Today, our Mosaic community commits to a new season of ministry together. We want to gift our larger community with a Christ-centered resource that offers healing and wholeness to hurting people, so we are developing a relational, transformational system for discipling people in crisis situations. Our heart is for those who need a community — a family, a supportive partner — so they can be built up in every way into Christ who is our head and so they can break the cycles that keep them stuck (the same cycles that kept many of us stuck).
Our vision for The Mosaic Center is a vision for moving people beyond mercy to discipleship.
Once a month, we already offer something called Third Saturday (a ministry taught to us by the people of Grace Church in Cape Coral, Florida). Now we are listening to the folks who come to Third Saturday to understand exactly what their next step needs to be. How do we move them from invitation to transformation? We are building a viable plan for offering the kinds of programs that break cycles and lead to sanctification.
Think of Third Saturday as the front door and The Mosaic Center as the living room. Third Saturday welcomes people in, and The Mosaic Center will offer classes, programs and mentoring that move people forward with Christ at the center.
Building people, breaking cycles.
I’ve never been more proud of our faith community. Already, our folks have proven their desire to do something significant and already they’ve shown their willingness to invest not just funds but time and skills. We plan to do this in the spirit of Exodus 35:
“All who are skilled among you are to come and make everything the Lord has commanded.”
It will take all of us to make this vision a reality. Our folks are up for it. Our goal is to have a working center by the middle of 2018. If you want a business plan for this, here it is: We want to use tangibles to produce intangibles. We want to use a building to build lives and break cycles. We want to use food and classes and computers to open the doors of people’s hearts.
This is the pattern Paul teaches in 2 Corinthians 9, but he didn’t make it up. The principle is built into God’s design. We find it repeated over and over in the Bible. Go back to Exodus and the building of the first tabernacle out in the desert. God used the gifts of the people to build a building and then he used the building to guide the people through the desert. In other words, the very first building designed by God was used to guide people through a desert and toward his promises. To explain the character of Christ’s new world order, Jesus used bread and wine. To heal a man, he used dirt and spit.
God has a habit of using tangibles to produce intangibles.
This is what Paul taught the Corinthians. “This service that you perform is not only supplying the needs of the Lord’s people but is also overflowing in many expressions of thanks to God” (2 Cor. 9:12). And this is the end goal of our Harvest. We want to use practical acts of help and care — GED classes and job training and budgeting and life skills — to produce a harvest of worshippers. We want to do practical things that lead people into the presence and power of God, where they can discover he is everything he says he is.
Slowly but surely, we are working our way toward the vision of John, who saw what it will look like when all our acts of love and care culminate in worship at the throne of God:
After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. And they cried out in a loud voice:
“Salvation belongs to our God,
who sits on the throne,
and to the Lamb.”
This is what we’re after. We’re after a harvest of souls. We recognize that this kind of harvest takes time. It takes sacrifice; it takes patience. It takes investment. Great moves of God tend to happen because of great moves of heart.
But we’re up for it because we are hungry to see the power of God and the Kingdom on earth, as it is in Heaven.
