March Madness reflection (second of three)

Part II: Discipleship

I'm thinking about Journey Church 's March Madness campaign. For back-story be sure to read my post from yesterday.

Yesterday I scratched the surface of the public impact. Today I want to talk about what practical discipleship means.

You see, Journey is a new church - barely over a year old. One significant impact of our March Madness campaign was that we had over 50 volunteers participate throughout the week. Remarkably many of those have never participated in a Journey event beyond Sunday morning church service. That alone is huge - just meeting people outside of a Sunday morning context helps us build relationship and community in a profound way!

Also remarkable is that most of those volunteers weren't involved in any church at all a year ago. Coming to church regularly is a big step. Coming out to give stuff away "in the name of Jesus" or "on behalf of a church" is a really big, risky step. We're asking people to put themselves out there in a dangerous way.

Frankly, the giveaway stuff is just fun. I think it's certainly meaningful - but I almost don't care about what "impact" it has. If nobody is saved by it, if nobody thinks "wow, I'm intrigued", if nobody responds at all - I'm OK with that.

Because the impact that cannot be ignored is the cultural impact that happens within our church community.

As a young church we're still trying to forge our makeup and identify. We're trying to become a community of faithful disciples that yearn and question and learn and live the redemption story. We want to be known as loving, generous, compassionate disciples.

But these traits don't happen overnight - they are learned, modeled, trained, given. As a young church we are taking baby steps and giving people the opportunity to grow in these ways.

And above all I think that internal impact is most significant. We asked people to give money - not to help our budget, or pay salaries, or buy more sound equipment - but to give away to something totally external. We asked people to give time and energy to do something totally outward focused - to look at people and interact with people that they would otherwise never see.

These are not unimportant lessons. In many ways that is the very point of March Madness - to say to our Journey people "it's not about you."

(Yes, I get that my whole post today is saying "the impact is about us." It's a circular argument - I get that. I think it's one of many paradoxes of practical faith - change inside leads to change outside which leads to change inside and the cycle continues. We don't spend a lot of time asking where cycles begin and end.

But we love encouraging people to join the cycle.)