Yesterday I spent the morning across a coffee table from a heart wrenching story. A young man who’s past is marked with substance abuse, felony charges, and broken relationships.  A lost decade.  And the reality of beginning a journey he should already be well into is simply too much for him to carry.

Alone.

Scared.

Paralyzed.

The distance between where he currently is and where he knows he should be is so great, he’s completely unable to see the other side of the chasm.  No vision means no hope means no ambition means no action.

Means despair.

Grace is free.  God makes beauty from ashes. But there is no “Extreme Makeover Home Edition” waiting to magically re-build your life in seven short days (barring inclement weather) while you vacation in Disney World.

It’s a process. One you can’t do alone.  One you don’t have to do alone.

It’s time to lay the first brick.

Today was our last at the projects. We packed up the tents, the crafts, the dulce (candy) for the last time on this Honduran adventure.

The kids cried.

We cried.

Time to head home.  But the damage has already been done. None who have walked these streets, sat in these homes, interacted with this beautiful people, will ever be able to scrape the images and encounters from our minds.  Nor do we want to.  But will this week really change us?

I guess that remains to be seen.

Love can’t be an event. Not something we block out for a week on our busy calendars.  Not something that stays here in Honduras as we head back to our real lives in the United States.

But that will be the temptation.  The direction the current will naturally try to take us as the intensity and focus of this controlled, planned experience abruptly morphs back into the comfort and familiarity of home.

That’s why trips like this can’t simply be something we do. Time moves on.  The trip comes and goes.

These experiences have to be about what we become.

Tomorrow we have a day to relax and process together before heading for home.  A day to drive these encounters into our DNA.  To make sure this act of worship called Honduras 2010 wasn’t just a self-righteous photo-op.

As we loaded the bus this evening, almost too surreal to believe, a rainbow appeared in the rain clouds engulfing the mountains that look down on Las Delicious.  Coincidence? Maybe.  Cliché?  Could be.

Or was God actually trying to remind us that there is hope?

Hope for all of us.

As a church leader, the reality is unavoidable. News stories circulate the statistics through Christian networks and publications with great regularity. Western Churches are dying. Closing their doors at an alarming rate.  And my honest, and undoubtedly controversial, question is this:  is that really all that bad?

I’m the co-pastor of a local church in downtown Indianapolis, and I unabashedly believe that the local church is God’s designated expression to bring His hope to the world. But I sometimes wonder if all our efforts to keep churches in business are actually working against God’s designed purposes for those churches to begin with.  Really, I haven’t been drinking.  Let me explain.

We have an undeniable propensity to see the church as an entity instead of a people, an institution instead of a movement. So almost involuntarily over time, our focus turns toward acquiring and keeping resources that sustain the organization. Efforts which may or may not lead to the expansion of the Kingdom of God.

“Preserve and keep builds my kingdom.  Create and release grows God’s.”

In fact, almost without warning, our church and its existence can easily become our definition of God’s Kingdom in its entirety. The complete answer to the question, rather than just a piece of a much larger landscape.

In business school we learned the product life cycle.  Eventually, regardless of longevity, all products become obsolete. It’s inevitable.  But that doesn’t necessarily eliminate the demand for what those products provided.  Cultural shifts or technological breakthroughs may simply create a better way to accomplish the desired outcome.

Let’s be honest, if McDonald’s goes out of business, people will still find cheap, artery-clogging food to eat.  If GM shuts it doors, transportation won’t cease to exist.  If Apple files for bankruptcy, our generation will still create technological tools that allow us to snobbishly mock users of Microsoft products.

“The church is a means, not an end.”

And if my organized expression of the local church ever ceases to exist, God’s Kingdom will still expand (ask any of the skyrocketing number of Christians in communist China).  Because the church is people, not an institution. If what I know as church isn’t expanding the Kingdom, wouldn’t it be best to release those people and resources to start new faith communities that are?  After all, the church is a means, not an end.

City Community Church turns 11 months old this weekend, and I hope with all my heart that we celebrate 10 years, 25 years, 50 years as a local church community.  But only if we’re truly advancing God’s agenda in the world. If not, we need to go out of business and release our resources to those who are. Getting CityCom to its next birthday milestone can’t be our focus.

Preserve and keep builds my kingdom.  Create and release grows God’s. And isn’t that what the Church is supposed to be all about?  Love to hear your thoughts: www.beyondtherisk.com

This is an entry from a previous blog I thought was worth re-posting in this new format.  Love to create some dialog around this topic.  What do you think?

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to play golf with the principal of Ben Davis High School. Not only is BD one of the largest high schools in Indiana, it is also my alma mater (purple and white class of ’92 baby!). Ben Davis is a quality institution and really a hub of life and culture on the west side of Indianapolis. So as much as I wanted to make the day just about golf, the spiritual leader in me had to utilize the opportunity to explore the mind of this man who daily interacts with thousands of students that represent the future of this community.

“What is the biggest challenge you see for our city through the lives of your students?” I asked. The dialog didn’t last long but it was amazingly insightful. The answer: loss of hope. “Many of these kids do not see a future for themselves beyond high school,” he said. “When they look out past year 12 there’s simply nothing there.” When hope for the future is gone we begin to live for the moment, or worse yet, we stop living altogether.

The imagination is the birthplace of creativity, but loss of hope kills the imagination. Reality swallows potential and dreams shrivel. And when dreams die, imagination disappears; creativity becomes non-existent, and life loses purpose.

Vision is the birthplace of hope.
Hope is the fuel of imagination.
Imagination is the seed of creativity.
And creativity is the breath of life.

The very first expression we see of God in His Word is as the Creator. “God created human beings; he created them godlike, reflecting God’s nature.” (Gen. 1:27 MSG). Creativity is a signal that the very nature of God resides in us. I firmly believe that The Church should be the most creative entity on planet earth! So why is that rarely true?

Because churches drift. We lose focus. Vision becomes blurry and hope begins to die. Our imaginations grow cobwebs and creativity for the future gives way to memories of the past. We become just like those high school students that see no picture for their lives beyond senior year. God’s church and God’s people, the hope of the world, becomes lifeless and predictable. Hardly a picture that rightly represents the everlasting God of the universe. So what do we do?

Vision is everything. If you are a community leader, creative leader, church leader, a mom or dad (if anyone is following you in any way), clear and compelling vision must be your mantra. When you look out beyond tomorrow for your life, your community, your church, your family, whatever you lead…what do you see? What picture has God painted on your heart? Share it!  Again, and again, and again, and again.  That vision becomes the birthplace of hope that will lead to unbridled imagination and creativity. It will lead to life.

You can see a lot in someone’s eyes.  Joy, fear, peace, happiness, hunger, pain.  Even after six weeks, I’m still processing my experiences from La Ceiba, Honduras…mostly when I look into the eyes of my own children.

The eyes on the left belong to my 7 year old daughter Anna.  I’ve met very few girls as care free and in love with life as this little one.  She spends her summer days playing with dolls, dressing up like a princess, riding her new purple bike, and playing with her friends.  She’s getting a passion for fashion, so it’s not out of the ordinary to see her in five different outfits on any given day.  And in the midst of all her carefree summer daydreaming, when Anna looks into the future the possibilities are endless.  Actually, it’s involuntary.  She doesn’t even question it, because she innately knows her future is full of limitless potential if she’s willing to pursue it.  She has the creativity, the relationships, and the culture around her to make it happen.  You can see it in her eyes.

The eyes on the right belong to Lourdess, a 7 year old girl we met in La Ceiba.  She lives in a square, wooden-box of a house with cardboard for “drywall,” about the size of our family room, with her mom and dad (a rare blessing in this community) and a plethora of brothers and sisters.  Dad is constantly struggling to find work in this depressed economy, but unlike so many other fathers from the neighborhood, has chosen (at least for now) not to leave his family for work in the USA.  Lourdess loves to play, too.  She had a doll, some crayons (she even gave us a picture she had drawn), and an old worn-out Disney princess dress.  The same dress hangs in my Anna’s closet here in Indy.

But as I wrote from Honduras, the greatest struggle for me is not the lack of money or even the awful living conditions.  It was in the eyes.  The hope, the encouragement, the possibilities that impulsively fill the gaze of my little Anna aren’t even in the lexicon for Lourdess.  In fact, when we asked many of these young children about their “sueños” (or dreams of the future), they required further explanation.  Not only did they have no vision for the future, they had no context in which to even understand the question.

Honestly, I don’t know what to do with all this.  Guilt is not a valid motivator, and God doesn’t use condemnation to push us in His direction.  But I do know we all need to embrace the journey, to ask God what He wants from us.  He never holds us accountable for what we don’t have, but He has high expectations for us to properly use what we do. That’s why we’re partnering with organizations like Mission of Mercy to try and do what we can to make a dent into the hopelessness we encountered in Honduras.

How do we fill both sets of eyes with the same limitless hope?  Not hope for the American way of life which is found in a temporary, man-made culture; but the Hope of the Creator of life, the limitless God-possibilities woven into our very being and intended for eternity.  The truth is, you don’t have to go to Honduras to find the injustice of hopelessness.  Just look into the eyes all around you.  Time for God’s people to right that wrong.