the pitt - part six: we're on a mission from God

How do you beckon to others with a rumour of God's promise? How do you go about inviting friends into an adventure that is just that it's an adventure...it's fuzzy...it's ill-defined...in fact the only way we define it is by walking into it. We don't have anything but evanescent fog...but I love fog (it represents the Spirit to me) and God is in the fog! Another admission: I think I jumped ahead of the official process at this point, but instead of going to find out about church-planting from the national or regional faciliators in the Vineyard, we went local. We began talking about it with good and old friends...and in the midst of that, others began to wonder if they were called into this thing. It then occurred to us that perhaps it wasn't just us, but God might be whispering to us as we sit and watch re-runs on WGN:




[I love that they are playing "I Love You Just the Way You Are" in the background here...]

So we decided to invite some friends over and have a "Summer of Discovery" group. We invited those who had showed an interest as we were describing what we felt God doing with us, and also those who we thought of when we thought: "I want to be neighbors and live life with these people!" Throughtout this past summer, we gathered, we prayed, we ate with each other, we laughed together, we went and visited Pittsburgh (we even did the ducky tour - It's a Boat, It's a Truck, It's a Duck! - actually not as schticky-bad as I thought, and all my daughters got to steer the craft when we were in the Allegheny river!)


At one of these recent Discovery gatherings, my friend Steven Leyva and I were talking about expectations and this gathering we call church. It was a really good conversation as we went along, and eventually I asked him, what do you want your expectations to be? He then reminded me of a few years ago, when his wife and I were in VLI together. Steven had joined the other students as we were working through one of the weekend intensives on healing, and while the teaching had ended, the ministry was still going on. The Spirit showed up in power as people felt released to risk and pray and bless and midwife what the Spirit of God was doing in our midst with one another, cooperating with God's will being done on earth as it is in heaven. I remembered it well, for it was one of those times that sticks out in my own memory, the deep texture of God's Presence with us.


Well, Steven said that was what he wanted his expectation to be. Yes! I totally agree, I want His Presence with us, and if He's not going with us, we're not going. A few days later I was re-reading James D.G. Dunn's The Christ and the Spirit, Volume 2, and came across this passage: "The basis of community is the shared experience of the Spirit. "The koinonia of the Spirit" (2 Corinthians 13:13-14; Phil 2:1) means primarily "participation in the Spirit," the shared common experience of the Spirit which was the other side of the coin from their common faith in Christ,"...[t]heir experience of the Spirit was not something merely personal, the individual in his or her aloneness. It was a society-creating experience, a body-of-Christ-creating experience, an experience of being knit into a community...[i]t may be significant, then, that Acts never records an occasion when the Spirit was poured out in the earliest days other than on groups - the shared experience of the Spirit..."





Choreography aside (I only wish I had moves like James Brown...or even Jake and Elwood...well, maybe I could get my Elwood on!), sometimes, words take on baggage that was helpful previously, but has become burdonsome in explaining the essence of what you mean. 'Koinonia' is usually translated as 'fellowship' and many people I talk to think "church" when they here that in that context, which makes it all rather vague and dependent on other words and thoughts in the semantic-range. When we limit it to "church", I think we don't really grab hold of it. But fellowship as shared experience...a shared experience that bind us, mold us together...it just strikes me powerfully, and I'm not sure I can articulate why it is hitting me deeply, but I love it. There is a lot to unpack in that, and I want to return and spend some time unpacking it...but for now, just let it reverberate...I'm just marinating in it. Of course, embracing the experience of God in Christ Jesus through His Spirit turns out to be core to our tribe, the Vineyard.


Here's another thing: it's a discernment process.  The very interesting thing to me is that in the whole "Summer of Discovery", people who postured themselves to hear from God and discern with others, actually ended up hearing a call, even though - with about half of the people - it wasn't to come to Pittsburgh with us.  But for others they did hear something concrete in a call from God and have stepped out to do those things.  While others are still waiting, still discerning, still seeking.  A shared experience of the Spirit and a collective seeking and discernment.  It's an on-going journey...and we're in it together.


May it be so, O Lord, in what you do to us and with us and through us...may it be so!






[to be continued...]