What If The Church is over.

*sigh*

We cleaned our paintbrushes, emptied the mop buckets, packed up the lunch leftovers and headed back to our respective communities of faith. It's kind of like when you were a kid in the summer time and your friend came over to spend the night, and then their mom called and said they could stay another night. Then, after two days of playing together, the time finally came when your friend's mom showed up for real to take them home. You and your friend begged for another day, but your friend had piano lessons or something. Do you remember how that felt? That's kind of what What If The Church ending feels like.

I mean, look at all the work we did! Look at how we worshipped together. I spent many a morning, afternoon and evening over the past months planning and coordinating with people who didn't even go to my church. That was amazing! I had my house phone up to one ear, saying "Hey" while saying "Catch you later" on my mobile at the same time. Well, it wasn't like that too much until the last couple days, but it was still cool.

Serve Day was an enormous event to coordinate, and lots of people put lots of time into making it happen. Anglicans framed walls with metal studs next to Vineyard-ites and the Heartlanders. We cleaned windows, replaced the flooring around toilets, painted walls, scrubbed bathroom floors and even disposed of unwanted computer equipment at one location. And I don't recall even one heated cross-denominational invective about predestination, whether or not Rob Bell is truly a Christian or the coming end-times apocalypse. What a great picture of the Big C Church serving together.

And now it's over.

...

...

*sigh*

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But I guess that's the funny part, isn't it? We showed Kansas City that the Church can work together. We showed them that we could lower the drawbridges of our respective keeps and come out into the collective commons of our city and work together.

And we'll be ready and willing to do it again - next year. It'll be great fun to plan another massive outreach. And we'll be better at it now that we've done it once. Man. Next year. That's gonna rock. We will so show this city what we're made of next year.

Until then...

Well, why does it have to be "until then"? Many relationships were sparked as part of this whole What If The Church thing. Mark, Patrick and Dan are all on a first-name basis now - they'd actually recognize each other at the Paciugo stand now. And they even have something to talk about: "Remember when we swapped pulpits back in April? Man, those were crazy good times."

So how about this: What if the Church tried to work together outside of What If The Church? What if we dismantled our drawbridges, filled in our moats permanently, created neat little stone paths between our churches and planted some kind of pretty little flowers (maybe daisies?) all along the path? What if Christ Church is on my speed-dial? What could we do?

This is a fantastic idea. I'm pretty sure the three churches who thought this whole What If The Church thing up are way ahead of me and already had this in mind. So, I won't claim originality. I'll just thank God for the little nudge he gave me to help me rub my eyes and see the potential.

I am certain we are not the first ones to stand at the split in the path and try to do the cost/benefit analysis in our heads or on the back of a receipt we had in our wallet. I think it goes something like this:

"If we go this way, we go alone, but hey, we don't have to worry about offending anyone, and it's a lot easier to make decisions with fewer people...and fewer of God's Kingdom resources. But if I go the other way, then we go together. It may not be very easy. In fact, if we have time to get to know each other a little better, we might find out we really aren't relationally compatible. Look at all the emotional risk! And break-ups are so messy. Maybe we should just play it safe..."

Nope. Let's take the risk. God has each one of our communities of faith where he wants us, and we need to stay on task for the things he's called us to do in our neighborhoods. But we need to figure out how to combine our resources and reach this city for Jesus Christ - together.

Join me in praying that the longer term vision the leaders of What If The Church envisioned becomes a reality. Pray that we can find ways to work together without the need for a city-wide event. Pray that What If The Church thinking becomes the norm for Vineyard and our new-found friends. Pray that God shows us what that could look like.

Peace,

David