Saturday we ventured into an interesting experiment to collectively create the perfect pizza. Ambitious? Yes. Possible? No…. We did what any large group of people do when needing to make important decisions regarding anything. We committeed up! We broke up into small groups to go away separately and then return to the larger group with the perfect pizza. Sounds easy right? Well here were my instructions:
- You must return to the group with the same pizza as everyone else; this includes shape, crust, sauce, toppings and cheese.
- You are not allowed to speak to other groups, txt message them or facebook or twitter them regarding said pizza.
- Not only must rule #1 be followed but the pizza must be in my opinion the best pizza EVER.
Surprisingly, there we no objections to the rules and everyone retreated to their respective corners to create their perfect pizza. We had six groups and I'll let you guess how many different pizzas we had we gathered back together
That's right: 6.
So I asked everyone why this exercise didn't work. Here were some of the interesting responses.
"We couldn't communicate with each other."
"There were too many people in my group!"
"Too many variables in order to be successful."
"Mine was right, everyone else just didn't get it right."
While humorous, each of these statements I have heard in the past regarding churches and why those within feel they cannot move forward or be successful. What was wrong with the pizza game is not that making the perfect pizza isn't a good and worthwhile goal and should be abandoned. The problem is the system we chose to exist in. We all agreed to the rules at the beginning and then never questioned them. We happily went to our committees hoping that we would arrive at our intended destination. The response from our group was incredible after we received the results. We spent 10-15 minutes discussing what was wrong with the system. No one said "Hey, could we try this a different way maybe?" But the point I think was to arrive there and realize how easily we fall into that rut. I also wanted everyone to realize that we all have our own ideas about what is best concerning everything, even pizza. How much more passionate will we be (should we be) about church? The point being that no matter what we are not going to arrive at the perfect church.
This past week I was thinking about what we are going to be about and the more I looked over and thought about our should and could list the more an adjective kept coming to mind: Restoration. Restoring relationships to God and people, restoring the church to a mission of love, hope, justice and mercy, restoring the communities image of the church etc. So that is why we are test driving the name Restoration Church on the poll question. Let me know what you think.
We also decided to go ahead and set a meeting time. So now starting this Sunday November 15th we will be meeting at our house @ 6 p.m. We'll have a time of worship and prayer together and afterwards we plan to have pot-luck dinner, so dig out those recipe books! Hope to see everyone there.
3 comments:
what if we just called it "church" or "the church." then we really wouldn't be assuming anything.
My only concern with the name is that there is already a church in the area named "Restoration Fellowship".
also, imagine this:
"what group is coming to volunteer today?"
"the church."
"which one?"
"just 'the church.'"
in a way, not having a name is a unifying gesture. i know a name is an identifier, but biblically it was always "the church in corinth," etc, and maybe that should be sufficient identification for us?
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