Navigation

Before we moved to Asheville to begin planting the church, I came up every other Wednesday and held services. One week as I was driving I got a phone call to tell me we were going to meet at an OB-Gyn office and that the local newspaper was sending a reporter and a photographer to the service. I couldn't have been less excited. What kind of nut jobs would we look like, a handful of people meeting in a doctor's office?

When I got here the reporter wanted to talk so we went into a hallway and talked for over an hour and when the article came out not a single word I spoke was used. That was better than I had hoped, but it showed me that I had confused her agenda. The words she wanted me to use were conservative and liberal and I had rejected her political vocabulary in favor of orthodox and traditional. She wanted to interpret traditional in light of her own experience, a denomination that didn't allow women any role and I asked that she look at a longer tradition and find many women, Terese of Lisieux, Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Avila, and on down to Mother Theresa who served the church and who were used by God and recognized by the church.

As I think about the state of the church today, I realize that political thinking has dramatically shaped the church over the last century. We have become so accustomed to thinking in terms of evolving and changing that we have forgotten that while the church and its structures may change, God doesn't. Sailors need a fixed point for navigation and so do we in our lives. How the church fulfills its mission can change but its mission does not.