’t feel like I am out of control.  At church, it doesn’t feel like what is happening is truly in God’s hands, because I can still put my hands into it.  I work with the Session to call the shots.  We’ve never been forced into a choice that leaves us frustrated because we have felt we are not in control.

The hypothesis talks about churches that ‘smell like mission’.  I think that smell is churches that have gotten to a place where they’ve given over something fundamental to the control of Jesus Christ.  And it bugs me that the closest I can get to that smell in my life and ministry is when my son suffers from fever that I can’t get my doctor to control.

My God, what a comparison!

What these two situations have in common is a lack of trust in Jesus.  I want to be able to go to my doctor and know that he can do this and that to implement a healing plan to get my son’s temperature back to normal.  This is not a life threatening thing, but it is a few days of school missed, sidelined from active intervention except some treatment of symptoms.  I CAN’T CONTROL IT.

When it comes to the church, it is another scenario.  For the last five years, there have been falling into place a number of significant pieces of the Lord’s plan.  Trainings and personal development, faith opportunities, community opportunities, a tele-coaching network on the form and function of church.  The Lord has been spoon-feeding this stuff to us, giving it to us as we can accept it.

I CAN’T CONTROL IT.  But I can get in the way, I can NOT trust Him, I can ignore what He has done.  But it is time to trust the Lord and go where He is calling us, it is time to change how things smell around our church. (And boy, is that an awkward ending!)