The most watched television show over the last 10 years, CSI, has started their show with The Who singing the question: Who are you? Now that this song is stuck in your head, I want to talk about this question. When I was in youth ministry, I watched this question play out in adolescent after adolescent. Who am I? I would watch this question whenever a kid changed their hair cut or color, their clothes, their group of friends. Erik Erickson, a psychologist in the mid 20th century, said that adolescence was the time in which an individual found their identity and ability to mesh with the world around him/her, or ultimately developed role confusion and slowly isolated themselves from relationships around them.
What does this mean in terms of church? Well, when a church doesn’t know who it is, why it is created, why it exists in its community, it will ultimately isolate itself, seeking self-preservation rather than engaging confidently in the community it inhabits. Yesterday, at Hidden Lake in Merrillville, about 40-50 of us gathered together to hear about our new identity as New Day Community Church, who we are (and who we are becoming). This is vital because without knowing who we are, we’ll just begin to isolate ourselves and seek organizational survival rather than hitting the bricks and meeting our world.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll begin to discuss each of these characteristics, and I hope that you’ll engage with me and each other around the answer to the question: Who Are You?
Maybe we should heed Yogi Berra’s warning, “You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.” But then once we are cognizant of “Who we are and where we are going (metaphorically),” we should move forward and work on who we are becoming.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s the knowledge of who we are (to be) that is the problem, or the effort it takes to make the change to become that which we are to be that is the stumbling block. I guess we’ll find out, huh?
I think for sure that it helps when a community unites in prayer and then conversation about their reason for being. Maybe that’s what was going on at Pentecost. They prayed and waited together until they received what they needed to proceed.