the making of a mission statement
(part two)
((unconditional love))

agape love - selfless love of one person for another...

this one should go without saying, right? if anything a church ever does isn't done out of and according to the example of unconditional love as shown in the gospels and the story of jesus christ, we are failing in the most basic of ways...

aren't we?

well, in theory, of course.

in practice, maybe not so much. any well-tenured church goer knows that when it comes to church, "conditional" is our middle name.

and that is too bad.

the church and huffman united methodist are businesses, man. and businesses will attempt to self-sustain with the same sort of primal ferocity as any mother would when protecting her children.

don't get me wrong. huffman didn't create this problem. we were born into it. but is that a reason for us to keep doing what we've been doing? or is it just an excuse?

think about it for a few seconds. how many times in the church of huffman past has our congregation performed an outreach event in the hopes, either consciously or subconsciously, that the outreach would bring more people into our fold? a bunch, right? there are still internal struggles to this day when planning the halloween carnival or the easter egg hunt about whether attendees should fill out an information card.

name:
address:
do you attend church?:
how can we pray for you?:

or something like that.

again, it's not that we are doing anything wrong, per se, when putting conditions on the outreach, it's just that it doesn't give a lot of credit to the idea that god is in the effort. the model is to self-sustain.

the model should be to serve.

moving forward, we plan to serve first, and we theorize the self-sustain part will end up taking care of itself.

we plan on serving each other, by helping one another find their holy purpose.

and we plan on serving our community by identifying needs and then finding ways to fill them where and when and how we can.

the days of "conditional" being our middle name are in the past.

with jesus as our example, our mission and community work will be performed not out of obligation or with strings attached, but out of agape love.

and it will be beautiful.

because it is going to happen.