The Vision . . .

My desire for this blog is that it will chronicle my pastoral journey as well as be a place to both share with and receive from others in that journey.

It begins with a vision that I believe God placed in my life as far back as my college days. I remember distinctly feeling that God was going to do something special with my generation, that things which had been status quo would be challenged and transformed.

Myself along with many of my friends from largley evangelical, more specifically Wesleyan-Holiness backgrounds, had long desired something deeper in our spirituality than what we discovered on a weekly basis in the seeker-sensitive style churches we attended. Thus we experimented with house churches in our dorms, we attended churches characterized as having high liturgy, we explored philosophy and theology to fill the void, and sadly, some of us stopped attending church altogether.

My journey took me to a Nazarene seminary in Kansas City. There I grew more convinced of the importance of the symbols and liturgical elements of the Christian tradition and their ability to give us handles, guideposts, in our relationship with God. However, looking back I believe I threw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater. I couldn't see that perhaps there might be some elements and forms of contemporary worship that held significant value. In spite of my increasing knowledge of and love for God and the Church, my life was a desert. (That's not to say there weren't oases, and large ones at that--just that my life was characterized by a general spiritual drynness.) That is, until my wife and I moved to Manchester, England.

In England, Barb and I came in contact with some of the leaders of the Alpha Course created by Nicky Gumble et al, from Holy Trinity Brompton in London. Through them, and through a professor at the university I was attending at the time, we began to realize that there was a distinct lack of appreciation or appropriate emphasis on the Person and work of the Holy Spirit. My evaluation, rightly or wrongly, of my denominational tradition was that it had become so focused on the conversion experience, that it had failed to recognized the importance of the Third Person of the Trinity--the Spirit of Christ. This had led to a church that was largely devoid of openness to the breath of the life-giving Spirit. Myself and many of my peers were suffering from an anemic life of the Spirit. What my professor and Anglican friends taught Barb and I was that the Spirit of God must be present in our lives and our churches in order for them to be vibrant and whole.

Looking back, I can see now that part of what my friends and I were experiencing in college was what is now called "postmodernism"--a disillusionment with the prepackaged and santized version of the Church and reality given to us by those who worshipped too long at the idols of rationalism, reason, and pragmatism. Gutted of any sense of the reality of the "otherness" of God, of the spiritual coexisting with the physical, of the magnum mysterium, we had reached a point of spiritual dehydration. What we needed was God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Of course the Spirit bloweth where He listeth. We moved back to Kansas City after a year in England and rejoined the church we had left. Only this time, we attempted to be more open to the movements and voice of the Holy Spirit. What I discovered was that when we give up our preconceptions of how God works, He can do great things. That's not to say that the journey and search at Kansas City Trinity Church of the Nazarene were all without bumps in the road, but that it was, in my estimation, an honest and genuine search for the life of the Trinity to take root in our lives.

Three years later and here I am in Lafayette, Indiana. Before we even came here, Barb and I felt like God had given us a vision and wanted to use us to reach this post-modern world. We considered planting an emergent-style church in an urban area, but nothing seemed to open up. Then we came to the First Church of the Nazarene here and really sensed that God wanted us here. Not because we're anything great, but perhaps because we're open to Him and what He might want to do here.

Just last week, a vision began to resurface in our minds in relation to this local body of Christ. A vision for a new kind of community. Not one that guts another church and takes all of it's members away (like the consumer-driven Church Growth movement has tended to do, knowingly or not), but one which sprouts up within an existing congregation and becomes yet another form of expression of the life of the Spirit of Christ among us.

That vision is Emmaus Road.