Lenses

Well, I am back blogging… the reason for my delay is that I tend to blog about what I’m feeling, thinking on, and absorbing; and lately, the responsibility of leadership has required me to keep most of this to myself.

This last weekend, I resigned from my position as Lead Pastor at NCC.  While the reasons are many, I think this is the biggest: At its core, each church adopts its own flavor, style, and methods to accomplish the mission – as well as its own concept of what the mission is.  While we have made much progress toward leading NCC to a new worldview about the nature and purpose of church, at its heart NCC is what it is – with a worldview befitting its history.

No matter what labels you use for church – traditional, contemporary, classic, emergent, Gen-X, neo-hippie 🙂 people make up the church – and people gather around a common worldview, a common lens to see the world.  Sometimes, no matter how much people desire to change, to embrace something new, their world-view lens remains largely unchanged.  Said another way, you can tweak that lens, but it is hard to recast it.  Hence the common belief that it easier to plant a new church, than transition an existing one.

Jen and I still feel called and alive with the vision that brought us here in the first place.  We’ll wait and see where God directs.  No matter what, we hope that NCC continues to discern God’s will, disciple people, and reach people far from God – by what ever methods work for them.  And I know we are grateful that we had a small part to play in its mission to Naperville.

OK – time to get off the soapbox – I’ve got work to do, and I think I’ll grab another espresso.  There is supposed to be a John Wayne movie on tonight, so life is good 🙂