Today, while I was at work I plugged in my MP3 player to a set of computer speakers that I brought in from home.  While I do this most days, I’m usually listening to worship music of some kind.  But within the last couple of days I loaded way more preaching onto my Walkman than should be allowed in any country, and so instead of listening to music at work, I listened to preaching. The great thing about it was that I found myself wanting to get back to my desk and work so that I could hear more of the sermon that was paused while I was away.  It was good motivation to stay at my desk and to continue working.

The featured speaker of the day was Mark Driscoll, pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle, Washington.  Mark has a movement of young men desiring to plant churches all over the place and has done (from what I understand) an amazing job of bringing the true Gospel to tons of non-believers.  This sermon was given to a group of potential church planters that were thinking of joining Mark’s Acts 29 church planting network.  It had a lot of funny moments, some stuff I liked, and some stuff I disagreed with.

But what the sermon did, it did well…and that’s this…Mark described very well the nature and pitfalls of movements.  He described movements as a river made up of various tributaries, always focusing on young adults, always harnessing new technology, and always bringing reformation to those outside of the movement’s reach. One of the things I greatly appreciated about Mark’s message was the single-minded focus he had about keeping Acts 29 focused on bringing the gospel to lost souls and planting churches where lost people are saved.  Mark has taken great pains to make sure that nothing else eclipses that goal.

And in the process it reminded me that all true, Jesus-centered movements are on the same mission that Jesus was on–to seek and save the lost.  There are no new movements (in the Kingdom, at least) where people are not being converted.  We (as a house-church and as part of the larger house church movement) need to make sure we don’t loose this as a cardinal value.  When we loose this, we become just another plateauing church that is part of the reason lost people are going to hell every day.  But if we embrace not just Jesus, but the mission He is on as well, we reconnect ourselves with the very cause the Church on earth exits and we become a little more like the phenomenal Jesus-movements of history.

I’ll talk more about movements sometime.  For now…are you part of the movement of Jesus to reclaim humanity under the reign of God?