Earlier this week, Stephen Proctor was sending crazy late night DMs on twitter. Anne Jackson (@flowerdust) had sparked a conversation on Twitter earlier in the day about coaching and mentoring. Proctor thought he’d be funny & say he was starting worshipVJ coaching network (by the way, his next DM said NOT!!!!!!!!!!! hahaha). That sparked a conversation though about coaching. Is it good? Necessary? That led into the whole idea of “church idols” (elevating someone in the church world who we think is doing amazing stuff to the point that we worship the person not the God who gifted them). That led to the thought that sparked this blog post. The essential part of the conversation went like his:
Me: “As someone said at a conference I attended this fall we have to get behind the cross & let God use us. If we try to stand in front with him in the background we fail.”
Proctor: “In other words, God shouldn’t be a motion “background.”
Me: “VERY true! God should be the foreground image covering all and we are the background text peeking through simply trying to help people connect the dots.”
Proctor: There you go. Now go write that into a blog post.
That nugget of wisdom I’d heard at a conference – it was from Stacy Spencer who I heard speak at STORY. WOW! Amazing. I had never heard of him before that but will never forget him. Not only is he one of the best speakers I have heard but his content was rock solid. My notes from Stacy’s talk say this: Telling the story is about getting behind Calvary’s cross to tell the story so someone can see Jesus.
Back to the twitter conversation: God shouldn’t be a motion background. God should NEVER be in the background, that’s where we belong. He should be the foreground image over which nothing else can cover. Yes, God supports us and holds us up and i that way is our background but the minute we try to outshine him we have failed. The minute we think we can tell the story better than the cross can tell the story we’ve failed.
Our roll is to put God in the foreground by putting ourselves in the background. That whole “you shall have no other gods before me” includes ourselves in case you were wondering! That includes our media, our videos, our photos, our music, our cool typefaces, all of it. When we try to stand in front of the cross and tell the story we are in the way of what’s most important. However, when we get behind the cross and reflect it with our lives, in our churches, with our music, through our visuals, then God can and will use us as his tools to communicate His Story in a powerful and meaningful way.
Now, how does that apply to your specific area of ministry? Ready, set, share!