In his August 23, 2019 eNews article, Lance records what he calls, "our Vision." Though he doesn't call it "our Vision Statement," I'm supposing that that is what this is.
This, then, is "our Vision."
Contagious Awakening: By our 200th anniversary (2025), we will equip and release thousands of spiritually charged leaders to every man, woman, and child to whom we are sent. This will happen by positioning ourselves for a movement of the Holy Spirit through repentance, reconciliation, and prayer.
To his credit, Lance becomes philosophical in the next paragraph of the article, explaining what he understands vision itself to be.
Lance says,
When you think about vision, you think about seeing into the future. You think about being able to see what doesn’t yet exist but could exist in the future. Vision isn’t so much about capturing our hopes and dreams for the future, but rather uncovering where the Lord wants to take us in the years ahead. Vision always draws us beyond what already exists and calls us to embrace what could be.
As can be expected, coming from today's Lance, as opposed to the "raw" Lance I praised so highly in a recent post, what Lance writes here is thoughtful and careful. It's progressive compared to the past fallen ways of our institution, yet it's moderate, mellow and, certainty, in no way, daring.
Yet, from way up here at 40,000 feet, the place people with the APEST gift of prophecy spend a nice piece of their time, it's clear that the whole new CGGC Vision thing has one crucial, and deadly, flaw.
The vision Lance describes,
"uncovering where the Lord wants to take us in the years ahead"
is not the work of APEST prophets.
------------------
(Jesus) gave some to be apostles others to be prophets others to be evangelists and others to be shepherds and teachers. (Ephesians 4). He did that, "to prepare the saints for works of ministry." (Ephesians 4) That is, He did it so God's will would be done in the world...by His people...in real and concrete ways.
Each spiritual gifting is unique and important.
All of the gifts function in a way that demands that each gift be acknowledged in the body. The Lord created us to be a body in which all of the parts depend on each other so that if the function of one part is ignored, the entire body suffers. (1 Corinthians 12)
When it comes to uncovering what the Lord wants His people to do, and to be, in the future, if the Lord reveals that information at all, by His design He does it:
1. Not through the leaders of the institution,
2. But, through the men and women to whom He has given the gift of prophecy. (In times when the church is out of step with the Spirit, as even leadership acknowledges we have been, those prophetic voices are heard from the distance, as they call out from the wilderness.)
------------------
As an institutional statement, what Lance calls "our Vision" is a nice, well-polished, and carefully crafted, piece of literature.
What is the chance, though, that "our Vision" actually is God's vision?
Based on the reality that "our Vision" doesn't come into the body through the Spirit, and through the people to whom Jesus would give it.
Zero.
------------------
The ancient Chinese saying contains truth: The longest journey begins with a single step.
If the vision that directs that first step is faulty, the journey will, at the very best, start wrong.
General Conference staff has been talking APEST for quite some time now. Yet, from what I can see, it has never walked APEST.
Charting the course to, as Lance says it, "repentance, reconciliation and prayer," from a biblical, uh, paradigm, would have begun with the words of the prophets.
It has not been.
I'll say what I've said many times:
The people who hold institutional authority in the CGGC are nice people. They have good hearts. They are very sincere. They are likable.
Yet, for all of that, the Lord hasn't blessed their plans and programs for generations.
All of those plans and programs have resulted in increased numerical decline and spiritual decay.
The Lord is not blessing us. If anything, he's cursing us.
This Strategic Plan, with the vision Lance describes, comes from the same bag of tricks our institutional authorities have been reaching into since the 1930s.
This plan sounds as good as every other plan and program our institutional authorities have devised in recent generations.
Yet, the result has always, always, always been the same.
Decline and decay.
We must repent.
No comments:
Post a Comment