One person showed up--so, why am I smiling?

I had lunch with Dave Browning, the founder of CTK who is visiting us. We had a conversation about perspective and attitude when it comes to ministry. One way of leading in ministry is to hedge your bets. In this leadership method, you try to anticipate the story God is developing and smooth the road as much as possible by forseeing every contingency or potential interruption and dealing with it ahead of time. I come from a bet-hedging background. I feel immense pressure to anticipate problems and deal with them before they ever become an issue. My natural tendancy is to deal with things as they come--unfortunately I've become convinced that that is the wrong and borderline lazy way of doing business.

Dave and I talked about approaching things differently--his point was that maybe we should allow God's story to unfold as we participate and respond as opposed to trying to "steer" history toward what we guess God is doing. I found this conversation profoundly fascinating and curiously validating. Not only was it validating, but a concept-come-to-life within hours.

I talked to Vi on the phone about a week ago. She was the one person who answered our CTK ad in the paper who wasn't upset about our name. Instead, we had a lengthy (and fairly one-sided) conversation about everything from how political a church should be to why the NIV Bible translation is evil. She promised to be at our information meeting so she could deliver an article on the evils of NIV, but I half hoped she wouldn't show. I never thought (even with all the potential tragic contingencies that kept me up all night all week) that she would be the one and only person to show up to our information meeting last night.

I knew it was her the minute she walked in the door. She had that look of "I'm coming to a meeting, but I have a mission" on her face. She walked directly up to Dave Browning (I guess he looked more like a pastor than anyone in the room) and introduced herself. When all was said and done, without question, we had ourselves an information meeting last night! It was CTK Durango, however, that was being informed. We decided to forego the planned presentation and the ten of us (our team and Vi) sat in a circle.

On the surface, Vi is an abrupt and fairly abrasive person. She talked a lot about all the evil in town and how she hasn't been able to get the church involved. Her vocabulary and methods were what I would expect from a narrow-minded conservative Christian. As we talked, however, I began to realize that Vi has a heart of gold. Better than that, she authentically loves people--all people. When I asked her what she thought should be done with regards to the people she was mentioning (mostly homosexuals and drug dealers), her response was that we should love them, care for them, and most importantly pray for them. My assessment of Vi is that she has Christ's heart for the lost, but all her vocabulary and equipment is all wrong. I came away from last night's meeting with clearer insight and vision for the direction of our church.

We were suspicious from the beginning that information meetings and newspaper ads might not be the best way to bring CTK to the light in Durango. This is a small town driven by word of mouth and a "show me who you are, don't tell me" attitude. I have a feeling it will be the slower (by my preference) relational path to church growth for CTK Durango. In the mean time, I got a kick out of Vi and every person on our team agrees we were exactly where God intended us to be.