Dreams are a pain.
People know what their goals are. People know what they are doing. And, most of the time, people know what dream of God that they are pursuing. But rarely, do they seem to know how to put it into words.
But, even worse, dreams are so ethereal and so abstract, that they are hard for the listener to wrap their head around, to truly understand.
I’ve run into a dream. It’s beautiful and ingenious and incredibly specific.
To explain however, I need to define a word.
A parish: a local group of Christ-followers who live in a community and work together to bring God’s kingdom to that community.
This sounds a lot like the definition of a church. In a way, it is. But, a church has way too many connotations that come with it from our culture.
First, a parish should have no physical location (e.g. no church building).
A parish has nothing to do with denominations or belief systems. It is simply a collection of believers.
A parish both serves a community and is made up of that community. A lot of churches are founded with the concept of serving particular communities or even cities; however, many of these churches are full of active members who do not belong to the communities being served, do not have a real stake in that community’s well-being, and do not belong to the community being served. Because of this, churches struggle with disconnect. The community generally feels that the church is not part of them but a bunch of outsiders trying to help when they know nothing of what is going on. The church generally is split between serving a community to which its members don’t belong and serving members who don’t belong to the community the church was purposed for. Churches generally find a balance. But a parish wouldn’t have to. A parish would be interdenominational. It could consist of members who visit a plethora of different churches that are serving their community. Furthermore, a parish consists only of people in the neighborhood. It’s purpose cannot split by serving the members or the community. By serving the members, a parish builds up the community. By serving the community, a parish builds up its members.
The dream that’s been shared with me is that of a neighborhood being overrun with a movement for Christ, of the kingdom of God being advanced so much in this neighborhood that other neighborhoods take notice, that other neighborhoods want to see what’s different.
The dream is of this neighborhood becoming a parish, a place where the incumbent Christ-followers are galvanizing God’s work, and where, like a domino effect, this neighborhood is influencing others.
Does that sound like a dream you could get behind?
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