I don't watch The Office normally, but one of the funniest lines I have heard from it is when Dwight is talking about the Acronym K.I.S.S and says, "Michael always says ‘K-I-S-S. Keep it simple, stupid.’ Great advice. Hurts my feelings every time." And it's really true.
Riverbend has been blessed by God to see a lot of growth over the last two years. Basically we have gone from 20-30 people each Sunday to 130 or so. When growth happens this quickly things get a bit crazy and our natural inclination is to build programs and systems to cover the growth. These aren't bad things to do, and most of them are probably necessary, but it has a very real potential to not follow the K-I-S-S advice. Next thing we know we end up forgetting what our mission and purpose is.
We have a pretty straight forward mission statement (http://www.riverbendonline.org/about-us/our-dream) but even this can seem intimidating in the midst of a bunch of community groups, events, and gatherings that can vary greatly in feel and context. This got me thinking about what is our purpose as Christians and the Church in simple form.
First off, we know its about Jesus. It's about the Gospel he lived out, died for, and rose again in. It's not about what we have done or what we do, but what he has already done. It's simple, it's radical. We don't have to do anything besides receive it and follow Him. The follow Him is what I get overwhelmed with and try to do things in my own strength. There may be some opportunity for me to elaborate more on this in the coming weeks and months, but for the sake of the Spirit of this blog, I'm going to Keep It Simple:
Following Jesus is like entering a traffic circle. We enter in one side when we start following Jesus and we go around the circle, which has two views, Proclaim and Respond, and then we exit, which is when we die.
That's it, we proclaim Jesus and then we respond to that Gospel, which leads us to proclaim it again. It may look different depending on our culture, context and audience, but to be a follower of Jesus means we are responding to the Gospel of Jesus which in turn should lead us to Proclaiming that Gospel to others. Period.
Keep It Simple.
