As we face the new year, I have a single resolution: to help us become a simple church. The word simple, unfortunately, sounds like “easy” or even “dumb” to some, but that’s not where we need to go. If we go back to the word’s Latin roots, simple means “single-fold.” So a simple church is a single, unified church with a single, unified goal.
Our mission at Memorial has been to “love God and love people.” It’s a simple, single-minded mission, and it answers a simple question. In Luke 10:25-28, Jesus encounters an “expert in the law” who was there to test Jesus. The man asked, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” That simple question is the single most important question the world is asking, and our mission is the answer: “love God and love people.” Jesus told the man, “Do this and you will live.”
That’s what the world wants: to live. Whether they understand it the way God wants them to understand it or not, that’s what they want. The desperate scraping together of wealth, possessions, health, and relationships is the world’s attempt to find the abundant life Jesus promises in John 10:10. The world has a single-minded purpose-to live-but it will never find what it is looking for on its own.
Some people in the world stumble upon deeper meaning in life and look to spiritual things to find the life they are looking for, and so we have many religions and brands of spirituality. Even God’s chosen people, the nation of Israel, tried to take their special relationship with God and wrangle life out it on their own.
But God sent Jesus to bring us life. He simplified everything by giving it to us. It wasn’t easy; it cost him his life. The Good News of eternal life, the answer to the world’s question, is the simple mission of the church: “love God and love people.” Let’s work together in 2009 to become a simple church that shares the Good News with a world that desperately needs it.