Reconciliation, Restoration, Revolution

One of the things that happened at Rockbridge was that the Coordinating Team (the core group of 5-8 student leaders) set the vision and goals for the coming year. This year's team decided to keep the previous vision statement: Reconciliation, Restoration, Revolution. Here's how they defined it:

What we’re about:
Reconciliation
Joining God’s work of mending broken relationships both between us and God and
amongst ourselves

Restoration
Joining God’s work of bringing healing and wholeness to individuals, society, and its systems

Revolution
Owning the countercultural nature of Jesus’s message: that radical transformation is both necessary (because of God’s goodness and our brokenness) and possible (because of God’s power and our redemption), and that this is through Christ alone.

I was encouraged by how they hammered out these definitions and by how excellently this "fit" the UNC culture. Some of their practical ideas: partnering on campus with service projects, hosting more Thursday night large group meetings that were intentionally evangelistic, developing the "white ribbon campaign" that we picked up this year as an awareness event about violence against women, and continuing to push forward in multi-ethnicity.

What was interesting to me was how un-excited many of my students were. There was definitely an under-current of "push back" on this.

The complaints that I received were two-fold: 1. that we were ignoring our own community in our focus outward and 2. that the ways that this was worked out this past year perpetuated a social-change agenda that students (particularly white males) feel beat up with on a regular basis on campus.

What I want to do over this next week is to hammer out some answers to these and other objections. I want to do this for two reasons: 1. because I know that at least some of my students read this and 2. because my hope and prayer is that all our churches will become missional, outward focusing communities and that those who read this blog will be agents of change where they are. I think that all believers need to be "in" on the priority of facing outward and that being agents of social change as well as evangelism is a part of that.