I am convinced that Crossroads has the best staff and leadership team on the planet! We have always had remarkable leaders and high capacity volunteers in every area at Crossroads and I believe it is the reason God has been able to do so much in us and through us over the last couple of years. Last night we had an incredible Staff & Leaders meeting at the Annex. I want to share a little bit about that, but give me a minute to thank and brag on some people.
Thank you Will and Chris and Rachel and Justin for making everything work so well last night. You made our Staff & Leaders meeting the most important thing to you, and it showed!
Thank you Leslie for making a ridiculous amount of really awesome chili to eat. Two kinds! I love that you made feeding our Staff & Leaders the most important thing to you!
Thank you Staff & Leaders for making last night's meeting so important in your lives. I know many of you had to miss other events, comittments and opportunities in order to be there. That you consistently sacrifice your own personal time and personal agenda to prepare yourselves to better serve others blows me away! Your faithfulness is why Crossroads even exists!
After we ate some really good chili, we settled in and I shared a bit about what was important for our church when we started out, what's important today, and what will be important tomorrow. We shared from Nehemiah Chapter 4 where we read about the incredible effort to rebuild the wall around Jerusalem. The wall was only halfway up, and people were tired. They were discouraged by constant attacks from the outside, and finishing the work they had set out to do seemed like an overwhelming and unattainable goal.
But then Nehemiah made some changes in their approach to the work. They organized themselves to do what they were doing BETTER. They worked out a system of staying united in their efforts, even though their work kept them far-flung from one another. They became unified around the vision of completing the work, and doing so realizing that God was fighting for them!
Along those lines we recognized that we were suffering from a certain amount of "organizational tiredness" in carrying out the work that God called us to do at Crossroads. We recognized that "our wall" was also only halfway up. That as a church, many things were distracting us or competing for our attention, getting us a bit off mission. We also recognized that our work had us far-flung, or spread out from one another. So we set out to unify our efforts by recapturing the vision that God put in our hearts for our community when we first set out.
We covered a lot of ground last night, but here, in short form, are some very important commitments that we have adopted as our own, and that we resolve to keep as we go forward:
We don't need to figure out how to keep church people (INSIDERS) happy and comfortable. That's an impossible task that we were never designed to accomplish. Instead, we need to stay on mission by spending ourselves making every effort to reach and serve those who are far from God (OUTSIDERS).
It's impossible to hate someone once you've heard their story. God knows everyone's story and He loves them anyway, and He's called us to do the same. But it's messy to do that, and it raises this question: "If I ACCEPT you, doesn't it look like I APPROVE of you?" The answer is, "Yes". Acceptance is the path to INFLUENCE, but it will look to some people like we approve of the choices or lifestyles or sin of others. But we are resolved to be the generation, the people, the CHURCH that is willing to look like we approve, in order to gain INFLUENCE for Christ, regardless of what anyone else thinks about us.
There is much to be LEARNED from other churches and leaders. In fact, the very resolutions you are reading were adopted from a well-known church leader. They are not original to us. But time is short, and we don't have to reinvent the wheel, or try to be original. What we need to be is effective. God has uniquely fashioned us as a church to reach specific people with the Gospel now! To be effective we must stay true to that calling. In turn, staying true to our calling makes us authentic. (Here's the cool part: by being authentic, we are original.)
We started this church with absolutely NOTHING. In fact, in purely economic terms, there's no reason that Crossroads should even still be here. At NO TIME have we EVER had enough money to do the things that we have done. Yet, we ARE here, and every indication is that we will continue to be here and continue to thrive. In a natural sense, it makes no sense. BUT GOD has provided everything we have ever needed, and He continues to provide what we need. And if GOD is on our side, and GOD had called us, and GOD has put the lost on our hearts, and GOD wants Crossroads to reach them, then NOTHING will stop it from happening! God didn't call us to protect assets, but to advance a kingdom. Let's always be fearless!
We dug down deep into each of the areas I mentioned above. We talked about where we had succeeded, where we had fallen short, where our focus needed to be going forward, and we commited to stay true to what God called us to do. While the ideas and the words behind these commitments are not original, they fully belong to us. Our vision, and purpose and mission at Crossroads are also not original words or ideas. But they wholly belongs to us, and we have them securely in our grasp. I'll be writing about them later in the week.
Wow. What a big night.
