’Tis the Season, Born to Die, day 6

…Contemplating what it means to follow Christ, in being born in order to die

This past week I’ve been contemplating the clarity I had when I thought I might have cancer. I have been wondering how I can live each day in light of the fact that someday I will die.  Today I’m wondering if it’s possible for churches and organizations to have that kind of clarity.

Every church, every organization, will ultimately die.  The churches that the Apostles started, died.  The seven churches of Revelation?  Gone.  If you visit places in the middle east where the churches of the new testament met, you will see ruins.  Did they know they were born / planted in order to die?

I think they had a better understanding of that than we (at least the “we” in the west) do.  They lived closer to death than we do, as we shuttle people away in hospitals when they are dying.  They also knew what it meant to be persecuted, and therefore to have a mobile church.  They knew what it was to have a church that was more relationship based than building or program based.  Still… I wonder if they fully grasped this “born to die” idea.  Might they have done ministry differently if they’d known that their church would be gone in 100 or 200 or 500 years?

And how would the churches that I have served over the past 27 years be different if they knew that they had been born to die?

I think all of them, if they really grasped this concept, would be more concerned with bearing “children” than they have been.  “Children” meaning both new followers of Jesus and new churches.  Because it is only through the next generation that our DNA continues.  Not in exactly the same form, but still the same DNA.

This brings me back to The Loop (our closing church plant).  Will our dna go on?  I pray it does.