Here's What imagine Will Look Like Going Forward.

Last Sunday, I presented and explained the outline below. In it I lay out a rationale for how imagine as a small, missional church community will seek to REDUCE (our costs), REFOCUS (our potential and resources) and RE-LAUNCH (our mission in Northampton and wherever else God summons us). The 3-R's are necessities for getting back on our feet so we might press on in a healthy, vibrant way. 

I began by reminding folks imagine’s mission remains: Helping People Discover and Follow the God Who Is More Than They Imagine. Since we came here that mission has not changed. We've had varying degrees of effectiveness executing it, both as individuals and as a group, but we've never jettisoned it for some other mission. Helping anyone we encounter to discover Jesus beyond their stereotypes or ignorance of Him remains our "prime directive." Walking alongside those who join our Christ-loved and loving community becomes our opportunity to help each person follow him through their gifts in his redemptive Kingdom work wherever he sends us -  individually or as a group.

Next, I fleshed out the following:

I. We’ll seek for our Kingdom life with God and one another to be lived through 3 interweaving expressions:

• Spiritual Formation: Training the life of heart, the life of mind, and the life of the spirit: teaching, retreats, spiritual direction (learning the disciplines), healing. I reiterated intimacy with Jesus was the wellspring from which fruitful Kingdom work flows. 

We'll continue to train the minds of people to think from a Scripturally-informed, practical and spiritual theology which helps each one know why they believe what they believe and are convinced it's the way, truth and the life in a world of competing spiritual/cultural world views.

We'll continue to train the heart of a people to love God and know his love. The heart pursues what it has passion for; what it loves, desires and cherishes. In turn, because God so loved the world that he gave it his son, we want people to love what is good and beautiful and worthy of cherishing. Ultimately, we'll work  to train the heart so its deepest desire and joy is what God wants. A heart captivated by God because it knows him can become full of peace, passion, and joy through all of life's vicissitudes.

We'll continue to train people's spiritual vision to discern, reflect on, and follow the still, small voice of the Holy Spirit. We'll encourage everyone to become more aware of the handiwork of God in their lives; how he reveals his Presence in the ordinary and the extraordinary. We'll encourage the spiritual disciplines of spending time on retreat, listening, reflecting, journaling, studying the Scriptures, reading the great writers of the spiritual life, prayer walking - all practices which lend themselves to such training in deepening a person's openness to the Holy Spirit. 

• Connecting With One Another: worship, teaching, getting together to build relationship. 

W'll keep encouraging imagine folks to form deep filial friendships: spiritual bonding, shared interests and passions, helping one another practically; just spending time with each other. So we get together for worship and teaching on Sundays and sometimes in workshops. We'll have meals together; go to events together. We have also formed cohorts from the inward/OUTWARD Missional Formation Workshop where we seek to know how each off us actually engages and walks with Jesus in everyday living. We;ll continue to do that also so we can help create life-giving spiritual and practical connections.

• Connecting With and Serving Others: the missional way of life to the community and surrounding culture. (The imagineART Gallery, Interfaith Shelter meals, Feast, Halloween, Christmas Giveaway bags, Winter hats giveaway, sending boxes of diapers to poor mothers on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in ND, cultivating the The Florence Organic Garden, etc.)

We will still see ourselves as a community in the midst of a larger community we are called to serve. We'll also see ourselves called to be of help to our neighbors beyond our neighborhoods. We have embraced the missional way of life as the normal Christian life and will not abandon it. Listed above are some of the efforts we have made to connect with folks in Northampton over the last 5 years. It's all about building relationships by loving and serving people that they might come to realize God knows and loves them; in fact, he made the ultimate sacrifice for them. We'll not leave that aside.

II. We'll adjust our structure:

The Leadership Team decided we needed to change our rhythm of life together in order to reduce, refocus and re-launch. Some of that had to do with leaving our current worship space because of the cost.  Some of it had to do with better integrating the facets of our life together so we were connecting internally and externally. Therefore:

• 2 Sundays/month we’ll gather for worship in Northampton or in homes. 

• 1 day/month (could be a week night) we’ll gather for an event of interest or refreshment: art, hiking, movies, plays, canoeing, concerts, dinner/brunch, bonfires at camp, day trips, sports events or activities, wine tasting, (all are invited to suggest an opportunity) etc.

• 1 day/month we’ll gather for a service project to bless our communities (all are invited to suggest an opportunity) helping the poor, joining a multi-church effort, helping a town effort, helping a neighbor in need, etc.

We want each month to reflect such a rhythm so we'll have regular opportunities to connect with each other, serve together, and grow spiritually in friendship with God, one another, and folks he puts in our path.

III. We'll express these values:

Core values animate any group, whether embraced formally, or inferred from corporate mindsets and behaviors. So does imagine.

• Creativity (art, ministry, worship). We still want our life together to reflect creative sensibilities whether in and through worship, events, service or community life. We'll seek to harness the arts and creative thinking as a way of being. We need to get back to that.

• Deepening community and friendship. We'll continue to work to experience life together as communitas: communally shared Kingdom values, and the passion for that which we've been given in one another. We have an abiding passion to live for the greatness and glory of God and his Gospel of grace. We recognize such communities of spiritual friendship can change the world and we want to be one of them, even if in a small way.

• Growing habits of outward missional service reflecting love for God and people. We still want everyone who comes to imagine for any duration to develop and embrace a life habit of outward missional service. By use of the word habit we're describing an unfolding mindset and spiritual attitude, a growing habit of looking at the Christian life as a combination of intimacy with Jesus out of which flows the missional way of living day to day. 

• Building up one another (and others) in the way of freedom, grace and sacrificial love. People have remarked spontaneously over the years that we are a church which extends grace to others. While perfectly, we've wanted to be such a community and still do. We'll remain committed to the notion that everyone who joins our community will experience freedom to work out their life with Christ without pressure to be perfect. We've always said we're a community of the redeemed broken. We still want our way of life to be one of building up anyone in the way of freedom, grace and sacrificial love. The sacrificial love part enables us to be sure that in our freedom we give our lives for others with increasing frequency, individually and together. Therefore, grace for us is not the freedom to do as we please no matter who suffers, but to do as God pleases in and through our lives.

Our hope in all of this is to carry-forward rather than give up or merely carry-on. As I've written many times, the challenges and difficulties we've faced since coming here have been formidable. But we love each other and want to keep our hats in the ring until God says we've completed our mission, if he does.

T-minus 5 Days Until Moving: Some Thoughts.

I'll bet you've noticed during certain moments of clarity that life can have an unexpected, unforeseen symmetry sometimes. Things line up just so; the end of something fits its beginning; what you experienced in one context you experience exactly again later, as if bookends.

In five days, Tricia and I will move out of our 3rd floor apartment at 70 Main Street never to reside there again. But we will still keep our offices and the imagineART Gallery at 70 Main Street on the 2nd floor. When we came to Northampton we began in an office on Armory Street owned by the same landlord who owns the 70 Main Street building, but we lived in Sunderland for the first year. Now, we will live in Shutesbury but remain at our office in Northampton.

It's as if God sees it as more vital we work in Northampton than live in Northampton. Our work is not finished here (sometimes it feels it's barely commenced).

Truth be told, we loved living in Sunderland. Living on Main Street in Noho also has had it's benefits, for sure: close proximity to interesting stores and restaurants, having the freedom to walk rather than drive everywhere, getting to know people who live and work in town, and being able to experience some of the life that comes from living in such a vibrant place.

Reality is we've lived half of our married life at a retreat center on the lovely grounds of a church before we headed north to plant imagine/Northampton. The grounds maintained a pastoral feel and pace, at least for us residing toward the back of the property. So going to live on the grounds of Pinebrook Christian Camp will offer a similar pastoral feel. We'll be in the country for sure! Yeah, there'll be 35 minute drive to the office; we'll have to manage our schedules, pack a lunch, stay late for meetings and gallery duty...wait a minute, that sounds like what normal working folks do every day. Hmmm. We've rejoined the "great madding crowd!" We'll negotiate the change.

There'll be adjustments, I know -- some pleasant, some not so. We'll get used to a different rhythm and pace. There'll also be some lovely blessings like Fall in the woods, not being awakened at 3AM by someone saturated with alcohol and "good times" had, not listening to ambulance, firetruck or police car sirens blasting 3-5 times per day (I know they are necessary), and being able to walk in the woods for exercise and communion with God.

Just living in a house again will be refreshing and welcomed. While we've enjoyed our Main Street-in-the-center-of town apartment, and prayed we'd live on Main Street before we came to Noho, we are ready to leave it for someone else to enjoy. We won't own the house, but it will give us a sense of sanctuary and peace because of where it is and because it will be our home for a time. We get to leave the hustle and bustle of our small city for a setting which will bring a needed measure of balance and internal quietness. We might even normalize a bit. Well, that maybe going too far, but we'll find another rhythm to offset our Northampton rhythm.

I think we both look forward to that.

Also, multiple thank you's to Kevin and Janet Williams for offering the possibility in the first place, and the Pinebrook Camp Board for supporting it! And thanks for folks who got the place spruced up after substantial water damage last winter, especially Janet, and Kevin's dad, Dick Williams. I also heard a rumor some unnamed folks chipped in to help as well. Wow! Lastly, we want to thank beforehand the people who'll help us move boxes tomorrow. We are wonderfully graced by your generosity to us!

Five busy days more and the next chapter of our Kingdom journey will begin to be written!