Vision

Last night I showed a DVD at my church called "Celebrating What's Right with the World." It's by Dewitt Jones, an award-winning photographer who has done a lot of work for National Geographic. It was made for corporate training sessions, but really has a lot of parallels to the church.

Because what he's talking about is vision and how we see things. He starts off saying that he used to think he had to see something to believe it, but now he knows that he has to believe before he can see it.

And I think that's one of the problems we've got in the church today. We've lost our vision and our imagination. All we see is decline and irrelevance. Ironically, though, being fixated on what's wrong prevents us from creatively addressing it because we lose the vision of what we should be.

"When vision is clear, then the passion and creativity are there as well." I really wonder in my own church and certainly my own denomination if the dearth of passion and creativity is connected to a loss of vision -- vision of what God can and wants to do through the church.

Sometimes it takes a voice from outside to tell us what we need to hear. And I'm well aware that "Celebrating What's Right With The World" is chock full of all kinds of motivational cliches that get thrown around in the business world.

But what he says is true. We have to believe it to see it. And the problem with many churches today is that they don't really believe in themselves -- in who they are, what they have to offer, and what God wants of them.