Agendas

 

Last week I went to a meeting of leaders in our denomination from churches scattered from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. We started with lunch on Wednesday, met all afternoon and into the evening, and then continued our meeting Thursday morning before we all headed back home at noon.

After the Wednesday evening session several of us gathered to just talk about whatever. Four of us were pastors and we had all met each other at least once before and as the time together progressed we all got to know each other better. It turned out that all four of us had gone to the same seminary, two graduating in 2008, myself in 2011 and the other man in 2020. As a required part of our education we had all taken part in a cultural immersion trip and three of us, myself included, and done our trip with the same ministry agency.

As we talked about our experiences on the immersion trip I let on that I was less-than-crazy for the trip I had taken, and in particular, the mission agency hosting us. When pressed for more information about my opinion I hemmed and hawed a bit, eventually saying, “They had an agenda, and I wasn’t really on board with it.” We decided to change the subject of our conversation.

Afterwards I though things over a bit. Agendas aren’t necessarily bad, and in fact they are quite useful. The picture is from my laptop as I was working on the agenda for a meeting I am leading this week. They can help us understand what our goals are and keep our group, whatever it may be, on track as those goals are pursued.

But agendas aren’t merely for groups, for as I thought about things it didn’t take me long to arrive at the fact that in my ministry I operate very much with an agenda, one that, for better or worse, shapes what I invest my time and effort into and what I push off to the side as being of lesser importance.

And that agenda is to build the Kingdom of God. There are two points of emphasis, one being to share the good news of Jesus in such a way that people come to trust Him as their Savior. The other is to nurture and guide people with faith in Jesus to live in ways that, more and more, show His Lordship. The primary tools for these tasks are the Bible and prayer. The power source, without which nothing will happen, is the Holy Spirit.

It's a pretty good agenda, in my opinion at least, and it applies not just to the ministry itself, but also as I serve the Lord in my family and seek for Christ to shape me as a person. 

May the agenda of my life, of this ministry, and of your life too, be one that, at the end of the day, is pleasing in the sight of the Lord.

Strangers

One part of the ministry here in Dulce that has really grown in the past year or so has been providing a meal to people who stop at the house. I don’t know for certain but I think that for most of the time we’ve been here we’ve fed people, but I believe in the early years it was something that was very occasional, maybe just a few times a month. In the last year it has been several times a week, and sometimes several times a day. Yesterday was probably the all-time high, with six people coming by and asking for a sandwich or “a sack.”

We have been blessed by the support of some of our mission partners in giving specifically to support this work. In the past it came out of our family’s food budget but now we are able to keep things on hand specifically for this purpose. We give people either a sandwich or some leftovers, depending on what we had for dinner that day and the appetites of our children, Gatorade, fruit, chips and another snack. Dessert if we have something on hand that is easy to place into a bag.

I often know the people who stop by for a meal. As a matter of fact after I wrote the last sentence of the previous paragraph the door bell rang and two of the men I fed yesterday were at the door. Their presence has changed what I was intending to write in this post. They were already carrying a meal that they had picked up at the Senior Center and today they stopped so that they could pray for me and that I could pray for them.

Yesterday I read the Old Testament book of Joel. As a prophet of the time before Jesus Joel is somewhat typical as he calls on God’s people to return to God lest they feel His wrath, as he notes that God will avenge the enemies of His children, and as he ends with words that point to the grace God has for His children. In the closing of his short book Joel writes this:

“So you shall know that I am the Lord your God, who dwells in Zion, my holy mountain. And Jerusalem shall be holy, and strangers shall never again pass through it.”

I think that Joel is looking forward to what the New Testament refers to as the New Jerusalem, where God will gather all of His children to be with Him forever. In referring to “strangers” I believe that Joel’s point is that the only people who will be there will be God’s children, a people fully known to Him and all equal members in His family.

The people who stop at our door often know about God and ask us to pray with them, but I wonder, do they know God? When the day that Joel looks forward to comes, will they be members of the family, or strangers, unknown and left outside? I don’t really know.

But I do know that God has called us to answer the doorbell, to feed, to listen, and to pray. The outcome is entirely in His hands but my hope is that on that great and glorious day we’ll be joined together as family to praise our glorious King.

 

Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.