The Vision
26/12/08 12:37
The Vision
Vision is the fuel that powers our aspirations. To create and maintain forward momentum you need vision for inspiration. Vision evokes self-sacrifice for a cause or result not yet seen. It keeps an athlete or anyone for that matter willing to pay the price in determination and discipline to achieve and reach beyond what is expected. It keeps you motivated when you least feel like doing something uncomfortable. It’s the reason you get up in the morning with expectancy and hope for the new day.
Wow! So, how grandiose does it have to be to produce this kind of effect? It doesn’t have to be that spectacular to grip you. In fact I think spectacular often paralyzes people from doing anything. If it’s too big and grandiose, they like to talk about it but don’t do anything about it.
Vision has only to grip your heart with what could be. Once it’s in the core of your being you can’t shake it. It can grow and become clearer with each step that you take. But it requires a step; you must act for vision to be effective. Action is like turning on the key in a car full of petrol. Without that simple movement all the potential languishes unfulfilled in all its gloriousness. Talking alone does nothing. We must put wheels to our words.
I had a vision for a church in Kensington. It wouldn’t let me go. I couldn’t shake it or rebuke it or renounce it away. It stuck in my soul, causing me to pray for its birth, to worry if I had really heard God, and to meditate on what it would look like. Then things started to happen.
Although I loved church as it was, I started to have a holy discontentment. I remember listening to some new worship music by United, Hillsong Church’s youth. It wasn’t what I was used to or what we normally sang at church services. I used to wonder how we could attain intimacy with this intensity of rhythm. To me intimacy came with slow, gentler music. Yet, I didn’t want to be lost in space. You know, where people come to visit your service and say, aren’t they cute, still doing those old songs from 20 years ago. My wife and I had thought that way about older friends whose church service didn’t have a song newer than the early 80s. If we could think this way, I didn’t want someone else thinking that about us. I wanted to be current with the creativity that the Holy Spirit was releasing to His Body worldwide. I told Bonnie that we needed to do whatever stretching was required for us to grow. Growth in the Spirit is more about our attitudes and how hardened they have become. We do stretching exercises to stay limber and loose physically, so why not spiritually? I didn’t want to be stuck in the 90s but I did want something that was marked by the Holy Spirit and could be reproduced by anyone willing to serve the Lord.
This discontentment continued to grow as I continued to pray. A dear friend of ours who has mentored us over the years said once that the church in North America grew through discontentment and division. I thought at the time how sad that was. But an edge of discontentment is necessary for church planting otherwise no one would ever leave or start anything new. We need to feel we want to do something different, even if only slightly. It tips the balance in favour of change over remaining the same. I thought I wanted to do a church with less emphasis on Sunday services and more on being the church, whatever that looked like.
Discontentment always creates an issue with timing. If you stay too long while discontentment is calling you on, you become bitter, critical and self-righteous. You judge everything in your home church out of this state of spirit. Discontentment is like a runner getting set in the blocks. It puts you in the starting gate with your body gearing to explode forward. Too long a delay causes false starts and sometimes even a sense of disqualification. Leaders need to be sensitive and alert to timing for the benefit of all: those who are staying and those who are leaving.
As I continued to pray over the vision I started to feel the Lord’s heart for the city. I found that statistically 29% of London’s population were in their twenties. My heart started to ache with His heart for His children. These are the young people who have not known fathers or mothers. Their lives have witnessed divorce and separation. They desperately want friendship, loyalty and fidelity, all of which they have not seen displayed by the generation that birthed them. I felt they were looking for fathers and mothers in the faith who would nurture them by example and teach them His ways.
Bonnie and I would walk the pathways along the edge of our estate and cry out for these young people. How we would reach them was beyond us. We just knew that His heart was for them and He desired them to know His home.
At the time of our release my vision was to plant a church in Kensington. It grew fueled by discontentment with what I had led before, but the vision didn’t clarify what contentment would look like. Accompanying all this I also had an ache for reaching 20s that would not go away.
Vision is the fuel that powers our aspirations. To create and maintain forward momentum you need vision for inspiration. Vision evokes self-sacrifice for a cause or result not yet seen. It keeps an athlete or anyone for that matter willing to pay the price in determination and discipline to achieve and reach beyond what is expected. It keeps you motivated when you least feel like doing something uncomfortable. It’s the reason you get up in the morning with expectancy and hope for the new day.
Wow! So, how grandiose does it have to be to produce this kind of effect? It doesn’t have to be that spectacular to grip you. In fact I think spectacular often paralyzes people from doing anything. If it’s too big and grandiose, they like to talk about it but don’t do anything about it.
Vision has only to grip your heart with what could be. Once it’s in the core of your being you can’t shake it. It can grow and become clearer with each step that you take. But it requires a step; you must act for vision to be effective. Action is like turning on the key in a car full of petrol. Without that simple movement all the potential languishes unfulfilled in all its gloriousness. Talking alone does nothing. We must put wheels to our words.
I had a vision for a church in Kensington. It wouldn’t let me go. I couldn’t shake it or rebuke it or renounce it away. It stuck in my soul, causing me to pray for its birth, to worry if I had really heard God, and to meditate on what it would look like. Then things started to happen.
Although I loved church as it was, I started to have a holy discontentment. I remember listening to some new worship music by United, Hillsong Church’s youth. It wasn’t what I was used to or what we normally sang at church services. I used to wonder how we could attain intimacy with this intensity of rhythm. To me intimacy came with slow, gentler music. Yet, I didn’t want to be lost in space. You know, where people come to visit your service and say, aren’t they cute, still doing those old songs from 20 years ago. My wife and I had thought that way about older friends whose church service didn’t have a song newer than the early 80s. If we could think this way, I didn’t want someone else thinking that about us. I wanted to be current with the creativity that the Holy Spirit was releasing to His Body worldwide. I told Bonnie that we needed to do whatever stretching was required for us to grow. Growth in the Spirit is more about our attitudes and how hardened they have become. We do stretching exercises to stay limber and loose physically, so why not spiritually? I didn’t want to be stuck in the 90s but I did want something that was marked by the Holy Spirit and could be reproduced by anyone willing to serve the Lord.
This discontentment continued to grow as I continued to pray. A dear friend of ours who has mentored us over the years said once that the church in North America grew through discontentment and division. I thought at the time how sad that was. But an edge of discontentment is necessary for church planting otherwise no one would ever leave or start anything new. We need to feel we want to do something different, even if only slightly. It tips the balance in favour of change over remaining the same. I thought I wanted to do a church with less emphasis on Sunday services and more on being the church, whatever that looked like.
Discontentment always creates an issue with timing. If you stay too long while discontentment is calling you on, you become bitter, critical and self-righteous. You judge everything in your home church out of this state of spirit. Discontentment is like a runner getting set in the blocks. It puts you in the starting gate with your body gearing to explode forward. Too long a delay causes false starts and sometimes even a sense of disqualification. Leaders need to be sensitive and alert to timing for the benefit of all: those who are staying and those who are leaving.
As I continued to pray over the vision I started to feel the Lord’s heart for the city. I found that statistically 29% of London’s population were in their twenties. My heart started to ache with His heart for His children. These are the young people who have not known fathers or mothers. Their lives have witnessed divorce and separation. They desperately want friendship, loyalty and fidelity, all of which they have not seen displayed by the generation that birthed them. I felt they were looking for fathers and mothers in the faith who would nurture them by example and teach them His ways.
Bonnie and I would walk the pathways along the edge of our estate and cry out for these young people. How we would reach them was beyond us. We just knew that His heart was for them and He desired them to know His home.
At the time of our release my vision was to plant a church in Kensington. It grew fueled by discontentment with what I had led before, but the vision didn’t clarify what contentment would look like. Accompanying all this I also had an ache for reaching 20s that would not go away.
