Jesus is Lord

Last night I shared with our leadership team from Chapter 1 of the Book of Acts. We talked about the essential importance of placing Jesus at the heart of everything we do as a new church.

Luke begins his account of the birth of the church not by talking about the church, or the mission of the church, or even the Holy Spirit, but by talking about Jesus; reminding us of everything that he wrote about Jesus in his Gospel.

One of the key insights that I have learned from the work of missiologist  and author Alan Hirsch is that Christology informs Missiology and Missiology informs Ecclesiology; in other words, we do not plant a church by beginning with the church, nor do we even plant a church beginning with a mission, we plant a church beginning with Jesus.

In their book, On the Verge: A Journey into the Apostolic Future of the Church, Alan and Dave Ferguson exhort us, “Don’t plant churches. Plant the gospel.”

The Journey will be a church that places the person and work of Jesus Christ at the center of everything we do. We have an idea of the kind of church we believe we are to be for our community. We have an idea of our mission. But we will lay our ideas at the feet of Jesus, we will read and study the Book of Acts and the Gospels together, we will learn who Jesus was and what Jesus was all about, and once we feel like we can supremely trust this “wild Messiah,” we will begin the work of determining what The Journey is going to be all about.

Here is a great video from Alan Hirsch and The VergeNetwork that illustrates this foundational principle: Jesus is Lord.