Close the opportunity gap

As we consider this week’s theme of vision statements & looking toward an improved future, I began reminiscing about our Men’s Group & how we got started 21 years ago.

We were an offshoot of the Pathfinder Sunday School class, which was a group of couples just starting their families. Pathfinders met Sunday mornings in the basement below what is now the Student Center. (Keeping with the SUV theme, I suppose today we’d be called the Yukon or Rav4 class.)

Our class members were rather prolific. During an 18-month stretch, we prepped meals to celebrate & support the arrival of 21 babies. (The hallway outside our room resembled the stroller parking lot at Disney World’s Peter Pan’s Flight.)

The guys in our group were feeling a tad stressed, simultaneously trying to balance fatherhood, marriage, & career, so, since our wives were already involved in several groups at Resurrection, we thought maybe we could start a group just for the guys.

On a bitterly cold January evening in 2002, we developed a Vision Statement that would clarify our purpose, would help attract other guys to join our group, &, most importantly, would demonstrate to our wives that we weren’t gathering to just talk about sports. (Since this sports era was post-Brett & pre-Mahomes, it wasn’t that challenging to convince our wives of the sincerity of our purpose.)

After much discussion, we arrived at the following Vision Statement: “Allow God to use our small group of men to create a life in Christ in us & in those whom we influence.” Our goal was to emphasize that we would actively be open to God’s guidance, that we would strive to be transformed through our time together, & seek to be good Christian role models for our families & our community.

Aside: Vision Statements can be hard to create. An Optometrist Convention took forever picking between possible suggestions: “Okay. Which is better? A or B?” B? Okay. What about now? A or B? A? Okay. What about now…?”

We would meet twice a month at 8:30 p.m., so we wouldn’t cut into our parenting time, & we would rotate facilitators as we discussed books of the Bible & studies about fatherhood, marriage, workplace leadership, etc. Our first study was Richard Foster’s classic book, Celebration of Discipline. We used this book as the template for our group where we emphasized study, attending worship, & time in prayer. (During one Lenten season, we fasted for 24-hours prior to our meeting & would break the fast at the start of our gathering. Coincidentally, the punctuality of our attendees improved markedly.)

Aside: A Pastor was telling the kids gathered around him for the Children’s Sermon that he had been fasting from his wife’s meals on Wednesdays during Lent. A little boy piped up & said, “I don’t need to fast.” The Pastor, thinking this could be a powerful teaching moment, said, “Oh really? Why not?” The boy replied, “My Mom’s a good cook.”

Our theme verse was Proverbs 27:17 – “As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.” This verse reminded us that sharpening needs to be done regularly or else the tool will become useless, that sharpening can help correct imperfections & improve effectiveness, &, finally, that sharpening can’t be done alone – it requires assistance.

Our Pathfinders class eventually dissolved as many of our gang answered the call to volunteer in the nursery or in KidsCor, but our Men’s Group continues to gather. As our kids’ schedules/activities changed, we shifted our gathering time to 6:00 a.m. (That certainly didn’t eat into quality time with our teenagers.)

Aside: As one Lenten-focused Dad liked to say to his sons as his offspring arise at the crack of 11:00 on a Saturday morning, “He is risen! He is risen, indeed!”

So, what might this reminiscing mean for us today?

• What are we doing to “sharpen” our faith? This Lenten season is the perfect time to make attending worship a priority or to set aside time for prayer or join a Small Group.

• What if we created a Vision Statement for our faith walk? What would be some audacious goals we’d set for ourselves for the next year or 5 years or 10 years?

• Finally, Resurrection has established a bold vision for 2030. These ambitions would be outlandish if the church was trying to do this alone. What are we going to do to help achieve these dreams?

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to download the hymn “Be Thou My Vision.” Of course, if I wanted to do this in 2002, I’d need to log onto my AOL account & set aside 13 minutes for the download. Considering how far we’ve come, it’s easy to get excited about the potential & possibilities for 2030. Let’s go!