We have liftoff!

Our first Catalyst life group launched last night.  There were seven of us who gathered in my living room to begin to envision with us what Catalyst will be, off the paper and out of my soul and into the real world.  Where do we go from this seven?  Only God knows that.  

We talked a little bit last night about mapping out a picture of our preferred future (vision) versus the importance of living in the moment, not trapped by the regrets of the past or the uncertainty of the future.  Somewhere as a church, people need to know where you're going, but I'm not certain that the way vision has been expressed has always been about following the way of Jesus, and instead has been about duplicating what we've determined "successful" churches are somehow doing.  So is vision that catches empirical or more abstract?  Or both?  

Recently, I sat down and wrote down a list of the characteristics of what I'd classify as a "mature follower of Jesus."  This is in fact what the scriptures compel us toward, spiritual maturity.  I hadn't really considered that this was an exercise in mapping out a preferred future for our church, really more for myself.  The conclusion I came to though is that if there were hundreds of people (adults and children) in our area in the next years who really began to, by the Spirit's discernment, evaluate where they are in terms of following Jesus and began committing their lives toward the goal of spiritual maturity, of growing to be more like Jesus in all areas of their lives, and our church could help encourage them and resource them and live life together with them on this journey, that that's a preferred future that I know the Lord would be pleased with.  I'd love your thoughts, additions, questions, maybe even subtractions to my list.  So I'm going to link it here, and I'd love your comments/thoughts.  Now again, these are my thoughts, but I'm not saying that this is the Gospel.  The Word of God is the Gospel, and I'm just trying to get my mind and arms around more and more of it as I grow forward.  You can leave comments on the blog comments section below this post, or you can email me your thoughts to chris@exit14church.org.