Re-Centering on King Jesus

It finally got me. After holding out for 2 1/2 years, Covid finally caught up with me, and I was down for the count. Like so many of you had told me, that was not a fun experience. The numbers of Kleenex I went through was well into the hundreds. It took me a while to heal from the infection and shake off the remnants of my symptoms.

I don’t know if you’re like me, but as I emerge from a sickness, it takes me a bit to get my bearings straight. Some of that is just the reality of my body being ready to reengage into my normal patterns of life, but some of it is also deeper than that. My mind has to reengage. My heart has to reengage. My soul has to reengage. I think of it as a re-centering.

As I’ve been reflecting on that, it made me think back to a re-centering of sorts that I needed to do a year and a half ago. As the leader of our church’s Teaching Team, I was in the middle of several months of studying and planning for the coming year. It was early 2021, and we had just lived through the strangest and most disorienting year of our lives. And it felt like we were sick.

Yes, many of us had been dealing with physical sickness from the pandemic, but the sickness I’m talking about was spiritual. The virus of disunity was running rampant. The plague of divisiveness seemed to be everywhere.

If someone had told me 5 years ago that a piece of cloth being worn or not worn over our faces would split churches, I wouldn’t have believed them.

If someone had told me that the group often least likely to show empathy and compassion for people of color would be Christians, I wouldn’t want to believe it could be so.

If someone had told me that so many people I cared about and considered part of our church family would just disappear, I would have had a hard time picturing it.

And yet, all of it was so. I thought about all the years we’d spent trying to help people find their way back to God and grow as followers of Jesus, and yet it felt like in the great moment of testing, so much crumbled. I’m going to be real with you: as a Teaching Pastor who takes seriously the call to make disciples, I felt defeated. 2020 made me wonder if so much of it had been in vain.

As so there I was, at the start of 2021, and the task I was neck deep in was planning the teaching series we would be doing over the coming year. And I was struggling. My mind was in a fog. Slowly I realized that before I could really plan out the details of what we’d be doing over the next year, I needed a re-centering. I needed to get clear on what we were trying to teach people and why it was important. I didn’t just want to plan teaching series because they sounded interesting or had a creative hook. I needed clarity on the vision behind our teaching.

And so I put the series planning aside, and asked God to re-center me, to give me a framework to guide our teaching ministry into the future. What emerged was a seven-point vision that I titled “King Jesus and His Kingdom Community.”

1. At the heart of the gospel is the declaration that “Jesus is King.”
   This is the gospel we will proclaim.

2. Finding your way back to God means turning from your former way of life (repentance) to declare your allegiance to Jesus as King becoming part of his Kingdom community of disciples.
   This is the commitment we will call people to make.

3. While the decision to become a follower of Jesus involves a personal decision with eternal implications, the Christ-following life isn’t primarily about my own personal salvation. It’s about following Jesus as part of his eternal Kingdom community.
   We will lead people away from individualism to life in the Kingdom community.

4. The focus of Jesus’ teaching was his vision for his Kingdom community, for how life in the Kingdom of God is meant to be lived.
   We will focus on teaching the Kingdom values and Kingdom practices modeled and taught in Scripture.

5. Love is at the heart of Jesus’ Kingdom vision. Loving God and Loving People are its supreme values. Therefore, loving God, loving people in the church, and loving people in the world are the core practices of a Kingdom community.
   We will call Christ-followers to walk in the way of love.

6. We live in the “now and not yet” time of the Kingdom. During this time, we are called to join Jesus in bringing more and more of heaven to earth until he comes again and the Kingdom is fully restored. The restorative nature of Jesus’ Kingdom vision means justice and mercy are central to the gospel (not “add-ons”).
   We will speak and act on behalf of the marginalized, oppressed, and the hurting.

7. The Holy Spirit will teach, guide, and empower us to live out Jesus’ Kingdom vision.
   We will rely on the Spirit in prayer and in practice.

I used this vision to help me shape the teaching series for that coming year, always asking, “How would this series help carry out this vision?” But I also noticed something as I began to share the seven-points with my co-workers. This “King Jesus and His Kingdom Community” vision resonated deeply with them. They began to ask me, “What are we going to do with this? How can we talk more about this? How can we live this out?” What began as a tool simply to help me clear my thoughts seemed like it might have a greater purpose behind it.

As I’ve thought about that lately, I’ve wondered if these seven points could be helpful to any follower of Jesus who needs a re-centering. It’s hard to keep our heads on straight nowadays. We are constantly bombarded by so many voices inside and outside the church trying to influence us in a million different directions. It’s easy to get caught up in ideology masquerading as gospel. It’s easy to lose sight of Jesus and what’s he’s really about and the message and way of life he came to usher in.

And so, in the hopes that it might be helpful to some of you, I thought I’d share “King Jesus and His Kingdom Community” with you. I may write about these points in the weeks ahead, but also tried to use my amateur Canva skills to create a downloadable PDF of all seven points in case you’d like a copy of your own. I adapted it slightly to be less about a teaching ministry and more about a community of Christ-followers. If you’re interested, you can get it below.

I’m ready to emerge from the Covid fog I’ve been in over the past few weeks to fully engage in my life once again, and my prayer is that we, as Jesus’ Kingdom Community will also emerge from all the muck we’ve been wading through over these past few years to fully center our lives on him.

Let’s follow King Jesus as his Kingdom Community.